Yule Heibel's Post Studio © 2003-2010

Couch Grass

Dave Winer posted a picture on the main page and asked for stories.

Cyberswept away

On Friday I listened to a CBC Radio report about a cyberporn conference in Montreal (June 5-7), featuring Mark Prince of 2Much, two women named Fay Sharpe and Kathee Brewer, and several others. None of the people interviewed stressed the porn aspect of the business. All of the people interviewed instead stressed the business aspect of the cyberporn. They talked with great enthusiasm about the fact that, aside from being a huge booming industry, cyberporn is the incubator for many web technologies that show up on “straight” websites months or years later. This made the participants proud; it proved their value. The conference attendees were a mixed lot: some had been laid off when the dot-com bubble burst and had found financial revival in cyberporn. Philip Brandes is probably the best example here: I think our market [cyberporn entrepreneurs, not consumers of porn] is the former dot.com people, who know this business, who know the potential of the Internet to make money. Another woman interviewed had worked as a waitress and was now earning steady money as a porn webmistress. Others breathlessly extolled the virtues of the business model that internet porn has pioneered, claiming that it’s a model for all of us. When I went online to find out more about this conference, however, I couldn’t find much. Googling “cybernet porn” and “Montreal” turned up the usual suspects focussed on penetrating eliminatory orifices, but not much else. When I typed in “Mark Prince” and “2Much” I did get a link to an older page that hyped the upcoming Montreal conference. From there, I had a name for the conference — Cybernet Expo — and could find more news releases. But they all appeared on “adult” pages. Big business model that it promotes notwithstanding, it is not front page news in mainstream business sections. I learned that Montreal is considered a premiere North American porn hotspot. All the usual trite cliches were trotted out to make it seem “natural” that this is so: Montreal women are more beautiful than women elsewhere; Montrealers’ Gallic mentality predisposes them to embrace erotica; they’re so laissez-faire. Well well, suddenly no business model, just tired old canards to shore up flimsy explanations. (Aside: When I was 17 I ran away to Europe for 3 months, and since it didn’t work that year, I next ran away to Montreal just after my 18th birthday. I lived through blizzards in April and heatwaves in August; slaved at a subsistence-pay job at a photographic ad agency — and was groped in the darkroom by the owner, who, fat & balding & liver-spotted everywhere, reached just up to my chest; rode the subway daily, and hitchhiked during the inevitable transit strikes; lived with actors & directors who were part of Montreal’s thriving theatre scene; and rented my own roach-infested flat from a guy whose Quebecois accent was so thick I couldn’t understand a word. As far as I could tell, the Greek, Russian, and Eastern (non-Anglo) immigrants easily outnumbered the “Gauls” in most neighbourhoods that I frequented, the women weren’t any more beautiful than elsewhere (they generally just dressed better and used lots of make-up), and the supposed Gallic indifference to sexual taboo seemed to me to be simple distraction in the face of the relentless grime & noise & hassle of a city in which making ends meet was no easy task.) Victoria has a seamy-nasty child prostitution thing happening, but no one is romanticizing that with misty-saucy cliches. But the cyberporn stuff seemingly involves so many billions that it begins to pass for glamorous and rational. That’s what the economic model does: it rationalizes things, even things that attract customers on the basis of desires so irrational as to defy explanation. Perhaps we’ve already overstepped some kind of limit, enslaving irrationality to a market model and making it become rational. Thinking about this yesterday I was reminded of Lina Wertmuller’s 1974-75 film, Swept Away which I understand has been remade with Madonna (urgh…). The reviewers all focussed on what they called Gennarino’s “bitch-slapping” of Raffaella. But the key event is really the scene where Raffaella asks Gennarino to perform a taboo sex act. She has to point to her bum since he doesn’t understand her when she names the act. The naming in itself sparks arousal and debasement in her, while it does nothing for him. He is a peasant, a fisherman, and has no truck with her jaded-decadent sexual ways. When he understands at last, he seems slightly disgusted-quizzical and lifts his eyebrows, but he complies because he is falling in love with her. It’s clear that this isn’t something that his sort of people typically do, even if the confused crypto-fascist privileged female he’s falling for needs the extra fillip of humiliation to get off. Wertmuller uses the breach of the taboo to illustrate class relations, and she got soundly drubbed for it by the critics, men, who didn’t “get it.” Yet who would have thought that 20 years later, the peasant Gennarino is well and truly dead: he’s a quaint little stuffed museum piece now, for guys today simply aren’t peasants anymore. Capitalism has made sure of that: well-schooled in the glamourization of the taboo, they hardly lift an eyebrow at any act. That’s pornography: making the irrational taboo compliant with economic rationality, regularizing it, making it normal. Wertmuller’s film is all about master-slave relations, and about how those relations psychically shift, about how we debase ourselves to construct illusions of control and mastery, and how economic status figures into it (when Raffaella & Gennarino are finally rescued, she instantly reverts to her economic status, denies him, and reclaims her place in the hierarchy: he’s still a peasant, she’s got the power). That was Wertmuller’s take in the early 70s. Since then our technologies have changed so much — it’s taboo-on-demand now. I wonder how we’re re-describing ourselves to each other through the glamourization and rationalization of the taboo, and if the yoking of the taboo to economic rationality will sweep us away.

Softie

My son (he’s an Africa-fan) called my attention to this story. I think it’s a brilliant tale, and I love the fact that this guy is winning in a brand new glass-bead game.

Environment

Incredible, but true: early June and the mercury is hitting the low 30s (Celsius; that’s 90 degrees Fahrenheit) for days in a row here. Very different. Went on a field trip to the Ocean Sciences Institute with my kids et alia, homeschoolers who work with S.I.D.E.S. It’s not just hot here, it’s dangerous and exciting: fault lines. Have discovered Monday Magazine online (vs. print), and learned that brilliant-beautiful (she really is something) Briony Penn has “been given an official nod from the prestigious Canadian Environment Awards, a national initiative of the federal government and Canadian Geographic. Federal environment minister David Anderson presented Penn with a Silver Award for Environmental Learning in Toronto on June 2. She was chosen, along with a few dozen others, to be honoured for her work in raising environmental awareness in her communities.” I don’t like David Anderson that much: he ignored my letter to him complaining about the fact that Victoria — eco-tourism magnet — pumps raw sewage into the ocean. But just because Anderson handed out the award doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take a look at Penn’s columns in Monday, Wildside, for more. It’s environmental writing at its best: immediate, engaging, local, and hence empowering.

A rose is

This is the story, What’s in a name?, pronounciation and all.

Peace & Justice

The Toronto Star‘s Michelle Landsberg writes about a conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace prospects in Toronto this coming weekend (June 7-8), which Landsberg predicts might bring “some air into the claustrophobic silence” created by undifferentiated pro or con thinking. Sponsored by an ad hoc group, Jewish Voices for Peace and Justice, it will, among other sessions, include teens whose discussion is titled, “Anti-Occupation Work 101, or I’m Against the Occupation but Afraid to Tell My Parents.” Great title.

And if you can’t go to the conference, consider supporting Seeds of Peace.

Copyright cancer, Bikram bootcamp

Since I poked around the web yesterday in search of links to that development on Rockland, I came across an article I’d missed earlier, and it’s yet another copyright issue. This time yoga asanas are at stake. Yes, postures. I had my own experiences with hot yoga here in Victoria, so this interested me. The tactics and attitudes on the part of the alleged proprietor of what your body can do are about as congenial as not being allowed to take photographs inside a Starbucks coffee shop. The Monday Magazine feature about hot yoga is a must read; it’s so enlightening to learn about the relationship between yoga and copyright law: Bikram Choudhury, a California-based yoga guru, copyrighted his popular series of yoga moves. His lawyers, Procopio, Cory, Hargreaves and Savitch LLP, say that the moves are part of Bikram’s growing portfolio of yoga copyrights and trademarks, which includes ongoing trademark applications for Bikram Hot Yoga, Bikram Yoga College of India, Bikram’s Beginning Yoga Class, and Bikram Yoga. When Bikram also compared himself to Superman, Jesus, and Buddha, and was subsequently asked how he could get away with such bragging, he answered: “Because I have balls like atom bombs, two of them, 100 megatons each. Nobody fucks with me.” Wow, what a card! Of course, after my academic advisors at Harvard and elsewhere, he really does sound like some kind of Jesus — what a sweetie, he sounds like he could really “go” (oh, sock it to me!) compared to those conceited, cold, constipated misogynists — but you know what? Who needs a jerk? Yoga is supposed to flow.

Windy

Whoa! I spent the better part of the evening at a furious, emotional community meeting that debated the merits of a development proposal in my neighbourhood, the Rockland district of Victoria. High on a hill sits a 110-year-old mansion, originally named Schuhum, a native word for windy place. Mansions aren’t uncommon in Rockland, but this one has acreage, which is indeed rare in a post-subdivision age: over 2 acres. Schuhum has many heritage trees (quercus garryanus) and rock, which is a heritage-protected substance in Rockland. The house came to be known as the Caroline Macklem Home, given in 1950 to the Anglican Church Women of the Diocese of British Columbia by a philanthropist, who presumably needed a tax write-off for a white elephant. The recipients turned the house into an old people’s home, but by 1999, staggering under the expense of upkeep on property like this, they actually gave the house over to a smooth-talking so-called Baron (in reality an American born in Santa Monica, California): the Baron somehow convinced the ladies, perhaps addled from too much sherry, into leasing the house to him for 99 years at $1 per year. Sweet deal.

They did realize relatively quickly that this had been a stupid move, and tried to get the so-called Baron out. But even though he has left the country, he has made enough trouble that the house has to be sold now (at an inflated price of about $2.25million), and lo!, the only buyer currently in sight is a developer with a plan that begins to sound pretty rickety when prodded and poked at. He needs to spend $20 million to turn the estate into an 85-unit independent living complex, complete with several additional buildings squeezed into the 2 acres.

The neighbourhood is having a NIMBY moment, but aside from that unsavoury reflex, the proposal really isn’t a good idea as it stands. The developer doesn’t appear to be playing with a straight deck, and he seems capable of pulling out aces as needed from his shirtsleeves. The only alternative anyone has floated thus far, however, is to build 10 additional single family homes on the site — make the property undergo the process of subdivision — which might alleviate traffic concerns, but which seems a sad and brutal deal for the Windy Place.

Where’s Laura?

Several months ago, when the marketing of Iraq’s invasion was building, a friend here in Victoria asked me if Laura Bush were dead. It wasn’t a morbid question as such. This person had simply noticed that since the build-up to war, Laura Bush was never seen in newscasts, never visible in photos, never quoted anywhere. I don’t subscribe to cable, and as it’s impossible here to pull in a single tv channel without it, I hadn’t noticed Laura’s disappearance from the network news. I eventually forgot about my friend’s question because I’ve never spent much time thinking about Laura Bush in the first place. But today I was reading reports in the Victoria Times-Colonist and in the Frankfurter Rundschau about Bush’s visit to old and new Europe, his first stop-over in Poland, his supposed reconciliation with Putin, his trip to St.Petersburg’s big birthday bash, his discussions with European and — gasp! — Canadian leaders, his exhortations to same to support the US war on terror that has made the world a more dangerous place, and I was suddenly reminded of that comment from bygone months: where’s Laura? And what, if anything, does Laura signify?