Wednesday, April 25, 2007

But You Hit My Heart With A Harpoon



A writer from Ricepaper loaned me a couple books by Adrian Tomine. He's a graphic novel/comic writer/illustrator from Berkeley, California. The last time I was this excited about an author was when I read Hemmingway's complete short stories. Sleepwalk and other Short Stories just blows me away, it's sixteen animated stories about the emotional lives of literate twentysomethings. It's eerie how much I identify with some of the characters. It's the rare graphic novelist who is as good a storyteller as he is an illlustrator. Tomine is briliant on both fronts

On my way back from Seattle today I listened to Herman Dune's I Hope that I Can See You Soon maybe five times in a row (thanks Jason). The video for this song is just as amazing.

Monday, April 23, 2007

The CanWest Museum of Human Rights


The Canwest Museum of Human Rights?
from This Magazine's Blog

Philip Gourevitch, in his essential We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families, describes the ridiculousness of reading a newspaper article on Rwandan atrocities while waiting in line at the Holocaust Memorial in Washington.

During a speech at the museum's opening ceremonies, Bill Clinton called it "an investment in a secure future against whatever insanity lurks ahead." Gourevitch writes, "Apparently all he meant was that the victims of future exterminations could die knowing that a shrine already existed in Washington where their suffering might be commemorated..."

Gourevitch goes on to chronicle not only the horrors of the Rwandan genocide (a word the Clinton administration was loath to use) but the west's complicity in the act. Not only for acting too late, and acting incorrectly but for a creating the historical circumstances that lead up to it and ultimately for supplying the resources with which to carry out mass murder.

This week we've been hearing a lot (especially if you live in a Canwest owned town) about Gail Asper's coup in securing federal status for the Human Rights Museum to be built in Winnipeg. Stephen Harper, always the intellectual, described the partnership as such, "never before has there been a collaboration of this scale to develop a national museum, but if ever there were a Canadian cultural institution suited for a public-private partnership, it is this one, because human rights can never be the exclusive preserve of the state."

According to Canwest News Services, "It's unclear how much say the Asper family, whose private foundation is putting $20 million into the museum, will have in the running of the museum. However, Harper said major contributors will serve on its board."

Call me an alarmist, but somehow "the Canadian state," in partnership with a right-wing media behemoth, defining human rights in my community doesn't sit right. Even worse, this is all happening in a structure expected to tower over Winnipeg in the form of an ancient Babylonian Ziggurat. Why such an obscure--and ugly--architectural reference, if we're giving homage to the great slave-labour empires of antiquity why no go with something a little more pleasing to the eye, a Pharaonic Pyramid perhaps, or maybe a couple Kremlinesque domes.

Last summer I visited the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site in Atlanta. The memorial to one of America's greatest heroes is a small National Park Service red-brick building across the street from his childhood home. The once thriving middle-class black neighbourhoood is now depressed. Only blocks away, I saw hundreds of people encamped underneath massive highway overpasses, many laying on bare concrete, amidst posters that said re-elect Ray Nagin as mayor.

The exhibit chronicling MLK Jr's life and the history of the civil rights movement was moving as was the video presentation that acknowledged the radical path he was on right before his death. In the section of the centre aimed at children I found a booth admonishing us to make ethical purchases. The exhibit gave an overview of sweatshops around the world and listed some organizations fighting child labour. "Great," I thought, but turning around I noticed a large plaque with the words "this exhibit is proudly sponsored by the Coca Cola corporation."

Coca Cola is one of Atlanta's biggest companies and they have a budget with which to sponsor culture, but this is the same brand that many student groups have been trying to kick of campuses world wide for human rights abuses in Colombia, India and other countries. The month before, I had watched a Colombian bottling-plant labour organizer weep as he recounted being tortured at the hands of the paramilitaries hired by Coke to imprison him and harass his family.

I'm not sure if it was the same feeling Gourevitch experienced outside the Holocaust memorial, a combination of shame and frustration, but my visit had been ruined and one of my heroes dirtied.

Cornell West talks about the Santa Clausification of Martin Luther King Jr, the rebranding of a political radical into someone cuddly and safe. I'm not sure if he knows that, like Santa Claus, MLK is now a shill for an authoritarian beverage company. And pretty soon, Canadian school children will have the privilege of learning about "Human Rights" from the number one purveyor of anti-labour, anti-muslim, anti-LGBTQ, and anti-women sentiment in this nation.

Friday, April 20, 2007

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

Greeks, Sex and Alanis

from This Magazine's Blog


Some things have been bugging me a lot lately. I worked a sorority ball the other night and it was by far the most embarassing thing I've ever witnessed. My university didn't allow greek associations and so until now I never quite understood what my friends meant when they admitted to hating these people.

I'm not one to rail against debauchery, I have no problems with people doing silly things and getting wasted, partying, having meaningless sex or whatever, but these people, the "sisters" and their fratboy dates, really bothered me. On the way in, girls already had to be helped into the washrooms to puke, they could barely stand up. The conversation ranged from meaningless to insecure. "There's this brand, kinda edgier than American Eagle, but not, like Abercrombie or anything like that..."

The drunk organizer couldn't understand how to speak into the microphone and even the seniors were basically illiterate. Their "roasts" of the graduating class were the saddest excuses for rhyming couplets I've ever heard, and, even in this hyper-sexual day and age, genuinely shocking, but more for the sheer magnitude of mainstream sex acts described rather than anything subversive.

On the other hand, I saw Alanis Morissette's parody of The Black Eyed Peas' "My Humps" video which everyone is talking about. It's brilliant, but wasn't the original song satire to begin with? That's the only way I can explain lyrics that bad. My question, if the original song is a commentary on the commodifying nature of mainstream culture then what is Alanis' version?

Monday, April 02, 2007

Anonymouz & Copasetic: The ILL-Legitimate Crew