Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2009

Addendum to “Connecting the dots”

Several hours ago, I added the following entry to my “Connecting the dots,” which I wrote yesterday but couldn’t post till today because the berkman server was down. Usually I don’t repost, but just now I checked my blog on another computer, and noticed that the addendum didn’t show up — weird. (Not much weirder than technorati telling me that I haven’t posted for nearly 50 days, so chalk it up to digital gremlins or something…) Anyway, here’s my postscript. In many ways this issue represents a mess I don’t want to get into, but I do feel strongly about freedom of the press and freedom of expression, and about imagery in social contexts…

—— ~~~ ——
Addendum:

To see the cartoons as they appeared, click here and scroll down a ways. For an explanation of the images in English words in a different article, click here — this is useful in terms of understanding any Danish text included in the cartoon(s), as well as understanding how the image illustrates a saying or some aspect of Danish popular culture or society. The entire article is worth reading for background information. Do take a look at the images, too: they’re pretty tame as far as cartoons go. Most of them would function easily enough as illustrations, which is what they were commissioned for in the first place. The ensuing row has to do with the fact that Islam forbids any representation of Mohammed, regardless of whether it’s favourable or not, and it has been exacerbated by fundamentalists’ insistence that they be accorded special privileges in western society by having this iconographic ban respected. No other religion that forbids representation of its gods is given this special status, however. Jews cannot sue or threaten to burn down the offices of newspapers (or kill its cartoonists) if they publish images that purport to represent God. (And let’s emphasise “purport”: one of the other things understood in the West is that images are fictions. They are not real. This might in part be a cultural quirk of ours, but it deserves to be admitted as one of our freedoms. If we agree on that basis, we can argue about whether the images are offensive, but we can’t argue from the basis of their “realness.” In part, the current arguments are clashes between literalists and those who are comfortable with fiction. Fundamentalists hate people who feel comfortable with fiction, it seems. To them, modern society is a decadent den of fictionalists who must be brought to heel by literalists.)

Read this article for more on how death threats were issued against the cartoonists months ago, back in December 2005: “The Pakistani religious party Jamaat-e-Islami and its youth branch have offered a bounty for anyone who murders the Danish illustators who drew cartoons of Muhammad for the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten”. Since then — in January 2006 — “Muslim intellectuals and representatives of Muslim organizations in Denmark have visited a number of Muslim countries to ‘explain’ the matter to local political and religious leaders and media. Their ‘explanations’ were biased and inaccurate. The Danish-Egyptian Dialog Center in Cairo says that after meeting with the Muslim representatives from Denmark the Egyptian press has claimed that Danish newspapers are waging a campaign against Islam, that Copenhagen plans to introduce a state censored version of the Koran, that a Danish film is underway ‘to show how horrible Islam is’, and that the matter involves 120 cartoons – not 12.” (See here. In response, the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, responds some days later that he “is shocked at the way in which some Muslims are misrepresenting Denmark in the Islamic world.” See here.)

By the end of last month, Denmark’s moderate Muslims were politely telling the fundamentalists to get lost, but to no avail. See this article:

A group of Muslims in the Danish city of Århus intend to organize a network of Muslims who do not want to be represented by fundamentalist Danish imams or others who preach the Sharia laws and oppression of women. “There is a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society,” said Bünyamin Simsek, a city councillor and one of the organizers. Århus witnessed severe riots after the publication of the cartoons in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten last Autumn.

In Copenhagen, too, moderate Muslims are speaking out. Hadi Kahn, an IT consultant and the chairman of the Organization of Pakistani Students in Denmark (OPSA), describes himself as a modern Muslim living in a Western society. He says that he does not feel he is being represented by the Muslim groups. When he goes to the mosque for Friday prayers he says the imam does not say much that is useful for him. “We have no need for imams in Denmark. They do not do anything for us,” he says. According to Mr Kahn the imams are not in touch with Danish society. He says too few of them speak Danish and too few of them are opposed to stoning as a punishment. [More...]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali posted a funny counter-counter cartoon on her website: it depicts a George Smiley-ish fellow in cap and glasses talking to a person in full medieval armour, on whose back a thrown rock is bouncing to the ground. Cap-man points to armoured guy and says, “You’re a cartoonist working on Jyllands-Posten, eh?”. Hirsi Ali incidentally supports solidarity with western freedoms and advocates publishing the cartoons as widely as possible. And if anyone still thinks the cartoons are offensive, take a look at these photographs (i.e., not made-up drawings), also courtesy of Hirsi Ali, which show European-based fundamentalist Muslims protesting with placards that read “Behead those who insult Islam!”; “Europe is the cancer, Islam is the answer”; “Exterminate those who slander Islam”; and “Europe you will pay — demolition is on it’s [sic!] way”, among other niceties of tolerance and peace. Oh, and it warns Europeans that they should “Be prepared for the real Holocaust!”

Connecting dots?

Call me paranoid, but here’s something that bothers me: via very different sources, I came across two articles in the www.timesonline.co.uk today (Feb.4/06) that make very similar arguments, albeit for seemingly different purposes. Seemingly. The first, by Simon Jenkins, is called These cartoons don’t defend free speech, they threaten it. It begins with a soothing affirmation of inclusionist sentiments (sentimentality?) that publication of the offending cartoons (and c’mon, you know which ones, unless you’ve been under a rock) cannot be defended under the guise of freedom of speech and freedom of the press, and it then goes on to argue that unless the press censors itself (Mr. Jenkins, can you hear yourself here?), governments will be forced to accept the kind of crypto-fascist legislation that was only recently defeated in the UK:

The traditional balance between free speech and respect for the feelings of others is evidently becoming harder to sustain. (…) [um, tradititional, Mr. Jenkins? whatever do you mean?...]

(…) Last week there were demands from some (not all) Muslim leaders for governments to “apologise” for the cartoons and somehow forbid their dissemination. It was a demand that Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, commendably rejected. It assumed that governments had in some sense allowed the cartoons and were thus in a position to atone for them. Many governments might be happy to fall into this trap and seek to control deeds for which they may have to apologise. (…)

In all matters of self-regulation the danger is clear. If important institutions, in this case the press, will not practise self-discipline then governments will practise it for them. Ascribing evil consequences to religious faith is a sure way of causing offence. Banning such offence is an equally sure way for a politician to curry favour with a minority and thus advance the authoritarian tendency. The present Home Office needs no such encouragement.

Offending an opponent has long been a feature of polemics, just as challenging the boundaries of taste has been a feature of art. It is rightly surrounded by legal and ethical palisades. These include the laws of libel and slander and concepts such as fair comment, right of reply and not stirring racial hatred. None of them is absolute. All rely on the exercise of judgment by those in positions of power. All rely on that bulwark of democracy, tolerance of the feelings of others. This was encapsulated by Lord Clark in his defining quality of civilisation: courtesy.

Too many politicians would rather not trust the self-restraint of others and would take the power of restraint onto themselves. Recent British legislation shows that a censor is waiting round every corner. This past week must have sent his hopes soaring because of the idiot antics of a few continental journalists.

The best defence of free speech can only be to curb its excess and respect its courtesy. [page one and then page two...]

Got that? Let it sink in: what it means is that we have these wonderful freedoms here, and they’re ever so civilised, don’t you know, and never a nasty word is spoken and never a feeling is ruffled out of place, because — well, because our nice little freedoms are, well, nice, you know, and we don’t go around pissing anyone off, and as long as we don’t go pissing anyone off, then the government gets to play nice, too, you know, and keep everything real friendly, like. See? But if any of youse go pissing people off, well then, don’t come crying to any nice folks in the diplomatic corps if all of a sudden you find yourself with your very own dictatorial government on your hands that’s passing out fascist legislation on the homefront. ‘Cause the government really couldn’t help itself, it had to do something to rein all those nasty uncouth brutes in who weren’t being civilised!

I think I’m going to weep.

And then, on the very same day, I read an opinion piece dated January 27 from the same paper, the www.timesonline.co.uk. It’s by Gerard Baker, and it’s called Prepare yourself for the unthinkable: war against Iran may be a necessity. Mr. Baker, uncannily, sounds just like Mr. Jenkins (or should that read: Mr. Jenkins sounds just like Mr. Baker?). Tewwibly, tewwibly ciwwiwised, don’t you know, as he makes his case for the postmodern post-orwellian white man’s burden:

THE UNIMAGINABLE but ultimately inescapable truth is that we are going to have to get ready for war with Iran. Being of a free-speaking, free-thinking disposition, we generally find in the West that hand-wringing, finger-pointing and second-guessing come more easily to us than cold, strategic thinking. Confronted with nightmarish perils we instinctively choose to seize the opportunity to blame each other, cursing our domestic opponents for the situation they’ve put us in. [More...]

Why do we have to face this “inescapable” truth? Because if we let Iran continue, our very own western governments will be forced (against their terribly civilised will, presumably) to crack down hard on our civil freedoms, all in the effort to keep us safe …from ourselves:

…the kind of society we live in and cherish in the West, a long way from Tehran or Damascus, will change beyond recognition [if Iran continues on its nuclear path and if we don't pound it into the dust now, according to Baker]. We balk now at intrusive government measures to tap our phones or stop us saying incendiary things in mosques. Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima. [More...]

And there you have it, dear civilised ladies and gentlemen: in order to preserve our cherished, civilised civil freedoms, we have to self-censor and make war. Make sense? Good, you may move up in the orwellian ranks.

—— ~~~ ——
Addendum:

To see the cartoons as they appeared, click here and scroll down a ways. For an explanation of the images in English words in a different article, click here — this is useful in terms of understanding any Danish text included in the cartoon(s), as well as understanding how the image illustrates a saying or some aspect of Danish popular culture or society. The entire article is worth reading for background information. Do take a look at the images, too: they’re pretty tame as far as cartoons go. Most of them would function easily enough as illustrations, which is what they were commissioned for in the first place. The ensuing row has to do with the fact that Islam forbids any representation of Mohammed, regardless of whether it’s favourable or not, and it has been exacerbated by fundamentalists’ insistence that they be accorded special privileges in western society by having this iconographic ban respected. No other religion that forbids representation of its gods is given this special status, however. Jews cannot sue or threaten to burn down the offices of newspapers (or kill its cartoonists) if they publish images that purport to represent God. (And let’s emphasise “purport”: one of the other things understood in the West is that images are fictions. They are not real. This might in part be a cultural quirk of ours, but it deserves to be admitted as one of our freedoms. If we agree on that basis, we can argue about whether the images are offensive, but we can’t argue from the basis of their “realness.” In part, the current arguments are clashes between literalists and those who are comfortable with fiction. Fundamentalists hate people who feel comfortable with fiction, it seems. To them, modern society is a decadent den of fictionalists who must be brought to heel by literalists.)

Read this article for more on how death threats were issued against the cartoonists months ago, back in December 2005: “The Pakistani religious party Jamaat-e-Islami and its youth branch have offered a bounty for anyone who murders the Danish illustators who drew cartoons of Muhammad for the Danish daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten”. Since then — in January 2006 — “Muslim intellectuals and representatives of Muslim organizations in Denmark have visited a number of Muslim countries to ‘explain’ the matter to local political and religious leaders and media. Their ‘explanations’ were biased and inaccurate. The Danish-Egyptian Dialog Center in Cairo says that after meeting with the Muslim representatives from Denmark the Egyptian press has claimed that Danish newspapers are waging a campaign against Islam, that Copenhagen plans to introduce a state censored version of the Koran, that a Danish film is underway ‘to show how horrible Islam is’, and that the matter involves 120 cartoons – not 12.” (See here. In response, the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, responds some days later that he “is shocked at the way in which some Muslims are misrepresenting Denmark in the Islamic world.” See here.)

By the end of last month, Denmark’s moderate Muslims were politely telling the fundamentalists to get lost, but to no avail. See this article:

A group of Muslims in the Danish city of Århus intend to organize a network of Muslims who do not want to be represented by fundamentalist Danish imams or others who preach the Sharia laws and oppression of women. “There is a large group of Muslims in this city who want to live in a secular society and adhere to the principle that religion is an issue between them and God and not something that should involve society,” said Bünyamin Simsek, a city councillor and one of the organizers. Århus witnessed severe riots after the publication of the cartoons in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten last Autumn.

In Copenhagen, too, moderate Muslims are speaking out. Hadi Kahn, an IT consultant and the chairman of the Organization of Pakistani Students in Denmark (OPSA), describes himself as a modern Muslim living in a Western society. He says that he does not feel he is being represented by the Muslim groups. When he goes to the mosque for Friday prayers he says the imam does not say much that is useful for him. “We have no need for imams in Denmark. They do not do anything for us,” he says. According to Mr Kahn the imams are not in touch with Danish society. He says too few of them speak Danish and too few of them are opposed to stoning as a punishment. [More...]

Ayaan Hirsi Ali posted a funny counter-counter cartoon on her website: it depicts a George Smiley-ish fellow in cap and glasses talking to a person in full medieval armour, on whose back a thrown rock is bouncing to the ground. Cap-man points to armoured guy and says, “You’re a cartoonist working on Jyllands-Posten, eh?”. Hirsi Ali incidentally supports solidarity with western freedoms and advocates publishing the cartoons as widely as possible. And if anyone still thinks the cartoons are offensive, take a look at these photographs (i.e., not made-up drawings), also courtesy of Hirsi Ali, which show European-based fundamentalist Muslims protesting with placards that read “Behead those who insult Islam!”; “Europe is the cancer, Islam is the answer”; “Exterminate those who slander Islam”; and “Europe you will pay — demolition is on it’s [sic!] way”, among other niceties of tolerance and peace. Oh, and it warns Europeans that they should “Be prepared for the real Holocaust!”

This is what Google censorship in China looks like

The husband sent me an interesting link this morning: click here to see a side-by-side representation of what Google’s dot-com search engine shows under “images” of Tiananmen Square on the one hand, and what Google shows in China under the same search term. It’s an effective visual-graphic representation of censorship in action.

Screenshot courtesy of Computer Bytes Man.

Library Thing (again…)

Ok, Library Thing is way too addictive: just a couple of days into the process and I’m 22 books shy of upgrading to a lifetime account. And I can hardly wait because I’ve only managed to get two shelves catalogued so far — there are many more that number to go. Many more. It’s very easy to use, and while there have been some wait times while Tim Spalding ugraded to a new server over the last few days, it’s a real breeze inputting data. I’ve noticed that I get fussy at times and try to make sure I’ve actually catalogued the very edition I have, but other times (with mass market stuff), I figure that the pretty picture from Amazon is good enough and who cares if I have the 1998 edition or the 2000, if it’s not a revision, that is… The main thing is that it’s a mnemonic for me: this is a book some version of which I have, and it’s now been tagged so that I can find it when I’m looking for a particular subject. It’s also been incredible fun getting reacquainted with some old friends.

And yes, it is a bit narcissistic, but all in good fun: I can check my “fun statistics” page and discover that out of the 178 books I’ve catalogued so far, only 48 are titles “shared” with other Library Thing users. And yo!, I haven’t even started on my obscure stuff yet!

Great work, Tim, really! This is one hell of a useful (and fun) application…

Better Living Through Chemistry

The only benefit I can discern thus far accruing from the miserable bug laying siege this late winter to wide swathes of my circle of friends and acquaintances, and its concommitant bacterial assault on my sinus cavities, is that the bath of antibiotics at this moment swishing through my insides has rendered the possibility of infection from something as banal as a kitchen incident moot.

There, did you follow that?

(You have to know German to construct sentences in which the key verb word [*] comes at the very end of a sentence 65 words long. …)

So there I was, on a recent evening, shredding mozarella on the coarse grater in preparation for making pizza from scratch, and whoosh!, I sliced the top of my right thumb’s knuckle. Off. Bone. I pulled back in time to prevent the lacerated flesh from separating entirely, hence no added protein found its way into the pile of already shredded mozarella. The shock to my system was great enough to prevent immediate bleeding — hence the incident did not lead to loss of bodily fluids right away, or their further addition to the aforementioned mozarella. Dinner thus was not ruined — just my digit.

Normally, a cut like that would result in an icky scab, typically the colour of …well, you know: the colour of white blood cells doing their job. And I was dreading this one! But nothing happened: the cut is healing unbelievably (unnaturally?) quickly. It’s now a little crater of a depression, tough new skin already forming across its diminishing face.

It must be the meds. But then, I’ve been a chemical bath of sorts lately, so perhaps it’s the combination. Yesterday I went to the dentist to have an old filling replaced — turned out a bit of decay had already formed beneath its failed seal. My dentist, whose father was a drug enforcement officer for the RCMP, knows that she has to give me lots of drugs, otherwise I go through the roof. I came out of her office pumped full of enough anaesthetic to knock out a small mammal. I know that the small mammal part of my brain went to sleep for the rest of the day, that’s for sure…

When I was a teenager I used to see a dentist named Dr. Boag, who took care of a couple of fillings I needed — in fact, probably one of the same ones I had replaced the other day. His office was in Victoria’s Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce building. He was a young, modern dentist (this was back in the 17th century), and he used to marvel at the amount of drugs I needed to put a nerve to sleep. One time he casually asked me whether I took a lot of drugs, recreationally, because none of his other patients seemed to require such quantities …and I naturally weaselled on the answer. When my pupils finally stopped dilating, he remarked that my eyes were a rather unusual shade of green-but-not-green: he insisted I had khaki-coloured eyes. Subsequently, I soon began to experiment with emerald-green-coloured contact lenses, which, in combination with yellow-tinted Ray-Ban gold-metal Aviator sunglasses, really did make my eye colour …unusual.

Of course Dr. B. was right: between the pro-drugs counterculture and strange family doctors who prescribed Valium for bronchial asthma, I had a steady exposure to eye-colour altering substances. Tonight I’m ending a 7-day run of Ceftin @ 250mg twice daily. Tomorrow, I’ll start topping it off with 3 more days of the same at double the dose. Together with my dentist’s painkillers, plus the ibuprofin I took to kill the pain afterward, and the Flo-nase corticosteroid together with the guaifenesen and pseudoephedrine for the sinusitis, …well, all that in combination and I’m sure I can count on imminent organ failure now.

But, boy, my thumb sure healed quickly!

————

[*] update, next day after a night’s sleep: Ok, I guess I’m not a grammarian — moot isn’t a verb. It functions here almost like an adverb, modifying the verb render, and sort of turns that whole thing into an adverbial phrase that works a bit like an adjective. Or something. But the general point’s the same…

Nam June Paik

Nam June Paik died in Miami on January 29 at the age of 73. Even though I never made video installations when I was still a sculpture student at the Munich Art Academy in the late 70s, Paik was definitely one of those influential artists who forced anyone working in sculpture to look at materiality, at the stuff of what goes into sculpture — whether object or installation — in a persistently different way. Fluxus put the flow in icons.

Here are some links to interesting biographies/ obituaries:

The Neue Zürcher Zeitung online calls him the anti-technological technologue — Paik showed us how free one could be in interacting with technology. Paik, who didn’t take too much stock in making his work “perfect,” is quoted as having said, “if too perfect, god angry,” which I guess underscores the artist’s role as a player vs a god. Artists play (which is why I get so annoyed at artists who take themselves so goddamn seriously, who never seem to evince any sense of humour, as though we’re supposed to take their work as timeless and eternal creation while they play the Misunderstood Genius…).

The Korea Times places Paik in a national, albeit cosmopolitan, context — clearly a political gesture:

It was in 1984, however, that the U.S-based creator became known to his compatriots through “Good morning, Mr. Orwell,” a global art project linking New York, Paris, Berlin and Seoul by satellite. The parody of an Orwellian totalitarian society gave a fresh shock to Koreans oppressed by military “big brothers.” It was an apt reminder of the then grim reality.

Paik was both a Korean and a cosmopolitan. Most of his artistic studies and activities were done abroad, including the United States, Germany and Japan, but his spiritual fount remained in his fatherland, where he lived until graduating from high school. So it is regretful that some web surfers here denigrated the international artist by taking issue with his U.S. nationality and Japanese wife. This is a most childish and narrow-minded way to treat one of the greatest artists Korea has produced.

The deceased artist used to stress the need for active advances overseas by Koreans, following the aged tradition of nomadic ancestors. Paik also called for his compatriots to have “strong teeth” to digest any foreign influences and use them for their own good. In an interview some years ago, the “cultural terrorist from Asia” said he would never give out his love of motherland, while noting that there were an increasing number of chauvinists in Korea. Malignant Internet users should take heed.

Some critics downgraded his works as just “plays,” not art. The artist, known for his ceaseless challenge and renovation, countered, saying, “Art is a fraud.” There may be different evaluations of this controversial artist and his 74 years of life, but one thing seems certain _ Paik never stopped trying to expand the horizon of the artistic world in his own unique ways, winning him global recognition. Even until his moment of passing, he was producing new works, both here and in the U.S. [More...]

The New York Times points out that Paik “exaggerated and subverted accepted notions about both the culture and the technology of television while immersing viewers in its visual beauty and exposing something deeply irrational at its center. He presciently coined the term “electronic superhighway” in 1974, grasping the essence of global communications and seeing the possibilities of technologies that were barely born. He usually did this while managing to be both palatable and subversive.“

The Mercury News notes that, aside from inventing the phrase “‘Electronic Super Highway’ years before the information superhighway was invented,” he is also credited with coining the expression, “The Future is Now.” Take that!

The Los Angeles Times writes, “Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, said Paik was ‘the first artist to realize the potential of television, the idea that it was going to be all around us and change the culture.’ Despite Paik’s fascination with that phenomenon, Schimmel said, ‘one of the beautiful things he did was to disrupt the sophistication of electronic technology.’”” The article quotes John Hanhardt, a senior curator of film & media arts at the Guggenheim in New York: “One of the great achievements we look to from artists is to significantly contribute to making us see ourselves and the world around us in new ways.”

Another Korea Times article obsesses about the funeral arrangements — I don’t know why I find this interesting, but I do. Paik’s ashes, according to his family, will be shared by New York, Berlin, and South Korea, presumably in Yongin, Kyonggi Province, where the Kyonggi Cultural Foundation plans to construct a new museum dedicated to the artist.

Fly away home

Continuing on the multi-cultural Canada theme, I walked the dog to our local video store yesterday and rented a wonderful film, Masala. Co-written by Srivinas Krishna, who also directed and stars, this 1991 film takes as its point of departure the Air India atrocity. On board a doomed flight to India are a mother, father, and little boy, between them an empty seat. That seat should be occupied by Krishna (Srivinas Krishna), their first-born son, but he stood them up at the airport. The family is returning to India because the father couldn’t adjust to his new world home; the eldest son, at this point 15, rebelled because he didn’t want to leave Canada. After the plane explodes in mid-flight, his immediate family is wiped out.

None of this is told in a straightforward, linear way, but as one watches the film one learns these facts, as well as that Krishna, completely unable to feel anything at all after the death of his family, becomes a heroin addict who gets clean through a tough tour in detox. The film starts its story five years after the fateful airplane flight, when Krishna has come out of detox and is trying to figure out what to do next.

He tries to lean on his ex-girlfriend, a Caucasian girl who’s still a user. Her new pimp nearly kills him, and he runs to his extended family, intruding like some ghost-from-the-dead on a festive event at their home that involves the Canadian Minister for Intercultural Affairs (or something like that), a Caucasian, who is formally announcing the federal government’s support of a new Hindu religious centre in the heart of the community. Krishna’s extended family (his mother’s sister, her husband, their son) aren’t over the moon to see him, for Krishna is not what anyone would consider a pliant cultural member: he wears a leather jacket over t-shirt and jeans, and he looks and acts like the proverbial rebel without a cause. His aunt accuses him of still wearing the same old jacket that he wore to his family’s funeral rites, even though he claims it’s a new one. She lectures him on how clothes make the man — her husband’s business is a successful sari importing operation.

What makes the film so different, and fun in a bizarre, wonderful way, is the introduction of what I guess are Bollywood elements: over the top operatic or musical twists and turns, surreal introductions of dream sequences, and a good-natured dollop of supernatural shenanigans: masala — spice mixture.

Krishna’s father had a friend in the Indian community, Mr. Tikoo, who works as a postman (Mr. Tikoo is played by the wonderful Saeed Jaffrey, who also plays Krishna’s uncle Lallu Bhai, as well as the Lord Krishna). It is at or around Mr. Tikoo’s house that the most intense action takes place. His wife was killed in the same air disaster that killed Krishna’s family, and he now lives with his mother, the formidable Grandma; his very young son Babu, who is regularly set upon by three especially revolting and racist Caucasian neighbourhood bullies; and his two grown daughters. One is a sharp lawyer who calls Indian men “mother-loving, women-hating” so-and-sos (I found that juxtaposition incredibly illuminating), and who consequently dates a Caucasian Canadian. The other is a bit more traditional-seeming: living at home, she works in a travel agency to save money, ostensibly for medical school, but really (and secretly) for flying lessons, for she wants to be a pilot. Flight and airplanes play a big role here. Grandma is the subversively traditionalist heart and soul of the household because she has a direct line to God — well, one of the many in the Hindu pantheon — via her television-VCR set: she can summon the Lord Krishna himself, his very Blueness, who is at her remote’s bidding. He is incredibly good-humoured and gracious most of the time, but even gods have their limits.

It’s this household that Krishna (the prodigal son) gets involved with most intimately, and it is they who provide the foil for Krishna’s character development as he tries to complete his escape from “Indianness” or, alternately, find his way back to it. The movie doesn’t end happily, unfortunately, which was too bad (I’m a sucker for happy endings…). Furthermore, the awareness of not being able to feel anything — which was also expressed by Lord Krishna, albeit to a different degree — is passed to the daughter who wants to be a pilot. I’m still mulling that over: is the problem of knowing what (or how) to feel (or simply having feelings) what brings us into the divine sphere (realm of gods)? Or does everyone else already have feelings naturally, and it’s the ones who fall away from the divine who lose theirs? Perhaps the former. I had the impression that those characters playing their cultural parts without too much worry were the ones most likely to be pushed around by the gods, to be their playthings because they were unaware, unconscious. While the ones who were awakening to the need to feel were the ones climbing closer to divinity (and danger, uncertainty). But that could be completely off the mark.

At any rate, a must-see film — even 15 years later.

More travels, with photographic and musical accompaniment

More travels in “Canadian Style” (see previous post): listen to this MP3 for a dose of Canadian music with a beat all its own. This is Bhangra Beat, a form of traditional Punjabi tribal music fused with North American hip-hop and disco. Listen to more on Signia’s media page. Signia is a group that formed in 2001 (read more on their homepage). From the Canadian National Geographic’s Bhangra Beat article:

How young women [the UBC Girlz] attending the University of British Columbia (UBC) decide to dance and the necessarily raucous music they choose are both indicators of the vitality of the culture — not of the Punjab, transposed 11,500 kilometres away, but of the new Canada, in one of its many singular and evolving manifestations.

With its large East and South Asian populations, Vancouver is the natural setting for cultural evolution from within these groups. More than half of Canada’s 285,000 Punjabis call the Lower Mainland home, making the region the logical epicentre. More exactly, it is to the sprawling satellite city of Surrey that the majority of young Punjabi Canadians return after rehearsal at UBC or Simon Fraser University. In the suburban basements and community halls of Surrey, a new sound is coming together. And although the official cross is of traditional bhangra and various Western beats, the real encounter is between inherited markers of creative identity — those grounded, so to speak, in that fertile Punjabi soil — and notions that belong to the cultural soil directly beneath our feet. If that makes bhangra hip hop at once a product of tradition and innovation, past and future, East and West, so much the better. Complex identities make for complex and interesting art. The challenge, as it often is, is to reshape the tradition — labour done most easily and naturally in those basements and community halls — and then somehow bring it out to the wider world, fresh and smart and ready to command any dance floor in any Canadian town. (links added) [...More...]

If you’re in the Lower Mainland vicinity, you still have time to check out the 3rd annual Punjabi Showdown on March 4, 2006. Punjabi online has lots more info on Bhangra, too.

I found these links through Urbanphoto.net, run by
Christopher De Wolf, who writes The Urban Eye column for Maisonneuve magazine.

It was also Urbanphoto.net that linked to a feature photo-essay by Colin Kent called Urban China. Really fascinating stuff, all in black and white: even the shot called Neon Infested Kowloon is b/w.

How’d I come to visit Urbanphoto.net? Through Streets and Soul, a wonderful site maintained by “tha krazy g,” whose hand is also visible in Chicago Above the Rails. If you love Chicago, check this out.

To continue with my travel theme (as I sit here with laptop and sinusitis, moored to the house), check out New York City Subway dot org, which has pages and pages of photos showcasing transit systems around the world.

(All this by way of saying that I didn’t get around to re-viewing the Robert Linsley file I mentioned last time, or writing something more about it. But if you’re interested, here’s the link [opens a RAM file].)

In closing, another Signia tune to listen to… Check out their video, too (Quicktime; for Windows format, go to their media page).

…And yet, grouchy-puss that I am, I have to add that, groovy music and multi-culti vibrancy aside, what bugs me about the images in the video is their emphasis on fast cars. The video is shot in an underground parking lot, so the cars are mostly stationary (or pulling into parking position), but they’re all “fast” and high-end expensive luxury models. The emphasis bugs me because it glamourises the culture of “street racing”: the girls had better be “hot” and the cars had better be “fast.” Is that what multi-cultural fusion boils down to: full-scale adoption of and adaptation to the reigning western ethos of sexualised (and “aggressivised”) competitive consumerism? What do I mean by “aggressive”? Last week in Toronto two street-racing 18-year olds killed a taxi driver (a Pakistani immigrant who was supposed to become a Canadian citizen on Monday; see here), and last night in Vancouver three men were killed in a street racing incident when their BMW spun out of control and was sheared in half. (See here.)

I’ll take the punjabilicious bhangra beat, but guys?, leave the fancy cars and Janet Jackson knock-off babes at home…. You are hot enough without all those extras.

Travels in Canadian Style

Lying around in a buggy daze (sinusitis) these past few days, my surrealistic empire of serendipidous internet encounters expanded exponentially. Wow — have I been on some weird trips! Oh well, once the meds wear off, I’ll probably forget all about them…

But maybe I’ll write them up sometime, if I don’t disappear down the rabbit hole of a LibraryThing time-sink. Yes, I’ve been checking out Tim Spalding’s excellent site again, and I think I’m hooked. I have to sign up, there’s no way around it. In fact, I should have saved myself the trouble and done so back in September when I first wrote about it. I’ll need a good alias, though, because although I’d like to keep my library public, I really don’t want just any old tom-dick-or-harry to know that the listed books are mine. Like my del.icio.us account, this one will need an alter ego who can bookmark or catalog to her heart’s content without worrying that someone — anyone! — is drawing conclusions based on the assembled collection of oddities.

A big beautiful prize in my wandering through that LibraryThing was the discovery of a cataloguer who lists her flickr page, which turned out to be gorgeous (she has lived in Tokyo for the past 7 years and takes great photos). Not only that, but if I interpreted various links correctly, she has (or had, a recent photo suggests transition) a job with an organisation I’d never heard of, the United Nations University — Institute for Advanced Study, and they in turn work on a host of worthy environment-related issues. Reading their pages, I found other environmental sites I’d never heard of before. …Oh, and since I of course googled Lil / “Esthet” / Kristen, I found Jean Snow’s A Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo: very cool! Jean has a project called Canadian Style right there in Tokyo, debuting at Cafe Pause February 1. And yikes, how is this for coincidence? I just noticed that Cafe Pause is located in Toshima-Ku, Minami-Ikebukuro, which happens to be the street my sister lives on… Japanese house numbers mean nothing to me (I heard they’re numbered according to when they were built), so 2-14-12 or 1-3-1 or any related string means nothing to me, but I think it’s a relatively small street in the ancient old part of downtown… Hmm, maybe I can get my sister or my niece to pick up a t-shirt for me? Canadian Style straight from Japan — that works.

Canadian style actually brings me to what I wanted to blog about in the first place: another leg of my virtual travels was spent listening to Canadian artist and writer-on-art Robert Linsley, a very smart lecture he gave in London England, where he talked about the depopulated spaces of Canadian art, and that this absence of figures (whether photographs, which is what he was specifically addressing, or landscape paintings or whatever) has become something that Canadian artists take refuge in, like a cliché. As it happened, I also went to visit my own flickr pages to look at my urban development set, really just to see what I could do about it now, because I uploaded all those photos ages ago and in a hurry, without rhyme or reason really, without titles or descriptions (for the most part), and worst of all, without any followups — the whole point was to document these projects in their various stages, which was supposed to mean that I’d take photos every couple of weeks or months. All those big holes in the ground have either gotten much much bigger, or they’ve sprouted gleaming glass and concrete towers. But I never did follow up, if only because I walk when I have my dog with me and it’s really difficult to take photos when he’s pulling on the leash…

As I’m looking through this set, I see that my pictures, too, embody the cliché of the depopulated Canadian spaces — and this for photos of downtown streets! But perhaps the worst part is that there really were so few people around when I was photographing. It’s not the case that I deliberately waited until the street was empty, although, after listening to Linsley, I wonder whether didn’t subconsciously wait until I could get a shot without cars and people…? My favourite is still of the couple sitting on the kerb, though. The woman has something so winsome about her, the man chuckling, but keeping it to himself.

That’s what I wanted to blog about, but now my head hurts, so this will have to wait. Tomorrow I’ll post the ram-file of Linsley’s talk, and try to chew through his arguments, think about them in relation to what I ended up posting on flickr. Strange stuff indeed to be caught in cliché like this….