January 2012
12 posts
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Gender Benders
I didn’t like Raf Katigbak’s articles in The Mirror before reading his latest, Gender Bender, and I like them less now.
Katigbak responds to a Canadian Medical Association article arguing for the sex of fetuses to be concealed, given the reality of global feticide and its preferential treatment for penises. He uses this as a springboard to reflect on sex and gender, emphasizing...
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The Call of Duty
I don’t think soldiers are honoured enough in Canada. I’m not saying they should be exonerated from the legal system, or given special privileges. I’m talking about honour, a civic responsibility. A handful of my grandfather’s brothers fought in WW2; the proof of which for me is a mustard coloured paratrooper bag in my room with the worn initials H.W. Nichols on it. But...
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A Dash of Hemlock
Juliana: How do you hope people will be activated by your work?
Erwin: Turned on. Opened up. I saw so much art from recent years in Germany that was very serious, asking serious questions about serious life issues and they did it with pathos, and I found it awful because pathos makes us heavy, squeezes us down. I use cynicism and humour to lift up and levitate.
- Bad Day Interview with Erwin...
Memo
I’ve been struggling with this a lot because it’s my 400th post, and I have a lot to say, but I can’t seem to get it right. So I’m going to let it slide. New writings, new ideas, new tattoos. In the three or so years of its existence, this little guy has become an online, accessible, archived history of somebody’s head (mine), and that’s pretty cool. We look...
XXX
Today’s track, Danny Brown’s I Will, is impeccably abhorrent, and for that reason awesome. This if from 2011’s XXX. Detroit hip-hop ya’ll.
Danny Brown - I Will
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“She settled in across from me. In ten years, she wouldn’t rate a second...”
– The First Quarry, Max Allan Collins, 2008
Sucker Punch
Season of lights off-duty private ordering a hamburger
December 2011
12 posts
1 tag
“It takes a certain intellectual courage for a man to frankly recognize that he’s...”
– Fernando Pessoa (via exploration-exposition
)
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Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Cave of Forgotten Dreams is a film by Werner Herzog that documents the world’s oldest cave-paintings, found in France in 1994. Comprised of horses, cave lions and other extinct animals, the paintings are 30,000 years old and were preserved only by virtue of a rockslide that encased them millennia ago.
Part compeling account of the object, part psychological portait of those examining the...
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“When people are ready to, they change. They never do it before then, and...”
– Andy Warhol
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O Yale Man
O Yale man Would it be all right if I groveled before you and smeared myself with your feces, Or would you prefer that I show by more subtle word or sign That you are my social and intellectual better, O Yale man? O Yale man are your sophistication and wit the froth merely Dancing atop the vastly deep of your accomplishment, And are you secretly amused at the pretentions of others, Secure in the...
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Some Pretentious Bullshit
Presumably like anyone supporting a certain aesthetic or piece of art, I often find myself needing to justify those things I support. I guess that isn’t necessary for everyone. But one of things I like about art is its potential to be mutually appreciated and shared with others, and once you realize how difficult it is to do that with people (how do you ever know someone ‘gets’...
“I think that the kind of pleasure I would consider as the real pleasure would be...”
– Michel Foucault, from a 1983 interview collected in Politics, Philosophy, Culture (via proustitute
)
November 2011
13 posts
1 tag
Christopher Hitchens and l'homme de hier
In 2011, one of the things we’re seeing a lot of on the cultural front is the depiction of the new man. Who is the new man? Some weeks ago a blog called Feminist Ryan Gosling went viral on Facebook, the contents of which featured images of the heart-throb Gosling with enticing feminist theory captions (example: ‘hey girl, we can be supportive of gender variance even while we get our...
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Jim Jones and the River Below
On this day in 1978, 909 people took their own lives under the direction of Jim Jones in Jonestown, Guyana, by drinking a concoction of kool-aid and cyanide. Crazy stuff. It’s easy to imagine that these people were all gullable, brainwashed idiots who’d long ago lost their minds, because it offers something in the way of an explanation (lazy at best) for the tragedy. But we know the...
“I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you … I...”
– Jacques Lacan, Seminar XI, trans. Alan Sheridan (via proustitute)
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On Learning From the Masters
Good writing reproduces itself. It is anonymous because it consists of a lack of particularity, sentiment and personality. Good writing is sentimentality transposed and depicted through action and observation, and because of that it registers with the universal and is available to everyone. Characters have to describe things without explaining them.
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“People expect not just songwriters but all personalities to pontificate about...”
– Cass McCombs, Pitchfork Interview, Nov 3
October 2011
15 posts
1 tag
“Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is...”
– Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz (via whiskey river)
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“How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.”
– Henry David Thoreau
Re: finding out gramps was protesting
at occupy toronto this week with a sign in his hand…you’re fucking cool old guy.
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À la campagne
Il se lève très tôt le matin, avec le soleil. Il fait froid malgré la moitie de l’été. Un givre froid couvre les arbres. Il ouvre le placard pour prendre son café «instant» et il prend des céréales. On penserait qu’il parle à quelqu’un, jusqu’à ce qu’on remarque le chien blond doré qui se repose encore sur le lit. Quand il ouvre la porte de sa caravane, cet ami doré...
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4 tags
Bélier
brave, énergique, cordial, talentueux, entreprenant…
naïf, ostentatoire, excessif, entêté, dominateur…