tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-67302121448552536472024-03-13T23:59:00.177-07:00Anatomy of CultureWhat Sigmund Freud called the "Prosthetic God."
All text is copyright R.B. GlennieRB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.comBlogger106125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-89381533340458623452017-07-07T11:07:00.000-07:002017-07-07T11:08:10.544-07:00The Labour Market for Golden-Age Porn<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> Years ago, I watched an episode of the PBS-TV <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/">Frontline</a> documentary programme, called <a href="http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2hvmhz"><i>Death of a Porn Queen</i></a>. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VxawLMpnEtA/WDmZ6aJRwHI/AAAAAAAABms/SKNmsBSBIUEY4n_Ptmv6IxHgfy5Uv_E2wCLcB/s1600/colleen-applegate-headshot%2Bfind%2Ba%2Bgrave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="302" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VxawLMpnEtA/WDmZ6aJRwHI/AAAAAAAABms/SKNmsBSBIUEY4n_Ptmv6IxHgfy5Uv_E2wCLcB/s320/colleen-applegate-headshot%2Bfind%2Ba%2Bgrave.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Collen Applegate as Shauna Grant, 1963-1984</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It profiled <a href="https://jl10ll.wordpress.com/2012/04/22/life-and-death-of-a-porn-star-when-innocence-meets-hollywood/">Colleen Applegate</a>, a small-town Minnesota teenager who, running away to Los Angeles in 1982, soon after became the porn actress known as “Callie Aimes” and then more famously as “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shauna_Grant">Shauna Grant</a>.” </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Blonde, rosy-cheeked and meaty, she was the fantasy girl for every dirty-old-man-next-door. She made 30 features and did numerous shorts and photo-shoots over just a year in the business. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But in March, 1984, Colleen put a rifle to her temple, and pulled the trigger. She didn’t die right away, but hung on in intensive care, long enough for her family to deplane from the mid-west and unplug their daughter from life-support. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k2l2hsEkxZU/WDmaMyhnaHI/AAAAAAAABmw/6Y7GbTbYy_84x1_VugwQy_B9TeiFtp-PgCLcB/s1600/colleen-applegate-grave%2Bfind%2Ba%2Bgrave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="244" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-k2l2hsEkxZU/WDmaMyhnaHI/AAAAAAAABmw/6Y7GbTbYy_84x1_VugwQy_B9TeiFtp-PgCLcB/s320/colleen-applegate-grave%2Bfind%2Ba%2Bgrave.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Colleen's grave, Farmington, Minnesota. findagrave.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is entirely obvious to blame porn for Colleen Applegate’s suicide. Colleen was a troubled young woman before she got into the business, though: her original flight to California was fuelled by rumours of a previous suicide attempt in her home town. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">She also hadn’t actually made a porn movie in the year before her death (though she was about to re-enter porn following the incarceration of her boyfriend, a drug-dealer who reportedly also had severed their relationship shortly before she shot herself). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Colleen’s depression may well have been exacerbated by the accumulated shame at having exposed herself sexually for the voyeuristic interests of many others. Other porno actresses have committed suicide; but many others have come and gone from the business without succumbing to such a fate. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The question remains as to why so many attractive young women such as Colleen Applegate, in the first place chose to expose themselves in such a fashion, especially during the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age_of_Porn">golden age</a>” of Californian porn during the late 1970s and early ‘80s. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Feminists would answer that they are coerced into doing this, either specifically by abusive boyfriends or by the “patriarchy” in general. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They cite the case of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linda_Lovelace">Linda Boreman</a>, who as “Linda Lovelace”, starred in the first pornographic movie to receive general release in cinemas, <i>Deep Throat</i>, from 1972. Boreman alleged that she only appeared in that film because of the violence, or threats thereof, perpetrated by her boyfriend. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But try as they might, the pro-censorship feminists have never been able to establish that porn actresses generally have faced such pressures to perform sexually in front of a camera, and I’ve never particularly understood the argument that “patriarchy” is responsible for getting young women involved in porn. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">When Western society was most truly patriarchal, great restrictions are placed upon women’s sexuality. This was the case, for example, during the Victorian era, and the fact of near-absolute male dominance coinciding with stringent limitations upon female sexuality, is practically universal. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, according to anti-porn feminists, modern “patriarchy” somehow demands that young women expose themselves sexually for the gratification of others. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In fact, the female demographic cohort to which Colleen Applegate (born 1963) belonged, was the first for which there was an unquestioned expectation of independent living well into adulthood, and for whom there was a presumption in turn (and however reluctantly arrived at by the older generation), that chastity wouldn’t be observed until marriage. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Or at least, this held for the middle-class family to which Colleen belonged. In any case, the insertion of such a large number of young women into the workforce, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973%E2%80%9375_recession">coincided with recession in the long boom</a> that was touched off in the United States with the entry of the country into World War in 1941. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CExdUOKwD_0/WDmamvvl2QI/AAAAAAAABm0/eKOAJqvHRo0DtiUWwMkIatFU4qY94jcZACLcB/s1600/Gr-Inf-71-89%2Bwww%2Breed%2Bedu.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="212" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CExdUOKwD_0/WDmamvvl2QI/AAAAAAAABm0/eKOAJqvHRo0DtiUWwMkIatFU4qY94jcZACLcB/s320/Gr-Inf-71-89%2Bwww%2Breed%2Bedu.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">and people think we have it bad now... www.reed.edu</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Inflation was unleashed as wage-rises outstripped gains in productivity, interest rates reached double digits, the price of basic commodities (principally but not exclusively crude oil) increased steadily, and the “Keynesian” methods of pump-priming through deficit spending, proved ineffective. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Throughout the 1970s, all Western economies faced desultory economic growth, while at the same time the cost of living continued to increase, sometimes by double-digits per year. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The sheer number of young people, born in the 1950s and ‘60s when fertility rates remained high, entering the workforce during this period guaranteed that a large proportion of them remained unemployed, and many others would be stuck in low-paid, service-sector jobs (as foreign competition had also battered the American industrial sector). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Young women in the workforce especially, faced discrimination and relegation to the “<a href="http://womenshistory.about.com/od/work/a/pink_collar_ghetto.htm">pink-collar ghetto</a>”, low-wage clerical and service work from which there was little chance of improvement or promotion. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Most workplaces, whether in the private or (increasingly larger) state sector, were managed by men who, coming from an earlier generation, would find it perfectly natural to refer to female subordinates, even middle-aged women, as “girls.” </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Some of these at least, behaved as a matter of course as though their younger female employees were happy to be harried, groped, even forced into sex. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In these circumstances, working as a sexual exhibitionist may not, at first glance, have seemed all so bad. On the other hand, for Colleen and others like her to have become involved in pornography in the first place, would also involve overcoming a general revulsion and shame about exposing oneself to others, in the act of having sex. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is considered such a private act, that the words “bed” and “bedroom” are widely understood euphemisms for the sex act. But it wasn’t always thus. Turning to <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7507825-at-home">social-historian Bill Bryson</a>, we find that just a few centuries ago, people tended to be less modest than they were subsequently. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The equation of sex as something dirty, was a byproduct of bourgeois culture. Porn, as I said, gained semi-legitimacy in the wake of the counterculture, which rejected middle-class values such as the “hangups” inherent in sex. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The economic and social forces that propelled Colleen Applegate and many other pretty young American women into pornography during the “golden-era” of the business in the late 1970s, are also behind the <a href="https://www.google.ca/#q=eastern+european+women+nude">sudden appearance of female youth from the former Soviet bloc</a>, in the adult-video business since the turn of the century. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During the Cold War, a joke was told that went something like this: “What do you call a pretty girl in Warsaw [or Prague, Budapest, Moscow or any other eastern-European capital]?” The answer: “A tourist.” </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3T05gKG9BSI/WDma7VhHdfI/AAAAAAAABnA/Ib-m3fxefMochmmqwcBJ-K69_bJmCLfdwCLcB/s1600/slavic-models%2Bwww%2Btheapricity%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-3T05gKG9BSI/WDma7VhHdfI/AAAAAAAABnA/Ib-m3fxefMochmmqwcBJ-K69_bJmCLfdwCLcB/s320/slavic-models%2Bwww%2Btheapricity%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">"Tourists" all. www.theapricity.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the West back then, people were so naive so as to construe the homeliness of Slavic women as a congenital quality, not a byproduct of the malnutrition and general scarcity of the Communist system. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was only a few years after the fall of command socialism, that Westerners understood that female Slavs (now well-fed and infused with hope) were more beautiful, very often, than the women of the liberal democracies. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">Russians, Czechs, Poles and so on, very often embody that traditional fair-haired and blue-eyed look of the Nordic ideal. After centuries of invasion from the far east, many also have an Asiatic physiognomy that many Occidental men find so alluring. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;"><br /></span> <span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt;">While modern Slavic women have beauty, what they don't have is very much selling power in the labour marketplace. In this, they are in a position similar to young North American women of thirty and more years ago. In order to thrive, it seems, not very many, but enough of these young women from eastern Europe have opted to sell their bodies, virtually.</span></div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><br />RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-91113153898902077072017-04-14T06:00:00.002-07:002017-04-14T06:09:04.389-07:00The Shrine in a Time of Science<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://www.thepost.on.ca/2017/04/08/family-still-grieves-as-ex-boyfriend-found-guilty-in-womans-death">A story in the Ottawa Citizen</a> this past weekend caught my attention
for a number of reasons. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It reported on the conviction of a young man in the car-crash death in 2013 of his girlfriend, and as a father, I feel very deeply for any parent faced with the death of a child. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Second, I was once a work acquaintance of the man, Marco Gauthier-Carriere, convicted of criminal negligence causing the death of Valerie Charbonneau. </span></span><br />
<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></span>
<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I will say only that I while I didn’t know Marco that well, I did like him and while I don't disagree with the verdict, I'm sure he had no intention that Valerie should die as a result of his actions - but negligence is the crime that deals with catastrophic sins of omission like what happened that night in November, 2013. </span><br />
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<a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yYy_56mkBRw/WO9bLbQUqSI/AAAAAAAABzg/n2tU5SilkDI8CkUZEcERvdO7Z4eCK-oMgCEw/s1600/valerie-charbonneau.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-yYy_56mkBRw/WO9bLbQUqSI/AAAAAAAABzg/n2tU5SilkDI8CkUZEcERvdO7Z4eCK-oMgCEw/s1600/valerie-charbonneau.jpg" /></a></div>
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Valerie Charbonneau.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I never met Valerie, but I remember Marco speaking fondly about her at least once, and I'm certain that he was devastated that his own actions caused the death of a long-time girlfriend that, I believe, he intended to marry. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Third, it seems like an absurd length of time for this matter to reach trial. Three-and-a-half years is nearly one-sixth of the lifespan of both Marco and Valerie, who were both 21 at the time of the accident (they had been high-school sweethearts). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For the family of the victim, not to mention that of the accused, to have to wait so long for a verdict seems almost like justice denied; the Supreme Court of Canada <a href="https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2017/04/03/supreme-court-of-canada-to-revisit-trial-delays-ruling-in-upcoming-session.html">believes this too</a>, which is why all levels of government are currently in a panic right now, trying to figure out this whole speedy-trial business after several accused murderers were released after their cases were stayed for taking too long to reach trial. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sometime ago, I completed an essay speculating on the reasons why over the last few decades, criminal cases have taken not only a long time to get to court, but also take much longer to try than was the case in the past. I may post it one day. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Another reason this accident stuck out in my mind, is that at one time, I travelled daily <a href="https://www.google.ca/maps/place/National+Research+Council+Canada/@45.441525,-75.6265573,2993m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m8!1m2!2m1!1smontreal+road+blair+road+ottawa!3m4!1s0x0:0x75f0e0b6268eff63!8m2!3d45.4476806!4d-75.618749!6m1!1e1">on the stretch of road</a> in East Ottawa where Valerie Charbonneau met her end. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It occurred just where Montreal Road heading east makes a fairly sudden turn before coming to the intersection at Blair Road. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Marco apparently lost control at this curve, jumped the median, and crashed into a concrete light-standard on the opposite side of the road, which crushed the roof inside the passenger cabin. </span><br />
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<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></span>
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<a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KvxJdX1mvnw/WO9bnoOTkqI/AAAAAAAABzo/Y6EUl_3MD5gNrK41Pzr2ovPWeBDYBu1agCEw/s1600/car-wreckage.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KvxJdX1mvnw/WO9bnoOTkqI/AAAAAAAABzo/Y6EUl_3MD5gNrK41Pzr2ovPWeBDYBu1agCEw/s320/car-wreckage.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
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<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As it happens, this was right outside the campus of the <a href="http://www.nrc-cnrc.gc.ca/eng/">National Research Council of Canada</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Since not long after the accident, a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadside_memorial">roadside-shrine</a> dedicated to Valerie Charbonneau's memory has been placed on the chain-link fence separating the NRC from Montreal Road. </span><br />
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<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work=""><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt;">I noticed driving by one day, that the supports for the black metallic NRC sign, do for a brief moment provide a frame upon the shrine itself, which consists in turn of flowers, trinkets, toys and even a tabernacle affixed to the chain-links, wherein is placed a photograph of the deceased young woman. </span></span></span><br />
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<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work="">
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">After seeing this numerous times passing by, a couple of years ago I stopped, got out and took cellphone pictures of the shrine. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Shrine to Valerie Charbonneau at National Research Council, Ottawa</td></tr>
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<span a="" acquaintance="" causing="" charbonneau.="" convicted="" criminal="" death="" gauthier-carriere="" i="" lang="EN-CA" man="" marco="" nbsp="" negligence="" of="" once="" second="" span="" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" the="" valerie="" was="" work="">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image of Valerie in tabernacle</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Teddies and trinkets left by friends and family of Valerie</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I've been struck by the fact that the name of an institution devoted to scientific investigation is juxtaposed by happenstance with an artefact — the shrine — with deep roots in religiosity. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shrine">Shrines</a> are common to most religions, it would seem, from pagan to monotheistic, and probably preceded civilization by many eons. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Indeed, shrines may have even been the locality around which settled life took form: the temple complex at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHG9URGDt6s">Gobekli Tepe</a>, in modern-day Turkey, was apparently started eleven-and-a-half thousand years ago, centuries before there is any evidence of farming in that region or anywhere else. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As shrines endure, walls and roofs are built to protect the venerated objects from the elements — most temples have a shrine as their hearth. Temples that are built high enough then become citadels, around which a city might grow. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Graveyards are a kind of amassing of shrines, although most graves are venerated only by the loved ones of those laid in them. In early civilized times, it was common for <a href="https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/98880/hillarya.pdf;sequence=1">the deceased to be buried underneath the homes</a> in which they once lived, and where the living apparently paid homage at shrines within the domus itself. </span><br />
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Reconstruction of Catal Huyak, the earliest town</div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In China, the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestor_veneration_in_China">practice of ancestor-worship</a> was maintained long into civilized times, for although the departed were laid in necropolises, shrines to their memory were maintained in the family home itself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In pagan Europe, it was common to have out-of-doors shrines to particular gods and goddesses, and during the Middle Ages this tradition endured under Catholicism, in which the saints were worshiped at shrines where they lived or (sometimes) where they died. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The roadside shrine, which became commonplace in the last years of the twentieth century, seems a combination of the European and Chinese traditions. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They are almost always objects of care and veneration only for the loved ones of the deceased. But the left-behinds are also determined that the shrines should be blatantly public markers, and indeed, they are seen by perhaps thousands of people each day as they pass by in their cars. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These roadside shrines may well be given more attention than the actual gravesites of the deceased person they pay homage to. Complaints about how such shrines constitute a driving hazard have lead many jurisdictions to curb them outright, which <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-councillors-approve-6-month-limit-for-roadside-memorials-1.3302938">the municipal government of Ottawa</a> did recently. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I’m unsure how this will affect the shrine to the young woman killed by her boyfriend’s careless driving, as the land on which it sits belongs to the federal government, and thus the city has no say over it. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is a coincidence, too, that she died on a roadway just adjacent to a facility devoted to scientific research. But the contrast between an artefact with deep, superstitious roots in the human psyche, being placed at the frontier of a place devoted to expunging this very thing from the human mind, cannot be overlooked. </span><br />
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-76199821632897435272016-10-03T04:54:00.002-07:002016-10-03T05:11:26.678-07:00The Linchpin of the Modern Economy<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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Advertising began as an industry something akin to land speculation. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The first agencies would purchase blocks of space in newspapers and periodicals, and then generate profit by selling them piecemeal to businesses wishing publicize their wares. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Originally, companies would provide their own advertising message – just as people who purchased land in the old days would contract to build their own houses. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is why neighbourhoods originating before the middle of the twentieth century, have residences that usually look much different from one another. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But just as latter-day land speculators build houses before they sell off real-estate in parts, ad agencies began to employ in-house writers, and then illustrators also, to provide content for clients in the periodical-space sold off individually. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Given how advertising removed the “place” from “market”, it is appropriate that the industry got its start practicing in microcosm the age-old practice of land speculation. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">From such relatively humble origins, advertising long ago grew into the linchpin of the modern information/marketing economy. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Advertising is quite rightly identified with corporate capitalism: revenues for this sector are <a href="https://www.statista.com/statistics/237797/total-global-advertising-revenue/">estimated</a> to grow to 660 billion dollars (U.S.) in 2016, most of which is spent by private business. But governments also spend heavily on advertising. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The U.S. government is ranked fortieth as the biggest advertising organization, <a href="http://www.adbrands.net/us/usgovernment_us.htm">but in the U.K.,</a> the central government is consistently in the top-five of advertising entities. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Public-service announcements are not the only type of advertising related directly to the political system. As a rule, such advertising is supposed to be non-partisan, but governments implicitly or sometimes explicitly use them to promote their own very partisan agendas. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There are also the fortunes spent on campaign advertising throughout the world’s democracies – more than four billion dollars in the current U.S. presidential campaign alone – which are counted as private-sector advertising, resulting from the transaction of political parties and ad agencies. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These are avowedly and doggedly partisan in nature, of course, and campaign advertising is of greater consequence to politics in a way out of proportion to the actual funds spent on them. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Often, campaign-advertising through mass-media is traced back to the 1960 presidential election which brought John F. Kennedy to the White House, or in the vote which brought Ronald Reagan to the presidency twenty years later. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, high-level politicians’ involvement with advertising agencies goes back decades before that, to ad pioneer <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Lasker">Albert Lasker</a>’s involvement in the U.S. presidential campaign of Warren G. Harding, which Harding won in a landslide, later appointing Lasker to be chairman of the U.S. Shipping Board. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It exaggerates only a little to say that politicians treat their pollsters’ words as though of a divine. Policies are now calibrated mainly for the purpose of winning office next time around (again, with the help of the marketing industry). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In order to gauge public opinion on behalf of political clientele, the marketer must be treated as trusted aide, as important or more so to an elected leader as a cabinet minister or legal adviser. We see once again that advertising and marketing executives, at the very least, have insider knowledge of another crucial domain of modern life — the political process. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For many “Madmen” the opportunity to have the ear of powerful statesmen and to influence public
policy has been more important than making money. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In some cases at least, the two went together: Dalton Camp (1920-2002) was best-known as a newspaper columnist but, earlier in his career, was an advertising campaign advisor who helped Richard Hatfield become the longest-serving premier of New Brunswick during the 1970s and ‘80s. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Camp did his campaign work pro bono, but in return, his advertising firm had a monopoly contract on all government advertising done by the province. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Advertising is the application of fine art to the business of persuasion. This is by no means a novel thing. On the contrary, in past times, art was usually employed for this purpose. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is the modern practice of selling "handmade" visual products to an abstract marketplace which is a novelty. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But as works designed and drawn for advertising purposes are not “done for their own sake”, they are considered mere “illustrations”, not real art. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nevertheless, many “real” artists have made a living through advertising work.
There is a definite case to be made that, in terms of simple dexterity in technique, commercial artists and graphic designers, whose work is bought and sold in the hundreds or thousands of dollars, are more talented than most “conceptual” artists, whose work may sell in the tens of millions. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Qualms expressed either for the payment of vast fortunes for what are, on the one hand, inanimate objects; and on the other, the wounding of the integrity of an artist who goes to work for amoral corporations, are secondary to the reality of advertising as a creative enterprise. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Creativity became an essential part of the process, as it became evident that the mass audience responded all the more to pictorial and emotive content, rather than didactic and cajoling text (as was common before the “creatives” entered the picture). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This occurred when magazines were still the dominant mass medium.
So it is that a novel type of speculative enterprise, evolved into the organizational crossroads for each sector of the engineered economy.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oR-00XAtm1Y/V_JGZ8IDkNI/AAAAAAAABfU/AlswrwX0hKsUq5CGvYYsKbLVbv8TgB8uACLcB/s1600/salman_rushdie%2Bwww%2Bsiasat%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="209" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-oR-00XAtm1Y/V_JGZ8IDkNI/AAAAAAAABfU/AlswrwX0hKsUq5CGvYYsKbLVbv8TgB8uACLcB/s320/salman_rushdie%2Bwww%2Bsiasat%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Former Madman.<br />
www.siasat.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The modern ad agency fulfills its original function as a broker of space for all the mass media: originally printed periodicals, then radio and television, and latterly, the Internet.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It thus has intimate knowledge of all the media processes, not even possessed by professionals and personnel in each sector, in regard to the others. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The agency acts on behalf of clientele — namely all the biggest private industries, representing the widest possible range of products.
These agencies are thus exposed to the mechanics of many businesses, which in ease case remain mostly obscure and half-understood by outsiders. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In addition to the privileged knowledge held by admen and woman, of the media business in particular, and industry and commerce generally, there is the industry’s involvement in politics. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Marketing and advertising, long central to the conduct of political campaigning, more recently became essential to governance itself. The lucrative patronage received by ad agencies in exchange for their getting politicians in office, may even be less important to marketing professionals, beside the clout they acquire through their knowledge of public opinion. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And, as advertisers provide the content for media campaigns political and commercial, they bring together these central facts of modernity with the creative class as well. It isn’t only graphic artists and illustrators whom ad agencies employ for persuasive purposes. According to author Mark Tungate, “advertising is a springboard for creative talent. The list of writers and film directors who have worked in advertising is long and illustrious: Salman Rushdie, Fay Weldon, Len Deighton, Peter Carey, Sir Alan Parker, Sir Ridley Scott, David Fincher, Spike Jonze, Michel Gondry... I could go on... and on. The French creative director Olivier Altmann, of the agency Publicis Conseil, once told me, 'Working in advertising is one of the few ways you can be creative and make money at the same time.” (<i>Adland: A Global History of Advertising</i>, Kogan Page, p. 4).</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A more direct link between “commercial” and “high” art, was seen in the activities of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Saatchi">Charles Saatchi</a>, the Iraqi-born British co-founder (with his brother Maurice) of the firm that bears their name (although they were both forced out in the 1990s). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Saatchi & Saatchi was one of the first ad agencies with a global reach. Not coincidentally, it was also heavily involved in politics. It came up with the slogan used by the British Conservative party in the 1979 vote, “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Isn%27t_Working">Labour Isn’t Working</a>”, which helped bring Margaret Thatcher to power. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9xTTjSUdfLY/V_JGxMLrFrI/AAAAAAAABfY/qJd6ZWhq2L8YCoCFBl5_3JJCXpZ77udAwCLcB/s1600/labour-isnt-working%2Btheconversation%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="155" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-9xTTjSUdfLY/V_JGxMLrFrI/AAAAAAAABfY/qJd6ZWhq2L8YCoCFBl5_3JJCXpZ77udAwCLcB/s320/labour-isnt-working%2Btheconversation%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Standing at the intersection of commerce and politics.<br />
theconversation.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Even before the agency’s founding in 1970, Charles Saatchi was an avid art collector. By the 1980s, he was supporting the work of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Young_British_Artists">Young British Artists</a>”, such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Their conceptual work included a shark submerged in a glass tank filled with formaldehyde (overseen by Hirst), or a very untidy, unmade bed (of Emin’s). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These and other words sold for millions or even tens of millions of pounds. Saatchi’s initial support for, and purchase of, these conceptual artists could be looked upon as a cagey investment, if nothing else. Often investing just a few thousand pounds to acquire the works directly from the artists, Saatchi often sold them at auction for many multiples of the original purchase price.
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-44998247981005210162016-08-13T07:21:00.000-07:002016-09-22T07:20:28.191-07:00Reflections on the Works of the Late Alvin Toffler<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_Toffler">Alvin Toffler</a>, who died recently aged 87, was the first author whose ideas I took seriously. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Wave_(Toffler_book)"><i>The Third Wave</i></a> and <i><a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/1695307/future-shock-40-what-tofflers-got-right-and-wrong">Future Shock</a></i> introduced me to themes and subjects that I still think about today. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Toffler translated.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I long ago forgot most of what he had to say, but I think Toffler’s biggest insufficiency as a thinker was his tidy division of history into specific periods: in his case, the “first wave” agricultural economy, the second an industrial economy, with the third wave being the information economy. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is, in fact, quite common in social-science, and inevitable in the study of history. Thus, in the Occidental tradition, the past is divided up into Classical, Medieval and Modern eras, though no one during medieval times considered themselves as being in the “middle” of anything. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In a more religious era, history was divided up starkly between the birth of Christ and after. <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/alvin-toffler-author-obit-1.3659263">Toffler himself had been a Marxist</a>, and Karl Marx also followed a tripartite method by dividing history into Feudal, Bourgeois and Capitalist eras. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These categories are all artificial, of course, but they are a way of grappling with social phenomena by grouping them according to presumed temporal and spatial characteristics. Thereby, new information can be construed in terms of the mental groupings, thus saving the energy of having to consider and examine each thing discretely in turn. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IPSZKkT6mE8/V68pwLxhSgI/AAAAAAAABa8/PYh12CHmiOwC129VU_c0xGVYzzPMKTBLwCEw/s1600/toffler-young.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-IPSZKkT6mE8/V68pwLxhSgI/AAAAAAAABa8/PYh12CHmiOwC129VU_c0xGVYzzPMKTBLwCEw/s1600/toffler-young.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Past Alvin Toffler.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It isn’t as though sociological and historical categorization always departs from the facts on the ground: the Latin world of the fifth century was plainly different from the “dark ages” that followed, just as the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries were different from the nineteenth. But perhaps it was reconsideration of Toffler’s central argument that the “third wave” information-economy is really so dramatically different from the second-wave industrial economy, which lead me to be wary of this kind of categorization entirely. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Instead, I’ve developed an idea in which particular artificial forms are brought into existence, and which in turn contain all potency which are variously acted upon their users. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In a book called simply <i><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/sep/11/highereducation.history">Cities</a></i>, author John Reader summarizes the first civilized society, in Mesopotamia, and the <a href="http://www.ancient.eu/cuneiform/">cuneiform </a>tablets found in the thousands by archaeologists (and deciphered thanks to the <a href="http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html">Rosetta Stone</a>) which more often than not document the quotidian acts and thoughts of Sumeria. Reader writes that they offer many “glimpses into the lives of ordinary people thousands of years ago, and accumatively they evoke a sense of how little the fundamentals of life have changed. Our lives and theirs could have been interchangeable. Only time separates us; we could have functioned there, and they could have functioned here. That this might seem at all surprising is a consequence of the way history is told. Accounts of ancient cities and societies have for generations tended to concentrate on the higher rungs of society, implicitly stressing the presence and overwhelming importance of kings and conquerors. To a degree, this is inevitable, since temples, palaces and treasure-trove burials have always been the prime target of anyone digging up ancient remains. ... Nowadays far greater attention is paid to evidence from lower down the social ladder.” (Reader, <i>Cities</i>, William Heinemann, 2004, p. 33).</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dbcbRcUrlxY/V68qeDPXEMI/AAAAAAAABbI/Fj6oySMIv8EKG0SSiNDjI0djJdUdi2lOwCLcB/s1600/rosetta_big_with_text_copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-dbcbRcUrlxY/V68qeDPXEMI/AAAAAAAABbI/Fj6oySMIv8EKG0SSiNDjI0djJdUdi2lOwCLcB/s320/rosetta_big_with_text_copy.jpg" width="223" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Rosetta Stone.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">My theory has long been that modernity pushed each of the variables of characteristic of "civilization", but to an extreme. Yet all of these variables were present in ancient Mesopotamia, just as they were in classical Greece, ancient Rome, imperial China, pre-Columbian America, and anywhere else that could subsidize city life. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Later, Reader describes how ancient Attica’s control of the trade in grain supported financially the fluorescence of Athens during the fifth and fourth centuries BC: “As their populations grew, the city-states were obliged to look further and further afield for their grain supply. Those with limited wealth, or situated inland, had precious little chance to alleviate their plight and succumbed to more powerful states, while those on the coast, with access to timber and shipbuilding expertise, looked across the sea for alternative supplies, and the interacting agencies of need, ingenuity and initiative soon created a network of trade routes across the Aegean and beyond. This was a critical point in the development of the city as a functioning entity. It was beginning to reach out on a grander scale than ever before — though certainly not as a source of benevolent influence, simply to secure whatever it needed to survive. During the fifth century BC, Athens was bringing grain form the shores of the Black Sea, tapping into the western end of Russia’s great wheat lands. By the fourth century, the city controlled the grain trade of the entire eastern Mediterranean.” (Reader, pp. 54-55).</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Later in Rome, in 123 BC, “laws were introduced establishing the basic right of every Roman citizen to a monthly ration of grain at a fixes that undercut prevailing market prices. The intention here was to even out the price fluctuations resulting from variations in supply, but the taxes imposed to pay the subsidies needed to gain the suppliers’ support for the scheme made it a hot political issue for the next sixty years. A law extending the number of grain distribution recipients was passed in 62 BC, and when Clodius became tribune four years later he abolished payment for the grain ration altogether. From then on, supplying a monthly ration of grain — free — to every eligible citizen became the responsibility of Rome’s governing authority. ... Moreover, Clodius’ law appears to have extended beyond the mere distribution of grain to cover all matters concerning both public and private supplies, the grain fields, the contractors and the grain stores.” (Reader, p. 57).</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Reading these passages reminded me of a book I read years ago called <i><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/103226.The_History_of_Money">The History of Money</a></i>, by Jack Weatherford. Given that civilization preceded the invention of money (by thousands of years for the original city-based cultures), Weatherford coined the term <a href="http://studentreader.com/tributary-and-oikos-economies-of-ancient-mesopotamia/">“tributary” economy</a> to describe the trade before coinage. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Civilizations in the New World didn’t have money at all before the arrival Europeans, and Weatherford describes how the Aztec empire of Mexico “operated primarily on the basis of tribute, the markets functioned as subsidiary parts of the political structure, and many different standardized commodities served as forms of near-money. ... The vast bulk of goods that passed through the Aztec Empire moved primarily as tribute from the peripheral parts of the empire to its capital. In this regard, the Aztec Empire was like virtually all other empires in the era before the spread of money. Ancient Egypt, Peru, Persia, and China all functioned as tributary systems rather than market systems.” (Weatherford, <i>The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace,</i> Three Rivers Press, 1997, p. 19).</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Latins ascended to civilization following the invention of money, initially using the Greek currency but ultimately adopting their own standardized coinage. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Although the Roman state (as republic and then empire) presided over a highly sophisticated market economy, its free distribution of grain harkened back more so to the tributary systems of the pre-money era. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Amongst the Aztecs, Egyptians, Persians and so on, the expropriation of staple farm goods was not only to enrich the upper-class, though it certainly did that. Part of what was taken was redistributed in turn, to maintain the loyalty of the urban masses, as was the case in Rome. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It demonstrates that apparently contrasting social behaviour can coexist simultaneously within the same culture. It could be tributary relations in a monetary economy; another example is hunting, which persisted in every society until very recently, millennia after farming had purportedly made it “obsolete.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Similarly, Roman history also shows how ancient is the rationalization of production, supposedly a hallmark of Toffler’s “second wave.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The historian <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Medieval-Cities-Planning-Howard-Saalman/dp/0807604712">Howard Saalman noted that</a> “Industrialization, it should be said, is not synonymous with mechanization. It does imply an organized process of production and distribution of goods and services — and a genius for order and organization was the very basis of the Roman state. Everything from fun to funerals found its place in the legally and traditionally ordered scheme of things and — up to a point — everything worked well. If mechanization remained relatively limited it was because cheap and slave labor provided the required substitute, as in the American south of the early nineteenth century. No project the Romans undertook failed because of inadequate technology.” (Saalman, <i>Medieval Cities</i>, Braziller, 1968, p.12).</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">According to Toffler’s schemata, ancient Rome was a “first wave” society, in no essential way different from the very first farming cultures — which is a patent absurdity. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As Saalman writes, “The Romans enjoyed their country villas and romanticized the rural idyll of Homeric times. But the land between their cities was rationalized by division into one-hundred-foot square units and farmed with an efficiency that can only be labeled `industrial agriculture.’ With the masses of population concentrated in large cities throughout the empire, less effective means of food production, of overseas and overland transportation, of agricultural products, or of less highly developed port facilities and storage terminals were practically unthinkable. With the satisfaction of basic needs and growing prosperity came a growing demand for manufactured products of all kinds. Roman craftsmen were prepared to make, and Roman merchants were ready to distribute, an impressive variety of products which gave life in urban apartments and rural homes a standard which compares favorably with later centuries. Architecture and engineering — utilizing stone, brick, and concrete masonry as well as metal, wood and glass — achieved a level of accomplishment by which all conceivable needs from those of frontier camps to those of town palaces could be and were met.” (Saalman, p. 12-13).</span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A "first wave" settlement: depiction of ancient Roman city that became Koln or Cologne, Germany.<br />
historum.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">All of this was even more the case with China, which remained without a substantial urban population until relatively late in history. It developed into a organized, legitimatized state relatively quickly, however, and after some centuries became the most technologically advanced of human societies. Chinese ingenuity during the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_dynasty">Song dynasty</a> from the eighth century, far surpassed that of western Eurasia at the time. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In China sophisticated engineering and advanced technology was employed to ensure the cultivation and distribution of the staple rice crop. One of the definitive features of “first wave” cultures, Toffler argued, was “decentralization”: population and authority remained scattered, uncoordinated, semi-legitimate. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">With the “second wave”, this gave way to the centralization of people in cities, and of power in formal, legitimate government. In imperial China, the vast majority of the population remained in villages, but their actions were coordinated by a despotic monarchy and centralized bureaucracy. It was a system established two centuries before Christ and which persisted (with periodic breakdowns and strife) until AD 1911. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There is simply no way to categorize China in terms of “first wave” or “second wave”, although perhaps Toffler argued these categories only applied to the Occident. It still makes no sense, because the Roman empire doesn’t fit into them either. Its population was, too, largely on the countryside, but nevertheless depended on the centralized authority of the SPQR. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">When Rome fell, the civilization itself largely faded away for a true “first wave” decentralization of population and delegitimization of authority. In the <i>Third Wave</i> and <i>Future Shock</i> also, Toffler describes how the new society’s conceptions of space and time will supersede the “linear”, “Newtonian” viewpoint characteristic of second-wave industrial societies. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Toffler seems to have chosen the term “wave” (to describe what later be better-known as a “paradigm”) so to convey the chaotic non-linearity of sociocultural change as wrought by technology, it being no more resistible than any other force of nature. But it turns out that Toffler’s own terminology was in itself highly “linear” in so far as he proposed that the socio-technological “waves” arrive sequentially, and don’t seem to mix together, as was plainly the case with Rome and China.
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-4805736483480698762016-07-19T03:53:00.000-07:002016-07-19T06:44:01.982-07:00The Triumph of Theatre<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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This past spring, after attending at the National Arts Centre a <a href="http://ottawa.broadway.com/shows/sound-music-baa/">touring-company revival</a> of <i>The Sound of Music</i>, I was reminded about thoughts I’ve had in the last few years as to how paradoxically in the age of the Internet, the live performance was being revived as a key part of the entertainment business. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is a consequence, of course, of the ability of Internet users to pass back and forth digital copies of recorded performance, illegally, of course, but nevertheless it is a fact of life. According to figures compiled at this <a href="http://blog.thecurrent.org/2014/02/40-years-of-album-sales-data-in-one-handy-chart/">site</a>, sales of recordings (compact disc, cassette, vinyl record) have declined from a peak of nearly 20 billion U.S. dollars in 2000, to around six billion inflation-adjusted dollars in 2013.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.33px; line-height: 26px;">Thus, in order to be assured of a living, musicians must play live, the only type of performance experience that cannot be adequately pirated or bootlegged. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.33px; line-height: 26px;">The movie-industry has also been affected by digital bootlegging, though not as dramatically as has recorded music. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.33px; line-height: 26px;">Nevertheless, <a href="http://www.the-numbers.com/market/">much of the revenue</a> derived from movies comes from other than actual cinematic audiences: while sales of digital-video discs have declined dramatically from their peak in 2004, the slack has been taken up by video-on-demand and related services which bring the movie-going experience direct to the home. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.33px; line-height: 26px;">Recently, too, <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jj-abrams-proposed-50-home-875583">it was reported</a> that <i>Star Wars</i> / <i>Star Trek</i> director J.J. Abrams, along with other filmmaking luminaries, were boosting a service that would bring newly-released movies directly to the home.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But, while the movie-theatre business itself remains moribund, there has been a very big revival in live theatre presentation, as well.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Often, "new" musical theatre productions are simply reboots of unsuccessful or long-forgotten motion-pictures.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.33px; line-height: 26px;">Last autumn, for example, the Arts Centre hosting the touring production of </span></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><i><a href="http://www.newsiesthemusical.com/">Newsies</a></i>. Opening on Broadway in 2011, the story is based on an actual <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsboys%27_strike_of_1899">New York city newsboy-strike</a> at the very end of the nineteenth century, and is evidently successful enough to be taken on tour across the continent. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsies"><i>Newsies</i> </a>was, however, originally a movie released by the Disney company in the early 1990s — which was (according to Wikipedia) a complete flop. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I’ve never seen this movie, nor yet the stage production itself, but is a reversal from the original practice, wherein Broadway musicals would be made into movies; but often the movies adapted to the stage, were often not musicals themselves. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Newsies originally was a musical, both others re-adaptation were not: such as <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_(musical)">The Producers</a></i>, which was a bit of a sensation in the early twenty-first century (and based on a 1967 film starring Gene Wilder), or <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairspray_(musical)">Hairspray</a></i>, which premiered in 2002 and was based <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairspray_(1988_film)">on a 1988 movie</a> by John Waters (the musical adaptation of which was, in turn, remade into a film a few years later, starring John Travolta as an obese woman). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Apparently, many stories are more popularly accessible when accompanied by song and dance, and when performed onstage. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">My thoughts in this direction may have been inspired by the book I read recently, <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/21/no-applause-just-throw-money"><i>No Applause, Just Throw Money</i></a>, a history of vaudeville by Travis Stewart under the “Trav S.D.” pseudonym. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Stewart traces vaudeville’s origins to the rough and raunchy stage entertainments of nineteenth-century America. But by the late 1800s, savvy impresarios responded to then-fashionable pleas for moral hygiene. Figuring out that a good, clean stage-show, appropriate even for women and children, was far more lucrative than appealing to smutty instincts of the crowd, theatre-men applied systematic industrial methods to the live entertainment. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As Stewart writes, “The revolution of the `double audience’ (appealing to women and children now as well as men) added enormously to the profitability of variety production. It had been achieved chiefly though a public relations coup (courtesy of Barnum and his vaudeville acolytes) the likes of which may never be seen again. But several other innovations not only added to, but multiplied the growth of the vaudeville industry, making its existence a foregone conclusion. Variety, after all, had been small potatoes. Its producers were small businessmen whose dreams didn’t extend any farther than their own saloon doors. Vaudeville, on the other hand, was big business. Following Adam Smith’s principles of division of labor and mass production, its producers would come to control the entertainment of the nation.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The difference between the old theatre-owners and the showmen of vaudeville, Stewart writes, “is essentially the same as the one between the proprietor of your local greasy spoon and Ray Kroc,” the later being responsible for franchising the original McDonald’s restaurant into a global operation. (Stewart, <i>No Applause</i>, p. 84)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://anatomyofculture.blogspot.ca/2009/12/labour-theory-of-capitalism-or-rubes.html">I’ve long viewed</a> the McDonald’s restaurant as the epitome of the division of labour, which even before engineered machinery, is the decisive factor of modern work. The technical resources of the McDonald brothers in 1950s California were no different than what was available to countless other roadside proprietors had at there and across North America. What made their restaurant so special was how they divided up the work needed to make burgers and fries in the most efficient way possible. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Similarly, the original manufactories were not necessarily steam-driven: they instead employed unskilled workers, each doing a fraction of the total work, to achieve exorbitant productivity. As Stewart observes, “The nineteenth century saw the birth of mass production and distribution of nearly everything: furniture, clothing, tools, appliances. It was inevitable that the techniques and the philosophy of industrialism would come to the theater.” (Stewart, p. 85) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Vaudeville performances were thus staged from eight o’clock in the morning until late in the evening, or even the early hours. Audiences could pay to enter and leave any time, and were treated to about ten separate acts, repeated over again until closing, according to “Trav.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There was a rough pattern the performances: novices and less-polished openers would warm up the crowd for the headliners that took up the middle of the cycle. Then, less-talented acts further down the playbill, would follow on until the final “chaser”, a performer so bad that he or she would literally chase the audience from the seats. The goal was, of course, to create room for more paying customers.
Often, notes Stewart, one of the segments of the vaudeville show would be a short silent-film. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The talking-pictures, though, were (along with the Depression) a cause of vaudeville’s demise. In the 1930s, film-production boomed even as live-theatre, and most other American industries, went into prolonged slump. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, as the movies could now feature singing as well as dancing, the musical talent of vaudeville and Broadway largely decamped to Hollywood, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musical_film#The_classical_sound_era">creating the great age of the movie-musical from the ‘30s to the 1950s</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">While vaudeville largely faded out, Broadway continued to originate musical-theatre during this period, with many of productions successfully adapted to the wide-screen. But as the west-coast became the talent-centre for the musical, the stage was set in <a href="https://books.google.ca/books?id=SgtyKzBes6QC&pg=PA194&lpg=PA194&dq=Thornton+Wilder,+Tennessee+Williams,+Arthur+Miller+and+Lillian+Hellman&source=bl&ots=pJpN_YBiWP&sig=VksNTk2IBjNPxZ_efXtECAxJ5cg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj2_oHI7_zNAhXDFj4KHW79AfkQ6AEIHzAB#v=onepage&q=Thornton%20Wilder%2C%20Tennessee%20Williams%2C%20Arthur%20Miller%20and%20Lillian%20Hellman&f=false">New York for a fluorescence of theatrical drama</a>, such as not been seen (in the English-speaking world, at least) since Elizabethan times. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During this period, plays written by <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/eugene-oneill-9428728">Eugene O’Neill</a>, <a href="https://www.google.ca/#q=Thornton+Wilder">Thornton Wilder</a>, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/tennessee-williams-about-tennessee-williams/737/">Tennessee Williams</a>, <a href="http://www.gradesaver.com/author/arthur-miller">Arthur Miller</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2011/jan/22/lillian-hellman-childrens-hour-sarah-churchwell">Lillian Hellman</a> met with great commercial and literary success, in spite of their often bleak and tragic content. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They dealt in subject-matter considered too controversial and subversive to be a part of “golden-age” Hollywood cinema. Orson Welles <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orson_Welles#Theatre_.281936.E2.80.931938.29">gained footing in show business</a> through the theatre, though he is best-remembered for his contributions to the art of the film. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Significantly, however, very few of the classics of the “great age of American drama” — such as <i>Our Town</i> by Wilder, O’Neill’s <i>Long Day’s Journey Into Night</i>, <i>Death of a Salesman</i> by Miller, or <i>The Children’s Hour</i> by Hellman — were ever definitively adapted to film. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6i7_inv-GJs/V41SiVwj5TI/AAAAAAAABNc/jBHGjU8FCb8S8wBix-Hd8Aaf8DEEGaA-wCLcB/s1600/death-of-a-salesman%2Bentertainment%2Btime%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-6i7_inv-GJs/V41SiVwj5TI/AAAAAAAABNc/jBHGjU8FCb8S8wBix-Hd8Aaf8DEEGaA-wCLcB/s320/death-of-a-salesman%2Bentertainment%2Btime%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cast of recent staging of Death of a Salesman, with the late Philip Seymour Hoffman second from right (and Spiderman to his left).<br />
entertainment.time.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Williams’ <i>Streetcar Named Desire</i> is perhaps the exception; but it is remembered chiefly, it seems, for Marlon Brando’s undershirted repetition of the character’s name, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S1A0p0F_iH8">Stella</a>”, than for anything else. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Apparently, the twentieth-century American dramatists were communicating something onstage that couldn’t be reproduced effectively on film. There was, on the other hand, little financial risk for theatre-owners to stage these high-brow plays, because of the relatively low cost of production (certainly compared to the expense of making a motion picture). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Edward Albee, a playwright whose career began at the tail-end of this dramaturgical flowering, was in fact <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Albee">the grandson of a vaudeville impresario</a>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Reaching his greatest success in the early ‘60s with <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who%27s_Afraid_of_Virginia_Woolf%3F">Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf</a></i>? (which was successfully adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), Albee introduced strong language and nudity to the stage, though in relatively chaste form, compared to what came later. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps the new era of the Broadway musical began with the premiere of <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hair_(musical)">Hair</a></i>, in 1968. Featuring a group of hippies trying to evade U.S. military conscription, the play also had full-frontal nudity at its climax, a first for Broadway, if not for the American stage as a whole. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Just a year later appeared <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oh!_Calcutta!"><i>Oh! Calcutta</i></a>, a revue of sexuality-theme sketches that featured nudity throughout the show. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In real way, both <i>Hair</i> and <i>Calcutta</i> were reviving the smutty character of the pre-vaudeville stage when, as Stewart describes it, boozing and whoring went hand in hand with theatre-going: when taverns and bawdy houses were not located right inside the venue, they sat right next-door. <i>Calcutta</i>’s incorporation of exhibitionism in the old-style revue, made it seem instantly avant-garde. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vZt_L64TdTM/V4zKPSXNiSI/AAAAAAAABNI/sO0Za7JUX3wWGquXrzc8ByGk7L8cwMFewCLcB/s1600/broadway%2B1970s%2Bgothamist%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-vZt_L64TdTM/V4zKPSXNiSI/AAAAAAAABNI/sO0Za7JUX3wWGquXrzc8ByGk7L8cwMFewCLcB/s320/broadway%2B1970s%2Bgothamist%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Broadway's Theatre Row, 1970s version.<br />
gothamist.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But soon the New York theatre district’s traditional home, around the intersection of Forty-Second street and Broadway, became </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS7Q3tcnHWM" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">far more ribald and dangerous</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> than the worst of the nineteenth century saloons. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Theatres that had staged dramas and musicals were often turned into pornographic cinemas, and the area around Times Square for a time recorded the highest number of offences for its land area, than any other place in the world. Broadway the street was saved by the aggressive policing of scofflaws (which in turn led to a reduction in more serious crimes), and the revocation of slot-palace business-licences. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Major retailers were encouraged to invest in the area, significantly including the Disney company (hence the implicitly derisive term “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disneyfication">Disneyfication</a>” to describe the contemporary Times Square district). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Below the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Times_Square">famous “sign” at the Square</a> (now a series of giant flat-screen monitors), have been installed bleachers so that visitors can sit and view midtown Manhattan as a show in itself (and they in turn are on stage for those walking through the area). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps because of its experience in staging technically sophisticated, interactive entertainment at amusement parks in California and Florida, Disney has also become involved in a big way in live-theatre production. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Not all recent Broadway-musical successes have been based on old movies. In particular, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamilton_(musical)"><i>Hamilton</i></a>, which debuted in 2015 and features a fictionalized account of the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton and his ultimately fateful rivalry with the Vice-President, Aaron Burr. Set to a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eOdWU-EnOEk">largely hip-hop score</a>, with Hispanic and African-American actors playing Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and so on, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/jul/16/theaters-cash-in-new-love-musicals">it has been a smash with audiences</a>, especially young people, and is strikingly original in concept and execution. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KhTKBRJITy8/V4zKbrSRA_I/AAAAAAAABNM/DFL2nHGFix4xa4tZEvLoWMqgXw-TIr0rgCLcB/s1600/hamilton%2Bcast%2Bwww%2Bmic%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="213" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KhTKBRJITy8/V4zKbrSRA_I/AAAAAAAABNM/DFL2nHGFix4xa4tZEvLoWMqgXw-TIr0rgCLcB/s320/hamilton%2Bcast%2Bwww%2Bmic%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Cast of <i>Hamilton</i>.<br />
<i>www</i>.mic.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The irony of all this is, of course, that while the cinema at one time supplanted live-theatre as the main source of public entertainment, now live-entertainment has become the growth industry even as the movie-exhibitor business shrinks in size. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Aside from being transformed into all-around leisure spots (with the addition of fast-food outlets, video-arcade games, rooms for children’s parties), the switch-over to digital projection has allowed cineplexes to <a href="http://www.cineplex.com/Events?cmpid=MainNavEN_events">transmit live entertainment as well</a> — sometimes sports events, but also awards shows, and even opera and other kinds of highbrow spectacle.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Contemporary musical theatre’s revival, often adapting failed or forgotten movies into box-office successes, is part of the trend in which the live performance has become the more lucrative part of the entertainment business, as the Internet and digital technology reduces the value of recorded entertainment to near zero. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The successful live-staging of stories that were failures or forgotten in other media, demonstrates that the form of experience really does matter, over and above its narrative content. And also that live performance which cannot be reproduced effectively in other, recorded media, is all the more precious to audiences.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-71648815479803747732016-06-27T04:14:00.001-07:002016-06-27T04:36:46.048-07:00When Books Do the Talking<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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In the recent <a href="http://anatomyofculture.blogspot.ca/2016/05/the-long-history-of-management-gurus.html" target="_blank">entry </a>on the probable ordinariness of Shakespeare as a person, I remarked as to how journalism is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oral_literature" target="_blank">oral literature</a> of the modern age. As conveyed in the synonym “reporter”, journalists speak directly to those involved in newsworthy events, quoting these accounts directly in order to write a story (another telling word).
Journalism is the translation of the oral into the written. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But for the last few decades, storytelling conceived and originally carried out in written (or typewritten) form, has been translated into a type of oral literature, as well: the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audiobook" target="_blank">audio-book</a>. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cq6ZZ7Xt-a4/V26xZIV6tsI/AAAAAAAABJo/rAy2SxtEwOM4XIHy6QAzEcgmVM7kVgYAQCLcB/s1600/0507Walkman_x6002%2Bwww%2Bwhathifi%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Cq6ZZ7Xt-a4/V26xZIV6tsI/AAAAAAAABJo/rAy2SxtEwOM4XIHy6QAzEcgmVM7kVgYAQCLcB/s320/0507Walkman_x6002%2Bwww%2Bwhathifi%2Bcom.jpg" width="228" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">www.whathifi.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I have, myself, listened to just a single audio-book through my entire adult life: a version of the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magnificent_Ambersons" target="_blank">Magnificent Ambersons</a></i>, the 1918 novel by Booth Tarkington that was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHSRS_nqAF8" target="_blank">adapted to the screen</a> by Orson Welles in 1942. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I obtained the recording on loan from the public library only because it didn’t have a paper copy.
Listening to <i>Ambersons</i>, I did reflect on audio-books as a reintroduction of performance into literature. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is what defines “oral literature” apart from the textual kind, and was the norm at least until the advent of the book in medieval times. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bPQloywwFls/V26zJ72P8bI/AAAAAAAABJ0/wDl-QZqbTrcRnsFOu3EefzZVApINg4tlQCLcB/s1600/native-american-storyteller%2Bwarriornation%2Bning%2Bcom.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="182" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bPQloywwFls/V26zJ72P8bI/AAAAAAAABJ0/wDl-QZqbTrcRnsFOu3EefzZVApINg4tlQCLcB/s320/native-american-storyteller%2Bwarriornation%2Bning%2Bcom.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Depiction of Native American storyteller.<br />
warriornation.ning.com</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">When I was young, there were audio “books” — mostly abridged versions on long-playing record of children’s literature such as </span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226759.Jacob_Two_Two_Meets_the_Hooded_Fang" target="_blank">Jacob Two-two Meets the Hooded Fang</a></i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, by Mordechai Richler. These were used mostly in schools, as I recall hearing that title in class. They were usually accompanied by an illustrated text, for the students or teacher to follow along. A little chime on the record would indicate that it was time to turn a page, as though no one could figure this out for themselves. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Audio-literature did not become commonplace until the 1980s, with the success of the Sony Walkman personal cassette player. As Wikipedia states:</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>Though spoken recordings were popular in 33⅓ vinyl record format for schools and libraries into the early 1970s, the beginning of the modern retail market for audiobooks can be traced to the wide adoption of cassette tapes during the 1970s. ... a number of technological innovations allowed the cassette tape wider usage in libraries and also spawned the creation of new commercial audiobook market. These innovations included the introduction of small and cheap portable players such as the Walkman, and the widespread use of cassette decks in cars, particularly imported Japanese models which flooded the market during the multiple energy crises of the decade.</i></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Mostly, people listened to music on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman" target="_blank">Walkmans</a> and the numerous cheap knock-offs that followed them on to the market. But the audio-cassette was also a practical medium for the reproduction of books in audio form. Each one could hold at least an hour-and-a-half of recorded sound. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A regular novel could be contained on five or six cassettes, whereas the same running-time would occupy an impossibly cumbersome and expensive twenty-five or thirty long-playing discs. </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">(Checking on audio-book titles at random at the library, I found that they average something over five-hundred minutes – almost or as much as ten hours.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Courtesy the Walkman, and the standard-feature automobile cassette player, the spoken word became both portable and private. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sound-through-earphone thus continued the individuation of conscious awareness as characteristic of modern times. But vocal narration of prose must inevitably be a performance, so as to keep the listener’s attention. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It thereby attends immediately to the emotional and holistic mind, in a way that reading prose cannot.
Long before contemporary digital-reader pads, which render text without the eyestrain characteristic of previous devices of the kind, the audio-book had already transformed literature into “media” — communication of sound and images through electrical current. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Publishers have long created audio versions of their major releases, on audio-cassette originally, and later on digital and download formats. The Walkman, however, is a perfect embodiment of the “post-modern”. It (and its successors, such as the iPod) have served to intensify the withdrawal of self from surroundings. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The very means for the marooning awareness in this fashion, is sound that is heard fully only by the user of the device (and it is mere annoyance if played too loudly for others to hear). It affects the more primitive forms of consciousness that are neglected, suppressed and underplayed by modern society. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--kTQRVwXk-M/V26z5kUSbNI/AAAAAAAABKA/Tw5ZS6hdwR8JJpZ6E1SbVRkevZsYzu_NQCLcB/s1600/medium-is-the-message-record-lp%2Brhizone%2Borg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/--kTQRVwXk-M/V26z5kUSbNI/AAAAAAAABKA/Tw5ZS6hdwR8JJpZ6E1SbVRkevZsYzu_NQCLcB/s320/medium-is-the-message-record-lp%2Brhizone%2Borg.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Early talking book.<br />
rhizone.org</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Traditional media for the individuation of consciousness, such as written and printed text, affected primarily the rational aspects of the mind. Electric media previous to the Walkman, could very well be consumed individually. This is especially the case with television, but it and the other broadcast medium, radio, have also been frequently consumed socially. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> The Walkman <i>required </i>individual use. It is thus enhanced individuality but in a different modality than what is witnessed when writing or reading a book, or attending to some other complex task. The electronic world represents less so the “tribalization” of consciousness, as <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/player/play/1809480997" target="_blank">Marshall McLuhan</a> described it, than a still-individuated consciousness that, unlike during high-modernity, encompasses the emotional and aesthetic aspects of life, as a matter of course.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-45037787508875529552016-05-16T05:28:00.001-07:002016-05-16T05:28:45.974-07:00The Long History of (Management) Gurus<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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I used to deride the whole idea of the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consultant" target="_blank">consultant</a>”, essentially someone who gets paid a lot to advise others how to act. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But reflecting more carefully on their role in modern business, aren’t consultants in fact the modern equivalents of <a href="http://www.thefreedictionary.com/wise+man" target="_blank">wise men and women of yore</a> — veterans with deep experience who, by choice or not, do not actually practice what they preach? </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bNgSkVr1Bug/Vzm74pnnbMI/AAAAAAAABFM/n4Y-E6cWSdwm6Fo5W638ZDfsBfFFtS2mwCLcB/s1600/Wise-Man%2Bkenokazaki%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="316" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bNgSkVr1Bug/Vzm74pnnbMI/AAAAAAAABFM/n4Y-E6cWSdwm6Fo5W638ZDfsBfFFtS2mwCLcB/s320/Wise-Man%2Bkenokazaki%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Consultant: medieval version.<br />kenokazaki com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Not all consultants are superannuated in this fashion. But even consultancies run by those long before retirement, always tout their x years or decades of combined experience, which usually add up to the length of the career of a single retired person. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus a random sampling from the Internet of quotes from various consulting firms: </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://www.corporateconsultants.com/" target="_blank"><i>“We leverage over thirty years of hands-on experience in a wide range of industries to provide our clients a focused approach…” </i></a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://www.bain.com/industry-expertise/index.aspx" target="_blank"><i>“(We have) extensive experience across all industries. Our highly customized teams bring each client a combination of deep industry knowledge and expert perspectives from other industries on the challenge at stake…” </i></a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://optimussbr.com/about/#sthash.YPcIDv12.dpuf" target="_blank"><i>“We have developed a series of best practices from years of consulting experience…”</i></a></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The most successful consultants do receive hefty remuneration to convey knowledge about a particular field, which comes mostly through experience, as opposed to mere academic training. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">No wonder that consultants’ preferred media of communication are the business meeting and the oral presentation. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Their most valuable advice relates not the technicalities of the field, but to behavioural subtleties the mastery of which can lead to greater professional success. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Certainly, consultants do publish their thoughts in books. Management consultants especially did (at least in the recent past) enjoy best-selling readership. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But whatever the differences in the various books on management, they are characteristic for their “conversational” style, heavy with epigrams and aphorisms: for example (and tellingly) “management is about people.” </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Revealingly also, management consultants were during the height of their popularity often called “</span><a href="http://www.forbes.com/2009/10/13/influential-business-thinkers-leadership-thought-leaders-chart.html" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">gurus</a><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">”, as are the most otherworldly of the wizened teachers of wisdom. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Certain consultants become gurus, because their ideas seem more oracular, than logical. It is their submergence in the oral culture of speech and beseech, which makes them seem like religious mystics. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The engagement of elders for their wisdom endured long after the accession from tribal-kinship society. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <a href="http://quatr.us/government/oligarchy.htm" target="_blank">oligarchies </a>that controlled ancient city states especially, were in essence councils of elders, men who’d distinguished themselves in the service of the polis. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <a href="http://www.unrv.com/empire/the-senate.php" target="_blank">Senate of Rome</a> was just such an entity, constituted originally as an advisory body only, whilst lawmaking was theoretically in the hands of the Assembly of the People. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Eventually, though, the Assembly of Seniors took precedence over that of the People, which in turn became an irrelevance and formality to the power structure.
With the rise of the emperors, the Roman Senate itself became irrelevant. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Not coincidentally, empire’s the younger man’s project: Julius Caesar was scarcely in his forties when he began his campaign of conquest in Gaul and elsewhere, before assassinated by the elders of the legislature, fretful about his life-dictatorship. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uwCBAjUsHSw/Vzm8PaYwItI/AAAAAAAABFQ/yJL2yZirDrA5y_pe_XYhXlwYlJadXFRMQCLcB/s1600/caesar-sunglasses-www%2Bavclub%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-uwCBAjUsHSw/Vzm8PaYwItI/AAAAAAAABFQ/yJL2yZirDrA5y_pe_XYhXlwYlJadXFRMQCLcB/s320/caesar-sunglasses-www%2Bavclub%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Casear was da bomb.<br />www.avclub.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Earlier, </span><a href="http://www.historyofmacedonia.org/AncientMacedonia/AlexandertheGreat.html" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Alexander the Great</a><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> conquered most of equatorial Eurasia years before his early death at age thirty-two. Modern empires, too, were overwhelmingly the work of younger men wishing to escape the suffocation of gerontocracy. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Apart from class struggle, there is an inter-generational contest in every major society between youthful thirst for adventure and novelty, and elders who seek stability and tradition.
In modern times, revolutionary movements, like imperial conquest, have been the work of younger men. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <a href="http://www.theopedia.com/protestant-reformation" target="_blank">Protestant Reformation</a>, for example, was begun in 1517 when Martin Luther, then aged 35, nailed his “ninety-five thesis” to the door of the cathedral of Worms. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Luther’s successors in the revolt against the
Catholic hierarchy, were also young men: Jean Cauvin (known in the English-speaking world as John Calvin) was just twenty-one when he began to attack the church hierarchy in Geneva. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Another Swiss Protestant, famous in his homeland but largely unknown outside, was Huldrych Zwingli, who was just over thirty when he began his theological revolt. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">John Knox, the architect of Scots Protestantism, was about Luther’s age when he became involved in Reformation.
Yet even here, the old-fashioned dynamic came into play. For when the Kirk was formally Established, it was governed by Elders — <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbyterian_polity" target="_blank">the Presbyters</a>. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Similarly, the state Protestant churches established throughout the Occident, had senior clergymen taking control of matters once again. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus, whatever his firebrand ways as a man in his thirties, the elder Martin Luther allied with the German dukes and princes who wished to reign in the instability of ecstatic religiosity, propagandizing against the even more radical young churchmen who succeeded him, as they were suppressed by the nobility. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Prussian church to which Luther gave his name, was appropriately sober and senior in constitution. The Reform clergy seemed to understand early on that the capriciousness and instability of youth, was contrary to the becalmed liturgy and lifestyle they wished to impose on society. </span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Observe, young friends.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The first of today’s </span><a href="http://cs.mcgill.ca/~rwest/wikispeedia/wpcd/wp/l/Liberal_democracy.htm" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">liberal democracies</a><span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> were mostly founded by Protestants, whose version of responsible government was strongly presbyterian in character. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus the upper chamber of modern bicameral legislatures — the one closest to the executive — is always the Senate, or an equivalent name given to an assembly of the old and wise. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Traditionally, too, these were appointive bodies, as was the U.S. Senate until 1912, while members of the Canadian and British upper Parliaments are appointed even today.
The rationale for reviving this ancient institution in modern constitutions, was precisely to give form to the oligarchical basis of democracy. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Canadian Senate has been called the “house of sober second thought”, with the sobriety of the cognition therein presumed to come from seniority and a lack of responsibility to an electorate. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">If the Senate here or in any other country, gives short shrift to this function in actuality, there was nevertheless the intention (and the hope of some even now) that it would do so.
What does it say, however, about the dynamism of present-day businesses, when they seem to pay so much to consult with elders?
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-78398404705077752922016-04-02T08:32:00.001-07:002016-07-18T09:37:26.676-07:00The Right Ordinary Bill Shakespeare<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">
The twenty-third of April, 2016, will mark the four-hundredth anniversary of the death of <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/william-shakespeare-9480323" target="_blank">William Shakespeare</a>, judged to be the greatest writer in the English-language, one of the greatest ever. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Recently, the <i>Daily Telegraph</i> published <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/william-shakespeare/12166254/New-portrait-of-William-Shakespeare-as-flesh-and-blood-man-you-might-see-down-the-pub.html" target="_blank">a new portrait</a> of the Bard by Geoffrey Tristram, which purports to be as “authentic” an image as possible of Shakespeare, who in turn is described as being like “a chap down the pub.” (<i>below</i>)</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Daily Telegraph, Geoffrey Tristram.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I think a large part of the fascination with Shakespeare lies in the fact that the details of his life are so obscure. As Bill Bryson writes in <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/135611.Shakespeare" target="_blank">his very slim biography</a> <i>Shakespeare: The World as Stage</i>, “After four hundred years of dedicated hunting, researchers have found about a hundred documents relating to William Shakespeare and his immediate family-baptismal records, title deeds, tax certificates, marriage bonds, writs of attachment, court records (many court records – it was a litigious age), and so on.” (Atlas Books, Harper/Collins, 2007, page 7). </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In fact, practically everything written about him is conjecture, supposition and outright fantasy. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There has even been for many decades an <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question" target="_blank">ongoing debate</a> as to whether William Shakespeare actually wrote the plays and poems that are credited to his name. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The most popular candidate as the “real” author of <i>Twelfth Night, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet</i> and the rest of the Shakespearean corpus, is Edward de Vere, the seventeen Earl of Oxford (amongst other candidates are Sir Francis Bacon, the Sixth Earl of Derby and Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe). </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Another more recent line of speculation focuses not on authorship, but religion: the historian Michael Wood, in his <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_aJquGePgY" target="_blank">In Search of Shakespeare</a></i> miniseries, argues that the playwright was a secret Catholic. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is, argues Wood, because the practice of the “old religion” in Elizabethan England would, if revealed, land the adherent in serious trouble, up to and including torturous and capital punishments. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But according to Bryson, it is unremarkable that so little of Shakespeare’s life is known, given that this was true of practically everyone in the poet’s lifetime, including his fellow playwrights (Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson and so on), excepting for royals and very powerful nobles. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Given the obscurity of Shakespeare as a person and publican, it is necessary to examine in detail his background, the details of the historical times in which he lived, for to speculate as to how he might have got on in life. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This was the procedure of the historian Peter Ackroyd’s <i><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/32483.Shakespeare" target="_blank">Shakespeare: The Biography</a></i> (London, Chatto and Windus, 2005), and I think Ackroyd captures perhaps the truest picture of the Bard of Stratford as any yet achieved. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bc_pyjU2CxQ/Vv_ko0w61oI/AAAAAAAABDU/RTz_QP5M_zomEtAnKLzk6VFUVp2CbDVaA/s1600/shakespeare3%2Bwww%2Bbridgemanimages%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="205" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-bc_pyjU2CxQ/Vv_ko0w61oI/AAAAAAAABDU/RTz_QP5M_zomEtAnKLzk6VFUVp2CbDVaA/s320/shakespeare3%2Bwww%2Bbridgemanimages%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Various portraits of William Shakespeare.<br />
www.bridgemanimages.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Ackroyd does briefly discuss, but gives no particular credence to the notion that Shakespeare illegally practised Catholicism. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Considering that evidence marshalled by Ackroyd about what kind of man Shakespeare was, I had the thought that if, somehow, people came to know the “real” Shakespeare (as for example, through the miraculous authentication of a diary or personal letters), it would be a disappointment. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">His name became, in his time, quite famous, and yet few seemed to have been interested in who he was personally. When he died in 1616 in Stratford, no one but friends, associates and family attended his services — quite unlike Jonson and other literary greats of the time. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The adjective that his contemporaries attached to the Bard was “sweet”, characteristic </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">both of his words and his temperament. Beyond that, not much else, even though he mixed with men of words his entire life, and at a time when the concept of privacy scarcely existed at </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">all. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">According to Ackroyd, there is but one record extant of Shakespeare addressing himself in the personal pronoun. It comes from testimony that Shakespeare gave as a witness in a civil-case over a dowry. As Ackroyd notes, the language Shakespeare uses is completely unremarkable for an educated man of his time. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Shakespeare’s personal obscurity, the cause of so much intrigue and speculation, may be because he was not very remarkable at all. His “absence” is so persistent, simply because he may have been persistently absent, hunched over a desk in candlelight, furiously writing out words that only came to him in concentration and solitude. Yet, as an individual social actor Shakespeare was the epitome of petit-bourgeois (whatever his aspirations toward gentility). </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">He </span><span style="font-size: 17.33px; line-height: 26px;">parleyed</span><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> a relatively modest income as a playwright and actor into a healthy nest-egg, cannily buying and selling land and assets (including a share in the theatrical company he worked with), and even being accused of illegal hoarding during times of shortage. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">At his death, he owned one of the largest houses in Stratford, and bequeathed healthy sums to his elder daughter. It seems that, in Elizabethan times, sobriety and responsibility had not yet become opponents of the highest creativity. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Part of the mystery of Shakespeare rests in the fact, during his lifetime, there were not yet newspapers. There were, in fact, unbound, semi-periodical documents that ultimately gave rise to what became the daily newspaper, by the opening of the seventeenth century.
But the first English-language daily (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_British_newspapers" target="_blank">which was in fact published in Amsterdam</a>) did not appear until four years after Shakespeare died in 1616. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">If newspapers existed then, and had reported if not on the details of Shakespeare’s private life, then about his work as a public man, it would have provided illumination to contemporaries, and to later generations, as to exactly what he was doing and when.
Newspapers chronicle public events and activities, just as diaries record private actions and thoughts. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The distinction isn’t so clear-cut, however, given that private diarists often comment on public events, and before the electric telegraph at least, daily newspapers consisted of correspondence sent from eyewitnesses to the scenes of important events (hence the synonym for “reporter”: “correspondent”). </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was at one time at least, commonplace for newspapers to be named the Journal, and in French, dailies are referred to as journales (just as a more synonym for reporter is“journalist”).
In this respect, the daily newspaper succeeded such documents as the <a href="http://avalon.law.yale.edu/medieval/angsaxintro.asp" target="_blank">Anglo-Saxon Chronicle</a> or the <a href="http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/domesday/" target="_blank">Domesday book</a> (and their equivalents in other languages) in providing a chronological record of society. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As with personal diaries, newspapers didn’t have to tell the truth, or at least, the whole truth, in order for readers to gain an understanding of the chronology of the life of the diarist, or of the city or society documented. </span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The oral literature of modern times.<br />
blog.rarenewspapers.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But because this institution had not yet appeared when Shakespeare was alive (or at least, not in the English language, though German and Dutch dailies were started in the early seventeenth century), we don’t even know where he actually was during his lifetime, except for one or two instances. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Neither do we know when exactly, or in what order, any of his plays were first performed. In the presence of newspapers, we might have knowledge, indirectly no doubt, of these key facts. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">We would in any case have a more comprehensive view of Shakespeare’s life, enough perhaps that it would be impossible for anyone to argue that he didn’t actually compose the works that bear his name.
It is interesting that while the periodical (which is to say, “the press”) is the ultimate form of the printing press, it really didn’t come into existence until more than a century following the invention of movable type itself. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During this period, the printing press was treated mainly as a great enhancement of the medieval use of manuscript, which was to preserve the writings of the past, in book form. Unbound documents certainly did have an immediate impact upon discourse. It was only that such printed media didn’t take periodical form until the seventeenth century.</span></span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-44085550678253545682016-03-09T16:21:00.001-08:002016-09-29T07:23:54.042-07:00Every Instalment Was the Holiday Special: Some Better, Some Worse<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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Recently, I attended the second-run showing of the <a href="http://thehatefuleight.com/" target="_blank"><i>Hateful Eight</i></a>, the “Eighth Film by Quentin Tarantino.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">t was released, to little fanfare as I recall, during the Christmas season. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Starlog Magazine, Issue no 19, dated February 1979, but published circa November 1978.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The publication of a Tarantino movie was – as recently as his last film, </span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Django Unchained</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> – something of an event. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And although the <i>Hateful Eight</i> did respectably at the box-office (according to Wikipedia, earning $145 million in theatres), the success of the <i>Star Wars</i> sequel, <i>The Force Awakens</i>, overshadowed all other late-year releases in 2015.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games_(film_series)" target="_blank"><i>Hunger Games</i></a> film series was, at one time, a cultural phenomenon. The final installment in the series, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games:_Mockingjay_%E2%80%93_Part_2" target="_blank"><i>Mockingjay Part 2</i></a>, came out in November to the yawns of most sci-fi fans (perhaps not as many as were caused by viewing the first <i>Mockingjay </i>film, however). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Although <i>Mockingjay</i> the second went on to gross more than US$600 million at the box office, <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=hungergames4.htm" target="_blank">the majority of this came from overseas’ audiences</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And, who can recall that December also saw the release of a movie by the once-hotshot director Ron Howard?
<i><a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=heartofthesea.htm" target="_blank">In the Heart of the Sea</a></i>, with a production budget of one-hundred million dollars, grossed just a quarter of that amount in general release. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">By contrast, the <i><a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=starwars7.htm" target="_blank">Force Awakens</a></i> has taken in more than two billion dollars in revenue since its release a week before Christmas. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This total makes the seventh Star Wars film the <a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/domestic.htm" target="_blank">top-grossing film</a> at the box office, surpassing the record held by the 2009 film <i>Avatar</i> (although, adjusted for inflation, the most successful theatrical film is <i><a href="http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm" target="_blank">Gone with the Wind</a></i>, which was released almost eighty years ago). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Seeing the <i>Force Awakens</i> just after it came out, I quite enjoyed the experience. The film has been hailed as a return to form for a film-series that definitely lost its way with the three prequel films released between 1999 and 2005. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, I’ve not been able to get over the notion that the fate of the <i>Force Awakens</i> will be similar to that of <i>Avatar</i>, another highly popular sci-fi film whose impact, as it turns out, was not at all enduring. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">When news came in 2012 that <i>Star Wars</i> mastermind George Lucas had sold his property to the Walt Disney company, and that the latter would commence with the production of further sequels, </span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I remained sceptical that there was any story left to tell of this “saga.”
Even having enjoyed the film, I think my scepticism was warranted.
The <i>Force Awakens</i> is hardly a terrible movie (as was at least the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Episode_I_%E2%80%93_The_Phantom_Menace" target="_blank">first of the three prequels</a> directed by series creator George Lucas around the turn of the century). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is, however, transparently not original, being largely a retelling of the first, and most successful of the movies, released in 1977.
This the movie’s director, J.J. Abrams, <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/jj-abrams-responds-rip-criticism-853352" target="_blank">has all but acknowledged</a>, but it is remarkable how much that Force Awakens conforms to the original, from its settings, to its characters, to the thrust of the overall story. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The satirical website Cracked had a <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/if-the-force-awakens-was-way-shorter-more-honest/" target="_blank">mock film-script</a> with famous scenes from the first Star Wars crossed out, their equivalents in the new movie placed beside them. </span><span style="line-height: 150%;"> </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-le9qdFPMiAE/VuC89MVW0LI/AAAAAAAABCM/S_M3jRXxK2Y/s1600/cracked-star-wars-comparison.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="227" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-le9qdFPMiAE/VuC89MVW0LI/AAAAAAAABCM/S_M3jRXxK2Y/s320/cracked-star-wars-comparison.JPG" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Yup.<br />
www.cracked.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">My idea has long been that the galactic setting of the first movie was not an imaginary place (as is, for example, the Middle Earth of the </span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Lord of the Rings</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> novels and movies), but a device through which several distinct adventure genres (the western, the war flick, the samurai picture, the medieval romance) could be combined into a single movie through the magic of sci-fi technology. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The original <i>Star Wars</i> was thus a kind of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variety_show" target="_blank">variety show</a>, something that was perhaps unconsciously signalled through the conclusion of several comic elements in the picture (such as the robotic oddball sidekicks, the hulking canine-man, the dance-band of assorted aliens in the famous “cantina” bar scene, which of course has a close counterpart in the Force Awakens). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is interesting in this regard that the very first sequel to the original <i>Star Wars</i> was not a movie, but a television show: the <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3a5j8PgQxg" target="_blank">Star Wars Holiday Special</a></i>, broadcast in 1978, and which was actually a variety program that featured the singing talents of Carrie Fisher (who played Princess Leia in the first trilogy as well as the <i>Force Awakens</i>), comic-repartee between Bea Arthur and Harvey Corman (popular television personalities at the time), as well as a cartoon segment that introduced the Boba Fett villain seen next in the <i>Empire Strikes Back</i>. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Badly-received at the time, it was never aired again, has never been made available through home-video, and its existence was scarcely acknowledged thereafter. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Regarded as a strange, “non-cannon” outlier in the whole <i>Star Wars</i> “universe”, the Holiday Special should have been viewed as an unsettling portent of Lucas’ lack of artistic judgement as well as his ambition <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_Jar_Binks" target="_blank">to pander to the most juvenile elements</a> of the target audience, both of which were on full display with the <i>Phantom Menace</i> and the other prequels. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Returning to point, I think it is unlikely that the sequel-stories will be as compelling as the </span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Force Awakens</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> simply because of the conceptual insufficiency of the setting in which the whole story takes place. It was a framing device for a variety show, and like any background, it doesn’t stand for much scrutiny until its phoniness is revealed. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <i>Star Wars</i> sequel inspired another idea relating to the “retro-mania” described by Simon Reynolds in his recent book of that name. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <i>Force Awakens</i> is a sequel (and retelling) of a movie that was released theatrically thirty-eight years earlier.
It would have been inconceivable in 1977, though, to make a sequel to a movie released in 1939. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The cinema of that earlier time was, if not largely forgotten, then viewed as irredeemably antique and outdated in a way that at least certain films of the mid- to late 1970s are not today, apparently. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is verified by the fact that Star Wars itself actually was directly inspired by features released in 1939, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Rogers_(serial)" target="_blank">Buck Rogers</a></i>, and three years earlier, <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Gordon#Film_serials" target="_blank">Flash Gordon</a></i>. Both starred the former U.S. Olympic athlete <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buster_Crabbe" target="_blank">Clarence “Buster” Crabbe</a> as a regular earthman who finds himself in the 25th century (<i>Rogers</i>) or in a far-off galaxy (<i>Gordon</i>). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Presented in about a dozen serial-installments with each but the last ending in a cliffhanger (the term “cliffhanger” itself deriving from a typical climactic predicament in these serials), <i>Flash Gordon</i> and <i>Buck Rogers</i> had total running-times of twice or even three times the typical ninety-minute length of a regular feature film of the era. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The acknowledgement by Lucas of his debt to these serials, resurrected them from the complete obscurity to everyone but the age-cohort to which he himself belonged.
<i>Buck Rogers</i> was revived as a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buck_Rogers_in_the_25th_Century_(TV_series)" target="_blank">network television series</a> for a couple of seasons around the turn of the 1980s, while <i>Flash Gordon</i> was made into a disastrously-received <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4mBGEdB-XE" target="_blank">big-budget picture</a> in 1980. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HApE_5lHHjM/VuC88niIXTI/AAAAAAAABCI/ZVHiF9-X-uk/s1600/flash_gordon_roobla%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HApE_5lHHjM/VuC88niIXTI/AAAAAAAABCI/ZVHiF9-X-uk/s400/flash_gordon_roobla%2Bcom.jpg" width="282" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I remember this movie quite well... <br />
because I saw it the evening that John Lennon was shot.<br />
roobla.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I recall seeing the serials themselves on TV during this period, but they nevertheless remained curiosities, and no one to my knowledge has sought to continue the unsuccessful revivals that came in the wake of the original </span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Star Wars</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">.
It was not only that the 1930s’ movies were in black-and-white, and the visual-effects were rudimentary (and even colour films of that time appeared unreal in Technicolor garish). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The serial format itself was part of a cinematic experience that hadn’t existed for decades, when the “feature presentation” was accompanied by another half-dozen films, including the newsreel, a couple of cartoons, a short comedy film, a song-and-dance routine, even a sing-along, in addition to an adventure serial (which were typically cowboy or crime stories). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Cinema-going in the <i>Flash Gordon</i> era was a kind of variety show in itself.
But as television became the chief medium of entertainment, cinemas pared back their offerings until the feature-film was accompanied only by a cartoon (then this disappeared as well, its place taken entirely by coming attractions trailers). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">fter the 1950s, there was no place at movie-theatres for serial-features, and while <i>Flash Gordon</i>, <i>Buck Rogers</i> and other serials were edited and presented on early television, their narrative structure (with a cliffhanger occurring at a set interval) seemed awkward when presented in one sitting (as opposed to being stretched over several weeks or months). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There was, in sum, a far greater disparity between the movie-going experience in the thirty-eight years between 1939 and 1977 that made the earlier features inaccessible to all but a small number of the latter-day audience, than was the case in the same period of time between ‘77 and 2015.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-3590421577724035662016-02-22T15:12:00.003-08:002016-02-22T15:12:19.464-08:00Conservatives Despise, and Leftists Embrace, This Particular Example of Laissez-Faire Capitalism<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">
An <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/john-robson-modern-art-is-garbage-and-it-stinks" target="_blank">article</a> posted at the website of the <i>National Post</i> by <a href="http://www.thejohnrobson.com/" target="_blank">John Robson</a>, made me aware of certain paradoxes with respect to the market for modern art. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Robson’s politics are to the right, and while an intellectual, he shares in the conservative distaste for contemporary artworks (the title of the piece: “Modern Art is Garbage”, Feb. 1, 2016). </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MI1zLhput0Y/VsuVXV9qwxI/AAAAAAAABBg/3xESS_kQ4lE/s1600/rothko-forgery.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-MI1zLhput0Y/VsuVXV9qwxI/AAAAAAAABBg/3xESS_kQ4lE/s320/rothko-forgery.jpg" width="259" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fraud.<br />www.theprovince.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Modern art, Robson says not inaccurately, is “meant to disgust, shock, challenge "convention" and reduce hope and morality to a smouldering heap of obscene rubbish.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">He describes how an abstract-expressionist work long credited to Russian-born American painter <a href="http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/slideshows/mark-rothko.html" target="_blank">Mark Rothko</a> (1903-1970), was recently exposed as a fake, but only after its owner paid US$8 million-plus for it (and who was an official with Sotheby’s, the famed London art-auction house). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Robson’s contention seems to be that it is in the nature of Rothko paintings that they can be so easily faked. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But Renaissance works have been subject to <a href="http://hoaxes.org/archive/permalink/renaissance_forgeries" target="_blank">successful forgery</a>, as well, with their exposure coming only as a result of chemical analyses revealing the anachronistic materials used in their production. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cN8ytMc9ppU/VsuVXUucNVI/AAAAAAAABBo/3-1FuKUy_cY/s1600/Renaissance-portrait-was-unmask-as-FORGERY-fakes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cN8ytMc9ppU/VsuVXUucNVI/AAAAAAAABBo/3-1FuKUy_cY/s320/Renaissance-portrait-was-unmask-as-FORGERY-fakes.jpg" width="285" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Also Fraud.<br />http://webartacademy.com/</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But more relevantly, abstract-expressionism and other more recent art movements that repel and even disgust conservatives like Robson, are a result of the free market. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Certainly, the arts (including visual and plastic art) have been subsidized by the government, but modernism in art going back to the nineteenth century, has developed many as a result of the free market. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The art market is in fact one of the few examples of nearly unregulated capitalism in today’s economy. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For being essentially a handicraft industry, as well, it is big money, as with the recent sale of a Picasso work for more than US$150 million. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Conservatives axiomatically favour the free market as the default means through which goods and services are produced (I know this to be true of Robson, as I’ve been reading his columns over many years). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, when it comes to a product — modern and contemporary art — which results from transactions of a market which is in turn almost entirely laissez-faire, they are unanimous in their hatred of it. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qwrtu6QNIik/VsuVXbwxDmI/AAAAAAAABBk/SrKqh75bQ0g/s1600/Sothebys-Contemporary-Art-Auction%2Bartobserved.com.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="223" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-qwrtu6QNIik/VsuVXbwxDmI/AAAAAAAABBk/SrKqh75bQ0g/s320/Sothebys-Contemporary-Art-Auction%2Bartobserved.com.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Capitalist pigs.<br /></td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is confounding to leftist politics, as well, though. For, not only do artists adhere to classical- and neo-socialist politics <a href="http://www.noupe.com/inspiration/showcases/50-stunning-political-artworks.html" target="_blank">as an orthodoxy</a>, regardless of their level of enrichment by the marketplace in art they claim to despise. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is confounding to leftist ideology in the first place, that contemporary art (painting, sculpture or new-media) is almost universally disparaging in content of bourgeois values and tastes, in spite of it being a product of laissez-faire. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Socialists have long claimed that cultural-commercialism is directed toward conditioning and brainwashing the masses into accepting the “status quo.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But with modern art, this is clearly not the case. Further, when contemporary artworks do come under criticism by conservatives, leftist commentators reflexively defend an industry that is practically without regulation by the state.
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-68805185464208552272016-01-31T09:47:00.002-08:002017-04-14T07:34:10.603-07:00Why Do We Prefer an Airplane Over a Starship?<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">
January, 2016 has turned out to be probably the worst month for rock-music deaths <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Music_Died" target="_blank">since February, 1959</a>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Just a week or two ago, came news that Glenn Frey of the Eagles (or rather, “Eagles”, as there was no definite article before their name) had passed away, from cancer, aged 67. A day previously, Dale Griffin, the drummer for the ‘70s band Mott the Hoople, was also 67 at his death (he had suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Jimmy Bain, the bass-guitarist for hard-rock band Rainbow (founded by guitarist Richie Blackmore after his departure from Deep Purple), died on the 24th. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> The most famous of the batch was probably David Bowie, who also suffered from cancer and passed away on January 10. Just before the New Year, too, Ian “Lemmy” Kilmister, lead singer and bassist with Motorhead, died from cancer. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There was also <a href="http://waterfordwhispersnews.com/2016/01/20/rock-legend-animal-dies-aged-66/" target="_blank">the tragic passing of Animal</a>, the manic drummer for the band on the Muppet Show.
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mwCEWRZpXks/Vq5IHMntRcI/AAAAAAAABAM/lSG24L28GJI/s1600/paul-kantner-hitsdailydoublecom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mwCEWRZpXks/Vq5IHMntRcI/AAAAAAAABAM/lSG24L28GJI/s320/paul-kantner-hitsdailydoublecom.jpg" width="242" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Paul Kantner.<br />
hitsdailydouble.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And then just this week, Paul Kantner, singer and chief songwriter of the Jefferson Airplane / Starship, passed away aged 74 of what is being called “multiple organ failure.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Kantner’s <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jefferson-airplane-guitarist-paul-kantner-dead-at-74-20160128" target="_blank">obituary</a> on the web site of <i>Rolling Stone</i> reminded me of thoughts I coincidentally had recently about him, and the bands that he lead. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">First, though Kantner wrote the vast majority of the material on Airplane / Starship albums, and was the lead male voice on most of their material (especially after the departure of founder Marty Balin), he was scarcely a household name. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> Given that the lead singer was Grace Slick, it is no wonder that the other crewmembers of the Airplane / Starship were virtually anonymous to the general public. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">An even more interesting puzzle, though, is why nowadays the Jefferson Airplane remains so well known while the Starship version of the band is virtually forgotten.
But during their career, the Jefferson Starship were far more popular than was Kantner’s earlier band. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">According to Wikipedia, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_Starship_discography" target="_blank">three of the Starship’s albums</a> released between 1975 and ’78, achieved “platinum” status (as recognized by the Recording Industry Association of America), with sales of one-million records or more (one of these, Red Octopus, achieved sales of two million or more records). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Four more Starship records released between 1979 and 1984, sold 500,000 copies or more (thereby achieving the RIAA’s gold-record award). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As for the Jefferson Airplane, the only one of their albums to go platinum (again, according to Wikipedia) was the Worst of the Jefferson Airplane, the 1970 compilation album. The releases with original material released during the Airplane’s “classic” period (when Slick had replaced the original lead female singer, Signe Toly Anderson), only ever achieved “gold” status. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Jefferson Starship was more popular than the Airplane, when these acts were active recording artists.
I remember this well from my own youth, when the Starship was so popular, and very occasionally, I would hear the name “Jefferson Airplane”, and think, “Isn’t that supposed to be Jefferson Starship?” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the ‘70s, the Airplane seemed an antiquated, forgotten version of the then-current version of the band.
However, it is the Airplane, and not the Starship, that people remember today. The name of the Facebook that I belong to which covers the careers of both phases of the band, for example, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/comeuptheyears.optimum.net/" target="_blank">is named after the Jefferson Airplane</a>, with no explicit mention of the Starship. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Was the Jefferson Airplane really that much better of a group than the Starship? I don’t know, actually, because although I have seven of their albums, I discovered upon rechecking my disc collection while writing this entry, that I don't have a single Jefferson Starship album (excepting the earlier solo album by Paul Kantner that was backed by all-star band called “Jefferson Starship”). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I can name several songs by the Airplane – such as <i>White Rabbit</i>, <i>Somebody to Love</i>, or <i>Volunteers </i>– that have significant radio airplay. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VitOUvE3YQI/Vq5IUHxiK1I/AAAAAAAABAU/oRzf37hxp-c/s1600/graceslickvolunteers_digitalseancewordpresscom.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VitOUvE3YQI/Vq5IUHxiK1I/AAAAAAAABAU/oRzf37hxp-c/s320/graceslickvolunteers_digitalseancewordpresscom.png" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hey, Grandma. You're so young.<br />
digitalseancewordpress.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But Jefferson Airplane hits that are played on the radio these days? Perhaps they are played in places where I don’t live. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But I would be hard-pressed to name a Starship song (besides <i>We Built This City</i>) to save my life. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It isn't out of any hostility to toward the Starship’s music that I have failed to buy any of their albums. If I had seen available, new or secondhand, I would have checked them out. Again, it is as though that variant of the band has faded into obscurity while the Airplane has become all the more prominent. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is a lesson on the capriciousness of fame. I'm sure there is something bigger here about culture and popular culture that the latter-day obscurity of Jefferson Starship could tell us, but I'm not sure what. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sZsgzSunaNM/Vq5IibPe8KI/AAAAAAAABAc/3eKhq8IsDUU/s1600/signe-ettin-facebook.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sZsgzSunaNM/Vq5IibPe8KI/AAAAAAAABAc/3eKhq8IsDUU/s320/signe-ettin-facebook.jpg" width="224" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Signe Toly Anderson Ettin.<br />
Photo from Facebook page.</td></tr>
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<b style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Postscript</b><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">: while preparing these writings for publication, I discovered that the aforementioned original Airplane vocalist </span><a href="https://www.facebook.com/signe.ettlin" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Signe (Anderson) Ettin</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, </span><a href="http://thewalrusmusicblog.blogspot.ca/2016/01/signe-toly-anderson-dead-at-74.html" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">has also passed away</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">. Like Paul Kantner, she was 74 years old. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A cruel month indeed, January 2016, for old rockers.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-45101173132711220792016-01-11T17:28:00.002-08:002016-01-17T08:09:33.674-08:00The Sounding of Moby Dick<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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Having seen, over Christmastime, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/news/jj-abrams-criticism-star-wars-the-force-awakens-a-new-hope-rip-off-a6804546.html" target="_blank">a small independent movie released without much ballyhoo</a>, I turn my attention to what is the undisputed blockbuster of the season, Ron Howard’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Heart_of_the_Sea_(film)" target="_blank"><i>In the Heart of the Sea</i></a>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The film portrays the ill-fated voyage of the <i>Essex</i>, the travails of which inspired Herman Melville’s <i>Moby Dick</i>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This tale was recounted also in Ric Burns’ documentary, <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PeS_gFhmVk" target="_blank">Into the Deep</a></i>, a history of American whaling first broadcast on PBS in 2010. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--0_hp2W4CUU/VpRUQmMhj4I/AAAAAAAAA-4/E3Fv7hTFh_8/s1600/in-heart-of-sea%2Bwallpapers%2Bfilmibeat%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/--0_hp2W4CUU/VpRUQmMhj4I/AAAAAAAAA-4/E3Fv7hTFh_8/s320/in-heart-of-sea%2Bwallpapers%2Bfilmibeat%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Image from In the Heart of the Sea.<br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This comes as part of a more comprehensive account of the whaling industry in the U.S., and is well worth a view. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It occurred to me, though, that only very recently did the whale change in the imagination of educated Occidentals at least, so that the routine slaughter of the sea mammals, ongoing for centuries, suddenly became intolerable, an activity requiring global prohibition. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Having surveyed the available literature on the topic, though, my tentative hypothesis had been to link the expansion of whaling <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_colonialism" target="_blank">to the colonization of the world</a> by Europeans. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The book <i><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/20/books/20book.html?_r=0" target="_blank">Leviathan</a></i>, is another history of American whaling by Jay Dolin, and confirms that while whale-hunting may have extended back millennia to the Phoenicians and Greeks, a true whaling industry began only during the Middle Ages with the Basques, the people of mysterious origin who have been fighting for centuries for independence from Spain. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><i><a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8027-1349-0" target="_blank">A Basque History of the World</a></i>, by Mark Kurlansky and published in 1999, expands on the Basque origins of modern whaling, showing that their pursuit of the giant sea-mammals took them throughout the Atlantic ocean long before most other European peoples even attempted long-distance seafaring. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Kurlansky supports the argument that Basques preceded Norsemen to the New World, citing the coincidence of Basque words in Canadian native languages, as well as the disproportionate number of Basque crew-members on the explorer ships of both Columbus and Magellan. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Whatever the truth, Basque dominance of commercial whaling was supplanted by the Dutch, imperial masters in the seventeenth century, and a century later by the British, upon whose empire the sun never set during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During the nineteenth century, too, the U.S. became a major whaling nation, in tandem with its rise as a global naval power. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For his part, Kurlansky explains why it is that the bottom-feeding codfish was so valued for centuries: when dried and salted, it kept from spoiling for long periods, which permitted in turn the distant voyages of the Basques and the Norse. The whale was valued because its extensive blubber produced oil for burning. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nantucket island, off the coast of Massachusetts, <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/history/nantucket-came-to-be-whaling-capital-of-world-180957198/" target="_blank">became the fabled centre</a> of the American whaling industry in spite of its relatively sparse population, as it was closer to the original whaling grounds, and the people of barely-arable Nantucket had no other means of prosperity. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Kurlansky notes that the Basques and other whaling peoples would eat the slaughtered creatures’ meat (with whale tongues being the most prized of the edible parts, often given as tribute to the local high clerisy). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Dolin states, however, that the anglophones viewed whale-meat as inedible, with the carcasses of the animals left to rot onshore (or dumped back into the sea) after the precious kerosene oil and whalebone had been extracted from them. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>Into the Deep</i>, describes how whaling expeditions became progressively far-flung as quarry near shore diminished in number. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The daylong hunts of the eighteenth century became months and even years in length later on, but whales had to be processed for their raw materials soon after the slaughter, so as not to go to waste. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Accordingly, <a href="http://www.whalingmuseum.org/learn/research-topics/overview-of-north-american-whaling/whales-hunting" target="_blank">whaling ships evolved into floating factories</a>. They were thus examples of Victorian high technology, and whaling was part of a seafarer culture which gave rise to the novelty of global imperialism. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, whaling also gave force to something primal in the human male, at least.
Only specialists really know or care that the proper scientific name for anatomically modern human is </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anatomically_modern_human" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Homo sapiens sapiens</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, the successor species of Homo sapiens, who were virtually identical with the super-sapiens in terms of physical form, but whose material culture has been shown to be consistently inferior. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Somewhere around one-hundred thousand years ago, as archaeologist <a href="https://classics.stanford.edu/people/ian-morris" target="_blank">Ian Morris</a> observed, the cultural monotony which characterized sapiens’ settlements up to that time, gave way “suddenly” (over a period of centuries) to a diversity of regional styles. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Part of this new cultural sophistication involved the hunting of mega-fauna, most of which disappeared shortly after the arrival of Homo sapiens sapiens. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">But not always the victor...<br />
baroquepotion com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Commenting on the habit of contemporary scholarship to exonerate human activity for these extinctions in favour of climate change, </span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/11/sapiens-brief-history-humankind-yuval-noah-harari-review" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Noah Harari</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> observes, “The giant diprotodon appeared in Australia more than 1. 5 million years ago and successfully weathered at least ten previous ice ages. It also survived the first peak of the last ice age, around 70,000 years ago. Why, then, did it disappear 45,000 years ago? Of course, if diprotodons had been the only large animal to disappear at this time, it might have been just a fluke. But more than 90 per cent of Australia’s megafauna disappeared along with the diprotodon. The evidence is circumstantial, but it's hard to imagine that Sapiens, just by coincidence, arrived in Australia at the precise point that all these animals were dropping dead of the chills.” (</span><i style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind</i><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, 2014, p. 66) </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Harari goes on to state that “mass extinctions akin to the archetypal Australian decimation occurred again and again in the ensuing millennia — whenever people settled another part of the Outer World. In these cases Sapiens guilt is irrefutable. For example, the megafauna of New Zealand — which had weathered the alleged `climate change’ of c. 45,000 years ago without a scratch — suffered devastating blows immediately after the first humans set foot on the islands. The Maoris, New Zealand's first Sapiens colonisers, reached the islands about 800 years ago. Within a couple of centuries, the majority of the local megafauna was extinct, along with 60 per cent of all bird species. A similar fate befell the mammoth population of Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean (200 kilo metres north of the Siberian coast). Mammoths had flourished for millions of years over most of the northern hemisphere, but as Homo sapiens spread — first over Eurasia and then over North America — the mammoths retreated. By 10,000 years ago there was not a single mammoth to be found in the world, except on a few remote Arctic islands, most conspicuously Wrangel. The mammoths of Wrangel continued to prosper for a few more millennia, then suddenly disappeared about 4,000 years ago, just when the first humans reached the island.” (pp. 66-67) </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Harari also makes an interesting comparison: “when climate change causes mass extinctions, sea creatures are usually hit as hard as land dwellers. Yet there is no evidence of any significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45,000 years ago. Human involvement can easily explain why the wave of extinction obliterated the terrestrial megafauna of Australia while sparing that of the nearby oceans. Despite its burgeoning navigational abilities, Homo sapiens was still overwhelmingly a terrestrial menace.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This situation continued until just a few centuries ago, when the Basques and then many other nations undertook whaling on a large scale. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Meanwhile, the story of super-sapiens’ success was written, in great part, in the blood of terrestrial mega-fauna felled by human hands. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The ethological conditioning inherent therein, had not primarily to do with the act of killing itself.
It was more so the tracking of game that was important to evolving human (perhaps especially male-human) psychology, as the amount of time actually chasing down fauna (large or otherwise) to kill, took much longer than the fatal activity itself. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was how Homo sapiens sapiens were able to “read” the terrain, literally on a step by step basis (with the footprints being signs virtually abstract of relation to the creatures that created them), in pursuit of a defined goal. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Stone-age hunting was also a communal enterprise, as well, and it could be that the early human communication that <a href="http://www.iainmcgilchrist.com/brief_description.asp" target="_blank">Iain McGilchrist</a> described as “<a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0271530908000025" target="_blank">musilanguage</a>”, obtained true grammar as the super-sapiens pursued big game.
Did the success that the cerebrally-modern humans have in killing mega-fauna contribute to a certainty that the world was their’s to own? The triumph of the diminutive man over the grandiose creature is a mainstay of storytelling, from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_Gilgamesh" target="_blank">Gilgamish</a> down to <i>King Kong</i>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Herman Melville’s twist on this theme, was to have the beast — a sperm whale — prevail over captain Ahab and his crew. But as if to underline the lack of resonance for human defeat at the hands of the ocean Goliath, <i>Moby Dick</i> was initially a flop, and contributed to Melville’s departure from novel-writing in favour of being a New York city clerk. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The reality is that millions of sperm and other whales did indeed perish by human hands in recent centuries (whereas very few men died because of attacks by whales). As with the <a href="http://www.flowofhistory.com/units/asia/8/FC53" target="_blank">hydraulic civilization of China</a> (which enshrined the village-tribe as the key social unit), the whale-hunt used advanced technology to satisfy a primal human urge, in this case to pursue mega-quarry. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Whales survived in such abundance, and grew so massive (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Largest_organisms" target="_blank">the blue whale is the largest animal on record</a>) just because people did not have, until modern times, the means of hunting them very effectively. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, when the harpooner’s role was mechanized in the 1860s (inaugurating the “age of modern whaling”, according to Norwegian academics J.N. Tonnessen and Arne Odd Johnsen in their <a href="http://www.bookdepository.com/History-Modern-Whaling-JN-Tonnessen/9780520039735" target="_blank">mammoth history of the subject</a>, published in English in 1982), the destruction of whale-stocks became so complete that by the early twentieth century, calls came to curb the fishery so as to ensure its future viability. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Led by Great Britain, biologists began to study the great whales as part of this conservation effort. As described by Graham Burnett in the <i><a href="http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/S/bo9845648.html" target="_blank">Sounding of the Whale</a></i>, nascent whale-science was more focussed on husbandry of a resource, than inspired by outrage at the vivisection of ocean mammals. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">He argues further that ocean-biologists, who accompanied whalers on their often years-long voyages, naturally came to sympathize with the industry, and thus served as an impediment to efforts prevent the slaughter of whales entirely. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Meanwhile, Burnett writes, the mechanical harpoon furthered the ambitions of Western colonialism, as the British took full possession of south Atlantic and Pacific islands over which they had long claimed sovereignty, but that had heretofore remain unsettled for lack of means to support them. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus the paradox that global, ship-borne imperialism, though an ultramodern project, revitalized the old <a href="http://hunter-gatherers.org/facts-and-theories.html" target="_blank">hunter-gatherer way of life</a> as a factor in human experience. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Whaling was just one, if a more conspicuous, part of this.
For the first months, years, and even decades after their settlement of the Americas, Britons and Europeans had to make their way wholly or greatly by hunting. The North American continent was substantially <a href="http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/nwc/history/01.htm" target="_blank">explored by hunters of beaver pelts</a>, the trappers who helped establish the white-man’s sovereignty over New France and the American west (so important was this fur trade in the north, <a href="http://www.pch.gc.ca/eng/1363619815777/1363619877898" target="_blank">that Canada is often personified as a beaver</a>). </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bQbyqhzTz_A/VpRVv4i9udI/AAAAAAAAA_Q/SdnET5zkTS4/s1600/beaver%2Bwww%2Bventuregraphics%2Bca.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-bQbyqhzTz_A/VpRVv4i9udI/AAAAAAAAA_Q/SdnET5zkTS4/s320/beaver%2Bwww%2Bventuregraphics%2Bca.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Once hunted, and now adored, by the millions.<br />
www venturegraphics ca</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The settlement by ancient Asians of what became the Americas, was accompanied by the </span><a href="http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2014/01/what-killed-great-beasts-north-america" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">mass die-off of mega-fauna centuries later</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, following the pattern established when the super-sapiens set foot anywhere for the first time. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">European settlement of the hemisphere precipitated another die-off of animal species here through over-hunting (<a href="http://www.bisonbasics.com/history/past_future.html" target="_blank">the most conspicuous mass slaughter occurring to the bison</a>). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Some would assert that American Indians were similarly hunted like animals, and in the far west at least consisted of the largest number of victims of homicidal violence (according to </span><a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/448447.Winning_the_Wild_West" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Page Stegner</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nevertheless, the <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/The-Frontiersmen-Narrative-Allan-Eckert/dp/0945084919" target="_blank">frontiersman was an enduring figure of American folklore</a>, the very epitome of the “<a href="http://millercenter.org/presidentialclassroom/exhibits/hoover-rugged-individualism" target="_blank">rugged individualist</a>” whose independence was based on the ability to “shoot his next meal.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Hunting remained a very popular means of recreation throughout the rural United States, until very recent times. Importantly, the hunting trip served in many families as a form of male initiation into adulthood — again, a very ancient practice of key intergenerational training flourished again amongst New-World settlers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunting#Pastoral_and_agricultural_societies" target="_blank">Old-World peasants</a>, on the other hand, faced outright prohibition or severe restrictions upon their hunting rights: their overlords reserved the right to hunt the game throughout all their lands, regardless of tenancy. Practically the first droit du seigneur that migrants to the Americas claimed for the common man, was unrestricted freedom to hunt. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Colonization of the Western hemisphere was, as <a href="http://www.amazon.ca/Pentagon-Of-Power-Myth-Machine/dp/0156716100" target="_blank">Lewis Mumford observed</a>, substantially a reversion to the primitive, or “paleo-technical”, phase of humankind. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As imperialism spread to Africa and Asia during the nineteenth century, the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hunter" target="_blank">great white hunter</a>” became another mythical hero in Western society, pursuing exotic big-game in the tropical bush. Of many such expeditions into “darkest Africa”, one of the more famed was undertaken by Teddy Roosevelt, the most openly and vociferously imperialist of all U.S. presidents. Upon leaving office, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smithsonian%E2%80%93Roosevelt_African_Expedition" target="_blank">T.R. led a safari</a> which netted over six-hundred wild beasts. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Returning in conclusion to the whale hunt, it seems clear that the scientific knowledge acquired through conservation efforts, encouraged people to conceive of whales as beautiful creatures to be preserved, not resources to be exploited. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But the “<a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/oceans/save-the-whales/" target="_blank">save the whales</a>” sentiment was part of a more fundamental change in psychology which took hold among educated Westerners at least, from the 1960s. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Before that, Occidentals looked upon engineered technology as the crown of creation. But since then, and probably as a consequence of engineering being made so normal as to be unremarkable, middle-class professionals in the West began to cherish the natural economy over artificial things, and especially its conspicuous mega-fauna such as elephants, tigers, and whales. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Greenpeace organization, which in the early ‘70s pioneered “guerilla” efforts to prevent the slaughter of whales (such as activists in boats placing themselves between harpooners and the whales), by the 1980s were employing more sophisticated methods of persuasion. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">At that time, the group launched television ads which featured semi-abstract, animated images of great whales moving through the oceans. A deep-voiced, authoritative narrator (whom I remember to be the Canadian actor </span><a href="http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/don-francks/" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Don Francks</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, though I have been unable to find this spot on YouTube or anywhere else) described them as “nature’s works of art.” </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G-4fkKPj4MU/VpRWlLETPYI/AAAAAAAAA_Y/D8Ank0m9snk/s1600/franks4%2Bwaytofamous%2Bcom.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="219" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-G-4fkKPj4MU/VpRWlLETPYI/AAAAAAAAA_Y/D8Ank0m9snk/s320/franks4%2Bwaytofamous%2Bcom.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">That would be him.<br />
waytofamous com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These placid scenes then dissolved into images of harpoons and whaling boats, with which the narrator says something to the effect: “...but mankind is trying to destroy the last of these works of art”, concluding with a plea to “help Greenpeace preserve them.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the <i>Master and His Emissary</i>, Iain McGilchrist describes how the right brain hemisphere is responsive to living things, while the left-lobe reacts to inanimate matter. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But, he goes on, certain inanimate objects, such as musical instruments, are perceived by the brain as though they are living. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">After the postwar especially, certain forms of engineering must have been perceived as animate: in particular, mass-media such as the hi-fi stereo, radio and television. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These technologies helped effect a reversal in Western psychology, especially and paradoxically on the educated, it would seem.
Constant exposure to holistic sound and imagery through mass-media, evoked sensitivity to living things as opposed to the mechanical. This was the cultural ground upon which revulsion not only toward whaling, but any sort of sport or big-game hunting, overwhelmed the prestige previously enjoyed by hunters.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-30748051145666315552015-12-16T04:47:00.000-08:002016-02-04T07:20:41.420-08:00Upstairs, Downstairs in Chinatown<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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A pleasurable side-effect of travelling for business by train or plane, and not automobile, is precisely that I don't have to drive a car. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This not only avoids the cost of parking, which depending on the city, could run as much as a couple of hundred bucks over just a few days. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo 1: Businesses on Dundas street, Toronto.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is also that I avoid the cost of driving – the stress and hassles involved in just getting around by automobile in the unfamiliar streets of a different city. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I'm lucky, I suppose, in that my affairs are conducted at or near the hotels in which I stay. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sometimes, I will take a cab, but often I will just walk from the hotel to the venue, to orient myself to the surroundings, observe them up close, and to see what there is to see. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Regardless, after business is done, during the evening I usually take a stroll, intending to check out the quarter near where I am staying. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But just as usually, I end up going much further, as the one block leads to the next, the one neighbourhood turns into another, and not getting back until later in the evening, in spite of my fatigue from working all day. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is how I get to know an unfamiliar place, not going where visitors usually go, but going where the natives are. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I may bring a map with me, just in case I get lost. But generally I don't, and rarely consult the map when I do have one. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This has got me to places where I didn’t expect, or perhaps want, to be: as on a recent visit to Vancouver, when I wandered into the notorious Downtown Eastside slum. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It may have been my naïveté, but nevertheless I felt in no more danger there than I did in the areas just a few blocks away, where condos sell for a million dollars and (much) more. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Last week, I was in Toronto. Having almost always visited that city by car, after work I instead I left my room in the Yonge street area, and headed west on Dundas avenue. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z2FvE9F0eo0/VnFa2B3dKFI/AAAAAAAAA9c/8nHj7bnvviE/s1600/chinatown-upstairs-downstairs-06.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-z2FvE9F0eo0/VnFa2B3dKFI/AAAAAAAAA9c/8nHj7bnvviE/s320/chinatown-upstairs-downstairs-06.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo 2: Businesses on Dundas street, Toronto.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I found myself, without design, in the city’s Chinatown, which begins around where the Art Gallery of Ontario is located, extending a dozen blocks or more down Dundas, to University avenue at least. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There, I encountered a sort of architectural style that I didn’t identify as “Chinese” until I saw many examples of it in the Vancouver Chinatown. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A lot of commercial buildings that I saw there, as well as in the Toronto Chinatown, are not entranced by a door leading directly from the street inside. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Instead, businesses therein are reached by stairwells leading up and down from the street level, with the buildings themselves divided into two units, or even three or four. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Often, these are stairs extend about a dozen steps directly from the street, down or up.
But at other times, they are more elaborate, as in the picture below. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I have given some thought as to why this sort of building-design is found especially in Chinatowns, and not apparently anywhere else. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps it is merely a utilitarian attempt to acquire more tenants by expanding the number of units available in each building. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Oy6LmDJeZjU/VnFYwCbSbrI/AAAAAAAAA9M/Z82202lL1II/s1600/chinatown-upstairs-downstairs-07.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Oy6LmDJeZjU/VnFYwCbSbrI/AAAAAAAAA9M/Z82202lL1II/s320/chinatown-upstairs-downstairs-07.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo 3: Businesses on Dundas street, Toronto.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">On other hand, at least with some of these shops, the total square feet of space available to do business, has been foreshortened for being accessed by a subterranean stairwell (Photo 3 above). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Apart from any functional reason why, the stairways of Chinatown objectify a different conception of place and space than in other parts of town – even where the building materials and designs are identical. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I haven't been able to identify wherein this difference lies. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But I think it goes back to an observation I had years ago, about the traditional layout of Chinese restaurants in my hometown and elsewhere. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This applies particularly to such dining places established by immigrants and refugees from Hong Kong and Mainland China, and may not for newer “Asian fusion” places founded by second- or third-generation people of Chinese descent in North America. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qbVCsTjmizA/VnFbsDBLizI/AAAAAAAAA9o/r5xSYEc8kKc/s1600/chinatown-upstairs-downstairs-09.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-qbVCsTjmizA/VnFbsDBLizI/AAAAAAAAA9o/r5xSYEc8kKc/s320/chinatown-upstairs-downstairs-09.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo 4: Close-up on subterranean business shown in Photo 3, Dundas street, Toronto.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is that the dining area of the restaurant is inevitably separated from the entrance: that is, it may be down stairs (as was the case at a downtown Chinese restaurant my family used to patronize), or accessed through a hallway; or as at another tiny place that I used to go to as a young adult, separated from the entrance by a removable barrier. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Apparently, there is some need to place a barrier – be it stairwells or otherwise – between the general public and the indoor functions of the business in Chinatowns, that doesn't exist elsewhere in the city.
</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-85066491358687305602015-12-09T19:42:00.003-08:002015-12-09T19:46:00.907-08:00Sat on a Dark Bench Like Bookends...<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">
The 35th anniversary of the murder of John Lennon has just passed. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thinking about this, it struck me that Lennon has been dead for more than twice as long as he was alive and world-famous.
Thus, while the Beatles were an almost an immediate smash in their native Britain in 1963, Beatlemania really became a global thing the next year. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Lennon was shot down outside his New York City apartment in 1980, about sixteen years after that. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Years ago, reflecting on the murder of another major public figure, I had the idea that the 1960s’ counterculture in America was a `</span><a href="http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-is-chaos-theory/" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">chaotic</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">’ side-effect of the assassination of John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y9hvdolUm10/VmjxUBp0iNI/AAAAAAAAA8I/2jL3CDSOUf8/s1600/jfk-lennon-old.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Y9hvdolUm10/VmjxUBp0iNI/AAAAAAAAA8I/2jL3CDSOUf8/s320/jfk-lennon-old.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Kennedy image: (c) All About History<br />
Lennon image: (c) Sachs Media Group</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It could be just coincidence that something recognizable as the counterculture began to emerge in ’64, less than a year after the killing of the President in Dallas. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is entirely coincidental that the Beatles’ <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/With_the_Beatles" target="_blank">second album</a> was released in the U.K. on the very day that Kennedy was killed. It is more than coincidental though, that the group was received with such hysteric joy when landing in the U.S. (at New York’s newly renamed John F. Kennedy airport) less than three months following the President’s slaying, in February 1964. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They probably would have been very successful anyway, but many have <a href="http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/features/the-beatles-in-america/" target="_blank">commented </a>as to how the appearance of these four young, cheery, cheeky and charming lads from England, served to lift the spirits of Americans mere weeks after their (relatively) young President was so publicly and brutally struck down by assassin’s bullets. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Kennedy assassination, meanwhile, was what caused so many young Americans to turn away from mainstream politics and culture as a whole, toward hippiedom on the one hand, and New-Left radicalism on the other. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was, as I indicated, a situation of non-linear dynamics. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">That is, the youth of America did not wake up on Nov. 23, 1963, and suddenly decide to become hippies or radicals (or both). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But Marshall McLuhan described in his 1964 book <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/126274.Understanding_Media" target="_blank">Understanding Media</a>, the electric circuitry that made television possible, as an “extended nervous system.”
In order to overcome this shock to the collective system, as precipitated by the live coverage of the Kennedy assassination, I think many young Americans essentially rejected their own culture, or at least the mainstream part of it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Certainly, the counterculture didn’t arrive willy-nilly. But in the years after 1964, many youth in the U.S. (never even close to a majority, but still a significant number anyhow) felt more and more compelled to create their own culture, especially as it appeared that Kennedy’s death had delivered the political system into the hands of the crude (Kennedy’s successor Lyndon Johnson), the crazy (the ultra-conservative Republican challenger to Johnson in ’64, Barry Goldwater) or the criminal (Richard Nixon, who had run for the Presidency against John Kennedy in 1960). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is no wonder then, the conspiracy theories about the President’s assassination <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Bb4DpejUUA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">first gained credence</a> within the counterculture. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fGnlHxl-bOQ/VmjzMu5JznI/AAAAAAAAA8U/5upNsTySqeQ/s1600/dealey-plaza-oct2015.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-fGnlHxl-bOQ/VmjzMu5JznI/AAAAAAAAA8U/5upNsTySqeQ/s320/dealey-plaza-oct2015.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The site of the Kennedy assassination: Dealey Plaza, Dallas, TX.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Beatles were, of course, heroes to the counterculture, no matter their fabulous wealth and mainstream success. They were avant-garde already upon their arrival in 1964, sporting hair quite long according to the prevailing male fashion, and playing brash and noisy music that was abhorrent to much of the older generation (regardless of political orientation: leftist folkies hated them as much as conservative choirmasters). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Throughout their career, the Beatles remained in the vanguard as to music-style and hair-length, as well. Their records seemed to anticipate and popularize countercultural themes of love, sex and, drugs, as well. They had many peers in the British Invasion (and ultimately, coming from the U.S. as well), but the reason the latter played rock music and not blues, folk, country or jazz, was due to the success of the “Fab Four.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Having lost one charismatic, youthful political leader, many young and educated Americans turned toward cultural leaders for inspiration – and of all the Beatles, John Lennon was the most charismatic and political. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is a simplistic analysis, I understand. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And I'm going to follow through on this simplicity by asserting that the murder of John Lennon, about seventeen years after the Kennedy assassination, was what brought a decisive end to the counterculture. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Lennon’s killer, Mark David Chapman, said as much when he asserted in police interviews (aired on a documentary in the 1990s) that the murder “was the last nail of the coffin of the 1960s.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FhGuAALOksU/VmjzdLtqd8I/AAAAAAAAA8c/_DPfDLWjEWk/s1600/dakota-apt-aug-2014.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FhGuAALOksU/VmjzdLtqd8I/AAAAAAAAA8c/_DPfDLWjEWk/s320/dakota-apt-aug-2014.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Site of the murder of John Lennon: Dakota apartments, NYC.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The most conspicuous aspects of the counterculture died out in about 1971, I think. They were partially absorbed into the mainstream culture, however, which during the ‘70s adopted not only the long hair and floral fashions characteristic of the hippies. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">More favourable (or at least laissez-faire) attitudes toward recreational drug use, premarital and gay sex, as well as race-mixing in friendship and marriage, came to prevail amongst many of the bourgeoisie (the working classes remained mostly unconvinced). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was a coincidence that Lennon was killed just a month after the election of Ronald Reagan to the U.S. Presidency, the Republican who “said with a smile what Goldwater said with a sneer.” </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As California Governor during the 1960s, Reagan had bumped up against the counterculture in its American homeland. His Presidency marked the rejection by much of the mainstream of countercultural styles and values. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus, men cut their hair short and doffed the flares and flowers for the “Preppie” styles more reminiscent of the years immediately before 1964, while women’s dress became more conservative, as well. The First Lady, Nancy Reagan, pursued a successful campaign to “Just Say No” even to soft drugs, while militarism became cool again. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The charisma of the two former film-actors who headed the First Family, was instrumental in this. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But I would argue that the murder of John Lennon in 1980 was the shock to the extended nervous system, that made conservative Reaganism all the more powerful than it would have been without it. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">President Reagan drafts Mr. Roper to teach those punks a lesson.<br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It occurred, crucially, just as the age cohort that established the counterculture, were finally leaving their youth behind, starting families, getting serious about careers, buying homes – the very things that, in and of themselves, encourage more conservative attitudes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The death of their beloved cultural hero by gun violence, must have hardened the worldview of the Sixties Generation all the more, at this decisive point in their lives. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">John Lennon was not a political leader, after all, whatever his outspoken views on various subjects. The motive for his shooting was, thus, nonsensical. And indeed, it emerged right away that Chapman was a huge Beatle fan – the last photograph of Lennon while alive has him signing an autograph on Chapman’s copy of <i>Double Fantasy</i>, just hours before Chapman gunned the musician down. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Whatever his personal foibles, Lennon’s most significant contribution to the culture was to give millions of people joy, including, it appeared, the man who killed him.
It was indeed entirely senseless, yet it happened anyway. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It seemed to mock the very humanitarian ideals of the counterculture – something accepted if only implicitly, half-consciously, embarrassedly even. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was as though veterans of the counterculture, after the murder of John Lennon, retreated from the culture wars, shocked, dispirited, disheartened, too busy and tired to fight any more, leaving the field to the Reaganites for a decade or so.
I concede again, that I have simplified things for narrative purposes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, there is almost literary parallels between Kennedy and Lennon, whatever the different lives they lived. They shared the same first name (which was, however, a very common one in the English-speaking world during the first half of the twentieth century). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The President was a generation older than the Beatle – born in 1917, Kennedy was a year younger than Lennon’s father, Alf. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But they were both of Irish Catholic background: Kennedy’s religious ethnicity is well known, but relatively few people are aware that <a href="http://www.beatlesireland.info/Irish%20Heritage/johnheritage.html" target="_blank">Lennon’s grandfather</a> (apparently named “McLennon”) came from Dublin sometime in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">To paraphrase Paul McCartney in <i>A Hard Day’s Night</i>, Kennedy’s ancestors went west and he became a Boston Brahmin, while Lennon’s went east, and he became an Angry Young Man from Liverpool. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Pursuing very different careers, both the Beatle and the President became world famous; indeed, it is difficult to know just which one has greater celebrity, or who is admired the more so not only by Americans, but people around the world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And, of course, they were both murdered while right beside their wives.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-82727615168736915502015-11-28T08:14:00.000-08:002015-11-28T08:14:48.827-08:00Ottawa 1968 & 2015: A Meditation on Urban Form<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I returned from Washington a few days ago; I might write about that later. There is a great deal to say.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For now, I will remark on another capital city: my own, Ottawa, Canada.</span></div>
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On the You-Tube site some months ago, I came across a clip entitled “Ottawa 1968 1969”, the entirety of which can be viewed here:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; line-height: 26px;">The blurb at YouTube, by "Gwood's Gang", states: "My uncle drove around Ottawa in the early spring, about 1968 and again about a year later. He takes us from Maitland Avenue along the Queensway to downtown, around Parliament, to Champlain point, along the Ottawa River, Dows Lake and many other places in town. How the city has changed!"</span></span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Last summer, on a lark, I took the same route as the home-filmmaker, recording the same scenes with my cell-phone camera, in order to edit the two scenes together. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The uneven result of this can be found at the link directly below. The chief problem of my own retracing of Gwood's Gang's uncle, is that I was recording the scenes from memory, and thus they are often shot from different angles from the original; as well, it was summertime when I took the cellphone movies, whereas as Gwood's uncle was evidently filming during the early spring, and thus the foliage and sunlight are very different from the earlier film to the new one:</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nevertheless, and contrary to Gwood, it is striking how recognizable the city is in the older footage, when compared to today. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">If, hypothetically, film existed of the same areas in 1921 (i.e. forty-seven years before 1968), the city would have looked very unfamiliar. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It would have, for example, been impossible to travel from the west-end to downtown by car on the same road, because it was then occupied by a railway. The vast majority of the buildings in the downtown core, as seen in the 1968 film, would not have been constructed in 1921 (whereas many from forty-seven years ago are in existence today). The McGregor Easson elementary school and neighbouring houses on Dynes road from ‘68, were no doubt pastures 47 years before. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As it happens, <a href="http://history.ottawaeast.ca/HTML%20Documents/Image%20Library/Airphotos/OTT22_3000pix.jpg" target="_blank">there is an an aerial photograph</a> of Ottawa taken, according to notations on the image, in 1922: one can view the various </span><span style="font-size: 17.3333px; line-height: 26px;">neighbourhoods</span><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> of the old city, like the Glebe, Ottawa South, and the area I grew up in, Ottawa East:</span></span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ottawa, Ontario, 1922: the waterway extending from the south to east <br />(i.e. bottom to right) is the Rideau River. The Glebe quarter is central left,<br />where the circular playing field is situated.<br />Copyright, </td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There was very little of the latter to call it a neighbourhood. It was a vast farmer’s field, with Main street merely a dirt laneway (a bridge over Rideau river would not be constructed for decades). In spite of its status as a capital city, Ottawa was until the Second World War, no more than a large town. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During and after the war, it underwent qualitative change, becoming a modern city. This is the form in which it remains today. While it is probably twice as large now as in 1968, its physical features have been refined but not drastically altered since then.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-65924503351164752822015-11-02T04:32:00.001-08:002015-11-28T08:22:32.666-08:00The Pointillism of Science<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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I’ve long been fascinated by the work of the post-Impressionist <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Seurat" target="_blank">Georges Seurat</a>, most famous for <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Sunday_Afternoon_on_the_Island_of_La_Grande_Jatte" target="_blank">Sunday Afternoon on the Isle of Grande Jatte</a></i>, which was unveiled in 1886. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunday Afternoon on the Isle de Grande Jatte.<br />
Georges Seurat, 1886.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I consider Seurat my favourite of the nineteenth-century French painters, if not of all time (but I like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rembrandt" target="_blank">Rembrandt van Rijn</a> almost as much).
Though the subject-matter of Seurat’s works is antique, his technique renders them strangely contemporary in appearance. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Recently, I watched a short docudrama with actors portraying Seurat and his contemporaries, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_hqqWtSZis" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Seurat and the Realm of Light</a>, produced by the French arm of the National Film Board of Canada in 1992. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In this, the painter’s so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointillism" target="_blank">pointillism </a>is described by a narrator as “a technique which consists of painting juxtaposed points of pure colour. Seen from afar these small dabs of pure colour blend together optically in one’s eye, become a homogenous image. A visionary artist, Seurat anticipated by half a century modern techniques of colour division, used in photo composition, television, and digital images.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In fact, though, the term “pointillism” is a misnomer. It is more accurately called “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divisionism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">divisionism</a>”, as Seurat did not compose the <i>Sunday Afternoon</i> and other works by placing dots of paint on the canvass, as is usually believed. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Instead, Seurat used tiny strokes of the brush to achieve a divisionist effect (as seen in the detail of Sunday Afternoon below). </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ec783nMIWa0/VjdVfjs-rYI/AAAAAAAAA4U/KKsOWcDIky8/s1600/seurat-grande-isle-jatte-detail01.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ec783nMIWa0/VjdVfjs-rYI/AAAAAAAAA4U/KKsOWcDIky8/s400/seurat-grande-isle-jatte-detail01.JPG" width="316" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Detail from Sunday Afternoon on the Isle du Grande Jatte.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Divisionism in fact came out of Seurat’s ambition to create a science of art. The NFB film quotes him: “I dream of a science of painting, which can be taught, like music, a colour scale than can translate the effects of light. ... I apply minute dabs of colour, which are blended optically in the eye, and which translate the shimmering effects of light, a mysterious light that reveals textures, curves, volumes and the dimensions of space.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Seurat also stated, “just as a chemist separates matter, my eyes are clear prisms that break down the elements of light. Transform them in the crucible of the imagination, and give them new meaning. I am searching for a secret geometry of forms. Painting is the art of giving depth to surface.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Knowing very little about Seurat before, I was somewhat taken aback by his avowed pursuit of a science of art. I had thought that by the nineteenth century, and especially after the Impressionists, artists had given up the very Renaissance ambition to make painting into a science. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impressionism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Impressionism</a>, as with modern art in general, was a conscious rebellion against the strictures of “Academy” art, the principles of which had been laid down centuries before. Seurat, who died in 1891 aged only thirty-one (of uncertain causes, but likely from a virus which also killed his young son soon after), embraced academic principles, however. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Circus-Parade, Georges Seurat, 1887.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">From a proper bourgeois family, Seurat dressed so conventionally that he was referred to by other painters as “the notary.” In another documentary about Seurat I viewed recently, one of the art historians interviewed speculated as to how, if he had lived a natural lifespan, Seurat would have affected the course of modern art. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I think, on the other hand, Seurat would have remained an outlier even if he had not died young, as he was during his lifetime, in fact. Impressionism set out to convey precisely what the pictorial medium derived from chemistry — the photograph — simply couldn’t. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In this way, the movement really was anti-scientific in so far as placed idiosyncratic perspective and technique at the centre of artistic endeavour. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-Impressionism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">post-Impressionists</a>, on the other hand, were determined to return order and principle to painting — doing something more than “splashing paint across the canvas”, as an associate of Seurat’s is quoted in the NFB documentary. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They were “post” in that Seurat, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Pissarro" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Camille Pissarro</a>, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_C%C3%A9zanne" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Paul Cezanne</a> and the others, didn’t reject entirely the Impressionist revolution in painting. They simply wanted to bring system and method to their predecessors’ treatment of colour and light, Seurat the foremost.
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Ultimately, however, the post-Impressionists failed in this goal, and modern art progressively rejected rationality and representation itself, during the course of the twentieth century. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Seurat’s own quest to break down light into its constituent parts was achieved by engineers, not painters, with the invention of TV in the 1920s. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But divisionism was the proper expression of the scientific approach to art. The inductive method separates and divides matter into its constituent parts. Seurat himself was only attempting more systematically the treatment of light and colour as pioneered by the Impressionists, whose works were intended to convey the psychological effect of a scene, instead of its literal features. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-B79feQjpXd8/VjdXXUxZ7_I/AAAAAAAAA4o/mI4ZKDxmifc/s1600/seurat-chahut-1889-90.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-B79feQjpXd8/VjdXXUxZ7_I/AAAAAAAAA4o/mI4ZKDxmifc/s320/seurat-chahut-1889-90.JPG" width="260" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">La Chahut (The Uproar), Georges Seurat, 1890.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Near the end of the National Film Board documentary, there is a fantasy sequence in which Seurat is shown interacting with a young boy who, after transforming into an adult, is revealed to be Albert Einstein. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">An actor in voice-over recites (with a German accent) words apparently spoken by the relativity-theorist: “In reality all matter is nothing but condensed light.” Seurat is then quoted as saying, “perhaps pointillism was a way of painting atoms.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The scientific approach of the “notary” was confirmed by the amount of time he devoted to <i>Sunday Afternoon</i> and his other, later works, such as the <i>Circus Parade</i> (from 1887-88) or <i>La Chahut</i> (from 1889-90, translated into English as The Uproar, and depicting show-dancers and musicians onstage). </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-knqZf8F-zYQ/VjdXqQXDVlI/AAAAAAAAA4w/dXp6BRr4FqE/s1600/seurat-study-with-figures-and-landscape-with-figures.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-knqZf8F-zYQ/VjdXqQXDVlI/AAAAAAAAA4w/dXp6BRr4FqE/s320/seurat-study-with-figures-and-landscape-with-figures.JPG" width="245" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Two of many sketches and studies for the Sunday Afternoon, Georges Seurat.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Whereas the Impressionists could complete a canvas in a few minutes or hours (though many Impressionist works took much longer to complete), Seurat worked intensively on </span><i style="font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sunday Afternoon at the Isle du Grande Jatte</i><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> for two years — not including the dozens of sketches and studies he took of the same scene and subjects beforehand. It is not only that placing minute strokes of paint on a canvas is in itself time-consuming. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Seurat was attempting to get to the radicals of light, where the image has no resemblance to anything except itself. To break down any phenomenon (whether light or substance) to its digital essence, is to automatically slow down the perception of time, as it must be reconstituted in a step-by-step, serial fashion.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-57309711594452256072015-10-22T16:15:00.002-07:002015-10-22T16:17:02.514-07:00The New Age of Print<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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Last summer I was out for my evening stroll when I came across two teenage girls sitting on the grass adjoining the thoroughfare that goes through my neighbourhood. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They were not speaking to, or even looking at, each other, though. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Instead, they were both furiously typing away on their smart phones. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">“They’re probably texting one another,” I thought to myself in disdain. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sometime later, though, I had an epiphany about this. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uF1uB3c9P6w/Vilti5zea0I/AAAAAAAAAzk/OxfudMzUh_M/s1600/text-speak.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uF1uB3c9P6w/Vilti5zea0I/AAAAAAAAAzk/OxfudMzUh_M/s1600/text-speak.jpg" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I couldn't hear you.<br />
workshop-marketing.co.uk</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During the initial decades of the electronic era, many believed that literacy would become uncommon or unheard of, as people forgot about books and reading generally, and spend all their free time watching TV or listening to audile media. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This was the retro-future famously presented in Ray Bradbury’s <a href="http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/451/summary.html" target="_blank"><i>Fahrenheit 451</i></a>, from 1953 and later made into the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC72Q_OgzyA" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">only English-language movie</a> directed by François Truffaut. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><i>Fahrenheit </i>depicted a world where the population not only had become indifferent to reading; squads of “firemen” also descended on the remaining dissenters who refused the new world order, throwing their books into piles and setting them alight. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The reality is quite different. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In fact, text has become the preferred medium of communication in the era of the iPhone. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The young people of my acquaintance use the texting feature on their phones, in preference to speaking with one another. More generally, in my observations of people – young or not – on their smart phones, I see that they typically use them to text, instead of to converse. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the contemporary era, text has partly now transcended its traditional home on the printed page. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But this explosion to text-based communication was something very few saw coming. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Granted, the experience of reading text onscreen is different than on a page. With phonetic and alphanumeric wordplay and emojis, texting and emailing is conveyed and construed almost in a verbal manner. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Still, modern information technology has had the effect of promoting and popularizing the printed word all the more. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As the graphic designer Michael Bierut <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/graphic-artist-michael-bierut-on-logos-and-emojis-1444846119" target="_blank">said </a>in a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal: “Forty years ago, graphic arts were a form of black magic—only a handful of people even knew the names of typefaces.” </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I would disagree in so far as it was not as long as forty years ago that no one knew the names of typefaces and fonts: it was more so thirty, or even twenty years ago. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But things are rather different now.
Statistics Canada a few years put paid to the notion that the personal computer has heralded a “paperless” office. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Instead, according to the agency, the consumption of paper has doubled in Canada since 1985, and surely these numbers hold for other industrial countries as well. And no wonder. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The computer terminal was and remains (in spite of recent advances in screen resolution and size) too difficult to read from over long periods. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is no trouble, given that printers can now produce printed text in quantity in a fraction of the time it would have taken a pool of typists in an old-style office. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Secretaries and typists, having professional keyboarding skills, were able to produce copy with a minimum of mistakes, thus cutting down on rewrites and wasted paper. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The nature of manual typewriting itself militated against constant rewrites. To correct a single mistake would require the retyping of an entire page, wasteful of time and resources. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus, very important documents were given to a professional, the secretary or typist, who would be sure to produce the text without error. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Typewritten text that did not have to be very polished (such as journalists’ copy), was simply edited with a pen. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AIHVfR16rpk/Vilts3t1lSI/AAAAAAAAAzs/gyMI4Tt9cbk/s1600/printer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-AIHVfR16rpk/Vilts3t1lSI/AAAAAAAAAzs/gyMI4Tt9cbk/s320/printer.jpg" width="234" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Printer (wetware version).<br />
www.uh.edu</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Now, of course, the secretary has disappeared as an independent job category. Using the cut and paste function, as well as spelling and grammar modules, virtual text can be rewritten, reedited and reprinted in a matter of seconds, with the former copy simply discarded in the recycle bin. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Formerly, the offices of managers and administrators would often be equipped with typewriters, but these devices were rarely used by their owners (for the typing of “sensitive” documents only). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Now, of course, everyone has a personal computer, and bosses are forced to use them as much as anyone. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This means that everyone gets a printed copy, and if a minor mistake is spotted on any page, it is thrown away (for “recycling”) and a new one printed in a matter of moments. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Paper, along with ink, is one of the biggest expenses incurred by organizations, and almost every officer worker is familiar (if not expert) with methods and styles of typography, information known only to printers not many decades ago. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">So it is that people are not only reading more, they are actually involved in the mechanics of the printed word itself. </span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-5679660705718371362015-10-19T18:50:00.000-07:002015-10-19T18:53:32.176-07:00Visiting Dealey Plaza<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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I was away on business in Dallas recently. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The place where we were was not far away from Dealey Plaza. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-42DaNE2YROo/ViWcg9nfx-I/AAAAAAAAAzA/pSjynUJdiCU/s1600/IMG_20151017_084542.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-42DaNE2YROo/ViWcg9nfx-I/AAAAAAAAAzA/pSjynUJdiCU/s320/IMG_20151017_084542.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elm Street in Dealey Plaza, man in white shirt <br />
is standing approximately where JFK suffered fatal head wound.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Having never visited the city or the site before, I went over during a break in proceedings. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is a picturesque although unremarkable place, really notable only because that is where John F. Kennedy was assassinated almost fifty-two years ago. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In my youth, I was a believer in the conspiracy stories told about the JFK shooting – as befits anyone who is half-informed about the matter. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Later on, I began to doubt these conspiracy-narratives (as I refer to them, so as to not devalue the good name of “theory” any further than it already is). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Looking back, I think the turning point came for me when I saw a television appearance by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_W._Belin" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">David Belin</a>, an assistant counsel to the President’s Commission looking into the assassination (chaired by the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court of the time, it is usually referred to as the “Warren Commission”), around the twenty-fifth anniversary of the crime. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was, of all places, on the trash-TV program hosted by Geraldo Rivera. This very segment can be found right <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ki-I13y-grI" target="_blank">here</a>.</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cZv4LPBw5hU/ViWcpqs_TnI/AAAAAAAAAzU/CwvcexfTfrc/s1600/IMG_20151017_084853.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-cZv4LPBw5hU/ViWcpqs_TnI/AAAAAAAAAzU/CwvcexfTfrc/s320/IMG_20151017_084853.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Former site of Texas Schoolbook warehouse, now a Dallas county building.<br />
Oswald shot Kennedy from last window on right, second from top storey.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">On the Rivera show, the case for conspiracy in the murder of John F. Kennedy was supported by all the other guests. The only dissenter was Belin. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, this one man blew away all the other pro-conspiracy guests and their “theories”.
This included the notorious <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_Wecht" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Dr. Cyril Wecht</a>, a Pennsylvania coroner who carried out a “demonstration” of the “impossibility” of one bullet causing the injuries to both the president and Governor John Connolly, who was riding in the limousine in front of John Kennedy. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is the so-called “magic bullet”, which according to Dr. Wecht on the Geraldo show, had to “stop in the mid-air – twice” in order to have injured JFK and Governor Connolly in the way recorded by pathologists and medical staff (Connolly survived his injuries and went on to run for the U.S. presidency himself in 1980). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But in fact, the president and governor were not situated in the limousine in the way depicted in the Geraldo program (as in most live or illustrated “demonstrations” of the event). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">John Connolly was sitting not “in the front seat” of the vehicle (as described by Rivera), but in another, removable seat that extended from the side of the limousine, and was thus several inches lower than the president. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">One of the surprises for me in visiting Dealey Plaza, a place I had seen many, many times in photos and on film, was that Elm street, the roadway on which the actual assassination took place, proceeds on a significant incline after Houston street, from which the presidential took a hard left in front of the Texas Schoolbook Depository, from where the fatal shots were fired. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This feature of Dealey Plaza is really not evident in images from the fatal day, nor afterward. But Governor Connolly must have been situated much lower President Kennedy in the vehicle as the shots were fired, which means the “single-bullet theory” is be the probable scenario for the wounds caused to both men. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ixqO30z_vwY/ViWcjyrkm1I/AAAAAAAAAzM/AUVLEW_JNPs/s1600/IMG_20151017_084226.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ixqO30z_vwY/ViWcjyrkm1I/AAAAAAAAAzM/AUVLEW_JNPs/s320/IMG_20151017_084226.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">View of Elm Street looking toward railway bridge, now apparently used by commuter tram.<br />
Photo: RB Glennie.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">On the other hand, I don't expect anyone will be convinced one way or the other by my words, not least the people I came across in Dealey Plaza on my visit. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">That day, near the “grassy knoll” area where a second assassin allegedly shot the president from the front, there were a group of people whom I took to be a family on vacation. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The father was expounding on all the “unbelievable” things that needed to have occurred for Schoolbook Depository Employee Lee Harvey Oswald to have acted alone in the killing of John F. Kennedy: that he “didn’t have enough time” to fire all the shots; that he made his way from the sixth-floor sniper’s nest to a lunchroom several floors below without anyone seeing him; that he left his workplace and made his way to the Texas theatre where he was apprehended by police, in twelve minutes “when it could not have been reached on foot in less than sixteen minutes”, and so on. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Earlier, at the corner of Elm and Houston streets, almost directly below the window where Oswald shot Kennedy, I was approached by a rather slovenly looking man who said he was from Florida. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">He said that, he too was visiting Dealey Plaza for the first time. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I didn’t tell him my beliefs about the assassination, but he clearly thought that were was a conspiracy in the murder, as well. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">“I’ve just been under that bridge”, the Floridian said, referring to the railway crossing marking the border of Dealey Plaza, where Elm street ends. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">“I saw a bullet hole there”, he went on. “I betcha it came from the second gunman,” speaking of yet another second gunman that was allegedly situated on the rail-bridge itself, or else within the underpass where the presidential limousine went on the way to Parkland hospital. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">He remained convinced of this, in spite of my objection that the assassination occurred more than half a century ago, and that there could have been dozens or hundreds of shootings in that place, in the meantime.
“The bullet hole looks like it was fifty years old”, he retorted.
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-85401989720100613392015-09-27T07:57:00.000-07:002017-04-14T09:38:29.746-07:00The Most Effective Way to Control People<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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A few days ago, the region was witness to a <a href="https://www.google.ca/#q=basil+borutski" target="_blank">horrible crime-spree</a>, in which three women residing across the rural precincts of the western Ottawa Valley were shot to death by a man who had dated each of the victims in the past. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Unsurprisingly perhaps, the suspect had not long ago been released from prison for assaulting one of the women he is now accused of murdering. The expectation is that such a person would have no redeeming characteristics whatever. Yet, a <a href="http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/a-closer-look-at-wilno-triple-homicide-suspect-basil-borutski" target="_blank">news story</a> in which his friends and acquaintances were interviewed, paints a more complex picture. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b6VavpXkI78/VggCLKM4urI/AAAAAAAAAx4/GF2yB0HEnVY/s1600/basil-borutski-ottawa-citizen.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-b6VavpXkI78/VggCLKM4urI/AAAAAAAAAx4/GF2yB0HEnVY/s320/basil-borutski-ottawa-citizen.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Courtroom sketch of triple-murder accused.<br />
Ottawa Citizen.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">One man described how he was provided space for a small-engine repair business, virtually rent-free, in a building owned by the alleged murderer. A neighbour of the suspect said that just recently that he borrowed her car, and upon returning it, left a hundred-dollar bill on her dashboard, “for gas.” Others spoke of him as an amiable man who, after drinking alcohol, became belligerent. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, the brother of the accused — whose family is spread throughout the Valley — told a reporter between sobs and sighs that he hadn’t spoken with his sibling in seven years, and seem to reserve all his sadness for the victims and their families. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I wonder, though, how much in contradiction was this extreme generosity, with the accused’s overarching need to control the women (and presumably others) with whom he was intimate. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">To give implies a very subtle kind of interpersonal control, especially when there is a large imbalance between the benefactor and the recipient of charity. This was evident in the triple-murder accused, when he gave over space to the individual who simply couldn’t otherwise afford to open a repair-business. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NKIejIJHoJs/VggCeM-dNbI/AAAAAAAAAyA/5aNPLqFkAEI/s1600/basil-borutski-victims-ctv-news.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NKIejIJHoJs/VggCeM-dNbI/AAAAAAAAAyA/5aNPLqFkAEI/s320/basil-borutski-victims-ctv-news.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Murder victims, from left: Anastasia Kuzyk, Nathalie Warmerdam and Carol Culleton.<br />
CTV News.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Following his release from jail, the alleged killer was not able to be so munificent, as his residence had been a public-housing apartment-house run by the county of Renfrew. Yet, he still the left the hundred dollars in compensation for the fuel he had used with the car he had borrowed from his neighbour. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I have no doubt that, when he was involved with the three women he killed (and anyone else, for that matter), the accused was the model of selflessness, perhaps alternating with a pose of helplessness. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In either case, he was able to provoke a sympathetic instinct in his partners, until something set him off, in which case his urge to control switched from the benevolent to the belligerent. This is a pattern amongst abusive husbands — or abusive wives, for that matter. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Usually, this doesn’t end in murder, but the homicidal behaviour manifest in the Ottawa Valley the other day, is the ultimate expression of this need to control, and it isn’t restricted to intimate relationships, either. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "arial" , "sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A few years ago, I was acquainted with a gentleman who (just because I was <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWkMhCLkVOg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">listening to R.E.M.</a> when I wrote this) I will refer to as “Kenneth.” Knowing him at first as an amiable family man, I soon enough learned that Kenneth had frequent outbursts of bullying rage toward his wife and children. H</span><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">e wasn’t even particularly covert about this, either, as I witnessed more than once Kenneth’s ill-temper directed toward them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I thought at the time, though, that this came in wondrous contrast to the generous actions he was capable of. Not long after we met, for example, Kenneth came over with his family for a special occasion. I was surprised, though, when he arrived with two cases of beer, when I had earlier assured our guests that beverages were available on premises. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Predictably, too, the evening concluded with the celebrants having none of the beer that Kenneth bought with him. When I moved to return the cases, he responded brusquely, “Don’t be ridiculous.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">An another occasion, I was at brunch with Kenneth for a club with which we were both associated. There must have been at least two-dozen others in attendance, and to the astonishment of everyone, Kenneth declared that he would pick up the bill for the entire party. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The head of the club, perhaps sensing the manipulative essence of the gesture, stoutly refused the offer and paid for her own meal (something which provoked bewilderment in Kenneth). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Though this was scarcely evident from his appearance, Kenneth came from a privileged background. From incidental descriptions of his own family life, I came to some understanding as to why he possessed such inchoate anger. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps the generosity I described in Kenneth, came from remorse as to his more aggressive behaviour at other times. But naturally, his marriage did not last, and one of his children, now almost grown, refuses to have anything to do with Kenneth on account of his treatment of his ex-wife. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">From what I have gathered since his separation and divorce, Kenneth is unwavering in his own self-righteousness: his rage is always someone else’s fault, and in consequence, he has not been in much contact with one of his offspring for several years. Kenneth wasn’t, so far as I know, physically abusive to his family, as was the suspect in the triple murder days ago. I think the most likely explanation for his munificent actions was, as I have proposed, as a disguised effort at controlling others, especially those with whom he was intimate. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KAer2uuHTAY/VggC2dtocKI/AAAAAAAAAyI/Y6IIa3Os-KQ/s1600/elvis-rex.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-KAer2uuHTAY/VggC2dtocKI/AAAAAAAAAyI/Y6IIa3Os-KQ/s320/elvis-rex.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tyrannous Rex.<br />
www.independent.co.uk</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">A different example of this type behaviour comes from a rather more famous personage: Elvis Presley. The “king of rock’n’roll” was </span><a href="http://www.elvis.com.au/presley/elvis_generosity.shtml" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">well-known for his generosity</a><span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, giving away expensive automobiles and other luxuries to associates (known as the “Memphis mafia”, after Presley’s hometown). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It became public knowledge not long after his death, however, that Elvis was subject to <a href="http://www.topix.com/forum/who/elvis-presley/TG3TQFSH0DQ5BIPIR" target="_blank">arbitrary and vindictive rages</a>, resulting in the summary dismissal or humiliation for Memphis-mafia cronies and others in the Presley organization. While some of these (such as Robert “Red” West, who knew Elvis from high school) got fed up and quit, most stayed on until Presley’s death in August, 1977. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In real way, though, the choices available to the Memphis mafia were quite delimited. Being part of the entourage of Elvis, they could live in the lap of luxury, and travel across the U.S. and around world, too — as well as receiving expensive gifts that they could not otherwise have afforded. From what I understand, being as part of the Memphis-mafia was hardly labour-intensive work. And really, what does working as a crony for Elvis Presley, or any other entertainer, qualify a person to do otherwise? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They could stick with their boss, mercurial as he was, or face the prospect of employment in a job with far less pay, satisfaction and leisure than they would have remaining as part of the “mafia.” Or they may not have been able to find work at all: especially during the 1970s, an unskilled worker could expect to face lengthy periods of joblessness, that combined with significant year over year increases in the cost of staple goods, to say nothing of the luxuries. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In a way, the situation of Presley’s entourage was not unlike that typical of the abused housewife of times past, who couldn’t leave the relationship because of a lack of resources and opportunity outside the marriage. In the case of Elvis Presley, a power imbalance was manifest whether he was firing one of his people for a perceived slight or insignificant mistake, or handing the operative the keys to a brand-new Cadillac. It brings forward, too, a hidden meaning to his title, The King. Absolute monarchs are known not only for their arbitrary rule, but also their noblesse oblige.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-85964729561819805072015-09-19T13:39:00.001-07:002015-09-19T16:59:55.520-07:00When Normal Perception Leads to Deadly Tragedy<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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Two years ago yesterday, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_bus-train_crash" target="_blank">an Ottawa commuter bus collided with a passenger train</a> at a level crossing in the western suburb of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrhaven" target="_blank">Barrhaven</a>. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-380HdXwPSFI/Vf3HJyL22sI/AAAAAAAAAxI/Dr-kFoTu2XE/s1600/oc-transpo-bus-crash.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="174" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-380HdXwPSFI/Vf3HJyL22sI/AAAAAAAAAxI/Dr-kFoTu2XE/s320/oc-transpo-bus-crash.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Woodroffe Drive and Fallowfield Road, Ottawa, Sept. 13, 2013.<br />
Terry Pedwell, Canadian Press.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The death-toll was perhaps mercifully low: only six fatalities, including the bus-driver. The Ottawa Citizen <a href="http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/the-crash-and-the-damage-done-how-the-oc-transpo-via-tragedy-changed-one-passengers-life" target="_blank">reported recently</a>, however, on the post-traumatic stress suffered by at least one victim.</span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This incident stuck in my head for a number of diverse reasons: not excluding the massive publicity it received, I was at the time exclusively a transit-user, not owning an automobile; also, a colleague of mine back then had years earlier been the boss of the driver of the crashed bus; seeing his photograph in the newspaper, I remembered that I had encountered at the workplace him as well. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">What jogged my memory was the bus-driver’s last name: “<a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/bus-driver-dave-woodard-had-clean-record-before-fatal-crash-1.1859555" target="_blank">Woodard</a>”, which I misspelled when searching for his name on the customer database, as the far more common “Woodward.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Not finding him under that name, the man advised me of the correct spelling, and there he was in the system. At least, this is how I recall it, but perhaps it didn’t happen that way at all. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Also, September 18 is the anniversary of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Jimi_Hendrix" target="_blank">the death of Jimi Hendrix in 1970</a>, and as chance would have it, on the day before the second year after the bus accident, I had business on the phone with a gentleman from Arizona who was also named “Woodard.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In a previous conversation with this American man, he told me that in his organization there is a colleague whose name is very similar to his, except that his surname is “Woodward.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As tragic as the accident was, my intent is not to write an elegy, but a meditation on some mysteries of its circumstance. </span><br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nKtfuqmldf8/Vf3HZXCyePI/AAAAAAAAAxQ/XfKYfXcymQw/s1600/oc-transpo-bus-crash-victims-mugshots.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img alt="" border="0" height="180" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-nKtfuqmldf8/Vf3HZXCyePI/AAAAAAAAAxQ/XfKYfXcymQw/s320/oc-transpo-bus-crash-victims-mugshots.jpg" title="Image: CTV News." width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Bus crash victims. Driver Dave Woodard, bottom left.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For though the driver had a clean driving record, nevertheless Dave Woodard apparently ignored warning signs and flashes at the level-crossing that a train was approaching. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Passengers saw the train coming, however, and shouted for him to stop, which the bus-driver did not do until just seconds before impact. All the deceased were from the bus, however. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But how, if <i>the passengers</i> saw the train, did the driver fail to notice it? </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It had been Woodard’s wedding-anniversary the day prior, and there was speculation that the aftereffects of too much alcohol in celebration, contributed to an impairment of function. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But a <a href="http://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/enquetes-investigations/rail/2013/r13t0192/r13t0192.asp" target="_blank">preliminary report</a> revealed no drugs or alcohol were in his system. This same document pointed to a security-video monitor located above the windshield as a cause of driver-distraction. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, in the days after the accident, news reports emerged as to how transit-drivers on that bus route — including the operator involved in the accident — <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/oc-transpo-to-review-claim-bus-ran-lights-at-rail-crossing-1.2514421" target="_blank">had been ignoring lights warning of an oncoming train at that crossing</a>, and proceeding as normal. This included at least one such incident — <i>following the accident itself</i>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It does seem foolhardy, especially for a motorist responsible not only for his own life, but that of dozens of others as well. Yet, there was evidently a large gap in time between when the warning lights began, and a train passed by. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For a bus-driver, though, waiting for the train to pass was the difference between remaining on schedule, and being late — with comparatively minor consequences in regard to upset passengers, unhappy superiors, and tardiness in leaving work, when compared to the risk of death and injury that would result from a bus being struck by an oncoming train. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Go9U9nlMvLk/Vf3Hou3OLCI/AAAAAAAAAxY/ihQfyubzKN8/s1600/oc-transpo-bus-crash-victims.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Go9U9nlMvLk/Vf3Hou3OLCI/AAAAAAAAAxY/ihQfyubzKN8/s320/oc-transpo-bus-crash-victims.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Tragic aftermath of inattention.<br />
Image: CTV News.</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet, from the behaviour typical of the drivers, this risk was comparatively small, even when (as in the one incident subsequent to the collision) the result could have resulted in numerous casualties. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Far from any impairment caused by alcohol or lack of sleep, the bus driver’s perceptual faculties were behaving just as they should. It goes back to previous musings as to how the incredible or unthinkable — the Holocaust, World War II, the moonshot, the destruction of the World Trade towers — become banal after not so long a time. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is how the mind is able to adjust to radical shifts in circumstance: the extraordinary becomes, after not so long a time, the new normal, fading from the centre to the background of attention as the psyche contends with the quotidian substance or details of the environment. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Sometimes this doesn’t happen, of course: shock and stress disorders result precisely from the inability of the mind to adapt to drastically changed circumstance. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, in most cases things and situations which are highly stimulating, whether affirmatively or not, are reduced to psychological noise: thus, funerary-workers are, after a time, no longer disgusted by the sight of dead bodies, just as strip-club bouncers quickly lose arousal at the sight of naked flesh. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Relatedly, for most drivers, the sight of flashing lights at a level-crossing provokes a reflex to slow down and stop the vehicle. Apparently, for drivers on the Barrhaven route, red flashing lights no longer registered at a subliminal the onset of a deadly hazard — a train. For the bus operator and five others that fateful day, it was a tragic lesson in the psychology of perception.
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RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-56151028407880074712015-09-07T12:44:00.002-07:002015-09-07T12:44:57.902-07:00The "Lamestream" "Mainsteam" "Corporate" "Media"<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">
Out of curiosity, sometime ago I read <i><a href="http://www.interlinkbooks.com/product_info.php?products_id=1615" target="_blank">Debunking 9/11 Debunking</a></i>, by a theology professor from California, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ray_Griffin" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">David Ray Griffin</a>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This work is apparently a follow-up to Griffin’s first book on the subject, called the <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Pearl_Harbor" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">New Pearl Harbor</a></i>. I’ve never read this title, as indeed heretofore I had never read any of books written by those in the “<a href="http://truthmovement.com/" target="_blank">truth movement</a>”, concerned with exposing "those really responsible" for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p68UkthYOXY/Ve3nC2lSDjI/AAAAAAAAAwA/9RTEVvfvnac/s1600/911-truth.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-p68UkthYOXY/Ve3nC2lSDjI/AAAAAAAAAwA/9RTEVvfvnac/s320/911-truth.jpg" width="237" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">www.aim.org</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I have, however, been heavily exposed to their thoughts online, in spite of the fact that I find the allegations of these individuals literally fabulous: that is, ludicrous and unworthy of examination on their face. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Unlike the <a href="http://www.jfklibrary.org/JFK/JFK-in-History/November-22-1963-Death-of-the-President.aspx" target="_blank">assassination of John F. Kennedy</a>, there can be no mystery at all to the events of September 11, 2001. The questions that arose following the tragedy of November 22, 1963 were resolved long ago, such that anyone who today propounds the idea that Kennedy was assassinated by anyone other than Lee H. Oswald, is either ignorant of the facts, or a <a href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/fabulist" target="_blank">fabulist</a> (which is to say, a liar). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Without any kind of minute examination of the “evidence” offered by the 9/11 conspiracy fabulists, I think anyone is fully permitted to reject outright, for their continual violation of the reality principle. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the introductory remarks, for example, Griffin challenges the criticisms made toward the conspiracy narrative he propounded in the <i>New Pearl Harbour</i>, as well as at 9/11 fables generally. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Accepting that any particular part of the story offered by the 9/11 narrators is possible (or at least, those among the more mainstream “theories” of this type) by no means precludes rejecting the whole succession of possibilities as implausible, even absurd.
</span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thus, I will take it as veritable that the military has remote-controlled aircraft that could be steered into the Trade Centre buildings or the Pentagon; I will assume that it is correct the statement that the Twin Towers could have been wired with experimental explosives that leave little or no trace, and that this could have been the cause of the buildings’ “controlled demolition”; that military jets could have diverted the four planes for the remote-controlled aircraft to take over their flight-paths; I will even take it as given, that military intelligence has the technology to accurately simulate the sound of any particular human voice (as per allegations that the phone calls made to loved-ones from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">the Flight 93 hijacking</a> that fell short of its target), though I’m sceptical that someone well acquainted with an individual, could not differentiate between their own voice, and that of a computer simulation. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Close friends and loved ones converse idiosyncratically, even (or especially) over the phone. The recipient of any call from a computer simulation of a friend or family, I believe would spot a fake, or at least, that would know that “something was different”. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But even if I believed it were possible to do this, and again that all the rest of what is alleged to have transpired on September 11 is theoretically possible at least, it is entirely appropriate to respond that it is logistically and practically impossible for any more than two or more of these operations to have occurred with the necessary precision and simultaneity. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The proponents of the 9/11 conspiracy narratives, simply need something more than what they have, in order to be taken seriously, by me at least.
Griffin, in the introductory pages, seeks to refute just this point — of the logistical impossibility of the scenarios envisioned — apparently by reference to <a href="http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/past-exhibitions/einstein/peace-and-war/the-manhattan-project" target="_blank">the Manhattan Project</a>, the code-name for the U.S. military operation which resulted in the creation of the first atomic bombs in 1945. Here, states Griffin, was a complex exercise which was, however, kept secret from the public. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Inconveniently for Griffin, though, <a href="https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1942-1945/espionage.htm" target="_blank">it was not a secret to everyone</a>, especially the Soviet Union, which acquired the knowledge of nuclear fission from the Los Alamos project, to create their own atomic bomb. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Referring to <a href="http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a49/1227842/" target="_blank"><i>Popular Mechanics</i>’ own debunking book</a>, Griffin dismisses them as products of the “corporate media.” </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I must say, this statement gave me pause.</span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Just what does that mean? That somehow “corporations” are all in league with the “truth” of the September 11 terrorist attacks, and publish works critical of the “truth movement” in order to divert the public from knowing what really happened? </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tjnaLSvDuRo/Ve3nWCyKWnI/AAAAAAAAAwQ/ty5ZT3yoT88/s1600/lamestream-media-quote-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-tjnaLSvDuRo/Ve3nWCyKWnI/AAAAAAAAAwQ/ty5ZT3yoT88/s320/lamestream-media-quote-1.jpg" width="242" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">www.picturequotes.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I don't think, however, that Griffin actually believes such an absurdity.
But writers and critics on the political left (including Griffin) use the term “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_media" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">corporate media</a>” in reference to any reporting which conflicts with their own ideology.
It is the equivalent of the term “<a href="http://www.naturalnews.com/mainstream_media.html" target="_blank">mainstream media</a>” (or "<a href="http://bernardgoldberg.com/category/columns/lamestream-media/" target="_blank">lamestream media</a>") used by people on the right, in reference to what conservatives see as a liberal or leftist bias in the major broadcast and broadsheet news services. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, the very formulation “corporate media” is even more stupid than “mainstream media”. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I don’t think even centrist-liberals will deny that most news-media affirm what they themselves believe — to them, after all, this is not an ideology at all, but simply the truth (“<a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-swadley/reality-has-a-liberal-bia_1_b_835631.html" target="_blank">reality has a liberal bias</a>”, the saying goes). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But conservative viewpoints are part of the “mainstream” discourse nevertheless — in Canada, there is the <a href="http://www.torontosun.com/topic/sunnews" target="_blank">Sun newspaper chain</a>, or the <a href="http://news.nationalpost.com/category/full-comment" target="_blank">National Post</a>, while the U.S. tabloids tend to be on the right (then, of course, there is the <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/" target="_blank">Fox news channel</a>). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Right-of-centre views are <i>not</i> over-represented in the news media, and are very under-represented in academia and <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tv-executives-admit-taped-interviews-193116" target="_blank">in pop-culture</a>. The latter, at least, results from the hostility that conservatives have shown toward Hollywood and popular music, pretty much since these things were invented. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">My view of this is that, if conservatives wish to make films or television shows that reflect their own, and not a “liberal” bias, they should get to work and get it done. Isn’t this what the “can-do” spirit of individualism is supposed to be about? </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is in any case a substantial refutation of the “corporate media” line, that American popular-culture generally, and movies and television in particular, have an acknowledged left-liberal viewpoint. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps uniquely in the West, the American entertainment industry receives the least in the way of government support. It subsists almost entirely on a free-market basis, and all major production companies are themselves owned by larger corporate entities. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But again, in so far as American media-products have a predominant “message” (and most do not), it comes from the left and not the right. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">More so, though, the very postulate that the various news-media present some kind of unified “corporate” point of view, is itself absurd. Just what is the “<a href="http://www.alternet.org/economy/alecs-scary-corporate-agenda-7-their-most-anti-democratic-and-science-denying-ideas" target="_blank">corporate” agenda</a>?
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4C4kG44o65w/Ve3nsS8XzXI/AAAAAAAAAwY/5GpStGyFsik/s1600/perot.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4C4kG44o65w/Ve3nsS8XzXI/AAAAAAAAAwY/5GpStGyFsik/s320/perot.jpg" width="240" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">www.usatoday.com</td></tr>
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Big-business lobbyists are interested in lower taxes, deregulation, and liberalized trade — this is precisely what their opponents “accuse” them of wanting. It is no secret, no “hidden” agenda: businesspeople big and small (and the latter always want to get big) are in favour of economic conditions which will permit them to buy and sell with greater ease.
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">They have many sound, hoary, and learned arguments as to why these policies should be implemented. Whether some or even all of the ideas of “<a href="http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=376" target="_blank">neo-liberalism</a>” are mistaken or incorrect, has no bearing on their existence in the first place; their presence consequently diminishes the verity of the claim, from leftist critics, that big business has been able to convince the public of the superiority of classical economics, through “corporate propaganda”. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In any event, left-wing opinion has been progressively less willing to engage directly the more free-market (though scarcely “laissez-faire”) policies implemented by all governments, regardless of party, in the Western world and elsewhere, since the late 1970s. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Mainstream thinking on the left has moved toward a neo-socialism of “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiculturalism" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">multicultural</a>”, grievance-driven politics (as embodied in the term “political correctness”) that, whatever its frequent genuflections toward the old, economics-driven socialism, scarcely enters in any meaningful debate with neo-classical or other non-leftist economic policies. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The very invocation of the term “corporate”, with its lack of substance or meaning, is proof as to how the left has abandoned economics in favour of culture, as its main political staging ground. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is silly, as I said, to conceive of all the corporations in the United States, or in the Western world generally — there must be millions of them — as having the exact same interests, and the exact same point of view of all things, or least views and interests of such close similarity as to form a coherent agenda, hidden or otherwise. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Even excluding all corporations except the very largest (with revenues of say, more than a hundred-million U.S. dollars), there are still tens of thousands of incorporated entities, and of course, they don’t all have the same interests or agenda either. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Many large corporations don’t have any truck with the basic agenda of free trade, deregulation and lower taxes. On the contrary, powerful business concerns in the U.S. and elsewhere, depend on government largesse if not for their existence outright, then for their status as large corporations altogether: defence-contractors, obviously, but also many other private concerns who do with the business with local and national governments, and who thus naturally form no interest in favour of dramatic — or any — decreases in the size of government. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In fact, since their vested interest lies in the opposite condition, these state-subsidized business corporations are lobbyists for bigger government. Similarly, although the opponents of the “corporate agenda” assert that business firms are singularly obsessed with deregulation (thereby to make it easier to cheat, steal and kill their customers, apparently), the truth is more complex. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Regulations are generally put in place as enabling laws: the actual legal rules of conduct are not contained within the statute, but are devised later in consultation with the major “stakeholders”, which of course includes the businesses that are to be regulated. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In a process known as “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">regulatory capture</a>”, large corporations create rules to make it difficult for new entrants to come into the market, thereby preserving, by mandate means, their own dominance. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is to the expense of smaller competitors, and of the general public, which must suffer higher prices due to lessened competition (on top of the inevitable costs to the consumer of the regulations themselves). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is an example of the “<a href="http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/RentSeeking.html" target="_blank">rent-seeking</a>” derided by neo-classical economists, at least, but I have not seen this sort of corporate perfidy criticized very much in the literature of the opponents of neo-liberalism. They are in favour of greater regulation, naturally, and so don’t seem to recognize that business can and does benefit from it. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is the same with free trade. “Corporations” are generally in favour of lowering trade barriers. Yet, some very influential business firms are opposed to free trade, at least as far as their own products go. For many decades, the North American auto sector has been able to maintain tariffs against cars manufactured outside the U.S. or Canada. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">During the presidency of the supposedly “right-wing” George W. Bush, the domestic steel industry managed <a href="http://www.economist.com/node/1021395" target="_blank">to have duties imposed on foreign-made steel</a> (although the tariffs were lifted due to adverse World Trade Organization rulings and penalties, along with the threat of trade-war with the European Union). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The WTO, successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, was at one time the bette noire of opponents of liberalized trade. According to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1999_Seattle_WTO_protests" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">protesters who blockaded the WTO meeting in Seattle, Washington, in 1999</a>, the organization was some kind of putative world government, the public arm of an invisible corporate conspiracy to reduce the world to proletariat and peasants. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">These forces were thereby misnamed the “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-globalization_movement" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">anti-globalization</a>” movement. But as the WTO has shown itself to rule against dominant players in global-trade — such as the United States and its steel tariffs — its status as some kind of sinister cabal has diminished, at least among the “mainstream” of the anti-liberal left. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The very terms “corporate media” and “corporate agenda” are held to be synonymous with “right-wing” (or even, on the extremes, with “fascist”). </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">One would think, thus, that politically active big-business and financial types would be uniformly right-wing in their opinions. This is far from the case, however. The most obvious counter-example is <a href="http://freedomoutpost.com/2014/03/just-george-soros-affect-american-politics/" target="_blank">George Soros</a> who, despite his profession as multi-billionaire financier, is an admitted socialist who gives millions to left-wing causes. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The founder of the <a href="http://front.moveon.org/" target="_blank">Move On</a> group, so prominent in the anti-Iraq war movement, was also a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_MoveOn.org#Opposing_Clinton.27s_impeachment" target="_blank">corporate billionaire</a>, making his fortune on Internet stocks.
As described by the urban-geographer <a href="http://www.joelkotkin.com/" target="_blank">Joel Kotkin</a>, such “new-economy” moguls, as well as those in older media such as film and television production, form a “<a href="https://www.google.ca/#q=gentry+liberal" target="_blank">gentry liberal</a>” class that, due to its control of key media of communication (not to mention the fortunes they donate to “liberal” causes), are influential far beyond their total numbers in the electorate, or even the political class only. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It should be no surprise that business people living in the metropolitan coasts of the U.S., have socially liberal politics at least, given that this is the mainstream culture in these places. Some of them, it appears, and notwithstanding their own material interests, are simpatico with the economic interventionism promoted by the Democratic party. </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet even <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Buffett#Taxes" target="_blank">Warren Buffett</a>, the billionaire investor from midland Nebraska, has come out as a Democratic-party supporter in recent years. Buffett has even pled with lawmakers to raise tax rates on the vast fortune his earns each year. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Meanwhile, corporate types who do come out as Republicans, almost always belong to the more moderate wing of the party. This goes back at least to Nelson Rockefeller, grandson of the oil-magnate John D. Rockefeller, the richest man of his day. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">As New York governor during the 1960s, the younger Rockefeller was an outspoken proponent of black civil rights, signed into law bills ending discrimination against women and minorities, and became an early supporter of (as they say) a “women’s right to choose.” </span><br />
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nelson Rockefeller may well have been philosophically in favour of lower taxes and a less intrusive government. But he usually presided over a state legislature that was controlled by the Democratic party that had opposite intentions. Rockefeller himself was scarcely reluctant to promote big-spending projects, such as the multi-billion dollar World Trade Centre. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">T</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">he <a href="http://www.anatomyofculture.blogspot.ca/2015/08/the-proud-towers.html" target="_blank">ultimate effect of the doomed Twin Towers</a>, as well as the other buildings in the complex, was to undermine the rental market in lower Manhattan, by providing so many millions of square feet of excess rental space, most of which wasn’t leased until a couple of years before the towers were destroyed in 2001. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Rockefeller ran several times for president, always as the moderate Republican losing to more right-wing candidates such as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Goldwater" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Barry Goldwater</a> or Richard Nixon — both of them career politicians (which is to say, they earned their living on the government payroll, notwithstanding their own rhetoric against “creeping socialism”). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is reminiscent of the political career of a contemporary politician from New York City, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Bloomberg#Political_stands" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Michael Bloomberg</a>, who made his own fortune in Wall-street related financial services. Succeeding another Republican — the famed <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudy_Giuliani" target="_blank">Rudolph Giuliani</a> — as mayor of a solidly-Democrat city, Bloomberg (who handed power to an avowedly left-wing successor) was far less right-wing than his predecessor; which is to say, a billionaire who entered political life well into middle-age after a career as a businessman, was more moderate than a career civil servant (with Giuliani serving as a federal prosecutor prior to his own entry into politics).</span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rWEXZqRWrg4/Ve3oFs7zUBI/AAAAAAAAAwg/h0uWHXpzqjs/s1600/jews-did-911.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-rWEXZqRWrg4/Ve3oFs7zUBI/AAAAAAAAAwg/h0uWHXpzqjs/s320/jews-did-911.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">www.4thmedia.org</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Bloomberg ultimately left the Republican party, winning re-election to his second term as an Independent. However, the term “</span><a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2012/11/evangelicals-vs-country-club-republicans/" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">country-club Republican</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">" was once used to describe party-members such as Bloomberg — and Rockefeller before him. It is the equivalent of “</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Tory" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Red Tory</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">” in the Canadian context, or “</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wets_and_dries" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Wet Tory</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">” in the U.K. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The American term is somehow more evocative, however, of the socioeconomic standing of centrist-conservatives: generally, they are well-off individuals who built (or built on) fortunes of their own, before entering government as a “public service”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Far from being miserly spokespersons for the free market, such super-rich politicians seem motivated by the “noblesse-oblige” ideals to help the less well off. Hence the term, used in Canada and Britain, “Tory” — precisely the sort of do-gooder derided by the likes of the truly right-wing <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Thatcher" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Margaret Thatcher</a>, a grocer’s daughter who was also a career politician. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Just over two decades ago, the schism that exists within modern conservatism between moderates who are more or less supportive of greater (though never complete) economic laissez-faire, and those who are social and cultural “extremists”, was played out in presidential politics. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992" target="_blank">1992 U.S. presidential election</a>, Texas billionaire Ross Perot left the Republican party and ran as an Independent opposed to the candidacy of president George Bush the elder. The latter, also a career politician and civil servant, was scarcely very right-wing by conviction. He felt he had to position himself as such, in order to overcome challenges in the party primaries from Patrick Buchanan, another rightist Republican who spent most of his career as a government employee (a one-time aide to Nixon) and as a commentator and pundit. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perot, on the other hand, was apparently a social liberal — which is why he left behind the Republicans in the first place. Bush’s tactical conservatism was, for him, unfortunate, because it probably lost him a second term as president. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Judging by political orientation typical of the American business class, it is impossible to uphold the notion that there is some monolithic “corporate agenda” which has been imposed on the American people, and the rest world, by them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The corollary proposition, that the for-profit media in the United States or elsewhere, are merely propaganda organs for this barely coherent “agenda”, fails even through a particular examination of the various media in question. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Does the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/" target="_blank">New York Times</a> have a right-wing editorial and reporting policy? Does the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/" target="_blank">Washington Post</a>, <a href="http://www.latimes.com/" target="_blank">Los Angeles Times</a> or any of the other metropolitan broadsheets considered as the “newspapers of record” in the U.S.? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is simply insufficient to declare, as many do, that since these news-services are owned by corporations, they "</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">must toe the corporate line”. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But in fact, the Times, the Post, the Chicago Tribune and most of the rest, hew at least a socially liberal line, and most of them are economically “liberal”, too — that is, in favour of various forms of government intervention to fix the problems of society. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Of all the major daily newspapers in the U.S., only the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wall_Street_Journal#Reporting_bias" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal</a> would qualify as right-wing — in its editorial line. Its reporting, on the other hand, is as typically “liberal” (in the American sense) as the New York Times or any other newspaper. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zqL5-WunyqE/Ve3oRU1YA8I/AAAAAAAAAwo/2vJvxsQpXWI/s1600/chomsky.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="211" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zqL5-WunyqE/Ve3oRU1YA8I/AAAAAAAAAwo/2vJvxsQpXWI/s320/chomsky.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Noam Chomsky, the Isaac Newton of the twentieth century.<br />© Corbis. All Rights Reserved.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Influential commentators such as the linguist </span><a href="http://www.chomsky.info/" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">Noam Chomsky</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, argue precisely that the Times, the Journal, the Post, and all the rest of the newsprint media, in addition to the broadcast and cable news-services, do indeed have a “corporatist” mandate, and are able thereby to “manufacture the consent” of the public and the political class for the allegedly militaristic, dog-eat-dog capitalism therein. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Chomsky has published various books on this subject with “collaborators” — though I’m convinced that the linguist’s “authorship” ends with the lending of his considerable rhetorical talents to the turgid, Critical Theory prose of the likes of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_S._Herman" target="_blank">Edward Herman</a>, with whom Chomsky is credited on <i><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_S._Herman#Manufacturing_Consent" target="_blank">Manufacturing Consent</a></i>, probably the most famous and influential Chomskyan tract. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I’ve always marvelled, though, as to how Chomsky is never more delighted to quote the New York Times, CBS News, Time magazine and the like, when they report something which seems to affirm his worldview. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, when they do not, they simply become “corporate media” again. This is a device that Chomsky uses to deflect criticism of his own errors, as well, such as his early defence of the Khmer Rouge from charges of mass-murder and genocide in Cambodia, his prediction that the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan would result in “genocide”, or his kissing the ring of the Hezbollah leader on a visit to Lebanon. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">All of these, Chomsky has said at various times, are the result of distortion by the corporate media. I notice he doesn’t ever specify the errors in his critics’ accusations. It is enough to change the subject, it would seem, to accuse his opponents in turn of being stooges of the “corporatist new world order.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Fox News channel is said by its critics to embody the “right-wing corporate” agenda. The very term “Fox” is, for the left, a shorthand for “lies and propaganda”, with the audience for the service being brainwashed “sheeple.” </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Fox News is definitely slanted to the right. But whatever its critics might say, Fox is as legitimate a news service as the New York Times or any other news-medium. No one (excepting Chomsky and his followers) would now deny that the Times is slanted to the left in its reportage. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This fact does not, <i>in itself</i>, delegitimize this or any other “liberal” American newspaper as sources of information, and it is the same with Fox News on the right. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The many critics of Fox are always on as to the channel’s “lies” and “distortions”. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But as with Chomsky’s invocation of the “corporate media” line as a sort of Teflon against his own indiscretions, those who attack “Faux” news do so out of an inability to engage ideas different to or opposed to their own. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Not only is Fox News, like all other news-media, compelled to observe standards of reportage so as to avoid civil liability. If the news service did indeed report “lies” on a regular bias, its competitors not only on cable (the Cable News Network and MS-NBC) but in the broadsheet and on network news, would gleefully expose them. </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This doesn’t happen, of course, because Fox no more distorts the news on the right, than the other networks and other cables do on the left. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The existence of the <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/" target="_blank">MS-NBC</a> news channel is confounding to the “corporate media” ideology, on its own. It is the cable arm of the National Broadcasting company, launched in partnership with Microsoft (whose founder and former president, Bill Gates, is apparently another member of the “gentry liberal” class). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">NBC was once owned by General Electric, a huge vertically integrated conglomerate, with business interests in various sectors of the economy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It thus ought to be the sort of propaganda service that Fox News is purported to be. It is of course nothing of the kind. The “liberalism” of its on-screen personalities ranges from doctrinaire to ravingly fanatical. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Evidently, the corporate titans at GE were unaware of what their own news channel is doing, or else they like it just the same. Surely they couldn’t not know, and if the low-rated MS-NBC did feature more impartial reporting and commentary, it might be the choice of more cable-watchers. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Evidently, corporate executives at some level have decided to forego profitability in favour of publicizing views that they believe need airing.
I’m certain that Ray Griffin, or Noam Chomsky, or any of the many peddlers of the “corporate media” line would argue, in turn, that MS-NBC and the other of the cable networks, and the rest of the for-profit media generally, “provide the illusion of debate”, which serves in turn to obscure the “real issues.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">There has to be some explanation, after all, for the reality of comment and contention as found in the “corporate media.” In this, they round the corner into conspiracy "theory" or narration. The essence of the latter is the assertion that the narrators know the “real story” behind what is apparently the case — that a man shot the president from a nearby warehouse, or that skyscrapers collapsed after being struck head on by jet planes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">No, say the conspiracy-narrators, these are merely theatrics disguising the “<a href="http://whatreallyhappened.com/#axzz3l53IRKlm" target="_blank">what really happened</a>”. Similarly, the “corporate media” school would have it that, an ongoing-basis, the gatekeepers of the commercial news media permit commentary and debate to take place, all of which is in fact unreal, in order place a curtain across the real mechanisms of power. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is interested that, some years ago, <a href="http://www.rt.com/usa/noam-chomsky-911-truthers-342/" target="_blank">Noam Chomsky denounced in no uncertain terms</a> 9/11 conspiracy-fabulists. I thought at the time that this, at least, is to his credit. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But I wonder now if Chomsky’s intemperance on this matter, didn’t have ulterior motives. Namely, it is to distance himself from commentators, like Griffin, whose won language of “corporate media” and “American imperialism” closely parallels his own. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">No doubt, many of Chomsky’s followers are 9/11 conspiracy-believers. I would suggest, however, that Chomsky’s denunciations of the conspiracy stories relating to the 9/11 attacks, has less to do with an empirically-based disbelief that they were in an “inside job.” It is rather that Chomsky and other proponents of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Frankfurt School</a>-based theories of “corporate-media”, have always strenuously denied that what they propose involves high-level conspiracy at all. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a class="irc_hl irc_hol i3724" data-href="http://mediatheorystudies.com/2013/02/16/frankfurt-school/" data-noload="" data-ved="0CAYQjB1qFQoTCLPAhc_X5ccCFU0YkgodOdEMKQ" href="https://www.google.ca/url?sa=i&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=images&cd=&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0CAYQjB1qFQoTCLPAhc_X5ccCFU0YkgodOdEMKQ&url=http%3A%2F%2Fmediatheorystudies.com%2F2013%2F02%2F16%2Ffrankfurt-school%2F&psig=AFQjCNENSXn4NliBTz_IaD2EI6Xsy8RDTA&ust=1441740460832446" jsaction="mousedown:irc.rl;keydown:irc.rlk" style="-webkit-tap-highlight-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.2); background-color: #f1f1f1; color: #7d7d7d; cursor: pointer; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; text-align: start; text-decoration: none;"><span class="irc_ho" dir="ltr" style="margin-right: -2px; overflow: hidden; padding-right: 2px; text-overflow: ellipsis; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">mediatheorystudies.com</span></a></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">No one involved in the corporate media complex, they maintain, need intend to deceive anyone; no one even need direct the whole thing. Somehow, they all respond to a “system” which makes everyone involved act accordingly. For his part, Professor Griffin asserts the same thing, that the conspiracy he narrates as to “what really happened” on September 11, 2001, wouldn’t have to involve “that many people.” But it is clear, in fact, that a conspiracy to perpetrate the mass murder of thousands, and the destruction of billions of dollars in property, not to mention a system that, in essence, reports false-news through the mass media on for decades on an ongoing basis, couldn't involved a massive conspiracy. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Most conspiracy-fabulists have a more “realistic” view on this, which is why most of their narratives involve some kind of shadowy elite directing things from behind the scenes. Chomsky, and allied “corporate media” philosophers, have laboured so hard to keep their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_theory#In_social_theory" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Critical Theory</a> pristine of the threat of “conspiracy theory”, that for Chomsky at least, it must have been insufferable to see so many of his own followers mucking it up for him.
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The “corporate media” philosophy is, in itself, an ideological dodge. It arose in earnest during the 1960s with the Frankfurters Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and the rest of the Germans in America. Before them, the role of mass-media in creating false-consciousness was more rhetorical than philosophical. It was the Critical Theorists who gave the “propaganda model” of the news media systematic heft — indeed, they made it into one of the pillars of neo-socialist thought. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">I don’t see that Noam Chomsky has contributed very much that is new to the Frankfurt School “corporate media” philosophy. His role has been, for decades, to act as the preeminent populariser of the Frankfurt theories, being a highly skilled propagandist himself, in writing and in print. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Certainly, none of the Frankfurters’ abstruse and Teutonic writings can compare to with the communicative power of Chomsky. His smooth and practised delivery has meant that the ideas, if not the names, of Theodore Adorno or Herbert Marcuse are known other than to the cohort of American university students who attended school in the mid- to late-1960s. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">His level of fame — Chomsky is perhaps the single most well-known U.S. academic — belays his own “<a href="http://www.chomsky.info/onchomsky/2002----.htm" target="_blank">propaganda model</a>” of the news media. He is not famous, after all, for his linguistic theories, as important as these are. Chomsky’s status is due entirely to his political agitprop. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But what “corporate media” would constantly let a critic like himself speak to the public (unless, of course, Chomsky is willing to declare himself one of the stooges who provides the “illusion of debate” for the masses...). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The Frankfurters’ and Chomsky’s “corporate media” theories are, in the end, no good-faith analyses of the nature of the news media. Like so much of latter-day socialist thought, it arises from the reality of the failure of “really real” socialism in the twentieth century. It was not only that command-socialist countries could not provide much beyond the basics of life for most of the population, regardless of their level of industrialization. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was that, in every respect, these places were less free and just than were the countries where capitalism prevailed. The Critical Theorists’ response was to declare the liberal democracies not really free after all. Everything was in fact controlled by the “corporatist” elite. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In essence, it is “<i>You</i> say the media in Soviet Russia/Maoist China/Castro’s Cuba/is controlled by the state, and opposing viewpoints are heavily censored. That’s as may be. <i>We </i>respond, in turn, that the media in Western countries is controlled by corporations, and opposing viewpoints are not permitted to be heard.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And since, to left-wing critics of capitalism, corporations are inherently evil, this form of “censorship” is far worse than what occurs in command-socialist states. What’s more, since what we know about these other regimes comes from the corporate media, how can anyone know the truth about really happens over there? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Surely no corporate entity will tell the full story of the reality of socialism within <i>[insert appropriate “people’s republic”]</i>. Chomsky or any other like-minded theorist would never state such a thing so boldly or crudely, but that is what this “corporate media” ideology is all about. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It shares another important thing in common with the conspiracy genre. With the latter, anyone who questions a conspiracy “theory”, wholly or in part, is said to be either a dupe to the conspiracy, or part of it her- or himself. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Similarly, challenges to the “propaganda model” of commercial mass media, are usually met with ad hominem characterizations of the questioner as either brainwashed, or part of the — no, not a conspiracy per se — but the media-complex just the same. It is an excellent prophylactic, for certain, to immunize the conspiracy narrative/corporate-media theorizing from criticism.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-46783489574069635012015-08-31T17:24:00.003-07:002015-08-31T17:31:02.512-07:00The Proud Towers<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
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The eighth and final segment of Ric Burns’ historical documentary on New York City, <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/newyork/" target="_blank">deals with the construction of the World Trade Center</a> complex in south Manhattan. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span class="irc_ho" dir="ltr" style="margin-right: -2px; overflow: hidden; padding-right: 2px; text-overflow: ellipsis; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">www.chibarproject.com</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was the brainchild of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Rockefeller" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">David Rockefeller</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, scion of his grandfather </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._Rockefeller" rel="nofollow" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;" target="_blank">John D.</a><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">’s oil fortune (David turned 100 this year). By the 1950s, Rockefeller was chairman of the Chase Manhattan bank, located in south Manhattan, near the waterfront district that had undergone steep decline after World War II. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Most commercial interests had migrated to midtown Manhattan, in the vicinity of the Empire State Building. What remained were several hundred retailers and other small businesses, and plenty of empty office-space and once-busy piers that were rotting into New York Bay. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Rockefeller feared that <a href="https://www.nyse.com/index" target="_blank">the Wall Street stock-exchange</a>’s status as world financial centre would be lost if the area went down any further. He proposed construction of a world-trade centre complex, to house all the companies in New York city doing business related to the financial markets. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The resultant process by which the project actually went ahead, verifies that skyscrapers of the height and “footprint” of the World Trade Center — that structure in particular, but including all tall buildings of more than sixty or seventy storeys — make no sense from a profit-calculus viewpoint. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><a href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/james_glanz/index.html" target="_blank">James Glanz</a>, a New York Times reporter, is quoted in <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1U2gpXnToCg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Center of the World</a></i> episode of Burns’ documentary: “The Twin Towers were the moonshot of structural engineering and in skyscraper construction. They were unprecedented in the same way that the Apollo program was, and virtually the same era. And they had similar ambitions. Just in terms of quantity, [the Twin Towers] were the biggest. Ten million square feet of space. Nothing had come remotely close to that number, in terms the amount of real estate in one complex. They were a multi-dimensional exercise in hubris.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But, Glanz goes on, “these things were wonders of the world. We shall not see their like again.” </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">While the World Trade Center has been axiomatically identified with “corporate capitalism”, in fact it required much government expenditure to get off the ground. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was such a bad investment in fact, that David Rockefeller thus had to enlist the services of his brother, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Rockefeller" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Nelson</a>, who assumed the New York state governorship in 1959. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">When the state legislature balked at putting up the funds directly for the world-trade complex, Nelson Rockefeller instead turned to the <a href="https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/its-time-to-kill-the-port-authority-of-new-york-and-new-jersey" target="_blank">Port Authority of New York and New Jersey</a>, a semi-autonomous body funded by each state to administer the massive harbour complex on New York bay. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It is one of many commissions and agencies that were set up by the city government since the nineteenth century, employing professional managers and engineers to administer the highly-complex infrastructure and facilities of what was in effect a city state. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Putting so much of governance beyond democratic control was a reform policy directed against the patronage-corruption that was endemic in New York city government. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">New Yorkers were, no doubt, better governed by the professional bureaucrats, than by oft-incompetent patronage appointees. But in exchange for “good government”, unelected functionaries assumed vast powers to arrange and direct the lives of millions of people.
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The most powerful, and famed (infamous to many New Yorkers) was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Moses" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Robert Moses</a>, head of various independent corporations which controlled infrastructure spending not only throughout New York City, but the surrounding municipalities and counties, too. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">An entire episode of the New York documentary is devoted to Moses’ vast influence on the very shape of Gotham in the twentieth century. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Suffice to say in brief, that the most troubling aspect of Moses’ unelected rule, was that many or most of his agencies were self-financing (collecting fees from road-tolls and so on), thereby putting him beyond the control of not only the city, but the state government as well. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Moses was not in charge of the Port Authority of the two states: but it, too, was self-financing, relying on port fees to keep solvent — and it has its own police force. Still, the organization required financing for the trade-centre project, and while the New York legislature proved amenable to governor Rockefeller later on, the state of New Jersey agreed to fund it only on the condition that the Port Authority take on ownership of the financially-troubled commuter subway line between Newark and New York. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It was, as observers noted, a queer mandate for the Port Authority to take on, not just ownership of a subway line, but the entire financial-centre project itself, a giant real-estate scheme with no direct involvement in the ports of New York. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Indeed, the “renewal” plan called for the removal of port facilities, to make way for park space at the foot of the trade-centre. Nevertheless, and in spite of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Construction_of_the_World_Trade_Center#Controversy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">strident opposition </a>chiefly from groups representing the businesses to be expropriated under eminent domain to make way for the trade centre, others (inspired by the author Jane Jacobs), looking to preserve heritage streetscape, and still others of sober disposition concerned about the vast price-tag of the project, as well as doubtful of the necessity of placing so much office space in lower Manhattan — and area with a surplus of such real-estate already. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The proprietors of the Empire State building were also opposed, citing the fact that as a government-owned complex, the trade-centre was at an unfair advantage compared to their privately-held concern. Even local television stations lobbied against the twin-tower design (unveiled in 1964), citing probable interference of broadcast signals by the 110-storey skyscrapers. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nevertheless, and in spite of the small-businessmen’s all-American call for “free enterprise” to prevail in land use in south Manhattan, the central-planning philosophy prevailed, and century-old buildings were demolished to make way for the ultra-modernism of the World Trade Center. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Opened between 1972 and ‘74, the complex did as predicted — by its detractors: flood the market with office space, and thereby lower the value of commercial properties in the vicinity (the owners of which, unlike the agency-owned Trade Center, had to pay property taxes). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Entire floors of the Twin Towers remained unoccupied for decades, and they did not become fully rented out (ironically) until just a few years before the buildings were destroyed. There is a reason why the Empire State Building remained the tallest building in the world for over four decades, until it was surpassed by one of the towers of the WTC (itself relegated to second place a year later by the completion of the Sears Tower in Chicago). </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">After its completion in 1931, the Empire State quickly became </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 17.3333339691162px; line-height: 26px;">New York</span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">'s emblem: but it was not fully leased, either, until 1951, twenty years after it opened. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Even then, the bulk of its profits came from tourists attending the lookout located near the top (a facility originally designed for docking airships), and this was the case with the World Trade Center as well. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Dy9aKq7mRPI/VeTvsH3JC-I/AAAAAAAAAvY/wg8eNPx-gQg/s1600/breakfast-cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="317" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Dy9aKq7mRPI/VeTvsH3JC-I/AAAAAAAAAvY/wg8eNPx-gQg/s320/breakfast-cover.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Take a look at my girlfriend...</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But the latter did assume the place of the Empire State building as the chief effigy of New York City (reproduced and parodied countless times (as on Supertramp's <i><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tODaH_fGtMY" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Breakfast in America</a></i> cover, as well as footage in the first seven parts of Burns’ New York, produced before the Trade Center attacks). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The <a href="http://www.skyscraper.org/TALLEST_TOWERS/t_sears.htm" target="_blank">Sears Tower</a> was, unlike the Trade Center, a private development, constructed by what was then the largest retailer in the world. But it, too, was a white elephant during its first decades, a money-loser with much vacant space, a considerable financial liability for a firm that faced series challenge to, and then loss of market dominance by competitors (such as Wal-Mart) during the 1980s and ‘90s. Sold long ago, and officially known as the Willis tower, the Sears building is the tallest in the U.S., but the WTC was much larger in terms of office space — ten million square feet, almost three hundred storeys (including the various other buildings in the complex), the single largest commercial property in the world. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Even those (and there are several in the Burns program) who didn’t like the appearance of the twin towers, would have to admit that it was an engineering marvel. Its architects and designers overcame the problem of elevator- and beam-placement inherent in such tall structures, by having its weight supported almost entirely by the frame. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Thereby, floor-space of the twin towers were not encumbered (as the case with the Empire State building) by load-supporting beams every few yards. On the other hand, the concrete walls were so thick that office-tower windows were relatively small and set back some feet from the interior. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">And, it appears that is
why the Twin Towers collapsed so quickly and completely, with the jets smashing through the frame (as is evident on the footage of the event), and the exploded fuel igniting materials inside the building to create a fatal weakening of the steel. Nevertheless, according to commentators in the Burns documentary, the frame-load design of the twin towers was highly influential in subsequent skyscraper construction. It was engineering achievement which was bought at the expense of government largesse, however, with inevitable detrimental consequences for the free-market, at least in the short run. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For, as the columnist <a href="http://www.petehamill.com/" target="_blank">Pete Hamill</a> </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">stated, if the Twin Towers and associated buildings hadn’t been constructed when they did — and given the near-default on debt that New York City nearly experienced during the mid-1970s, just after the completion of the </span><span style="font-size: 17.3333339691162px; line-height: 26px;">project</span><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">, they wouldn’t have constructed at a later time.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Hamill had already expressed his disdain for the levelling of old-time </span><span style="font-size: 17.3333339691162px; line-height: 26px;">neighbourhoods</span><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> to make way for the Trade Center. Yet, even he admitted that without the urban-renewal that came with the development, there would have been insufficient office-space </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">in the area near Wall Street to house the thousands of workers directly and indirectly involved in the booming financial services sector of the 1990s. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">If so, the financial heart of New York could well have drifted uptown, as David Rockefeller predicted it would without the Trade Center (on the other hand, a Lower Manhattan without the twin towers and resultant demolitions could well have developed into another bohemian-artist quarter, like nearby Greenwich Village). </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the event, the Trade Center did inspire a renewed building boom in downtown New York. But significantly, no builder even attempted to go near the height of the WTC. Like the Apollo moonshot, and most other large-scale engineering feats, the Trade Center came about as result of large-scale government spending and subsidy. Whatever the beneficial consequences that ultimately arose for private industry from these expenditures, private investors have been reluctant to spend such sums on engineering projects of even the modest scale of the World Trade Center (as compared even to the Apollo program) for the good reason that they are a poor investment. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Rocket-ships to the moon, alike with the office-buildings that, beginning in the late nineteenth century, reached ever-greater heights, are plainly </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">totemic in motivation, whatever the extensive rationality that went into their creation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Freudian and feminist theory would suggest that skyscrapers (and rockets) are objectified <a href="http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Phallic_Symbol" target="_blank">phalluses</a>, and into this category could be included savage totems, as well as the pyramids and ziggurats of the earliest civilized societies (old world and new). </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xc0kccU-3l4/VeTwK2ztIVI/AAAAAAAAAvg/Qz9ezthBO5A/s1600/babel-limbile.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="222" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xc0kccU-3l4/VeTwK2ztIVI/AAAAAAAAAvg/Qz9ezthBO5A/s320/babel-limbile.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">First Skyscraper.<br />
www.crestinortodox.ro</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps it is more accurate, though less exciting, to consider pyramids, ziggurats, and skyscrapers as well, as monstrous extensions of the egos of the head priests, kings and captain of industry that had them built. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">An episode of Burns’ documentary focuses on the early twentieth-century “<a href="http://www.pbs.org/wnet/newyork//laic/episode5/topic5/e5_t5_s1-hh.html" target="_blank">skyscraper war</a>s.” </span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Between 1900 and ‘30, one industrialist after another constructed headquarters for their operations, each </span><span style="font-size: 17.3333339691162px; line-height: 26px;">building</span><span style="font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;"> holding the record for a year or two, before it was overtaken by another tower. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">At one point during this period, two captains were building towers, each contending to be the world’s highest. It seemed that the one businessman had won out, when the other apparently completed his building short of the record. But then, a spire created in secret, was erected for the structure to take the name of world’s tallest. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It didn’t last long either, and the Empire State Building was built to one more than a hundred storeys in order to beat out the Chrysler building, completed in 1928 at less than a hundred floors. But it was quickly nicknamed the “Empty State Building" because of the lack of occupants in its early years. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333339691162px; line-height: 26px;">American capitalists have been pilloried throughout the years for their slavish devotion to the bottom-line. Yet, a significant and conspicuous part of their heritage - the skyscraper - came about often in spite, rather because of any inherent calculus. They were, in effect, the gargantuan expression of pride. </span></span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-10233235601477408182015-08-30T12:15:00.002-07:002015-08-30T12:16:14.645-07:00Plagiarist!Just a few months after <a href="http://anatomyofculture.blogspot.ca/2015/03/united-federation-of-planets-be-damned.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">this</a>, there comes <a href="http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-star-trek-federation-evil-empire/" target="_blank">this</a>:<br />
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<br />RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-6281870670846445072015-08-22T09:38:00.002-07:002015-08-30T12:53:03.941-07:00Fashion in Clothing Now Six Feet Under<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;">
<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">
This week marked the tenth anniversary of the end of the HBO cable-program <i><a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/gallery/six-feet-under-10-years-815276/1-peter-krause-nate-fisher?facebook_20150821" target="_blank">Six Feet Under</a></i>. </span><br />
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<span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Arial","sans-serif"; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">However, I watched the entire five seasons of the show only earlier this year, never having even glimpsed a moment of it before. </span><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Dead is the New Black.<br />
www.slate.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">At the same time, I was reading <i><a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2011/08/retromania-why-is-pop-culture-addicted-to-its-own-past/242868/" target="_blank">Retromania</a></i>, by <a href="http://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.ca/" target="_blank">Simon Reynolds</a>, a British journalist who reports from the U.S., published 2011. It details how modern pop culture has become in the twenty-first century mainly concerned with reviving the past. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 17.3333339691162px; line-height: 26px;">What struck me about <i>Six Feet Under</i>'s first two series (dating from 2000 to '02) was how the </span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">clothing styles at least were no giveaway to when the series was made. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Bulky cathode-ray and white-encased computer monitors, and the models of car, more subtly dated the program. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The word "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fashion" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">fashion</a>" in itself is still immediately identified with the sartorial. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Yet for the past fifteen years or so, clothing has ceased to be a temporal marker of changing taste. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The apparently undated feel of <i>Six Feet Under</i> is evoked partly by the fact that <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Realism-of-sets-gives-life-to-scenes-on-Six-Feet-2667725.php" target="_blank">the sets </a>(such as for the Fisher family’s funeral parlour) are themselves designed in a retro “Prairie” style. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Even so, the actors are also costumed in a way that would not, to my eye, be out of place if the clothes were worn today. However, no one would be able to dress in the styles of 1987 in 2001, without seeming passe. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Changes in fashion, with clothing-styles foremost, has (during modern times at least) been fuelled by status-seeking. Chic styles are established by higher-class taste-makers, which are in turn emulated by social climbers on each wrung of the ladder below. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j2t1jkYCRlQ/VdilCRqQnJI/AAAAAAAAAuU/rYOIJLVCrMk/s1600/jason%2B%25281%2529.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="242" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-j2t1jkYCRlQ/VdilCRqQnJI/AAAAAAAAAuU/rYOIJLVCrMk/s320/jason%2B%25281%2529.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Radical Chic.<br />
www.channelmassive.com</td></tr>
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">When fashions become identified with a certain class, they are quickly abandoned by those on the strata above. Periodically, the fashionable avant-garde will adopt styles identified with the underclass, so as to prevent imitation by those directly below. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">In the twenty-first century, however, clothing has mostly ceased to be a medium through which people define themselves in terms of status. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Perhaps it is that clothes have become too inexpensive a means for status-seekers to assume the appearance of those of better station. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Or maybe it is that the possible variations in style for modern clothing-formats (cuffed pants, front-buttoned shirts, etc.) have been exhausted, and fashion designers have to return to the past to come with anything “new.” </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Being in-fashion now focusses on products other than clothing, it seems. Certain information-technology devices have become chic to be seen with, but are at once too expensive to be easily emulated by the lower classes. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">This is the case with the Apple company’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">i-phone devices</a>, which are in no way superior to other “wireless” handheld telephones, and are (speaking from personal experience) a great deal more fragile. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Nevertheless, anyone with a fashion sense wouldn’t dare to be without one (in spite, or because of, the fact that they cost twice as much as equivalent phones that do the job just as well). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The disparate meanings placed by the fashion and tech industries on the very word “<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">design</a>”, undergo an odd concurrence here. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">For the garment-industry, the <a href="http://www.wikihow.com/Become-a-Fashion-Designer" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">designer </a>is responsible for laying down patterns in cloth and colour, creating an aesthetically-pleasing style for the marketplace. This hasn’t mainly to do with the functional aspects of clothing: fashion-design could be described as “useless” (as much as any art or aesthetic has no use). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">With information-technology, however, the <a href="http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/faculty/bina/cs506/lec1/tsld006.htm" target="_blank">designer </a>is more fundamental to the manufacturing process. His work may well touch on the aesthetic features of a silicon-based device (as is the case with the i-phone and other Apple products), but design in the IT world refers to the technical architecture that makes the device functional in the first place. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">Famously, innovation has occurred far more rapidly in computing technology, than in any other industry. The biannual doubling of computer-power (the “<a href="http://www.mooreslaw.org/" target="_blank">Moore’s law</a>” predicted by a cofounder of Intel in 1965) has rendered state-of-the-art information technology, obsolete within just a few years. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">The bulky, white-encased computer equipment seen in <i>Six Feet Under</i>, was outmoded because of newer, more powerful information-processors soon became available. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">But not merely so: during the time the series was in production, desktop computer-cases went from being all-white (or slightly off-white), to all-black. This was not due to solely improvements in functionality, as instead to the desire to make the desktop computer an invisible part of the decor, by rendering it literally opaque. </span><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NTKrlhssh3Y/VdilOa_fY1I/AAAAAAAAAuc/m-gDlbF0iEA/s1600/topic_iphone_5c%2Bwwwimorecom.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-NTKrlhssh3Y/VdilOa_fY1I/AAAAAAAAAuc/m-gDlbF0iEA/s320/topic_iphone_5c%2Bwwwimorecom.png" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">If It's Not a i-phone you're a no-account declasse piece of garbage.<br />
wwwimorecom<br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">It reflects the personal-computer’s shift from a status symbol (with conspicuous white panelling) to simply another home appliance. As laptop computers became more portable, they were initially marketed in darker colours. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">More recently, however, their cases have been silver-chrome in appearance, making them resemble a jewellery-box or the like. The white or otherwise “ice-cream” tones of the i-phone case, are a striking claim to higher status. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13pt; line-height: 150%;">With clothing, “design” is usually what renders a garment obsolete to wear, long before it becomes worn-out or otherwise dysfunctional as apparel. Obsolescence in computing is also accelerated, by pairing the redesign of basic technical architecture for greater power and efficiency, with changes in the aesthetics of the products themselves.</span></div>
RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6730212144855253647.post-28244484251480467362015-08-21T14:49:00.001-07:002015-08-31T17:31:49.285-07:00Some examples of the coverage of the death of Paul McCartney...Are right <a href="https://www.facebook.com/thebeatlesdeutschland/photos/a.1428398240791045.1073741827.1428376567459879/1491523897811812/?type=1&fref=nf" target="_blank">here</a>.RB Glenniehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16916044843808043297noreply@blogger.com0