The Bigge Idea

Keenan insight into Ford business card debacle

2011-11-06T14:03:00.000-05:00

Rob Ford defined the standard by which use of expense accounts and sole-sourced contracts should be judged abusive or corrupt. He defined the principle by which $1,200 in spending should be considered an outrage. Then he spent $1,200 in taxpayer money he did not need to spend, and funnelled the money into his own company. Saying “whoops” and cutting a cheque now that the press has pointed it out cannot erase the misdeed. By the rules Ford defined, he ought to resign. And if he won’t judge himself by the standard he set, council ought to do it for him.

-- Edward Keenan calmly explains why Ford should be sent packing in The Grid

Indie bookstore ponders the merits of social media

2011-11-05T13:52:00.000-04:00

I subscribe to the newsletter for indie bookstore Of Swallows, their Deeds, and the Winter Below. (The descriptor "indie bookstore" is probably redundant for an establishment with a name like that). The November issue contains one of the better skeptical debates about social media I've seen in awhile:

1. Bust or facebook

Banker: "You suffer from a trafficproblem."

Swallow: "Yes."
Banker: "Why not use social media?"
Sw.: "Would a priest visit ananalyst?"
B: "The priest has no Landlord."

We now have a facebook. You can recommend ourfacebook. It might help others know: they could be traffic.

www.facebook.com/283college

tweet2hold is brilliantly simplistic according to Metro

2011-09-29T23:12:00.003-04:00

But perhaps the most brilliantly simplistic exhibit is their social media app, which takes the data from tweets sent to the project’s dedicated Twitter account, @tweet2hold, and converts them into physical objects, in this case origami birds.

-- Ian Gormely of Metro provides us with some much appreciated print media coverage

Photo by Dylan Reibling

@tweet2hold seeks 2,525 secrets about the future for Nuit Blanche 2011

2011-09-21T19:58:00.000-04:00

TORONTO, ON (September 22, 2011) – On October 1, tweet2hold (tweet2hold.com), will fill the Bata Shoe Museum with 2,525 paperbirds containing secrets about the future. In order to share a secret,participants simply send @tweet2hold an @reply.

Created specifically for Nuit Blanche 2011 by Toronto mediacollective the Brototypes, tweet2holdis a site-specific version of txt2hold, a recent CFC Media Lab interactive artproject. Both txt2hold (which debuted at Toronto’s mini-Maker Faire in May2011) and tweet2hold involveturning a digital experience into a permanent physical object.

“We drew partial inspiration for tweet2hold from MarshallMcLuhan, who loved to describe the future using pithy aphorisms,” explainstweet2hold spokesperson Ryan Bigge. “As for gathering 2,525 secrets about the futureour inspiration is a little less highbrow,” Bigge admits. “It’s a reference tothe one-hit wonder ‘In theYear 2525’ by Zager and Evans.”

Part of this year’s CFC Media Lab’s Nuit Blanche exhibit(entitled TechnologicalDisplacement), tweet2hold willflirt with notions of public and private by placing 2,525 secrets in plainsight inside a large tweetcage. Tweet2hold also will leverage the sophisticatedanalysis engine of Lymbix.com in order todetermine the emotional tone of each secret and assign it an appropriate colourpalette.

“McLuhan said ‘We march backwards into the future.’ Givenhis interest in communication technologies I think he would have beenfascinated by Twitter,” notes Bigge. “Or at the very least he would havesomething witty to say about it.”

To learn more visit: http://www.tweet2hold.com

Twitter: @tweet2hold

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/txt2hold

-30-

Contact:

Ryan Bigge, tweet2holdspokesperson, rbigge [@] cfcmedialab [dot] com

An animated gif for tweet2hold, my Nuit Blanche interactive art installation

2011-09-18T23:01:00.001-04:00

When not working full-time, I've working on @tweet2hold, a new media project that I helped create as part of the CFC Media Lab's IAEP.

We're now into the marketing phase of the project, trying to get 2,525 secrets about the future before Saturday, October 1. As a bribe to convince you to submit a secret, I've included my very first animated gif:

Smooth jazz cannot rescue bad website design

2011-09-14T20:57:00.000-04:00

Tempted though you are, you stay focused and click for the San Francisco restaurant. One bit of advice: If you’ve got a subwoofer attached to your computer, now’s the time to crank it up, because you’re in for some auto-playing, royalty-free, ambient techno smooth jazz!

-- Slate.com on the enigma of bad restaurant websites

Michael Schur from Parks and Recreation explains why taxes are okay

2011-08-07T17:00:00.001-04:00

People don’t seem to make the connection between their tax money and the benefits that they get from their tax money, like free education, and the fire department, and police protection, and everything else. It drives me bonkers, because it’s pretty straightforward to me. People think of taxes as money just being robbed from you. They don’t consider the benefits of paying taxes. The benefits that they get and also the benefit of just being a part of a large group of people: a town, or a city, or a country, or a society that allegedly should stand together and all try to help each other. So my cynical, angry side I gave to Ron. And we have him voice the idea that there’s no point, that governments can’t function, that society is unreasonable, that everyone should just leave everybody else alone.

-- From The Onion AV Club

Freelancers Unite! Either Full Price or Free

2011-05-31T08:38:00.000-04:00

Being underpaid is worse than not being paid at all. You know what you’re getting yourself into with the latter. You are a volunteer, so you can unvolunteer at will. You can prioritize other jobs above the non-paying “favor” job and expect that the person benefiting from your unpaid labor will, if they have any common sense, understand and you can decide just how much effort and time to expend because you’re the one holding the magnanimous cards. Not so with underpaying gigs. It’s all the work and the demands of a well-paid opportunity, but with a lot fewer zeros.

-- J. Maureen Henderson explains why working for less than you're worth is for chumps.

Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because, Because

2011-05-23T16:13:00.000-04:00

The Future of eBook Advertising in Hilarious Charticle Format

2011-05-23T16:05:00.002-04:00

Softcover Hardsell
Hello, (Stoli) Vodka, It’s Me Chelsea

As the Wall Street Journal recently reported, the popularity of e-books has resulted in various experiments that place advertising between the covers. And while a Keebler elf suddenly appearing beside Proust’s precious madeleine might sound like bad sci-fi, the same thing was once said about urinal ads. The trick to making e-book sponsorships palatable is finding a seamless partnership between prose and unique selling proposition (while hopefully avoiding a pathetic fallacy). --Ryan Bigge

Book: What The Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell
Synergistic Concordance: Since Gladwell’s best seller journalism involves more product integration than an episode of American Idol (to wit: Heinz Ketchup, Hush Puppies, Pepsi, Ragu spaghetti sauce, the Ronco Showtime Rotisserie & BBQ, the Aeron chair, Blue’s Clues) it’s not much of a stretch to imagine e-book sponsors. Especially since all Dog articles first appeared in the ad-friendly New Yorker.

Book: The Girl Who Played With The Hornet Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
Synergistic Concordance: Like Gladwell, the late Larsson was obsessed with verisimilitude, at least as it applied to Apple laptops. So while a Stieg sentence like “best of all, it had the first 17-inch screen in the laptop world with NVIDIA graphics and a resolution of 1440 x 900 pixels” ain’t exactly literature, it does scan better than most of the ads in Wired, and provides multiple opportunities for click-through promotions.

Book: The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook by Ben Mezrich
Synergistic Concordance: At this point, reading about Facebook without being interrupted by series of annoying bleats about Farmville or miracle weight loss tricks would feel positively wrong. And given that publishers are undoubtedly collecting information on your e-reading habits anyway, it won’t be long before e-book screens perfectly resemble your Facebook feed.

Once Again, Walter Benjamin Was There First

2011-05-23T14:48:00.001-04:00

Back in 2009, I wrote about the sex appeal of bicycling for Spacing. This was not exactly groundbreaking journalism, but I thought I was adding something to the debate. Turns out, however, that Benjamin was there first:

The figure of the woman assumes its most seductive aspect as a cyclist. . . . In the clothing of cyclists the sporting expression still wrestles with the inherited pattern of elegance, and the fruit of this struggle is the grim sadistic touch which made this ideal image of elegance so incomparably provocative to the male world.

I discovered this thanks to a quite wonderful N+1 article called Hasids vs. Hipsters, which also includes this little gem:

That each group selected Williamsburg as the terrain for carving out a secessionist utopia can only be blamed on the cunning of history, plus the L train.

And this gem too:

A group dressed as clowns led a funeral procession along Bedford to protest the decision, but failed to capture the public imagination since they lacked any vernacular of protest other than the language of a grant application.

Text Message Keepsake Generator txt2hold Invited to Toronto Maker Faire

2011-05-05T13:29:00.001-04:00

TORONTO, ON (May 5, 2011) – txt2hold (txt2hold.ca), a new free service that transforms any text message into an attractive and permanent paper keepsake, will be participating in Toronto’s first ever Maker Faire (makerfairetoronto.ca) to be held this weekend, May 7 and 8, at the Toronto Brick Works. Developed by Toronto-based media collective the Brototypes (with the assistance of the CFC Media Lab), txt2hold allows anyone with a cell phone to capture and display a precious digital memory forever.

“txt2hold is built around the idea of creating a physical keepsake of a digital experience,” explains Brototypes spokesperson Dylan Reibling. “Our research process showed us that most cell phone users have many text messages with sentimental value, but these texts are hard to preserve and easy to lose. Our txt2hold service solves this problem by making your favourite texts easy to preserve and hard to lose.”

During Maker Faire, users can forward their precious text messages to 647.462.8292. The txt2hold system uses a powerful semantic engine to interpret the emotional content of the text. It then generates a unique and attractive origami shape that seamlessly incorporates the original text message. Utilizing a magical combination of technology, graphic design and paper folding, txt2hold is meant to generate a shoebox of text message mementos for the 21st century.

“The technology-infused, Do-It-Yourself ethos of Maker Faire dovetails perfectly with our project,” explains Reibling. “And we’re honoured to be a part of the event’s debut in Toronto.”

To learn how to let your memories unfold 160 characters at a time, please visit http://www.txt2hold.ca

Twitter: @txt2hold
Facebook: www.facebook.com/txt2hold

Contact Info
Dylan Reibling, Brototypes spokesperson: dylan[dot]reibling [at] gmail.com

How Starbucks Fought for Its Life by Asking Bloggers to Sell Their Soul

2011-04-11T21:16:00.005-04:00

I received this email today. Really.

Hi Ryan,

My name is Tony and I help promote industry specific content. Your site is a great resource and I have an infographic that I think your readers would enjoy.

Starbucks is a global business powerhouse. It has come a long way from a small Seattle coffee shop to 16,000 different locations worldwide, making it the world's largest coffeehouse and blowing competition out of the water. This infographic details their path to global business powerhouse and takes a detailed looked at the numbers:

[URL DELETED]

I hope you enjoy the graphic as much as we do, and we'd love to hear any feedback you might have!

If you have any questions or want more graphics for your site, please free free to contact me!

Thanks,
Tony Shin
[email deleted]
(815) xxx-xxxx
Folllow me on Twitter @ohtinytony

Gamification to Lamification in Less Than 150 Words

2011-03-15T21:20:00.000-04:00

Although the gamification trend at this particular historical moment is unstoppable, it's so problematic in so many horribly obvious ways that we need more writers like Oliver Burkeman willing to dismantle the flimsy logic behind treating life like Pacman. Better yet, he does it in less than 150 words:

The current public face of gamification is Jane McGonigal, author of the new book Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better And How They Can Change The World, but many of her prescriptions are cringe-inducing: they seem to involve redefining aid projects in Africa as "superhero missions", or telling hospital patients to think of their recovery from illness as a "multiplayer game". Hearing how McGonigal speeded her recovery from a serious head injury by inventing a "superhero-themed game" called SuperBetter, based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in which her family and friends were players helping her back to health, I'm apparently supposed to feel inspired. Instead I feel embarrassed and a little sad: if I'm ever in that situation, I hope I won't need to invent a game to persuade my family to care.

(Guardian link).

Why Writing That Targets Humans Remains Cutting Edge

2011-03-09T10:46:00.001-05:00

Thousands of digital marketers and gadget geeks will soon be descending on Austin, each determined to be personally responsible for overloading Twitter with their snapshot insights from SXSW Interactive. And while SXSWi has become a launching pad for exciting new technologies such as Foursquare and Twitter, the panel I’d most like to attend (if I were going) focuses on the apparently unhip technology known as the written word.

This Saturday (March 11), Kyle Monson, a content strategist at JWT, will talk about Brand Journalism: The Rise of Non-Fiction Advertising. What is brand journalism? No one is quite sure. As Monson notes in a recent interview with Razorfish.com:

Brand Journalism is, in short, a method of engaging our audience in discussions about the brand. This is done by creating compelling content and messages as well as by incorporating the audience’s own viewpoints. We’re teaching brands to mimic publishers and journalists in how they produce content, and to mimic humans in how they communicate with their audience.

While Monson admits that brand journalism might just be a new name for the well-established practice of corporate communications and PR, his panel description notes that “we're still trying to teach big companies and ad agencies how to communicate like humans, how to listen, and how to use transparency as a messaging tactic.”

It’s strange to think that in 2011 this is still the case, but as this article about Groupon’s success demonstrates, some of the most forward-thinking content-driven marketing involves nothing more than harnessing the very basic and ancient technology of empathy, understanding and trust.

Einar Sneve Martinussen Makes WiFi Visible

2011-03-06T16:57:00.000-05:00

This project, which makes wifi visible, is worth checking out. I'm captivated with it for a number of reasons, the most prominent being that my CFC media lab classmate Dylan Reibling thought of this idea a few months ago. Don't worry, his idea wasn't stolen – this is one of those cases when a good idea spontaneously appears in the brains of a bunch of different people around the world at the same time. Here's more info on the project and its creator Einar Sneve Martinussen.

A Spam Email Worth Sharing

2011-02-26T09:37:00.000-05:00

There was something wonderful about the language used in this spam email, so I thought I'd share it:

Patch Up With Your Girlfriend With Luxury Designer Replica Watches
If you are worried about your breakup, then you should be bold enough to patch up it with grace and style

By having a beautiful luxury designer replica watch, your girlfriend will be surely inclined towards you at once. All of a sudden, natural feelings of love, peace, comfort, romance, and sex will be restored again between you and your girlfriend for long time.

Gopnik on the Internet Mind

2011-02-10T09:10:00.002-05:00

One of the things that John Brockman’s collection on the Internet and the mind illustrates is that when people struggle to describe the state that the Internet puts them in they arrive at a remarkably familiar picture of disassociation and fragmentation. Life was once whole, continuous, stable; now it is fragmented, multi-part, shimmering around us, unstable and impossible to fix. The world becomes Keats’s “waking dream,” as the writer Kevin Kelly puts it.

The odd thing is that this complaint, though deeply felt by our contemporary Better-Nevers, is identical to Baudelaire’s perception about modern Paris in 1855, or Walter Benjamin’s about Berlin in 1930, or Marshall McLuhan’s in the face of three-channel television (and Canadian television, at that) in 1965. When department stores had Christmas windows with clockwork puppets, the world was going to pieces; when the city streets were filled with horse-drawn carriages running by bright-colored posters, you could no longer tell the real from the simulated; when people were listening to shellac 78s and looking at color newspaper supplements, the world had become a kaleidoscope of disassociated imagery; and when the broadcast air was filled with droning black-and-white images of men in suits reading news, all of life had become indistinguishable from your fantasies of it. It was Marx, not Steve Jobs, who said that the character of modern life is that everything falls apart.

We must, at some level, need this to be true, since we think it’s true about so many different kinds of things. We experience this sense of fracture so deeply that we ascribe it to machines that, viewed with retrospective detachment, don’t seem remotely capable of producing it. If all you have is a hammer, the saying goes, everything looks like a nail; and, if you think the world is broken, every machine looks like the hammer that broke it.

-- Adam Gopnik on the Internet brain

Books as Bombs Quote

2011-01-29T10:24:00.001-05:00

It may be that in the nineteen-sixties, when television was still muzzling itself, from fear of provoking advertiser displeasure or F.C.C. reaction, books were a more accessible form for social criticism and dissent. It may also be that books were still a little radioactive then, a little dangerous. Friedan’s book came out in the wake of some celebrated censorship trials—“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Tropic of Cancer,” “Fanny Hill.” One of Coontz’s respondents recalled “The Feminine Mystique” being treated “like a banned book.” The sense that an object is somehow forbidden gives it greater power.

-- New Yorker article on The Feminine Mystique

Review of Steve Martin's An Object of Beauty (Reprint)

2011-01-28T09:55:00.004-05:00

Comedian Steve Martin explores the New York art scene in his first full-length novelToronto Star | December 5, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

An Object of Beauty by Steve Martin

Grand Central Publishing, 292 pages, $32.99

By virtue of his many decades of A-list celebrity, Steve Martin is a famous author. But unlike James Franco (who last month released Palo Alto, a debut collection of short fiction) or Pamela Anderson (who has written not one, but two quote-unquote novels), Martin has spent the past decade proving that he’s not a dilettante capitalizing on name-brand recognition. Starting with his 2000 novella Shopgirl, Martin has been keyboarding at a steady pace, publishing a second novella in 2003 (The Pleasure of My Company), along with his 2007 memoir Born Standing Up.

An Object of Beauty is Martin’s first full-length novel, an examination of how art and commerce intersect in New York (“Auctions were, and still are, spectator sports, where the contestants are money”), as chronicled by an art writer with the unfortunate name of Daniel Chester French Franks. Providing a peek inside Sotheby’s auction house along with the back rooms of various Chelsea galleries (“from which new art was mined and then trucked into residences of Manhattan”) the novel exposes the strange rituals and logic-defying prices of the contemporary art world, in a way similar to Sarah Thornton’s non-fiction book Seven Days in the Art World. But since An Object of Beauty begins in the early 1990s and concludes with the recent recession, Martin instead provides Eighteen Years in The Art World.

Our heroine is Lacey Yeager, a good-bad girl determined to open her own gallery no matter who gets crushed along the way. As Lacey explains to her confidant Daniel Franks:

“I’m seeing a guy who’s got me figured out. He never says I love you.”
“That’s good?”
“I love him for it.”

During her 20s, Lacey quickly learns to convert objects of beauty into objects of value — be it artworks or, indeed, herself. Her off-again, on-again lover, Patrice Claire, notes that “both you and paintings are layered. You, in the complex onion-peel way, dark secrets and all that.”

The problem with Lacey, however is that “Patrice was used to the steadfast responses of paintings, not the unpredictable responses of people.” Thus, the Picture of Lacey Yeager eventually becomes as grotesque as Dorian Gray.

While Martin effectively mixes research with an obvious passion and insight into art (he’s a noted collector himself), the novel contains a few unnecessary brushstrokes, mostly involving 9/11. It’s not that funnyman Martin isn’t equipped to handle the challenge — it’s more that there isn’t anything to add to that particular tragedy. As the Toronto literary journal Taddle Creek notes on its submission guidelines, “The magazine wishes it didn’t still have to be said, but it does: no stories about September 11th, the Y2K bug, or tsunamis.”

As you might expect from a lifelong comedian, there are plenty of witty asides throughout — a hotel “where the lighting had been preset to sex” and “Basquiat was achieving sensational prices but at least had the courtesy to be dead.”

More often the novel provides a serious attempt at documenting the financial and creative ripples made possible by Warhol’s self-aware pop art. It would seem that the true wild and crazy guys are contemporary artists able to create surreal punchlines (“Maurizio Cattelan made a life-size sculpture of the pope flattened by a meteor that had just fallen through a skylight”) that earn them millions.

My Review of Combat Camera

2011-01-24T13:17:00.000-05:00

I will spare you the details, but up until recently I've been too busy to blog. So harried, in fact, that I lacked the time to post published work, which is really quite sad when you think about it.

Anyway, here is my review of Combat Camera by A. J. Somerset.

Combat Camera: Imprisoned behind the lens

A damaged ex-war photographer struggles to define some notion of redemption while paying the bills with second-rate porn

Toronto Star | Oct 24 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Lucas Zane is a photographer in his mid-40s whose career has lost focus. While that might sound like a bad joke (a photographer losing focus — get it?), Zane has a healthy appetite for strange humour: “At the bedroom door he paused. What is the proper form for dealing with a wounded, hung-over, messed-up porno chick in one’s bedroom?”

Zane, once a successful photojournalist who survived tours of Nicaragua, Lebanon and Afghanistan, now spends most of his time trying to avoid innumerable psychological landmines: “The mind, allowed to wander, can easily stray into a bad neighbourhood.” After post-traumatic stress amplifies his alcoholic tendencies and effectively ends his career, Zane finds himself snapping niche porn in Mississauga to pay his grocery bills.

London, Ont.-based A. J. Somerset, himself a photographer, uses his debut novel to juxtapose the “elegant lies” of the camera with the brutal rationalizations required to perform and distribute pornography. This might sound like Russell Smith territory, whose most recent book Girl Crazy also features Internet nudity and scenes set in strip clubs, but there’s nothing particularly erotic about Combat Camera. The niche porn is raw and violent while strippers appear bored if not worse.

To be fair, Zane finds these financially motivated exposures of the flesh to be especially unarousing due to a bullet wound that has inflicted a variety of physical dysfunctions. Unable to act upon Melissa’s flirtations (the aforementioned hung-over, messed-up porno chick) he instead expresses his affection by becoming a protective father figure.

Throughout the novel, Somerset alternates between the immediate and blunt trauma inflicted upon civilians in various warzones and the slower-acting but no less injurious actions of a culture lacking in modesty: “This is the story of our time. Hardcore goes mainstream. A generation gets its sex ed from the Internet. Teenaged girls photograph themselves in the mirror and post the pictures online, call it empowerment, go wild with empowerment at Fort Lauderdale, demonstrate empowerment at Mardi Gras for cheap strings of beads, email their empowerment to boys they like.”

As the above demonstrates, Somerset is a confident, gifted writer, which explains why Combat Camera has already won the Metcalf-Rooke Award. Somerset is able to seamlessly switch between dialogue and Zane’s internal monologue as he darts between grim horror and grim comedy. He also avoids the arid claustrophobia endemic to novels where much of the action takes place within the main character’s mind.

But the most satisfying aspects of this novel involve Somerset’s refusal to make obvious the numerous parallels between photography and fiction:

• “You define what’s in the story and what remains untold.”

• “Pictures don’t preserve anything, much less the truth. What you put on film is 1/250th of a second.”

• “Photographs never lie, but liars can take photographs.”

Such observations offer an ongoing argument between the camera lens and the keyboard, with the novel eventually revealing the strengths and limitations of both.

Although the subject matter and tone could not be more different, Combat Camera retains echoes of Maggie Helwig’s superlative Girls Fall Down from 2008, which also features a photographer as protagonist. In Girls Fall Down, the photographer in question is slowly losing his sight, provoking a desperate chase to capture his surroundings before the inevitable darkness arrives.

Combat Camera’s Zane, meanwhile, hides behind his camera in order to shut out the world around him, haunted by everyone he has imprisoned in silver prints, unable or unwilling to see what’s right in front of him.

Hawkblocker Explained

2011-01-24T12:29:00.001-05:00

I looked down. I was wearing £90 Nikes, £270 Sevens, a £45 Topshop jumper and a £200 Philippe Starck watch. There was a smartphone in my left pocket, a fancy wallet in my right, and I’d paid £32 for my haircut. I’d essentially taken close to £1,000 of my own hard-earned (well, you know what I mean) cash, blended it into a fine puree, poured it all over myself and smeared it around like a lover with a tub of icing.

And thus was born the new ad-review site Hawkblocker.

Books Stink: Super Sad True Love Story Review

2011-01-20T09:43:00.000-05:00

Super Sad True Love Story: Immigrant love in dystopia

Gary Shteyngart goes over the top with his corporate satire, but his third novel still has bite

Toronto Star | August 21, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

On the Bookavore tumblr, an anonymous Brooklyn bookseller recently posted an “E-books Article Drinking Game.” Trigger phrases and their alcohol equivalents include “any discussion of book world after 2020 — one drink” and the debilitating “smell of a real book — clean out the liquor cabinet, drink until you pass out, wake up next morning, puke, then continue drinking.”

Meanwhile, in Super Sad True Love Story, anti-hero Lenny Abramov is forced to mask the odour of his formidable book collection with Pine-Sol Wild Flower Blast. In Gary Shteyngart’s satiric dystopia of the near future, books stink. Literally. (“Duder, that thing smells like wet socks,” notes an airplane passenger, referring to Lenny’s collection of Chekhov short stories.) But a crashing American dollar and the possible repossession of Manhattan by the Chinese means Lenny has bigger problems than the uncoolness of his antiquarian reading habits.

Shteyngart’s comic timing has always been exceptional, but with Super Sad he demonstrates his socio-cultural radar is equally well calibrated. Anticipating the triumph of our smartphone-addicted, attention-span deprived, Google-stupid culture, Shteyngart is less concerned about the future of the book (i.e. Kindle versus hardcover) and more focused on whether books have a future, period. (“Lenny Abramov, last reader on earth!” declares his friend Noah, over drinks at a popular new bar on Staten Island called Cervix.)

Although there is plenty of overlap between Super Sad and his previous two novels (especially Absurdistan), pushing the setting 15 minutes into the future helps make Shteyngart’s obsession with slang, sex, the Russian immigrant experience and the shortcomings of the American military-industrial-political-media complex appear fresh. Is his strategy is a success? This depends on whether you find such corporate monstrosities as LandO’LakesGMFord and ColgatePalmoliveYum!BrandViacomCredit hilarious or hokey.

Like many futuristic dystopias (Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four or We by Yevgeny Zamyatin), the bleakness of Super Sad’s over-surveillanced and politically restrictive America is relieved by a sweeping romance. But Shteyngart is only willing to allow Lenny partial happiness. As his semi-girlfriend Eunice Park explains in a quasi-diary entry on Facebook-of-the-future site GlobalTeens, “he’s gross physically, but there’s something sweet about him.”

Although the novel is told through the alternating journal entries of Lenny and Eunice, their romantic chemistry is never entirely explained. Opposites attract, but 39-year-old Lenny and 24-year-old Eunice are less a couple than an engineered way of highlighting the novel’s major tensions. That said, their ongoing relationship is messy, complicated, argument-ridden and complicated by past obsessions and emotional scars — which is to say, entirely believable.

Since the novel’s title functions as an obvious spoiler, suspense is instead generated by Lenny’s tenuous job prospects at the Post-Human Services division of Staatling-Wapachung (a company that promises immortality to those who can afford it) and ongoing corporate intrigue. As befits a novel with Super Sad in its title, Shteyngart eventually stops cracking jokes as the country he loves starts to crumble for the last time.

Can a novel filled with references to TotalSurrender panties and a website called AssLuxury also serve as a serious work of cultural and political commentary? Duder, I’m not entirely convinced. Can an author successfully mock our rapidly depleting attention spans through the creaky medium of the novel? Duder, yes. And for such audacity Shteyngart deserves to be read —preferably in a quiet room, in a few sittings and without the compelling but empty distractions of Facebook, Twitter and iPhone.

Are You a Modern Gentleman or a Man of the House?

2011-01-19T13:39:00.002-05:00

Reading this New York Times article about the website ManoftheHouse reminded me that I should post this Globe article I wrote about The Modern Gentleman.

Advice from dad? No thanks, I'll just Google it

Globe and Mail | October 23, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

It’s a recent Thursday evening at School Bakery and Café in Toronto’s Liberty Village. Gavin Roy Seal and Phil Adrien have just settled back for an after-work drink. Sipping beer served by a waitress dressed as a schoolgirl in a neighbourhood thick with tech startups seems entirely appropriate, given that Seal and Adrien are the brains behind The Modern Gentleman, a new online magazine designed to help 18-to-29-year-old men make the most of their leisure time.

“We want men to take the hard-earned money they’ve made in their first jobs and spend it wisely on stuff we think is fulfilling,” explains Adrien, a web developer and designer who graduated from Ryerson University’s radio and television arts program last year. “We all read GQ when we were younger,” adds Seal, who works at CBC Sports and graduated from the same Ryerson program this summer, “but couldn’t afford anything in it.”

Taking sensible style as its guiding principle, The Modern Gentleman is one of at least three recent guy-oriented Web publications that eschew fart jokes and wet T-shirt contests and instead speak to young men like, well, a dad might, honestly and intelligently.

Others include Boston-based The Good Men Project Magazine and New York-based Made Possible. While their tones range from the heartfelt earnestness of Good Men (recent article: “Confessions of a Recovering Homophobe”) to the empowered sensitivity of Made Possible (recent piece: “What You Can Learn From Chick Flicks”) to the more straightforward beer and career advice of TMG (recent article: “To Pour, or Not to Pour”), they all share something that Maxim and Details never aspired to: filling an informational role that, in previous generations, fathers once held.

“I think that today guys make their style or fashion mistakes on their own,” says Adrien, who’s 25. In the past, advice about the gentlemanly arts, such as pairing ties with suits or shaving properly, “would be passed on by my father, but now we have the Internet and Google.” And, increasingly, resources like TMG.

When Michael Kimmel, a sociology professor at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, used to ask his students in the mid-1990s to name their heroes, “I had many saying their dads were their heroes,” says the author of Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men. Now, however, “I don’t get that at all. The most common answer I get from students is: ‘I don’t have any heroes.’ “ In the absence of strong paternal bonds, which can be ascribed over the last two decades to everything from increased divorce rates to longer work hours, the cultural knowhow that is passed down through generations also falls through the cracks. From a style point of view, even dads who spent a great deal of time with their sons over the past 15 years were Baby Boomer fathers likely unschooled themselves in the intricacies of tying a Windsor knot or evaluating wine, valuable social info today. As for the media aimed at young men until now, publications such as Men’s Health, Maxim and Details, says Kimmel, who sits on the board of advisors for Made Possible, spent the past 15 years trying to replace fatherly advice, but failed to take into account the increasingly complex nature of masculinity.

Men under 40, Kimmel notes, have cross-gender friendships, acknowledge that their wives will have significant careers outside the home and assume a more involved role in raising their children than their fathers did. But you’d be hard-pressed to see such issues addressed in a mag like Details. Instead, he says, most mainstream men’s magazines have preyed on the anxieties and insecurities of men in order to make them avid consumers.

By comparison, the new crop of online men’s magazines take these developments into account and “assume that there is no battle between the sexes … they actually minister to men at their best, not pander to them at their worst,” says Kimmel. In doing so, he believes, they address the disconnect between the male fantasyland of Maxim and 21st-century realities.

Not that those realities are necessarily straightforward. “There’s still that male misconception that you shouldn’t publicly share your feelings, that you should be very reserved and not talk about fashion or style,” says Adrien. In the past, questions about such issues were answered, by fathers, other family members or at least the family tailor, in the privacy of the home or a draped-off fitting room. Not coincidentally, the anonymity afforded by the Internet may explain why these new men’s sites – which can be regarded as de facto digital dads, the fitting rooms or barber shops of today – are blossoming right now and becoming so popular.

Since launching in March, TMG’s audience has grown from about 1,000 visitors a month in the spring to between 5,000 and 6,000 now. Seal and Adrien have been hard-pressed to keep up: Both are quick to admit that the site requires more content updated more frequently, but their focus of their handsomely produced Web mag has been quality over quantity.

So what is the biggest sartorial dilemma facing wannabe gentlemen today? “Right now, it seems that, for young professionals, formal attire is dress pants and a dress shirt chosen without any thought whatsoever,” Adrien says. “If a shirt has a collar and your pants have pleats, then it counts as formal wear.” Asked to name someone who embodies the ideal aspects of a modern gentleman, Adrien and Seal point not to George Clooney or Barack Obama, but, anachronistically, to Mad Men’s Don Draper.

Well, kind of. While they admire Draper’s style and workplace elan, they are not, in keeping with the gentlemanly code, impressed by his adultery. “That’s not something we’d ever aspire to or want from a friend,” says Adrien.

Come to think of it, Draper’s fathering skills leave a lot to be desired as well.

The Radical Compression of Language (aka TLDR.it will rule us all)

2011-01-18T13:48:00.001-05:00

In honor of tldr.it, I’m reprinting my Toronto Star article about the radical compression of language:

The long and the short of naming things

Toronto Star | September 3, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Four years ago, Toronto journalist Andre Mayer wrote about very long song titles as the latest trend in music for CBC Arts Online. Offenders included and Sufjan Stevens (“To the Workers of the Rockford River Valley Region, I have an Idea Concerning Your Predicament, and It Involves Shoe String, a Lavender Garland, and Twelve Strong Women”).

But the wordy excess detailed by Mayer now appears to be a relic of the pre-Twitter era. The first single from M.I.A.'s new album is called XXXO, and none of her other song titles are longer than 17 characters. (Compare that with the aforementioned Sufjan Stevens song, which exceeds Twitter's 140-character limit by a whopping 20 per cent).

This brevity tendency is not limited to music, either. As Stephanie Strom reported in The New York Times on July 11, “The organization previously known as the Y.M.C.A. is henceforth to be called ‘the Y.' ” When a four-letter acronym is too time-consuming, we've clearly entered the era of radical compression, when the abbreviated convenience of URL shorteners like Bit.ly is now being applied to offline phenomena.

Perhaps the best, (if not funniest) example of this trend appeared in The New York Times Media Decoder Blog on March 23: “Stefano Tonchi, the editor of T: The New York Times Style Magazine, has been appointed editor of W, the fashion magazine published by Condé Nast.” Given that magazines are generally in the business of delivering a bushel of words, it seems strange to mute themselves with such nondescript titles. And while T and W might be isolated letters, they aren't isolated examples of publications with barely there names. There's a Toronto-based technology magazine called UR (full disclosure: I'm an occasional contributor) along with a couples magazine called 2.

Which is not to suggest that a single letter (or number) cannot contain multitudes. In his 2008 book X-rated!: The Power of Mythic Symbolism in Popular Culture, University of Toronto semiotician Marcel Danesi argues that symbols like the letters X and V “tell us more about the state of the world than do theories and sophisticated academic debates.” Along with V (a feminine symbol) and X (which blends the sacred and the profane), Danesi uses X-rated! to discuss the ubiquitous lower case “i” prefix attached to anything remotely technological (iPad, iTravel, iSandwich).

But rather than panic about our one-letter future, Danesi points out that humans have an inbuilt tendency toward language efficiency (or laziness, depending on your perspective). Referring to the work of the late Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf and the law that bears his name, Danesi notes that “the more frequent, necessary, or popular a form becomes for communicative purposes, the more likely it is to be rendered compressed or economical in structure.”

Tom McCarthy, a British writer and artistic provocateur, appears to have taken Zipf's Law to heart with his upcoming novel, entitled C. Although it won't be in stores until September, C has already made the Man Booker Prize Long List. Unfortunately, Danesi has nothing to say about the letter C, nor does he provide insight into L, which is what Montreal writer Ian Orti titled his recent novel. Although, to be fair, the full title of L includes a parenthetical: (and things come apart).

Since bookstore browsers might find it difficult to judge Orti's book by its sole letter, I will offer a quick review: sly. If my review leaves you wanting, it's only because I'm emulating filmmaker and illustrator Sarah Lazarovic, who in June started posting three-character book reviews via Twitter. Examples include: Ugh. Ha! Meh. Yup. Those, respectively, are for The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, The Bedwetter by Sarah Silverman, The Ask by Sam Lipsyte and The Imperfectionists by Tom Rachman.

Of course, given the ever-shrinking book coverage in newspapers, it's probably dangerous to draw attention or otherwise legitimize three-character literary reviews.

Instead, I'll conclude by praising a children's book from 1968 whose four-character title appears to have anticipated text message shorthand. I refer to CDB! by New York illustrator William Steig. Re-released in 2000, a few years before Steig's death, CDB! (see the bee) is a book where “letters and numbers are used to create the sounds of words and simple sentences 4 u 2 figure out.”

So, for example, the book contains an L-F-N (elephant), an L-F-8-R (elevator) and a boy saying I N-V-U (I envy you).

CDB!'s word puzzles are a perfect mix of charming and goofy. Or, in keeping with the three-character review format, fab. And given the current climate of compression, Steig's publisher should consider reissuing the book yet again. The way things are going, it's sure to be a bestseller.

-------------------

(Toronto Star link).

Never Too Proud to Recycle Content Nearly a Decade Old

2011-01-16T17:11:00.000-05:00

Late last month techcrunch revealed that mailing all those AOL CDs during the 1990s cost quite a bit of money. Which reminded me of an article I wrote for Shift back in December 2001 about Lydia Cline, a woman who collects AOL disks. I can still clearly recall that I tried my best to imitate the witty sophistication of Adam Sternbergh with this article. I'll let readers judge how successful I was.

Discography

Shift | December 2001 | Ryan Bigge

Until this very moment, you were unaware that Lydia Cline of Overland Park, Kansas, packrats Lucite purses, vintage TWA posters, Raggedy Ann and Andy dolls and cartoon character glassware. But this list evaporates when you learn Cline has willingly acquired over 500 playfully-decorated AOL disks, the ur-junk mail of the nineties. While most deride and scorn the software delivery devices that lurk inside cereal boxes, flyers and magazines, Cline has lovingly gathered all manner of AOL product: CDs, mini-CDs, even 3 1/2 disks. She also has Q-Link diskettes (an AOL forerunner) for the Commodore 64 and discs printed in funny languages from strange, faraway countries like Brazil, Germany and Hong Kong.

She has a lot of them.

It wasn't always like this. "I used to throw 'em away at first just like everyone else," admits Cline.

It was a slow, tranquil evolution from skeptic to completist. A few years ago, Cline, an AOL user and small fry shareholder since 1994, started putting disks aside in a basket in case she needed to reinstall the software. Then, one fateful day, she realized each of her fifteen discs featured a different, snazzy image. Her curiousity piqued, she began to seek out other designs in the same way as a pog or Coke bottle enthusist might. Two years later, her collection includes such oddities as a Spiderman disk, a Bugs Bunny disk, even an X-Files disk. And 497 others, examples of which are neatly displayed at http://www.lydiasaoldisks.com/

Cline is an otherwise sane, forty-one-year-old mother of two, an architect and professor at Johnson County Community College who just happens to be able to wax poetic about old AOL discs the way other people discuss wine vintages. "The pre-1992 version 1.0 are really neat because they're on 5 1/4 floppies, they have packaging which includes a letter from Steve Case, a fold-out poster, and a booklet on getting started."

Cline is the sort of person who refers to 5 1/4 floppies as "antiques."

Nevertheless, Cline is a pragmatic collector. Her living room doesn't boast an AOL shrine. Instead, "they're just in a bunch of Rubbermaid tubs in my basement." She adds to her stash by trading disks with a small circle of eight similarly afflicted collectors who all met through eBay. (She even has a rival, KrazyErik). Thrift stores, garage sales, newspaper ads, friends, students, and email lists are also an excellent source of digital booty.

She'll even go as far as to politely pester webmasters in foreign countries for disks in hopes they have a stash of AOL product they have no use for. When all else fails, she capitulates to eBay.

Thus far, Cline has spent between $500 and $700 on her hobby. "It sounds really sad to hear myself say that," Cline says, laughing, before rationalizing her addiction. "I know other collectors on eBay have spent far more than me because they always outbid me on the really desirable disks."

Like many visionaries, Cline is content to wait for the rest of the world to catch up. She views AOL discs as another Pez or metal lunchbox -- a pop-culture collectable that will eventually appreciate in value. Despite the millions of free discs distributed, most end up in the trash can or as drink coasters, meaning there are fewer mint-condition discs than you might think. As Cline sagely observes, "Ten or 15 years from now, people who have websites on mangling the disks, are gonna slap their foreheads and say, 'I wish I'd saved a few.'"

Content Strategy For Twitter (Magazine Edition)

2011-01-13T09:36:00.000-05:00

Toronto Life has a popular twitter feed. It has many inbuilt advantages, including a lot of quality content that it can reference and leverage.

What it doesn't quite have yet, however, is a coherent content strategy. Sending out 14 tweets in under an hour, all about their Good Stuff Cheap issue makes no sense. I understand that Toronto Life (wisely) puts their previous issue online for free once the new issue hits the stands. But either send me to your table of contents or schedule your tweets throughout the day. The firehose is a blunt instrument that is only designed to work on fires and wet t-shirt contests.

Jason McBride Explains Toronto Real Estate Syndrome

2011-01-10T12:51:00.002-05:00

In the new February issue of Toronto Life, Jason McBride manages to perfectly articulate my real estate frustrations:

House hunting, for us, was like having a hobby you hate and can't afford but which you're compelled to spend every free moment pursuing. We kept looking and looking, every weekend, most weeknights, for six months. This crusade ate away at a sense of entitlement I didn't even know I possessed. Isn't one of the privileges conferred upon the privileged the ability to buy a small house in a neighbourhood in which you'd want to live?

Thank you for saying what I was thinking.

Toronto Life Regrets The Error

2010-12-06T21:02:00.001-05:00

"For one thing, Toronto may have dodged a bullet: Smitherman was a lousy candidate who never managed to define what he believed in ... He struck me as nervous and shifty -- not a natural leader."
-- Toronto Life, Editor's Letter by Sarah Fulford, January 2011

"[T]he city is ready to bust out of its self-stifling punctiliousness … We need a brash mayor who will throw some weight around. Which brings us to George Smitherman, the oddsmakers’ favourite in the October 25 mayoral election … Smitherman is staking his campaign on the issue of job creation, while his rivals are proposing no end of brazen ideas—from subway networks to privatizations to casinos—in an effort to be what he already is: larger than life.

The Conservative strategist Jaime Watt—one of the architects of the Harris Conservatives’ two majority election victories and a partner with Navigator, the PR firm, and now one of the key players on Smitherman’s campaign team—once said that the key to image management isn’t to make a politician into someone he’s not, but to convince voters that a particular politician, warts and all, is the person they want to elect for the job at hand. And George Smitherman is looking more and more like the proverbial right guy in the right place at the right time."

-- Toronto Life, 50 Reasons to Love Toronto, Philip Preville, June 2010

Funny Person Jessica Holmes Writes Funny Book

2010-12-06T13:03:00.001-05:00

Funny Ladies

Canadian Jessica Holmes is the latest female comedian to trade stage for page

Chatelaine | October 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In January 2009, exactly two years after Vanity Fair claimed women aren’t as funny as men, Tina Fey got revenge by appearing on the magazine’s cover. Not only are female comics as hilarious as their male counterparts, they are also now storming bestseller lists as well as sitcoms and stages. And their rising popularity means female funnybooks are now being taken very seriously (so to speak) by publishers and readers alike.

Royal Canadian Air Farce’s Jessica Holmes is the latest comedian to humorously over-share with her new memoir, I Love Your Laugh: Finding the Light in My Screwball Life. Her book combines family zaniness (her father’s predilection for buying crappy brown cars) with an emotionally revealing look at various professional and personal humiliations (such as going to a drugstore to return a box of condoms during the height of her Air Farce fame).

Holmes’ philosophy is that you cannot die from embarrassment — it will only make you stronger (and funnier): “Whatever you experience at the time, hopefully in the end it’s something you can laugh about.”

Today Holmes has plenty of company on bookstore shelves, including The Daily Show’s Samantha Bee (I Know I Am, But What Are You?) and Sarah Silverman (The Bedwetter). But this wasn’t the case when she began the book. “It was only after I started writing that Kathy Griffin’s book came out,” Holmes explains. “I thought about studying the technique for writing a book, but in the end I just decided to literally put what was in my brain down on paper.”

While Holmes jokes that “books don’t pay the mortgage” because most authors earn “six cents an hour,” the quip isn’t entirely accurate. In October 2008, Tina Fey signed a book contract worth an estimated $5 million — proving that female punch lines can be very good for a publisher’s bottom line.

(Chatelaine article link).

Steve Martin Name Checks Deborah Solomon In My Chatelaine Interview

2010-12-04T20:28:00.002-05:00

I interviewed Steve Martin for Chatelaine back in September and he mentioned Deborah Solomon as an art writer he admires. Given the recent hullabaloo about Martin's recent appearance at the 92nd Street Y (where he was unsuccessfully interviewed by Ms. Solomon), I thought I'd post it here. I should also mention that, like Solomon's Q&As in the NYTM, my interview with Martin was condensed and edited.

All About Steve

We talked to the master comedian, actor and banjo player about his love of writing and his new novel, An Object of Beauty

Chatelaine | December 2010 | Ryan Bigge

From interviewmagazine.com culture blog

Steve Martin remains best known for his comedy – be it as an Academy Awards co-host, Tina Fey’s one-time love interest on 30 Rock, doting boyfriend to Meryl Streep in It’s Complicated or, of course, his wild and crazy stand-up days. But over the past 10 years he has quietly developed a respectable career as a man of letters. Along with a couple of novellas, 2001’s Shopgirl (about a sad young woman selling gloves at Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills) and 2003’s The Pleasure of My Company (about a young man with obsessive-compulsive disorder) Martin has also written the memoir Born Standing Up (2007), which details how he conquered the stand-up world before quitting forever in 1981 to focus on feature films. The newest addition to Martin’s book list is An Object of Beauty, his first full-length novel. “I wanted to blend art history with a novel,” Martin explains. “And making the narrator an art writer gave me an excuse to recall what I thought were some fascinating historical stories about the art world.”

Spanning 18 years, An Object of Beauty is a dark and wry look at the 1990s boom and eventual bust of the contemporary art market in New York. The novel follows the exploits of a young, stylish and ambitious woman named Lacey Yeager who starts as an underling at Sotheby’s auction house and eventually opens her own gallery in Chelsea. Along the way she breaks a variety of hearts, inflicting multiple fractures on an art-collecting playboy named Patrice Claire. Narrated by Daniel Chester French Franks (an art writer and friend of Lacey), An Object of Beauty is filled with sharp and witty observations about fashion, Manhattan rituals and the culture of money. And, as an added bonus, the novel includes various colour reproductions of famous artworks (including pieces by Andy Warhol and Ed Ruscha), providing Martin with an opportunity to dabble as a curator.

Despite recently turning 65, Martin has no desire to slow down. “I don’t even know what that means,” he says. “Sometimes for me, retiring is sitting down to write a book and doing nothing else. But in a sense I am retired since I don’t have a job.” Chatelaine spoke with Martin by telephone from his New York home about his favourite kinds of literary characters, his brand-new Twitter account and the financial (and artistic) genius of Andy Warhol.

What inspired An Object of Beauty?

I have been fascinated with art and the art world and how they overlap my whole life. I’ve also been fascinated with a certain type of character that exists in both men and women: the narcissistic personality or sociopath, although I don’t like to use those terms because I think they ruin books. I’ve seen these characters come and go throughout my life and since I’m a writer, I’m always looking for things to write about.

Why did you decide to include colour reproductions, like Pablo Picasso’s Woman with Pears and Willem de Koonig’s Woman I, in your book?

I found myself describing the pictures – and I really enjoyed writing those descriptions – and I suddenly thought “Why not create an illustrated novel?” Which, by the way, is not unique: they used to do woodcuts in novels. It felt interesting to have colour photographs of paintings in a novel. I hope the images help the description’s poetry rather than inhibit them.

An Object of Beauty includes a lot of references to Andy Warhol: There’s an image of his Marilyn silkscreen; the character Lacey Yeager buys a Warhol and you describe the work of Picasso and Warhol as equivalent “objects of beauty.” What’s so appealing about Warhol?

Not only is Warhol important as an artist, like Roy Lichtenstein, he was also a financial wonder during the period of time I describe in the novel. He was really leading the way in terms of the art world and the auction houses. As I explain in the book, his phenomenal prices were actually making work by new artists more valuable.

You’ve written two novellas before, but this book is your first full-length novel. Did you experience any significant challenges while writing the longer work?

I tend to write terse. And I knew I wanted to write a longer book. So I wrote about a longer period of time. Both Shopgirl and The Pleasure of my Company were about events that occurred over about two years. This book takes place over 18 years. So that was one way I tricked myself into writing a longer book.

You’ve written a number of screenplays, including L.A. Story and Roxanne. Do you approach fiction and screenplays differently?

Yes, completely different. A screenplay is an interface that is not an end in itself. It’s almost a shorthand or a guide, while a book is the final thing. You craft every sentence. You let it stew. You put it down for three months. You pick it back up. You read it aloud to yourself. I read it to my dog. I worry over individual choices of words for weeks.

Who are some of your favourite authors?

In terms of this book, I would say my favourite authors are art writers. Adam Gopnik – but he hasn’t written about art lately. Peter Schjeldahl. John Richardson. And Deborah Solomon, who only writes sporadically about art. She wrote the Joseph Cornell biography and is working on biography of Norman Rockwell.

Is there something you’re reading right now that you’re exciting about?

Not right now because I’m overwhelmed. But I do recommend the John Richardson biography of Picasso.

What projects do you have coming up next?

I’m working on another bluegrass-banjo album that will be out in February. It’s called Rare Bird Alert. And I have a movie coming out next year that I’m quite proud of called The Big Year starring Owen Wilson and Jack Black.

And you also recently joined Twitter. Last week you wrote “Reading other people’s Tweets, I think I’m getting the hang of it now. 9:23am: cleaning toenails.”

Yes. I do jokes. I don’t do personal stuff. I’m not sure how long it will last. I’m just experimenting. But it’s fun.

SMS MLS = Stned Dk Hdwd Thruout

2010-12-04T13:15:00.000-05:00

The recent downturn in the real estate market apparently means that agents can no longer afford to use vowels.

Revenge of SuperFreakonomics in 3-D!

2010-11-09T10:12:00.001-05:00

This a funny chart I did for the current (December) issue of ROB magazine, featuring a series of proposed films based on business books. Prepare to LOL.

Linky link

Unsubtle Upsell Via Amazon.ca

2010-10-16T16:11:00.002-04:00

I understand I'm being upsold, but do you really have to be so blunt about it?

Sharrow Minded: The Lose-Lose Compromise of Toronto Bike Lanes

2010-10-13T13:34:00.000-04:00

I'm happy to report a bit of good news has occurred since I got all whiny about sharrows in the current issue of Spacing -- Bixi Toronto now has over 800 members signed up. (When my article went to press there were only 400). That's obviously very encouraging. (I should note that despite already owning a bike, I've signed up for Bixi. You should too.)

To celebrate, I'm posting the aforementioned article on my blog. I've also included two photos of a bike lane protest intervention at Harbord and Borden that I'm rather fond of.

Sharrow Minded

The large ebbs and little flows of bike culture in Toronto

Spacing | Fall 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In the spring of this year, sharrows appeared on College Street west of Manning. Neither a type of bird nor a new venereal disease, sharrows consist of a bike icon and two chevrons (arrow thingies) and are short for “shared lane pavement marking.” The first word of that phrase is clearly the most crucial, since “share” appears no less than nine times in the City of Toronto’s PDF explanation. The intent of sharrows is to remind drivers that cyclists also belong on the road, and are being tried on a few major downtown streets where it’s not possible to build a proper bike lane.

But the sharing message is clearly not being universally heard; this past summer, campaign vehicles belonging to both Joe Pantalone (a Smart car) and Rob Ford (a motorhome) were photographed parked in bike lanes. These incidents served as a reminders that Toronto cycling lanes continue to be treated as though they were invisible. If drivers refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the bicycle, then peaceful co-existence through sharrows is impossible, no matter how many times a municipal bureaucrat tells us that sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing, sharing the road is right thing to do.

The best description of the problem comes courtesy of Spacing editor Shawn Micallef, who wrote in a March 2010 column in Eye Weekly that “Toronto is in the weird in-between space of being almost a full-on alpha city, embracing all its big-cityness, and just another second-tier city in the eastern part of North America.” In alpha cities like New York, driving is awful, while in second-tier cities, driving is still relatively pleasant. As Micallef concludes, “we’re in that middle zone of cityness: though it can be hard to drive here, the city’s transit and cycling infrastructures haven’t caught up to make not-driving a completely viable option for everybody.”

This in-between state helps explain the lose-lose political compromise of the sharrows and the defeat of the University bike lane trial in early 2010. Without realistic methods of alternative transportation, who can blame drivers for thinking they still deserve to own the road? Study after study demonstrates that creating a safe and inviting cycling infrastructure requires protected bike lanes that form a continuous grid. Making this happen, however, will require more than the benign neglect of the David Miller era – a mayor who prided himself on appearing to promote cycling. One can only imagine what a mayor actively hostile toward cyclists will accomplish in four years.

By not delivering on the ten-year cycling plan created in 2001 that promised 1,000 km of bike route (we got less than half instead), Miller has provided cycling opponents with a legitimate opportunity to backpedal on bike lanes. Certainly when compared with 2005, when only 1 km worth of bike lane was built, David Miller’s second term in office has provided the appearance of momentum. There were 34.9 km of bike lane created in 2008, 13 km in 2009, and 2010 promises and additional 5 km of lanes, along with 7.1 km of sharrows. Which makes this momentum illusionary, akin to someone working up a sweat on a stationary bicycle.

Granted, there have been some victories including the formation and continued growth of the Toronto Cyclists Union, secure bike lockers at Union Station the bittersweet success of the Jarvis street makeover; and the 2.1 magnificent kilometers that comprise the West Toronto RailPath. According to a January 2010 City of Toronto Cycling Survey, there has been a 6% increase in the number of cyclists in Toronto over the last decade (from 48% to 54%). However, “when asked to rate the quality of cycling routes and facilities in the city today, scores are the same, or in some cases, directionally lower than there were reported 10 years ago.”

This fall's launch of the Bixi bike program in Toronto will serve as an unofficial referendum on whether or not cycling is considered to be a safe and mainstream method of transportation. If Bixi fails to get 1,000 subscribers before the November 30 deadline the initiative will be cancelled (as this went to press nearly 500 people had signed up since Bixi launched on July 28). And who can blame people for not signing up for a bike share program in a city where cycling can be as aggravating as driving or public transit? (The 2009 Cycling Survey notes that “only one-third of cyclists say they are comfortable biking on major roads without bike lanes.”) David Miller proudly promoting Bixi without providing an adequate bike grid is putting the car(t) before the bike.

Bike lanes might seem like a minor issue given the various challenges the city faces, but our underperforming cycling grid is one of the reasons that Toronto has never appeared in Monocle’s Top 25 Liveable Cities index. (Montreal and Vancouver, meanwhile, both have.) While Monocle is guilty of promoting expensive lifestyle consumerism for global elites, it treats public transportation with the seriousness it deserves. As editor-in-chief Tyler Brule explained to PSFK.com in June of this year, Copenhagen ranks highly because you can take a train from the airport to downtown “and then you can immediately get on a bicycle and never have to deal with a car ever again. That’s why it does well.”

Toronto politicians and cyclists need to be more aggressive about the future of spokes on pavement. Instead of looking at cycling developments on a year-by-year basis, it might be more effective (if not more depressing) to consider the long-term picture. In the spring of this year a small photocopied letter to the editor of the Toronto Star appeared on various Toronto street poles. Titled “Real Bike Lanes Are Long Overdue!” it began by asking “What good is a bicycle lane if cars are allowed to park in it? The bicycle lanes of Toronto are an insult to cyclists. At best, they are ornamental.” The letter writer, Noa Stroyman, goes on to note that “The roughest pavement is always that which is in the bike lanes” and argues for protected, European-style bike lanes “as wide as a car lane, physically divided from the car lanes by a curb or poles.”

This combination wish- and shit-list is nothing new. Which was exactly the point the person who stapled this photocopy everywhere was trying to make. The letter was published on Sunday, March 12, 1995. Fifteen years later, the same problems remain. The number of kilometers of bike lane in Toronto is a meaningless metric until the psychology of cycling changes.

Becoming an alpha city, or even a world-class city requires multiple transportation options. Remaining a second-tier city means saying “no” to anything that might challenge the dominance of the automobile. By that measure, Toronto remains a sharrow-minded, second-tier city.

Bike Lanes As Politicized As Abortion According to Rob Ford

2010-10-11T10:29:00.002-04:00

I was reading my brand new copy of dandyhorse yesterday, which features profiles of various cyclists and/or mayoral candidates. I could not help but choke on the final Q&A from the Rob Ford profile:

What about the Toronto Bike Plan?
The problem with bicycles is that they have become a political issue -- saying I'll put in bike lanes gets the support of cyclists, but the rest of the voters will hate me. The debate has become equivalent to abortion -- whatever I say, someone will be angry.

No further comment required.

Your Content Strategy Homework For This Week’s Toronto CS Meetup

2010-09-13T09:28:00.006-04:00

In the spirit of the new school year, the Toronto Content Strategy Meetup has decided to assign a bit of homework for the 6:30pm, Thursday September 16 edition.

If you’re interested in attending (and why wouldn’t you be?) please listen (or watch) this recent one hour pod- / videocast of content strategy guru Kristina Halverson being interviewed by User Interface Engineering CEO Jared Spool.

We’ll drink a few beers and debate a few ideas and issues raised during the interview, including:

1) When should you consider hiring an SEO expert instead of a content strategist (and vice-versa?)

2) How critical are content strategy success stories for building momentum within the discipline and how can they best be achieved?

3) Under what circumstances can/should information architecture and content strategy be handled by the same person?

4) What is the best way to measure the overall effectiveness of content strategy for clients?

See you all there!

The Scariest Paragraph About Freelancing I Have Ever Read

2010-09-03T13:35:00.001-04:00

Freelancing is that remarkable stretch from February to December 2009, where I wrote entire features… using only my phone, a first-generation iPhone jailbroken for T-mobile, bought for $100 from a friend at Mac Week. That was because my computer had broken and I couldn't afford a replacement.

(Richard Morgan's ghost story for The Awl).

Elizabeth Spiers on Digital Mistakes

2010-08-31T10:35:00.000-04:00

Q: How do traditional mainstream get digital products wrong?
A: (I gave a talk about this a couple of weeks ago, so from my notes:) They don't understand their audiences because they're not used to using data aggressively.
They view their sites as mere brand extensions and fail to treat them as stand-alone media properties.
They don't understand usability and make their sites pretty but impossible to navigate, and then naively think they'll educate their users to find their content.
They don't understand Web metabolism and produce content that's stale.
They think Web content is inherently inferior when it's merely different, and create inferior Web products as a result then wonder why they're not succeeding.
They fail to monetize their products properly, then underpay talent and wonder why they can't recruit good writers.

--Elizabeth Spiers

Algorithmic Niche Culture is Killing the Romance: Toronto Star Reprint

2010-08-30T13:57:00.001-04:00

Books are losing out to the algorithms of love

The mathematics of identifying niche behaviour and interests promises to bring like-minded people together. But it may be tearing society apart

Toronto Star | August 27, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Last month in Slate.com, Mark Oppenheimer wrote about the latest trauma inflicted by the e-book revolution. It wasn’t lower prices turning novelists into ever more wretched paupers or copyright quandaries that make it impossible to share your favourite e-book with friends. No, the problem for Oppenheimer was that e-book readers make it impossible for randy bibliophiles to judge prospective lovers by their collection of book covers.

“As the Kindle and Nook march on, people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view,” writes Oppenheimer. “We’ll go into people’s houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we’ll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.”

His panic turned out to be premature, however. Two days before Oppenheimer published his lament, alikewise.com launched “a dating site that allows you to find people based on their book tastes.” Sadly, alikewise.com is not an anomaly, as specialty dating services are becoming increasingly common — Apple cult members have Cupidtino.com, indie rock fans visit Tastebuds.fm and followers of Ayn Rand’s Objectivism have theatlasphere.com. And while such sites should eventually serve to cull their respective populations through vicious inbreeding, they reflect a larger problem — the triumph of algorithmic niche culture.

As Devin Leonard explains in the August issue of Wired, Hunch.com is trying to personalize the Internet by soliciting people’s opinions, beliefs and tastes and then mining the data “for correlations that provide precisely tailored recommendations for each user.” Hunch.com is not alone, with similar services provided by GetGlue.com. The interest in these sites are obvious — there’s big money in artificial serendipity. In September of 2009, Netflix awarded a $1 million prize to a team of statisticians and computer engineers who created movie rental recommendation software that was 10 per cent more accurate.

The problem isn’t that the educated guesses of Netflix or Hunch.com are inaccurate — quite the opposite. But the mathematics behind the niche-ification of everything threatens to destroy the very fabric of democratic society. Or, at the very least, create some very nasty blog postings.

In a May article in The New York Review of Books about the Tea Party movement and the “politics of the libertarian mob,” Mark Lilla refers to Bill Bishop’s 2009 book The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart. As Lilla notes, “People with higher degrees who care about food and wine, support gay rights, and want few children but good Internet connections have been gravitating to urban centres on the two coasts, while churchgoing families that drive everywhere, socialize with relatives, and send their kids to state universities have been heading to the growing exurbs of the southern and mountain states.” This, as you can imagine, causes problems for politicians trying to find consensus among an increasingly polarized electorate.

But according to Adam Sternbergh, things are not entirely bleak. In the January 2010 issue of New York magazine, he explained that we are still united by events like Avatar and the launch of the iPad, but the binding mechanism is now pre-announcement buzz and speculation. “Once we experience something en masse — or even as we experience it — we splinter off to our myriad forums to broadcast our personal takes.”

Another reason to avoid complete despair is that even a NASA supercomputer is unable to persuade us to enjoy certain algorithmically generated suggestions. Writing in the New York Times Magazine last October, Rob Walker explained how the Internet radio service Pandora was slicing songs into their atomic parts of enjoyability to better determine listener matches. The problems Pandora has encountered (music fans made irate by suggestions such as Celine Dion or Journey) will be familiar to anyone ever set up on a blind date by friends.

Which highlights the biggest blind spot of the algorithmic niche — its target audience is irrational, unpredictable, contradictory human beings. And not taking this into account appears to be the largest predictive failure of them all. If we can’t trust Pandora to pick a great song, it’s unlikely that alikewise.com can help us locate a soulmate.

As is so often the case, a popular sitcom provides necessary wisdom and perspective. During the first season of Modern Family, a recently remarried Jay explains to his 30-something son Mitchell that opposites not only do, but should, attract. “We’re both with people different from us and that’s gonna create stuff,” notes Jay. “But you want different. Your mom and I were perfect on paper and you know how that ended.”

It’s good advice, although undercut slightly by the episode’s conclusion, wherein Jay’s wife Gloria mistakenly believes her husband is about to marry a life-sized statue of a dog butler named Barkley. Then again, love is also blind. Which means it doesn’t matter if the boy or girl sitting across from you in the subway is reading Stieg Larsson or Gary Shteyngart. As long as they’re cute (and hate Journey) the complex and irrational numbers that comprise the algebra of love will take care of the rest.

--------

(Tstar link).

Toronto Content Strategy Group Meeting This Thursday

2010-08-17T10:08:00.018-04:00

As readers may or may not have noticed in the About Me section of my blog, I now offer content strategy services, along with cultural journalism and editing. (I also make and drink classic cocktails, but that’s less relevant to my professional aspirations).

Anyway, James Houston (@jimmy2bills ) has been kind enough to organize a Toronto Content Strategy Group. We meet the third Thursday of every month.

The next meeting is this Thursday, August 19, 2010 starting at 6pm at the Rivoli, upstairs. I’ve attended the last two meetings, and they’ve been fun and engaging. (Meetup details here).

The idea is to debate and define best practices for the developing discipline of Content Strategy through short, informal presentations and beer-fueled discussions. (We also hope to bring in guest speakers at some point this spring.)

Because there is a lot of overlap between web editors, information architects, copywriters and other content people, the field of CS attracts a diverse bunch, producing lively conversations about the current role and future evolution of the discipline. In short, there is more and more content out there on the web, and producing valuable words that are easily findable is going to be increasingly important over the next five years and beyond.

For those who have heard the term Content Strategy being tossed around, but aren’t 100 percent sure what it’s all about, I recommend the following:

* Excellent primer on CS

* CS guru Kristina Halvorson makes her case for CS

* Jeffrey MacIntyre on why CS matters
* Great list of CS resources

* #contentstrategy hashtag

Greedy Little Eyes by Billie Livingston (Book Review Reprint)

2010-08-13T16:41:00.000-04:00

Greedy Little Eyes: Stories of observance

A scavenger of the wistful and generous sort

Toronto Star | August 7, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In a recent article for Slate, Jessica Winter discussed how writer-director Noah Baumbach (Greenberg; The Squid and the Whale) takes great pleasure in populating his films with narcissists and misanthropes.

As if that were not enough, many of these disagreeable characters also have greedy little eyes, since, as Winter argues, “A Baumbach protagonist wears his pretensions like armor, but the pose of detachment is also the stance of the fiction writer or critic (incidentally, Baumbach is the son of both), who benefits from a ruthless facility for treating events and people as potential content to be appropriated or evaluated.”

In her new collection of short stories, Greedy Little Eyes, Billie Livingston, or rather one of her protagonists (a freelance magazine journalist named Lila), makes a similar observation in “Candy From a Stranger’s Mouth.” As Lila studies two adulterous lovers in a restaurant, she notes that “I have been accused, in the past, of sitting back, busily thinking up pithy descriptors that I might later use in an article. To some people this is the behaviour of a scavenger.”

Livingston might be a scavenger, but she does not have a ruthless facility. Her eyes are greedy but her stories are generous and wistful as they borrow and return delicate family secrets without breaking them. While her stories are also filled with narcissists and misanthropes, they are almost always antagonists, trying to ruin or frustrate the ambitions of dependable, reliable, plodding heroines: An unappreciated woman who works as an assistant manager at a music store. A woman stuck running a paper store out of family obligation. A librarian with an overprotective father who’s trying to ruin her marriage. All deserve better.

There are, however, moments of redemption and revenge, such as the arrest of a strange attacker in “Make Yourself Feel Better” and the surreal, gorgeous violence of “Did You Grow Up with Money?”

While much of Livingston’s material is relevant and contemporary (an affair revealed by Facebook snooping; Robert Pickton’s pig farm) a few stories feel dusty, such as a fictional retelling of Vancouver performance artist Rick Gibson’s unsuccessful attempt to drop a 25-kg block of concrete onto a rat named Sniffy in 1990. This might be personal bias, but as an ex-Vancouverite who survived the wackadoodle reign of Socred premier Bill Vander Zalm (1986-1991), I feel that no fiction should ever try and compete with the off-kilter reality of that era.

Then again, the little eyes of book reviewers are often jaded. Never satisfied, always making further demands from the authors they are asked to evaluate. Livingston offers many memorable sentences: “The man on the ground struggles with the vagueness of a nature-show cheetah just shot with tranquilizer.” “To my ears the words had a liquid quality, as if they’d been left out in the rain.” “Something in him looked refurbished to me.”

But her default prose style is dependable and unflashy, just like her heroines. I don’t wish to sound greedy (or worse, display a ruthless facility for evaluation), but this collection could use at least another dozen sparkly moments of wordplay. Such prosaic lives certainly deserve to be sprinkled with a bit more magic of the ordinary.

------

(Tstar link).

Exposed! Philip Carr-Gomm's A Brief History of Nakedness

2010-08-09T09:20:00.001-04:00

Picture and a thousand words: Philip Carr-Gomm's A Brief History of Nakedness
Toronto Star | August 8, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Reaktion Books

It’s safe to say that Philip Carr-Gomm is the rare man of letters who would admit to reading Playboy for the centrefolds, rather than the articles. His new book, A Brief History of Nakedness, is exactly what it sounds like, complete with numerous photographs such as the one seen above. But rather than providing flimsy justifications for his ogling, the book instead offers a sustained mediation on the spiritual, cultural and political implications of being naked in public.

The 50 peaceful women seen here are part of Baring Witness, a group of Iraq war protesters who posed nude in West Marin County, California, in November of 2002. As Carr-Gomm argues, “Nakedness makes a human being particularly vulnerable but in certain circumstances strangely powerful, which is why it has become so popular as a vehicle for political protest.” According to Carr-Gomm, by disrobing, protestors demonstrate that they are both fearless and have nothing to hide.

At least, that’s the ideal situation. Sometimes the political intentions of being in the buff can get lost, as happened during the recent expressions of G20 activism. “There’s a naked guy at Queen and Peter,” @one_more_night tweeted. “I think he’s protesting clothes.”

For a cold, northern country, there’s a surprising amount of clothing animosity in Canada. (Our country’s first nudist club formed in 1918, while it took until 1929 for the United States to be able to say the same.) In his book, Carr-Gomm mentions the Toronto-based Naked News (“the program with nothing to hide”), Montreal-born artist Cosimo Cavallaro (who, in 2005, created a chocolate sculpture of a nude Christ entitled Sweet Jesus) and the World Naked Bike Ride (created in 2004 by Vancouver’s Conrad Schmidt).

And, of course, the Doukhobors. A radical sect of Ukrainian Christians, the Doukhobors (which translates into “spirit wrestlers”) were considered heretics by the Orthodox Church and generally irritated the Russian government. So in 1899 the Doukhobors were encouraged to move their troublemaking to Canada, where they were promised 65 hectares of free land, a bracing climate, equitable laws, peace and prosperity. More than a third of the population (nearly 8,000) said yes, but by 1903 they were unhappy, and an extremist faction called the Sons of Freedom emerged, inspired by the Quakers and Leo Tolstoy. As Carr-Gomm notes, the Sons of Freedom “decided to mount a sustained campaign of protest against the government, whom they believed had reneged on their promises regarding land rights and were enforcing compulsory education in government schools.”

In May of 1903 over 45 Doukhobors protested by marching naked, were charged with “nudism” and sentenced to jail. Naked skirmishes between the Canadian government and the Doukhobors continued into the 1970s.

The Doukhobors were a rare instance of a religious sect demanding political reform through nudity. But there are plenty of historical examples that demonstrate the more purely spiritual aspects of nudity. And given that Carr-Gomm is the author of six different books with the word “druid” in the title (including In the Grove of the Druids and The Druid Way), it’s unsurprising that the spirituality of being in the buff captured his attention.

Druids performed certain rituals naked, or as they called it, sky-clad. Not that the druids had a monopoly on weirdness. As Carr-Gomm notes in a section about folk-magic: “English customs included sweeping a room naked on Midwinter night to then dream of your future husband, entering a lake or river naked at midnight to discover his face revealed on the surface of the water, and undressing at a crossroads on St. George’s night.” (Presumably, if none of these tactics worked, then your future husband was just not that into you.)

But even some Christians have adopted the pioneering work of Adam and Eve and embraced “naturism.” As Carr-Gomm points out, there are Christian Nudist Convocations along with provocatively titled books such as The Naked Christian: What God Sees When He Looks Right Through Me.

Given the general level of permissiveness toward being starkers, even a family newspaper like the Star can publish the Baring Witness women seen here without having to worry about angry mobs rioting outside 1 Yonge St. (Although the paper would go bankrupt if it was forced to pay $550,000 per nipple, which is the fine that CBS received from the Federal Communications Commission for the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction.) Spencer Tunick has built a career out of his photographs of multitudes of naked people posing in public places. And neither Puppetry of the Penis nor the Canadian version of the television show How To Look Good Naked generated much outrage.

To be shocking now requires “supernakedness,” which is how one reviewer described performance artist Annie Sprinkle’s show A Public Cervix Announcement. (The curious should use their imagination to figure out what supernakedness might entail. Or, failing that, consult Google.) As if to acknowledge that the coyness of the traditional nudie calendar is no longer effective or eye-catching, Eizo, a German medical imaging company, released an x-ray pin-up calendar in June. Each month a woman is posed provocatively, but the only thing visible is skeletal structure and high heels. Truly revealing, but not very sexy.

As Carr-Gomm notes, it seems impossible to believe that back in 1945, the BBC’s guide for comedy writers warned against using the word “naked” as a punchline. Today this prudishness is history. At the very least, it allowed humorist David Sedaris to joke about spending a week at nudist trailer park in his 1997 essay collection Naked. “I’ve noticed that when forced to go into town, the costumed nudists appear ornery and uncomfortable, like cats stuffed into little outfits for the sake of a wacky photograph,” he writes. “They claw at their buttons and zippers, their eyes wild and desperate.”

Which is to say that not every nudist has a political agenda. The Baring Witness women might want peace through nudity, but many others go naked only for peace of mind.

------------

(Tstar link).

Buster Keaton + Digital Antiquing + Isaiah Mustafa = Trend Piece

2010-08-06T13:36:00.001-04:00

The transformations of that Old Spice dude are the real deal
The rousing success of those Old Spice commercials confirms our innate distrust of digital manipulation
Toronto Star | July 30, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In a delightful collision between creaking analogue and shiny digital, Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill Jr. was recently released in Blu-ray format. If this silent comedy from 1928 sounds unfamiliar (or worse, irrelevant), I’m confident that everyone is familiar with at least five seconds of it. Near the end of the film, as Keaton is buffeted by a wind storm, he manages to pause in front of a two-storey house. A moment later, the façade tilts forward and topples, with Keaton spared only because an open window frame corresponds with the spot he’s standing in.

According to the documentary A Hard Act to Follow, the stunt involved 1,000 pounds of wood crashing down around Keaton, making it the ne plus ultra of cinematic verisimilitude. More 80 years later, technology has now allowed us to move so far away from the actual that summer filmgoers willingly embraced the absolute fakeness of a CGI tank (attached to three CGI parachutes) battling two CGI planes in The A-Team.

The good news for those with “reality hunger,” as author David Shields dubbed it in a recent book, is that the backlash has arrived — although, in typically post-modern fashion, it’s a complicated form of revolt. Consumed columnist Rob Walker recently wrote about various options for “digitally antiquing” that add a layer of imperfection to digital sound, film and photographs. As Walker notes, “The unifying theme is the link between the flawed and the interesting. A boringly perfect digital picture of a flower makes no impression. But an equally boring one marred by (digitally recreated) light leaks, exposure mistakes and focus inconsistencies presses the aesthetic button that suggests deeper meaning.”

Walker is not the only person to locate our fatigue with binary manipulation, or at the very least its unyielding precision. In June, anthropologist Grant McCracken wrote about low fidelity culture on his blog CultureBy.com: “In a world of post-mechanical perfection, we love the actual, the manual and the mechanical. It grounds us.” The desire for a touch of humanizing imperfection helps explain the otherwise impossible-to-articulate charm of unevengoogle.com, which is the famous search engine, but, you know, slightly crooked.

Without the excess of digital effects over the last decade, it’s doubtful we’d have much nostalgia for the way things once looked and sounded. The successful reboot of the James Bond franchise courtesy of Casino Royale and A Quantum of Solace was due in large part to the fact that these films avoided the garish CGI of 2002’s Die Another Die. That film, if you recall, featured Timothy Dalton glacier surfing through a computer-rendered backdrop so horrid that even Max Headroom called it cheesy. Casino Royale, meanwhile, contains a mesmerizing 10-minute sequence featuring Daniel Craig chasing a bad guy through a construction site. You can’t get much more lo-fi than that. (As if to solidify his commitment to realism, Craig accidentally sliced the tip off one of his fingers during the filming of Quantum).

The death of manipulation leads inevitably to the recent Old Spice commercials. Despite a slick social media strategy and a smart viral campaign, the television ads pay homage to the decidedly unmodern, over-elaborate contraptions of Rube Goldberg. During a recent appearance on Attack of the Show, ex-NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa explained the secrets behind his second TV commercial for Old Spice (a.k.a. “swan dive”). The commercial was done in one take (not unlike many OK Go videos, another example of contemporary Rube Goldberg-ism) and necessitated a hidden wire and harness. (Buster Keaton would not be amused.) However, Mustafa refused to explain how the final trick (which involved donning a pair of jeans in a hot tub moments before it collapsed) was accomplished.

This was refreshing, because for the first time in a long time, the answer to the question — How Did They Do That? — wasn’t CGI. Instead, it was creative ingenuity applied against the constraints of the physical realm. This makes the line “I’m on a horse” (from the first Old Spice commercial) not only a punch line, but a reminder that Mustafa is really, actually, sitting on a living, breathing horse.

The return of the real has arrived just in time. In a July 12 interview with German photographer Julian Faulhaber for The Morning News, Nozlee Samadzadeh noted that Faulhaber’s images of parking garages and supermarkets under construction look unreal. “What does it mean to say that reality looks Photoshopped?” asks Samadzadeh.

It means it’s time to make Photoshop look more like reality.

------------
(Tstar link).

Taryn Simon Essay Reprint: Photographs That Make the Invisible Visible

2010-08-06T10:55:00.001-04:00

Taryn Simon's photographs of contraband were featured last week in the New York Times Magazine, giving me the perfect excuse to reprint an essay I wrote about her book An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar for the Toronto Star.

A PICTURE AND A THOUSAND WORDS
Taryn Simon is a photographer with the instincts of a journalist who strives to make the invisible visible
Ryan Bigge | Toronto Star | September 30, 2007

In March of 2007 I went on a long-weekend art crawl in New York, organized by Ryerson's School of Image Arts. Partway through my cultural bender, on the fifth floor of the Whitney, I discovered an easy-to-overlook mezzanine, analogous to floor 7 1/2 in Being John Malkovich. There, inside a small, windowless gallery, was a series of photographs by Taryn Simon entitled An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar.

The bunker-like atmosphere was a perfect compliment to the surreptitious nature of the subject matter, which included a huge pallet of uncut $100 bills from the U.S. Treasury, and the locker room in the Plum Island Animal Disease Center in Long Island.

The image seen here was also part of the exhibit, and is included in Simon's new book of the same name. At first glance, the drab, flesh-coloured walls and harsh neon lighting of this hallway are banal, even repellent, the sort of tableau that should have remained hidden. The only nice thing to say is that the bland walls make the zing and pop of Thomas Downing's two paintings that much more dramatic. (Downing was a member of an influential 1960s movement of painters known as the Washington Colour School.)

But there is obviously more going on here, or this would be a picture with only 250 words. What you can't see is the accompanying caption, which explains that this is part of the original headquarters building of the CIA, located in Langley, Va. It turns out that spooks like art.

Simon points out in her caption that the CIA invested heavily in cultural diplomacy during the Cold War, including actively promoting abstract expressionism. As Simon writes, "It is speculated that some of the CIA's involvement in the arts was designed to counter Soviet Communism by helping to popularize what it considered pro-American thought and aesthetic sensibilities."

Good teachers are said to make the invisible visible. That is, they find ways of converting abstract concepts into concrete examples so that the light bulb in our head switches on. Simon also makes the invisible visible, but in a more literal manner.

Other images from Hidden include a hibernating black bear, a flask of live HIV, the headquarters of the KKK, a cage on death row, a jury simulation room, and a contraband table at JFK airport filled with 48 hours worth of confiscated foodstuff (including, but not limited to, African cane rats and jackfruit seeds).

Like the mezzanine gallery in the Whitney, the cover of Hidden reinforces the theme of secrecy. Made to resemble a bound Ph.D. dissertation, the book features its title stamped with thin, gold-foil lettering, and the plain grey and black cloth cover offers no hints as to the images sequestered inside.

Although the locations and items in Simon's book are furtive and clandestine, her style of documentation is anything but. As Salman Rushdie writes in the book's introduction, "Simon's is not the customary aesthetic of reportage - the shaky hand-held camera, the grainy monochrome film of the 'real.'"

Instead, her images are "suffused with light, captured with a bright, hyper-realist, high-definition clarity that gives a kind of star status to these hidden worlds." Her captions, meanwhile, are detached, dry journalese. Still, Simon is not a dour tour guide. Her book includes some visual puns, like a Braille edition of Playboy, the only version of the magazine that finally makes true the claim "I only read it for the articles."

At the same time, Simon is not afraid to visit uncomfortable places, such as the University of Tennessee's Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, a 6.5-hectare plot filled with 75 dead bodies (legally obtained) that are used to determine decomposition patterns.

As this hallway photograph would suggest, the images in Hidden require a two-part viewing process. An initial impression is formed through viewing the image, followed by a reappraisal after reading the caption. Unlike many artists, Simon tends to generate shock and surprise through textual revelations rather than through her subject matter. Even the Forensic Anthropology photograph is not lurid or true-crime but almost painterly in composition, taken from a discrete distance, and concealing as much as it shows.

It is only after the viewer has digested both image and caption that the formal aspects of the photograph can be appreciated. Simon's work demonstrates that the 1,000 words contained inside a photograph sometimes require an equal number of explanatory words before the image can make its content seen and heard.

While Simon captures her targets from the viewpoint of an artist, the project required her to think like an investigative journalist. Simon worked methodically to gain access over the four years the project required, with some shoots requiring a year of negotiation. As Rushdie writes, "Her powers of persuasion are at least the equal of her camera skills." Thanks to her patience, we have been granted a backstage pass into alternate worlds, infrastructures and subcultures, all of which were selected by Simon at random.

Rushdie believes that these people, places and things constitute a "phantom world," and professes a mixture of envy and gratitude for being allowed to glimpse them. Given the power and importance of this phantom world, Rushdie calls into question the supremacy of the visible world. Perhaps the real arc of our lives is being plotted in the art-lined corridors of the CIA, rather than in legislatures, town halls and boardrooms.

"Democracy needs visibility, accountability, light," Rushdie argues. "It is in the unseen darkness that unsavoury things huddle and grow.” Hidden and unfamiliar, our collective secrets, like photographs, can only be exposed through the judicious application of light.

Gentrification! in Kensington Market

2010-07-20T22:25:00.006-04:00

The Domestication of Gentrification
A Toronto-based art collective has developed Gentrification: The Game!, a wild mix of live-action Monopoly and performance art.
Toronto Star | July 11, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

In the past 10 years, the mechanics of gentrification have become so predictable and codified that the once-messy process of urban renewal is now as tidy and rule-based as a game of Risk or Mouse Trap.

Which helps explain why the Toronto-based artist collective Atmosphere Industries (www.atmosphereindustries.com) debuted Gentrification: The Game! at the Come Out & Play Festival in Brooklyn, N.Y., last month.

The game, created by Internet researcher Kate Raynes-Goldie, game enthusiast David Fono, architect Alex Raynes-Goldie and educational technologist Luke Walker, pits teams of “developers” against “locals” in a competition designed to contrast corporate and community-based approaches to urban development.

Fono describes the game as a mixture of live-action Monopoly and performance art, with Kate Raynes-Goldie amending that tagline to include “random acts of kindness plus public space hacking.”

But Fono has an even simpler explanation: “We’re interested in hipsters. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Specifically how they think,” adds Walker, laughing.

During the game, participating hipsters “purchase” properties by photographing them. These businesses are then “improved” through various tactics including “Slightly Creepy But Wise Neighbourhood Guy Gives Impassioned, Poetic Speech” (that would be a “locals” trick) or “Hired Goons” (that would be a “developer” trick).

Anyone wandering through Park Slope on the afternoon of June 5 would have seen 30 Brooklynites scrambling to hand out flowers and organize spontaneous parades (with banners that read “Happy Neighbour Day!”)

Gentrification is part of a larger trend in location-based entertainment that has been variously described as interactive theatre, transmedia and alternate reality/locative/pervasive gaming. But whatever label Gentrification is given, it’s a winner, receiving Best Use of Technology and Best in Fest at the recent Come Out & Play Festival. These accolades helped convince the Hide and Seek Festival to invite Atmosphere Industries to replay the game in London’s South Bank neighbourhood today.

That the game has been successfully exported to other countries is proof not only of the universal nature of gentrification, but the fact that Gentrification’s gameplay can be absorbed quickly and is geographically flexible. And it turns out that the most nerve-racking aspect of organizing the game is not finding participants but trying to cross the U.S. border with a bag full of bells, noisemakers and party hats, along with a dozen protest signs with slogans like “Down With Frowns.”

Now the four are hoping that Toronto will serve as the next successful location for Gentrification, which will take place on July 25 as part of Pedestrian Sundays in Kensington Market.

While the group beta-tested Gentrification in Kensington Market in April of this year, the July event will mark its official Canadian debut. And just to be clear, Atmosphere Industries is not trying to scrub Kensington clean of its gritty, ramshackle charm. “We like it the way it is,” says Kate Raynes-Goldie. “We don’t want there to be a Starbucks there.”

But Fono acknowledges that the future of Kensington is precarious, since “gentrification is always a looming spectre.” That said, the group admits that Gentrification is designed to be fun, not preachy. “We didn’t really take a stance on whether gentrification is good or bad,” says Alex Raynes-Goldie. “We were pretty snarky toward both sides.”

The four are also realistic enough to acknowledge that a single game isn’t going to change the world. But convincing the public to make better use of their public spaces, and pushing people out of their comfort zones through games like Gentrification, can be good for both the city and the soul.

Or, as Fono puts it, “The larger philosophy behind these sorts of games is turning the everyday world into a playground and an adventure.”

--------------------------------
(Photo courtesy Kate Raynes-Goldie)

(Tstar link).

Bike Makes Right

2010-07-19T22:37:00.002-04:00

The Andre Alexis Hugs And Kisses Continue

2010-07-13T14:21:00.003-04:00

Paul Wells reports from the literary warzone with an entry entitled:

The Smoking Pile of Rubble Where André Alexis Used to Be

It's pretty self-explanatory.

Girl Crazy Reviewed By Non-Crazy Woman

2010-07-13T09:51:00.003-04:00

I concede that Justin has real feelings for Jenna, but ultimately he can't let her go — not because he loves her, but because for a self-identified shrimp like himself she's an intoxicating affirmation of his worth. She's an object, property. The real question isn't whether the book is sexist, though, but if it is aware of its own sexism.

[...]

Girl Crazy does showcase the contrast between Justin's ex (an educated and sexually conservative middle-class woman) and Jenna (a drug-addled, undereducated and marginalized sex worker). However, the novel does nothing with this contrast other than to condemn the former's prudishness and support the sexual openness of the latter.

[...]

Although my immediate instinct is that Jenna is a female chauvinist (she confuses sexual power with real power), still the fact remains that there are plenty of real-life Jennas who are happy to be Jennas. I'm more concerned about the Justins of the world. And I'm most of all concerned that Smith takes the time to point out the "wrong" types of women, yet doesn't truly commit to throwing relief on the less than savory actions of his male characters.

Nice work by Bronwyn Kienapple for eye weekly's bookclub.

Toronto Life Mocks "Over-Aspirational Swagger"

2010-07-12T13:06:00.003-04:00

Ridiculously over-aspirational swagger. This thing has reviews of the Audi R8 V10 (starting at $141,000) and the Porsche 911 Turbo Cabriolet (approximately $200,000). The Porsche can go from 0 to 100 in 3.4 seconds, though presumably—hopefully—not on King Street.

That's from the Toronto Life blog, which today mocks Kingwest magazine for being too much like, well ... at the risk of quoting myself, here are some excerpts from the November 2008 issue of Toronto Life on how to act rich:

Toronto Life: For short-term auto jollies, head to ASG Exotic and Luxury car rentals, where rocket-ready six-speed Porsche 911 Carreras ($550) await open roads. For longer-term indulgences, The Private Collection allows for fractional ownership at an annual cost of $31,000, plus $5,000 initiation fee. That nabs 40 to 60 driving days, depending on dates and models; rides include a 007-worthy Aston Martin DB9 and a Lamborghini Gallardo— a car that begs for endless laps of Yorkville, subtly broadcasting “I’m a human penis!” to the world.

[...]

Toronto Life: Canoe—140 seats, regional Canadian cuisine, dazzling 54th-floor views and similarly lofty menu prices—can be had for a mere $14,000 minimum tab on Saturday (Sunday is half-price, $7,000; a private sommelier is extra). While the elegant, modern space isn’t exactly shabby, guests often customize it: for a wedding, antique bird cages were filled with cupcakes; another affair featured million-dollar diamond displays and accompanying armed guards. Go-for-broke guests even bring in their own entertainment, including Celtic dancers and Chinese dragon dancers.

[...]

Toronto Life: Marco Enterprises co-founders Deborah Zwicker and Marlee Novak have been in the luxury property management biz for 10 years and manage more than 80 ogle-worthy mansions across the city, stocked with such Entourage essentials as indoor pools, tennis courts and private movie theatres. Clients tend toward the famous and fabulous (Bono, Hilary Swank and John Travolta have stayed in furnished homes on such stylish streets as the Bridle Path, Roxborough and Hazelton), but a Hollywood pedigree is not required—just an ability to afford the $10,000 to $50,000 monthly payments. One month minimum rental. 416-410-4123

I suppose if your "over-aspirational swagger" refers to rental items, then you're okay. But if you want to buy those items, then look out, because then you're a wealthy d-bag.

The Warhol Gang Considered

2010-07-12T11:13:00.002-04:00

I just finished reading The Warhol Gang by Peter Darbyshire. I reviewed his novel Please for the Toronto Star a bunch of years ago. Since I liked his book, I eventually decided to email him, and we are now friends. So my opinions about The Warhol Gang might be somewhat compromised. That said, I really liked his new novel.

Some of Darbyshire's literary influences are quite obvious -- Palahniuk's Fight Club, the totalitarian consumer absurdity of George Saunders. There is also an intro/conclusion that echoes The Pornographer's Poem by Michael Turner. But what's curious is that this didn't detract from the novel. I tried to imagine how I might review his book if I didn't know him (obviously an impossible thought exercise), and I suspect that beyond mentioning the fact that his influences are less-than-hidden, I would have gone on to argue that Darbyshire is able to spin something unique from the echoes of others.

And that is way more difficult than it sounds. I've read a lot of books, both fiction and non-fiction, that hover around the same set of issues relating to consumer culture and advertising, and the results are uniformly disappointing, if not awful. (Sorry, I'm not going to name names). Darbyshire is not the first, nor will he be the last person to discuss male consumer alienation, but he has made it new, made it fresh, which is really quite impressive.

There are two other things about his novel I'd like to praise. One is that it was a pleasure to read, which is rare. I read it quickly, and was drawn back to it, rather than having to read it out of duty or obligation.

The second is that Darbyshire has a very minimalist, deadpan style and tone that he is in complete command and control of. I can't remember an instance in the novel where anything -- be it dialogue or description or plot -- seemed discordant or out of place. And that is even tougher than making something new out of male consumer rage. Every word is there for a reason, everything thing is in the right place.

To celebrate the greatness of The Warhol Gang, I'm reprinting my review of Please. Enjoy.

Could we have some more?
Debut novel puts story ahead of pop
We all search for a reason to love
From the Toronto Star, May 11, 2003

Please by Peter Darbyshire, Raincoast, 200 pages, $21.95

Back in 1999, the journal Canadian Fiction published an anthology titled Pop Goes The Story, which included "Still" by Peter Darbyshire. The story mixed a live police manhunt on CNN with a conversation between a nameless narrator and his parents, and featured the following volley of dialogue:

"Any new ladies in your life?" my mother suddenly asked.

"I had a wrong number the other day," I said. "We talked for a while."

"Still" is now a chapter in the Darbyshire novel Please, but the second line now reads, "'No,' I said. 'There's no one.'" Even though the joke was funny, I'm glad it's gone; it was a distracting tangent, appropriate in a short story, not a novel. Its omission proves Darbyshire is willing to sacrifice laughs to ensure strong narrative flow. Not that Please isn't funny -- on the contrary, it's filled with dark, absurd and wry moments of verbal sparring. When the narrator and his girlfriend find themselves working at the same hospital, they soon pretend that a baby behind the maternity ward glass is their own:

"That's not our baby," I said.

"It doesn't know that," Rachel said. "It's still young enough that maybe it'll imprint on us."

"It's not a chicken," I said.

"Wave to baby," she said, "or it'll think you don't care."

Finding something or someone to care about is the main theme of Please. Like Jonathan Goldstein's excellent but overlooked 2001 novel Lenny Bruce Is Dead, Darbyshire is comfortable with moments tender and callous, often abrupt. Both novels omit events and juggle with chronology, forcing the reader to fill in the gaps.

Disorientated by sadness, the narrator of Please still manages to survey scenes like a detective: "The air inside the Happy Harbour was cool and wet. There were five or six men sitting around a table in the middle of the room, with maybe two dozen beer bottles occupying the spaces between them. I didn't recognize any of the labels on the bottles."

Later, the narrator stumbles into the employ of a small-time crook: "We drove to a subdivision in the north end of the city, a quiet and clean place that looked as if it had been abandoned and sterilized at daybreak."

Please claims to be a novel yet resembles a linked story collection. Regardless of labels, the book is a cohesive whole, with the looser format complementing the style, voice and aims. Darbyshire doesn't introduce the marriage and its dissolution until half-way through Please, even though the novel begins with the narrator dealing with divorced life. By the time the relationship failure is detailed, the reader has been shown the pain and confusion wrought.

Please has the texture of a recurring slow-motion underwater dreamworld. Surreal situations are embraced, not repelled. The narrator drifts along and around various situations without haste, since he sees no reason to generate momentum in a life that lacks direction or purpose. Some of the Please episodes -- a more appropriate description than "chapter" -- involve Mormon thieves, a movie director who accidentally kills a man he mistakes for John Cusack and a deadbeat roommate who steals tickets to a Tom Waits concert. The situations and style are modern and urban but Darbyshire doesn't strain to be hip, since love lost is always painful.

In searching for what comes next, the narrator eventually identifies his inaction as the main obstacle. To escape emotional inertia he must react against his environment to generate momentum, either positive or negative. Near the end of the novel, after the narrator has avoided (or tried to avoid) numerous Good Samaritan situations, he notices the house beside him engulfed in flames. "This is our chance to do something right," he says to his friends, instead of "standing around doing nothing again."

Please has modest ambitions, and succeeds admirably. Only one chapter, "Jesus Cured My Herpes," falters, as Darbyshire tries to cram too much into a small space, straining to link planespotting, a faith healer and cows escaping a transport truck. Otherwise, this is an accomplished debut.

"Still" was included in the Pop Goes The Story anthology for a good reason. Please references pop culture, but, thankfully, doesn't rely on it. Clouds are described as moving as if in a "time-lapse movie"; a Jamaican roommate wants "a happy marriage, like on television"; the call centre that temporarily employs the narrator "was the kind of place you see on television." What separates Darbyshire from many of the other writers included in the Pop anthology is his ability to always privilege the story over the pop. Please is the screenplay for a sitcom-length movie that need never be filmed.

Zachariah Wells Says it Much Better Than I Could

2010-07-12T11:05:00.003-04:00

Zachariah Wells, over at CNQ, responds to the Andre Alexis essay that was recently published in the Walrus. I think it adroitly identifies some of the key things that Alexis overlooked in his argument, including:

With Ryan Bigge, the case is weaker yet—no better than speculation, really. The only piece of evidence I know of linking Bigge to Metcalf is Bigge’s publication of a review of a book by Andrew Pyper in Canadian Notes & Queries. While Metcalf has long been on CNQ’s masthead, he is not the reviews editor. That job, at the time of Bigge’s review, belonged to Michael Darling, who also once commissioned me to write a review for CNQ. I subsequently joined CNQ as an editor and replaced Michael as reviews editor when he stepped down in 2006. I have served in that capacity for approximately four years, during which time I have had very limited exchanges with John Metcalf, who has never once told me what to have reviewed, nor whom I should hire to write for CNQ. I therefore think it entirely probable that Ryan Bigge has never had so much as a conversation with Metcalf, never mind the paranoid notion that Bigge is some kind of Metcalf acolyte.

If the Metcalf, Marchand, Starnino or Bigge of your essay appeared in a novel, say, the author of that novel might justly be charged with creating cardboard characters. It strikes me as a singular failure of imagination on your part—a failure made wilful by the suppression of facts—that you can only see, or choose only to portray, one dimension of these rather complex individuals. You speak of “the shallow, self-aggrandizing rhetoric that now passes for criticism.” Do you really want to go there? In this essay? Do you really believe that all Carmine Starnino does is insult poets? Or was this another rhetorical flourish? You leave an informed reader in the position of having to decide if you’re being ignorant or dishonest and neither option, needless to say, redounds to your credit. Is Bigge’s review of Leah McLaren’s book actually representative of his normal reviewing approach? Is this someone who reviews for the sole purpose of avenging hurts suffered? Is he allowed no mulligans on your course?

I believe I deserve a mulligan. I've certainly earned it at this point.

Snark Vs. Legitimate Criticism: Reprint of National Post Article on Canadian Book Reviewers

2010-07-03T09:45:00.005-04:00

On the butcher's block
When it comes to book reviews, nasty is entertaining. But in Canada, you need to know where to look to escape meek and milktoast criticism
National Post | January 3, 2004 | Ryan Bigge

George Orwell, in his 1946 essay "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," describes lit hacks as malnourished and poor; varicose vein sufferers who endure low pay and a surfeit of bad books they must say something good about. "The prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job," he concluded. Fifty-odd years later, this Orwellian nightmare has not substantially altered, save perhaps for the varicose veins.

Not that literary hacks have ceased complaining. Every few years, a plea for improved rigour of craft (and more money) emerges. Andrew Pyper, writing in book industry broadsheet Quill & Quire in December, 1997, argued, "If we want Canadian literature to be taken seriously, we must take Canadian criticism seriously along with it." Sadly, such noble intentions normally melt into the background hum, but lately, literary chatter about weak-kneed book reviews has become unshushable.

Talk began in March of last year when the anti-Snark campaign was launched, courtesy of The Believer, a new San Francisco mag from the McSweeney's literary factory. To summarize co-editor Heidi Julavits's overlong, over-discussed essay: Snark is bad. (See www.believermag.com for the full text.) Clive James eventually rebutted in September in The New York Times, arguing that Snark (i.e. a "killingly negative review" meant to advance the career of the reviewer at the expense of the author) can be good. Laura Miller soon tried to split the difference in the New York Times Book Review and on and on ... the literary equivalent of the old woman who swallowed the fly.

Meanwhile, professional Snarkers like Dale Peck (a target of the Julavits essay) and Tibor Fischer continued to accrue notoriety for suggesting Rick Moody is the worst writer of his generation and Martin Amis is a wanker, respectively. (Peck, an author of four novels no one has read, has made a mini-career of Snark, and Hatchet Jobs, an anthology of his book review bile will be published this spring.)

As a reviewer myself, I think this sustained public debate is easily the most exciting thing to happen to our metier since the London Review of Books started accepting personal ads. (From the November issue: "The greatest bliss a couple can enjoy is to jointly urinate on public displays of poetry.") And by no means is the topic exhausted. Witness Carolyne Van Der Meer's recent essay "What's Wrong with Book Reviewing in Canada?" published in subTerrain, a scrappy lit-mag out of Vancouver. Van Der Meer wants to see harsher criticism of books, but describes well the Catch-22 facing many would-be Snarkers: irritating an influential author can be a terrible career decision, but a dishonest reviewer who waffles or avoids truth telling will also suffer from a lack of respect. Van Der Meer concludes that book reviewers have a moral responsibility to say what they think, or suffer their tortured conscience.

And then there is The Malahat Review, a University of Victoria literary journal whose newest issue is devoted entirely to debating book reviews, functioning as a de facto Royal Commission on the topic. Sadly, The Malahat Review, given a circulation of 1,000, is akin to samizdat -- although this implies illegal political content it does not possess; indeed, it receives grant money from both the Canada and British Columbia Arts Councils. The Malahat might be whispering into the wind, but its lack of profile does not diminish the relevance of the issues raised. The alarmist cover story of the December, 2003 Quill & Quire discusses "aliterates" -- young, intelligent Canadians who are able to read books but choose not to do so, preferring instead the instant gratification of DVDs, Friendster or video games. Such conscientious objectors comprise 40% of the population, and unless this literary allergy is cured quickly, the already woebegone book industry in this country will face further peril.

If book reviews are the lighthouse of literary culture, then it stands to reason they must be entertaining, provocative and accurate. But lodged inside the Canadian debate about tougher reviews is a generational battle being waged over urban versus rural fiction. This skirmish is best described in The Malahat in an e-mail exchange between reviewers Bert Archer and Zsuzsi Gartner, as the latter describes her frustration with well-written but unenjoyable "Canadian horsehair-shirt books, or cod-liver oil books -- both you and the characters suffer and suffer and become better human beings for the experience, or die trying (or of boredom)."

As Archer notes, negative reviews provide an opportunity to discuss what is missing in the CanLit ecosystem: "Calling attention to a book's faults should not be considered courageous; it should be considered the job description." Gartner, meanwhile, believes that "often the best response to a lame book is a murderous silence." Reading these comments, along with the thoughts from the 20 or so other contributors to the issue, it becomes clear that not all Canadian reviewers adhere to our stereotypical meek and milquetoast demeanor. In fact, a few even Snark, if you know where to look. For example:

- "I suspect Mavis Gallant's grocery lists are more elegant than anything Atwood has written."

- "In fairness, Miss Wyoming is often funny. But it would be better -- and funnier -- if the characters didn't melt so quickly when left out in the sun."

- "This is the sort of paragraph that creative writing profs pass over because it would be too damaging to the student writer's ego to point out everything wrong with it."

The final comment, by the way, refers to The Ash Garden, by Dennis Bock, not some turgid Harlequin. All are courtesy of Canadian Notes and Queries (CN&Q), a literary magazine printed twice a year by thePorcupine's Quill (the press responsible for When Words Deny the World, a collection of rabble-rousing essays by Stephen Henighan published last spring which attempted to explain everything that is wrong with CanLit). Unfortunately, if The Malahat Review is samizdat, then CN&Q, with its circulation of 400, represents a particularly well-edited church newsletter.

And not to suggest that Snark fixes everything. Nasty is entertaining (thus solving one problem with many book reviews) and ensures you never look at that book the same way again. But like cinematic violence, it desensitizes. A collection of Dale Peck's eviscerations will no doubt resemble a rote horror film -- we know those nubile teenagers trapped in the woods are going to die, the only question is: pitchfork, chainsaw or scythe?

Girding the Snark debate in Canada is an unspoken lack of confidence about our literary traditions. Rick Moody has not retired, nor will Martin Amis or Margaret Atwood pawn their keyboards because of a few sharp words. We need to learn to utter unpopular opinions more often, otherwise, as Carolyne Van Der Meer argues in subTerrain, "Too many pedestrian books will continue to get published and find their way into literary culture, ultimately muddying the distinction between banal writing and first-rate literature."

According to the Orwell confession, "The best practice, it has always seemed to me, would be simply to ignore the great majority of books and to give very long reviews -- 1,000 words is a bare minimum -- to the few that seem to matter." Given evaporating attention spans, lengthier reviews might sound like a suggestion smuggled out of the sanitarium, but multiple pages are usually necessary to prove the worth (or guilt) of a particular book. Peck spent nearly 6,000 words destroying Rick Moody's memoir The Black Veil and Canadian Notes & Queries offers reviewers 2,000 words-plus to thoroughly castigate (or celebrate) their victim.

Obviously, it is better to give than receive in such circumstances, but for those on the butcher's block, it's worth remembering that in 1886, Edmund Gosse's book From Shakespeare to Pope received a 41-page dismantling in the Quarterly Review courtesy of John Churton Collins, an Oxford-educated critic who spent four months preparing the review-cum-eulogy. Miraculously, Gosse and his reputation survived the Snark, and he continued to publish -- his A Short History of Modern English Literature was reprinted 10 times. Similar success eluded Collins, and he died unhappy, although, one assumes, with a clear conscience.

Snarky Sidebar
Some writers have never been afraid to utter an unpopular opinon. Here are a few samples of some of the most venomous, excerpted from Bad Press: The Worst Critical Reviews Ever!:

As a piece of good taste [his essay on George Sterlin] ranks with that statuette of the Milo Venus with the clock in her stomach.
-- Dorothy Parker on Upton Sinclair in The New Yorker, December, 1927

One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
-- Oscar Wilde on Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop

Indeed the whole of Milton's poem, Paradise Lost, is such barbarous trash, so outrageously offensive to reason and to common sense that one is naturally led to wonder how it can have been tolerated by a people, amongst whom astronomy, navigation, and chemistry are understood.
-- William Cobbett on Paradise Lost, in A Year's Residence in the U.S., 1800

The monster gibbering shrieks, and gnashing imprecations against mankind -- tearing down all shreds of modesty, past all sense of manliness and shame; filthy in word, filthy in thought, furious, raging, obscene.
-- William Makepeace Thackeray on Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver's Travels

This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
-- Dorothy Parker

No one has written worse English than Mr. Hardy in some of his novels -- cumbrous, stilted, ugly, and inexpressive -- yes.
-- Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy, The Moment, 1947

Monsieur Zola is determined to show that if he has not genius he can at least be dull.
-- Oscar Wilde on the French novelist Emile Zola

It may be that this autobiography is set down in sincerity, frankness, and simple effort. It may be, too, that the Statue of Liberty is situated in Lake Ontario.
-- Dorothy Parker on evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson's autobiography, In the Service of the King, in The New Yorker, February, 1928

If the author's object was to realize an American bore so perfectly that most of his readers would feel as if they were suffering from the man himself, he may be congratulated on a masterly performance.
-- The English Review, July, 1928, on The Man Who Knew Coolidge, by Sinclair Lewis

Here is Miss Seward with six tomes of the most disgusting trash, sailing over the Styx with Foolscap over her periwig as complacent as can be -- Of all Bitches dead or alive a scribbling woman is the most canine.
-- Lord Byron on Anna Seward

From Bad Press, by Laura Ward (Copyright) 2002, Baron's

Me Not Book Smart

2010-07-03T09:10:00.003-04:00

Jeet Heer explains my intellectual shortcomings in today's National Post:

I do admire the gallantry with which Alexis defends the literary reputation of Leah McLaren, who was viciously insulted by Bigge. But it should be said that McLaren and Bigge are both creatures of the world of confessional journalism and media hype. They hardly belong in a literary discussion at all.

I should point out that I haven't written anything that could be described as confessional journalism for at least four years, possibly longer. Instead, I've spent the past few years writing think pieces for the Sunday Star's Ideas and Insight section.

Or, to put it another way: I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Either Store or Toe Would Work. But Not Tore.

2010-06-30T13:21:00.003-04:00

Profile of Jason Kieffer, author of The Rabble of Downtown Toronto

2010-06-29T18:28:00.006-04:00

Rabble!
Jason Kieffer's comic book about Toronto's infamous street characters sparks both outrage and defense
Spacing | Summer 2010 | Ryan Bigge

My walking tour of Cabbagetown, courtesy of cartoonist Jason Kieffer, begins at Jet Fuel on Parliament Street. We head west on Carleton, past Chew Chew’s Diner, where 27-year-old Kieffer often meets with fellow scribbler Dave Lapp. At Sherbourne we meander through Allan Gardens. Kieffer points out a park bench where he likes to sit and watch the sideshow of drug addicts, prostitutes and vagrants that provided the inspiration and source material for his recently self-published book, The Rabble of Downtown Toronto.

Despite spending half an hour in prime rabble territory, we fail to spot Crazy Wire Lady, Alex the Joke Teller, Retarded Crackhead or any of the other 37 people included in Kieffer’s handbook of annotated illustrations. And while a street person-free afternoon in Cabbagetown might sound like a good thing to some people, it reflects how the redevelopment of Regent Park is pushing marginalized residents out of the neighbourhood.

“Money is moving in,” explains Kieffer, a shy, thoughtful person who majored in philosophy and art at U of T. “And I don’t like it.” He mentions how a bike cop recently forced a street person to stop standing near a newly opened Starbucks. “The more people with money move in, the more people like that will be displaced.”

In this way, Rabble serves as a census for an often invisible demographic. Kieffer spent two years researching and illustrating the book, which combines clean, bold, black and white line drawings with assorted notes and commentary. (The entry for Norman, a male prostitute, notes that he is “usually picked up by guys driving pick-up trucks” and was “once spotted wearing only a towel.”)

Although not overtly political, Rabble is designed to draw attention to society’s outcasts. “I’m taking all this difficult stuff and forcing it into the reader’s face,” Kieffer explains. But given some politically incorrect territory (i.e. Retarded Crackhead), and seemingly ambiguous attitude toward his subject matter, it may be no surprise that his small, self-published book has generated big controversy, including a rowdy Q&A session during Kieffer’s book launch in April.

“Comics have long had the problem of being misunderstood,” explains Peter Birkemoe, owner of comics store The Beguiling. “And some people get really upset when a comic doesn’t meet their expectations or behave in the way it should.” The reception of The Incident Report, a recent novel by Martha Baillie, reinforces how Kieffer’s medium sent the wrong message. Consisting of semi-humourous memos about Budgie Man, Sheep Woman, Scruffy Chessman and other marginalized patrons of the Allan Gardens Public Library, Baillie’s appropriation can be considered equally controversial, but instead of earning outrage, her novel was long-listed for last year’s Giller Prize.

Still, Kieffer should not be entirely surprised that people have misinterpreted the intent of his book. Back in 2007, he posted two early profiles on BlogTO (Crazy Hand Lady and Rage Man). After a vigorous comment board pile-on among the digital rabble (e.g. “Yeah, there’s nothing more hilarious than mocking someone poor and mentally challenged”) Kieffer was asked to stop contributing to BlogTO.

“I like letting the work speak for itself,” Kieffer says. He carefully considered including an introduction to Rabble that would have explained his good intentions but eventually decided against it. “I’m happy with that decision, even though it leaves me open to attack, because people can assume what they want about me.”

Which is exactly what happened in March 2010 when Joe Fiorito wrote an outraged Toronto Star column about the book. Kieffer was most disappointed by the fact that Fiorito didn’t bother to contact him.

Too bad. Fiorito would have discovered, as I did, that Kieffer is a gentle soul, not a sniggering Vice magazine hipster. His biggest shortcoming, at least according to Birkemoe, is that Kieffer “is lacking in his ability to advocate for his work, which is true of many artists.” During our interview at Jet Fuel, Kieffer shifted uncomfortably and stared at the floor as he tried to explain why his work gets misinterpreted. “Some people think 'comic book equals funny',” he says. “But when I read through the profiles I don’t find them funny.”

Kieffer’s interest in the marginalized is both genuine and ongoing. His next book will be about street performer Zanta, a shirtless Santa who until recently roamed Toronto doing pushups. Eventually banned from significant chunks of the downtown core, Zanta now lives in the suburbs with a family member. “I’m doing the book because Zanta is a prime example of the way the city responds to people who don’t fit in or operate outside the norm,” says Kieffer.

Having lived in Cabbagetown his whole life, Kieffer has modified the dictum “write what you know” into “draw what’s around you.” Our tour concludes at Gerrard and Parliament in a tiny, triangular park. “This is the view from my apartment,” Kieffer says. He points across the street toward a third-floor window above a discount fashion store. At night, Kieffer explains, the park becomes a stage for addicts, prostitutes, and various drug disputes.

Rabble asks readers to determine for themselves which is worse: diligently recording the eccentricities of the less fortunate or ignoring them outright. Kieffer recalls being at a bus stop recently when an angry, disheveled woman tried to talk with commuters who refused her eye contact. “That’s crazy to me,” Kieffer says, neatly inverting the traditional definition of mental fitness. “That’s really horrible behaviour, super anti-social. I don’t know how you can treat other people like that.”

(www.jasonkieffer.com)

Little Portugal Is Quiet, But For How Long

2010-06-29T17:34:00.004-04:00

Portugal lost today in their world cup match against Spain. Which should mean no more insane honking jags along Dundas Street.

Except for the fact that the Portuguese are blessed with a special, adaptive genetic mutation that allows them to cheer passionately for Brazil if their team is eliminated from the tournament. The best way I can describe the science behind this is through a sound clip from Jurassic Park:

I'm simply saying that life, uh, finds a way. sound bite

The New Context

2010-06-29T09:51:00.003-04:00

Very late to this. Five months late, actually, but this is a great quote about how the Internet distorts past and present:

Regardless of whether Johnson’s view of Vlaams Belang is correct, it is notable that the party is defined for him entirely by the trail it has left on the Internet. This isn’t necessarily unfair — a speech, say, given by Dewinter isn’t any more or less valuable as evidence of his political positions depending on whether you read it (or watch it) on a screen or listen to it in a crowd — but it does have a certain flattening effect in terms of time: that hypothetical speech exists on the Internet in exactly the same way whether it was delivered in 2007 or 1997. The speaker will never put it behind him. (Just as Johnson, despite his very reasonable contention that he later changed his mind, will never be allowed to consign to the past a blog post he wrote in 2004 criticizing that judicial condemnation of Vlaams Belang as “a victory for European Islamic supremacist groups.”) It may be difficult to travel to Belgium and build the case that Filip Dewinter is not just a hateful character but an actual Nazi (and thus that those who can be linked to him are Nazi sympathizers), but sitting at your keyboard, there is no trick to it at all. Not only can the past never really be erased; it co-exists, in cyberspace, with the present, and an important type of context is destroyed. This is one reason that intellectual inflexibility has become such a hallmark of modern political discourse, and why, so often, no distinction is recognized between hypocrisy and changing your mind.

(link).

The Girl Sounds The Same

2010-06-28T17:35:00.002-04:00

Well, actually, the two bands sound quite different, but I feel like the two women seen here are either sisters, friends, lovers or distant relations...

Remember When American Apparel Was Anti-Establishment?

2010-06-28T12:47:00.004-04:00

(Globe article detailing attack on American Apparel).

A Niche Culture Searching For A Song of the Summer

2010-06-23T20:18:00.005-04:00

Note: This is a reprint of a Toronto Star article about the impossibility of a big summer song in the age of the closet hipster.

Death of the monoculture
The monoculture – the force that united mass audiences around a TV or fostered a clear-cut consensus on the 'song of the summer' – is dead. In another guise, however, its flattening effect on non-Western culture is, sadly, thriving
Toronto Star | Jul 20, 2008 | Ryan Bigge

The season of popcorn blockbusters, beach reads, summer girls, and boys of summer has arrived. And the only thing missing is the (un)official song of the summer – a ubiquitous pop smash that demands we shake our hands in the air and sing along as though we had not a care in the world.

In 2007 that song was "Umbrella," by Rihanna; the year before "Crazy" by Gnarls Barkley. Even Canadians are capable of making a sun song: In 1999, the rather apropos "Steal My Sunshine" by Toronto pop/hip-hop group Len brightened our June, July and August.

So where is this year's hot, hazy hit? Although New York magazine last month handicapped eight potential summer songs (including Lil Wayne's "Lollipop," Leona Lewis's "Bleeding Love" and Coldplay's "Violet Hill"), a leading contender has yet to emerge. And at this point, we're starting to run out of summer.

If you wish to play the game of blame, the death of the monoculture has become a popular choice in recent years. The infrastructure that made the winner-take-all monoculture possible during the mid-to-late 20th century – the radio-MTV-record store monopoly of music distribution – is gone forever, thanks to the Internet.

We now have the "long tail," Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson's belief that there are huge profits to be made from the extensive back catalogues of movies, music and books. Add to that legal (and illegal) downloads of TV, music and movies, and the cultural jambalaya of YouTube and MySpace.

While consumers enjoy the binary buffet, critics – those in charge of constructing contexts and explanations for what we like – are less enthralled. "When I grew up, there was a monoculture," Robert Christgau, the dean of American music criticism, noted in an October 2006 interview on Popmatters.com. "Everybody listened to the same music on the radio. I miss monoculture. I think it's good for people to have a shared experience."

As Toronto music journalist and author Carl Wilson recently noted on his blog Zoilus.com, Christgau repeated his gentle yearning for the monoculture during a Q&A session following his talk on indie-rock, neofascism (!) and John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change" (?!?) at the annual Experience Music Project (EMP) Pop Conference in Seattle this April.

For cognitive musicologist David Huron, however, the monoculture is very much alive – albeit embedded in the songs themselves. In a recent article in Nature magazine, Huron argues that, as a result of globalization, the scales, melodies and harmonies used by musicians throughout the world are becoming more and more Western, even if the style and genres of world music remain diverse and localized.

We hear music through Western ears – which for Huron means, for example, that we "expect large changes of pitch in a melody to be followed by a change of direction" – but what we take for granted as musically natural might not be universal. With the rapid spread of North American culture across the world, however, alternative musical approaches are being muted through hybridity.

So as the cultural infrastructure is changing rapidly, the sonic landscape degenerates. Perhaps the reason we lack a summer song is that the eight songs chosen by New York magazine are too structurally similar to each other to meaningfully distinguish themselves as an uber-hit.

In his new book, Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are, Rob Walker, who writes the popular Consumed column for The New York Times Magazine, describes this as the Pretty Good Problem, in which consumer goods such as kitchen ranges are now of such similar quality, we're forced to distinguish between major appliances on the most minor of differences.

The death of monoculture also reduces the necessity of having to write a genre-crossing hit song in the first place. Writing late last month on her blog Asymmetrical Information, Megan McArdle argued, "The rise of cheap distribution means there are more genres and sub-genres than there used to be – and also that acts don't need to broaden their appeal so much as they once did. If you don't need to get on a top 40 station to make it big, you will lose the elements you once might have added to attract that audience."

There might be more genres, but from an engineering standpoint, all those songs are starting to sound the same. "On most modern CDs the music is squashed into the top 5 dB of a medium that has over 90 dB of range," writes Nick Southall in a 2006 stylusmagazine.com article called "Imperfect Sound Forever." The result: "Not only are the volume differentials flattened when you compress music, but bass and treble frequencies are pressed into the midrange and the space surrounding instruments is lost, making them less easy to separate when you listen."

Putting things in plain speak, Southall concludes that, "By the time you've listened closely (or tried to) to a whole album that's heavily compressed, you end up feeling like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange – battered, fatigued by, and disgusted with the music you love."

This aural assault, known as the "loudness war," began in earnest with Oasis's 1995 album (What's the Story) Morning Glory?, which averaged -8dB Root Mean Square volume (RMS), as compared with the 1987 Guns N' Roses album Appetite for Destruction, which was -15dB RMS (and was considered plenty loud at the time). The 2005 average volume for a rock record, according to Southall, is -9dB RMS. Negative numbers and weird acronym aside, today's albums are really loud – and identically so.

Cultural critic and professional irritant Chuck Klosterman has argued that the monoculture eradicates regional differences, but at the same time, "the acceleration and splintering of media destroys the potential for cultural universals," he said in a 2006 interview with Popmatters.com. "There are fewer and fewer specific cultural touchstones that every member of a certain generation shares simultaneously (Johnny Carson, Led Zeppelin, Jaws, etc.). As a result, people end up feeling alienated by their own normalcy; they feel lonely within a crowd. And this is a huge cultural problem."

Or, as a headline on a mock 2004 article in The Onion put it: "Majority Of Americans Out Of Touch With Mainstream."

Some would argue that critics such as Klosterman and Christgau have an ulterior motive in their left-handed compliments about the way things used to be – their relevance and livelihood diminishes as the monoculture dwindles. Not that Christgau is likely to over romanticize the past. As noted in the comments section of Wilson's blog, Christgau amended his statement at EMP Pop Conference by adding, "I understand that we can't have it (the monoculture) back and that there are reasons why we shouldn't." So would it really matter if this summer fails to produce a song to call its own? It might even be a blessing, given that past summer songs include "Who Let the Dogs Out?" and "Macarena."

And now, at the risk of making everything even muddier, Anderson's long-tail theory is being aggressively challenged. Anita Elberse's article "Should You Invest in the Long Tail?" in the July-August 2008 Harvard Business Review, examines data from Nielsen VideoScan and Nielsen SoundScan, along with Quickflix (an Australian version of Netflix) and Rhapsody (a subscriber-driven online music database). She argues that the importance of big hits, be they movies, music or books, is increasing over time.

"Although today's hits may no longer reach the sales volumes typical of the pre-piracy era, an ever smaller set of top titles continues to account for a large chunk of the overall demand for music."

For Elberse, the tail is long but flat – we have more choice through Amazon or iTunes, but we are still social animals who prefer to listen to what others are listening to, although heavy consumers of music and movies are more willing to dip into more obscure waters occasionally.

While Elberse and Anderson are already respectfully debating definitions of where the hits end and the tail begins online, it appears that the nichification of culture is not yet complete.

So, to recap thus far: In the near future, we might have to be content with songs of the summer, rather than a lone chart-stomping tyrant. The monoculture is dead, except it's not. The long-tail theory is correct, except when it isn't. And critics miss the monoculture, except not really, but kinda maybe.

Which is to say the monoculture is dead. Long live the monoculture.

---------------------------------------
What the monoculture sounds like

Skeptics seeking a literal demonstration of the pop-music formula should listen to Greatest Hit, a six-song album by Toronto writer and artist Brian Joseph Davis. On "I'm Every Song," Davis combines 18 Whitney Houston hit ballads into one track. The result is weirdly listenable. brianjosephdavis.com

If Davis's work hints at what the monoculture sounds like, the amalgamations of artist and University of Chicago Assistant Professor Jason Salavon provide a way of visualizing cultural sameness.

In his 2002 series, Every Playboy Centerfold, Salavon uses sophisticated software code to average every Playboy centrefold for various decades. The result is a non-erotic blur of flesh and blue that hints at the standardization of body type. salavon.com

(Toronto Star link).
(The Smart Set link).

Verbatim

2010-06-22T09:18:00.001-04:00

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Middle Stories and Ticknor comes a bold interrogation into the possibility of a beautiful life. How Should a Person Be? is a novel of many identities: an autobiography of the mind, a postmodern self-help book, and a fictionalized portrait of the artist as a young woman -- of two such artists, in fact.

For reasons multiple and mysterious, Sheila finds herself in a quandary of self-doubt, questioning how a person should be in the world. Inspired by her friend Margaux -- a painter -- and her seemingly untortured ability to live and create, Sheila casts Margaux as material, embarking on a series of recordings in which nothing is too personal, too ugly, or too banal to be turned into art. Along the way, Sheila confronts a cast of painters who are equally blocked in an age in which "the blow job is the ultimate artform." She begins questioning her desire to be Important, her quest to be both a leader and a pupil, and her unwillingness to sacrifice herself.

Searching, uncompromising and yet mordantly funny, How Should a Person Be? is a brilliant portrait of art-making and friendship from the psychic underground of Canada's most fiercely original writer.

(link).

Faye Hammill Explains Why Sophistication Used To be Subversive

2010-06-21T12:45:00.003-04:00

What is sophistication?
We now think of it as a kind of cultural cool, say Faye Hammill, but the word has never quite lost its early negative associations

Globe and Mail | June 12, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

On the season finale of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon (a.k.a Tiny Fey) joked that “people wear flip flops to church.” You might mourn along with her that sophistication is dead. But it’s not. It’s alive and well and embodied in people like Alan Rickman, Audrey Tautou and Stephen Fry, according to Faye Hammill, a senior lecturer in English at Glasgow’s Strathclyde University. According to Hammill, Fry’s ability to convey worldly wisdom made him the perfect actor to portray Oscar Wilde; “he even played the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland,” she said, “which I think is a very sophisticated caterpillar.”

Hammill is the author of a new book, Sophistication: A Literary and Cultural History. She was seduced by sophistication while working on her previous book Women, Celebrity, and Literary Culture Between the Wars. “I was researching Dorothy Parker and I found out that her first job was at Vogue writing captions for underwear illustrations. And her next job was at Vanity Fair.” She realized that those magazines, along with The New Yorker, were using sophistication as a way to market themselves. She decided to explore “at what point the word changed from being a derogatory term to being something celebratory.”

Originating from the ancient Greek word for wisdom, sophistry soon came to mean something like disingenuous reasoning, and sophistication has never shaken free of its guilty-by-association semantic roots. But unlike hipsterdom or trendiness, sophistication involves smooth, invisible cool -- the ability to intuit dress codes for gala events, bring a superior syrah to a dinner party or talk accurately (or at least convincingly) about contemporary art. Think Tyler Brule, who founded not one but two bibles of global sophistication (Wallpaper* and Monocle magazine) which serve simultaneously to educate and affirm the stylish sensibilities of cosmopolitan urbanites in Zurich, Berlin, Madrid and Toyko.

However, sophistication has evolved considerably from being defined as “adulteration, not genuine” in the 1799 edition of Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary to its valorization during the interwar period. Today, as Hammill concludes, sophistication has become too diffuse a concept to be meaningful and is “applied indiscriminately to everything stylish, luxurious, clever or technically complex.”

Still, some core attributes of sophistication have remained fairly consistent. What has really changed is society’s attitudes toward those qualities. As Hammill writes, “Sophistication is often associated with a degree of hedonism, an unshockable attitude in sexual matters, a distrust of bourgeois values … and a focus on the pleasure of the moment.” That description, once fraught with moral and political defiance, could now easily double as a corporate mission statement for the American Apparel clothing chain.

As she explains, the problem with sophistication, at least during the late 18th and early 19th century, was that “the Romantic privileging of expressiveness entailed a rejection of artifice and literary sophistication.” Sophistication became associated with “moral laxity and self-indulgence” and was so strongly distrusted that “unsophistication” became a term of praise. It was not until the 1830s that a modern understanding of sophistication first appeared, involving “taste, elegance, delicacy, leisure, and above all refinement.” Through a close reading of various authors, including Jane Austen (Mansfield Park), Edith Wharton (The Age of Innocence) and Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita), Hammill traces sophistication’s slow and subtle shift from disingenuousness to discrimination.

For Hammill, the most exciting era of sophistication was during the 1920s and 30s, when conflicting definitions were in flux and the mannerisms of the time had much to recommend them. “We think of the Twenties as the last days of the leisure class,” she says, “when people had the time to be really stylish and sit around smoking long cigarettes and making witticisms.” As if to reinforce this, the cover of her book is a photograph of Noel Coward and Gertrude Lawrence taken from the play Private Lives.

That said, the decadent lifestyle that sophistication upheld, like punk rock, has lost its ability to alarm the bourgeoisie. Women smoking is no longer considered subversive and standards of virtue have dissolved so dramatically that flip flops should be the least of Liz Lemon’s concerns. Hammill believes that sophistication now involves class aspiration and being a discriminating consumer, instead of the ambitious, heady modernism of the 1920s: “I think Vanity Fair in the Jazz Age was encouraging an intellectual openness, rather than simply encouraging people to try new thing that they might need to pay for.”

Although Sophistication focuses on British and America novels and magazines, Hammill, who specializes in Canadian literature at Strathclyde University, hopes to one day examine Canadian-specific responses to sophistication. She points to the launch of Maclean’s and Chatelaine (1911 and 1928 respectively), along with lesser-known Canadian magazines of the era, including Mayfair (a high-society monthly launched in 1927 that once described itself as “Canada's Smartest Magazine”) and Montreal’s Le Revue Moderne.

Hammill would also be inclined to add Ethel Wilson to the pantheon of sophisticates. Wilson was a Vancouver novelist who published Hetty Dorval and The Innocent Traveller during the 1940s.

“Because Ethel Wilson was such a stylist and had a detached ironic attitude, often reviewers and commentators have described her using the word sophistication,” she says. “And I think she’s quite unusual, because that’s not the word that comes up the most often in reviews of other Canadian writers at that time.”

There’s something charmingly incongruous about hearing Hammill list off current Canadian examples of sophistication in her heavy English accent -- she mentions Guy Maddin and Atom Egoyan, along with The Walrus magazine. And, of course, La Belle Province.

“I talk a lot about Frenchness, as in Paris, being associated with sophistication in my book,” notes Hammill. “But you could imagine a Canadian version where Montreal would be at the centre.”

-----------------------
Ryan Bigge’s recently completed debut novel contains the phrase “cigarette swirls of sophistication.”

Technophobes Hate Internet; Deaf People Hate Music

2010-06-21T10:33:00.002-04:00

Award-winning Irish writer Colm Toibin firmly believes the novel will remain fundamentally unchanged by the Internet or other high-tech innovations, a realm in which he admits he is nearly illiterate.

[...]

Toibin is a technophobe. He writes with a fountain pen on paper and cannot figure out how to send e-mails by phone. An interview with Reuters on Tuesday was delayed as Toibin fumbled with his cell phone, repeatedly failing to answer it.

Take that Steve Jobs! Your iPad is doomed! Doomed I tell you!

Toibin is not alone, of course:

The authors—Theroux and Govier (a last-minute replacement for Richard Bausch)—were much more concerned that the reading experience and their work would be compromised by e-readers. Govier went so far to argue that books shouldn’t even be made available online because the process devalues her work. Authors deserve to be compensated, we won’t argue that, but such resistance to technology is worrisome. Thankfully, Silver and moderator Stossel, provided a more Internet-friendly point of view, pointing out the marketing, publicity and accessibility benefits of putting books online, despite it’s ability to increase piracy.

The biggest theme of the conversation was that reading on an e-reader is a different experience than reading a book. Most of the panelists argued that the experience of reading a physical book is inherently a better experience (a popular argument throughout the industry right now, but, really, it’s a personal preference and not a universal truth), and a more immersive one. This application of personal preference to an entire audience of readers is problematic. Why assume everyone everywhere wants to read everything in the exact same way? Different readers want different kinds of experiences, and publishers should be creating opportunity for consumers to make that choice.

--------------
(Toibin link).

(Govier link).

The Fake and Real of Toronto's Upside-Down G20 Mirror

2010-06-19T10:53:00.004-04:00

Picture and a thousand words
Toronto aspires to be ‘world class’ but finds it’s annoying, expensive, and dull. Wouldn’t we all rather be playing soccer? Four reflections on the G20 host city, seen through the looking glass
Toronto Star | June 18, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

Vanity Mirror
Mirror, mirror on the security wall, who’s the fairest G20 host city of them all? The answer is probably not Toronto.

At this point, it appears the only people in our city looking forward to the arrival of G20 leaders are anti-globalization protesters.

Which is not to suggest the upcoming summit will be a complete failure. Already it has served to accurately reflect the petty irritation that Torontonians emit toward any inconvenience large or small.

Our city is about to serve as a stage for some of the world’s most powerful politicians, and most of our citizens are casting about for a shepherd’s hook.

Sad to say, but “the personal is political” does not extend to complaining about traffic and parking disruptions. And, in a tidy irony, those most inconvenienced will find it difficult to share their frustration, since cellphone signals will be jammed during portions of the summit. Unlike the puppeteering activists who will coalesce at the barricades to agitate for a better tomorrow, the everyday complainers will allow their rage to turn impotent. As per usual.

Funhouse Mirror
While the reflection in the mirror on this page offers a reasonably accurate representation of the big, curvy ass of the Rogers Centre, the mirror is ultimately a distortion device, reversing whatever is placed before it.

And in relation to recent events, this circle of glass and reflective coating might as well be a rippling funhouse mirror.

True events now sound false: a $57,000 fake lake, trees being removed for security purposes, a ban on kite flying near G20 events, a Toronto-based security fence company called Mammoth Erection (FYI: mammoth as in woolly). Meanwhile, false events now sound true: “Protesters will all dress as zombies, attempt to gnaw police, world leaders” and “80 per cent of G20 security price tag will be used to distribute fluffy kittens to subdue protesters.”

The zombie and kitten theories, courtesy of @jo_words and @rmcw respectively, are two of the many fake G20 rumours now circulating on Twitter thanks to a request from Torontoist’s Andrew Louis ~~editor-in-chief David Topping~~. Look for them under #G20fakerumours, a hashtag created by @frsrmtthws, who initiated the rumour mill by warning that the CN Tower will be relocated to Brampton during the summit.

Unlike the $57,000 artificial lake (a.k.a. “water feature”) to be built inside Toronto’s Direct Energy Centre, the fake rumours are funny, but that explains only part of their appeal. This humorous hearsay wouldn’t have gained much traction if the actual G20 event wasn’t becoming so unreal.

And while Twitter satire and reversal of expectations might rely on a modern method of digital delivery, its roots can be traced back to the 15th century. Barnard College professor Keith Moxey, in his book The Practice of Theory, discusses how painter Hieronymus Bosch drew inspiration from the margins of illuminated manuscripts and their notion of the world upside-down.

Moxey argues that the artwork along manuscript borders “satirize classes, occupations, and the sexes by inverting the relationship in which they usually stand in society.” Hence, police handing out kittens instead of pepper spray. The world upside-down provided the freedom to imagine revenge, but always with the knowledge that such satire “could take place only in a context in which such questioning did not constitute a real challenge to the status quo.”

Two-Way Mirror
Although this mirror works in only one direction, the meetings of the G20 are held behind two-way mirrors, at least metaphorically. The powerful can see out, while protesters and ordinary citizens can see only themselves.

But as Antonia Zerbisias explained in the Sunday Star’s Insight section last week, our city will also host a variety of alternative summits, and these “open gatherings are counterpoints to the closed-door sessions between the heads of the world’s richest nations, and their financial elite.” It is here, not the G20, where various creative solutions and fresh utopias will be sketched and debated.

And, as it happens, the late Michel Foucault, the philosopher and critical theorist who closely examined the intersection of power, surveillance and politics, had something to say about utopia (and mirrors). In his essay “Of Other Spaces,” Foucault talks about a counterpoint to utopia he calls the heterotopia. Utopia, by its definition, is imaginary — what Foucault calls a “placeless place” — while a heterotopia is “an effectively enacted utopia.”

Foucault suggests that thinking about a mirror can help define heterotopia because “it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real . . . and absolutely unreal.”

The point of this academic smoke and mirrors? Foucault felt that a heterotopia offered an opportunity to “suspect, neutralize or invert the set of relations that they happen to designate, mirror or reflect.” By combining the real and theoretical, alternate summits can be thought of as heterotopias, an opportunity to turn the world upside down with the hope of properly challenging the status quo.

Mirror of Society
“G20 security forces will be equipped with vuvuzelas,” according to a tweet from @zbussey, offering yet another entry in the fake rumour competition. The real G20 security forces will be equipped with sound cannons, although given the $1 billion security price tag, some serious cost savings could be realized if a bunch of small, colourful plastic horns were utilized instead. They might even be as effective since, as Monocle magazine’s Andrew Mueller noted in a June 15 online column, “the enervating drone of the vuvuzelas” can reach up to 127 decibels.

There are other parallels between the World Cup and the G20, which is why Franklin Foer, back in 2004, published his book How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization. But no matter how hard the G20 might try, meeting economic goals will never be as exciting as scoring one. And so, as we cheer our athletes and jeer our politicians, we make soccer the truest mirror of our city.

------------------------
Photo by MIKE CASSESE/REUTERS Reuters
(Toronto Star article link).

Andre Alexis and His Wonderful, Terrific, Marvellous, Brilliant and Thoroughly Engaging Reviews For the Globe and Mail

2010-06-15T10:44:00.005-04:00

“In other words, a book section isn’t only about letting people know that such-and-such a work has been published. It’s a place where consideration happens — and the nature of a consideration is important, whatever book or idea sets it in motion. Consideration, for me, isn’t so much a matter of determining the ultimate value of a work, but rather of allowing a community to participate in the evaluation of the work.”
– Andre Alexis, writing in the July/August 2010 issue of The Walrus

“And one is as grateful, in the end, for Vassanji's company as for his wonderful book.”
- Review of Place Within by M. G. Vassanji, 8 November 2008 The Globe and Mail

“It's wonderful.”
- Review of Kant! by Moses Harry Horwitz, 1 April 2009, The Globe and Mail

“Moreover, Fantagraphics has done a wonderful job.”
- Review of Krazy and Ignatz by George Herriman, 1 September 2007, The Globe and Mail

“Though Home is slower than Gilead and not all of its characterizations worked for me, it is still a terrific novel.”
- Review of Home by Marilynne Robinson, 27 September 2008 The Globe and Mail

“I want to add, after saying so many contradictory things myself, that I found the book thoroughly engaging, from one end to the other.”
- Review of Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, 5 June 2010 The Globe and Mail

“In the end, I want to say that this is both a brilliant book and one that is flawed.”
- Review of Glenn Gould by Mark Kingwell, 19 December 2009 The Globe and Mail

“In the end, I feel I'm in the odd position of saying negative things about a book I enjoyed. The thing is, of course, that my love for Ishiguro's previous work, his novels, has (along with my quibbles about his story writing) dampened my feelings for Nocturnes. So, if a friend were to ask me how I liked the book, I'd answer: It's good, but have you read Never Let Me Go? Now that's a great book.”
- Review of Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro, 23 May 2009, The Globe and Mail

“Finally, there's the third section: Affinities. It's simply marvellous.”
- Review of Kant! by Moses Harry Horwitz, 1 April 2009, The Globe and Mail

“In any case, I can't recommend these volumes highly enough.”
- Review of Krazy and Ignatz by George Herriman, 1 September 2007, The Globe and Mail

“It's a good read.”
- Review of The Aeneid as translated by Robert Fagles, 23 December 2006 The Globe and Mail

“The Kindly Ones has been a tremendous success in France, but it has also generated heated and very interesting debate both in France and elsewhere in Europe. I think the novel is good, but the debate is crucial.”
- Review of The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell, 7 March 2009, The Globe and Mail

“(The first four chapters deal directly with his early life and they are terrific.) He can be very, very amusing. (This is, here and there, one of the funniest books I've read in some time.)”
- Review of Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens, 5 June 2010 The Globe and Mail

“There is much in Kant! to amuse, instruct and entertain. So much so that it feels churlish to complain about anything. However, though the book is handsome, it is quite pricey for so short a text, only 125 pages.”
- Review of Kant! by Moses Harry Horwitz, 1 April 2009, The Globe and Mail

Criticizing the Critics -- Apparently I Stink

2010-06-15T09:00:00.005-04:00

Andre Alexis doesn't like me:

If I had to blame one Canadian writer for this state of affairs, I’d blame novelist and critic John Metcalf. Yes, it’s rhetorical to blame any single person for the current state of critical affairs. But Metcalf, with his early books of essays and through his encouragement of “critics” like David Solway and Ryan Bigge, has been, at the very least, a spur to the shallow, self-aggrandizing rhetoric that now passes for criticism.

[...]

What critics like Metcalf — and Connolly before him — have done is to declare the fineness of their own sensibilities sufficient to tell good work from bad. But, of course, they are the only possessors of their sensibilities. There is no basis for a universal aesthetic scale, unless the thought behind a sensibility is unpacked. Just to be clear: I’m convinced Metcalf and I, if we sat down together and read a page from a certain book, would agree, maybe eight times out of ten, on what is good and what is not. On the evidence, I think Metcalf and I have similar sensibilities. But those who have been influenced by him — Ryan Bigge, for instance — are not on the same level and don’t possess the same credibility, though they allow themselves to make the same kinds of pronouncements.

[...]

For some twenty years now, we’ve had the discussions that unfounded, pugnacious reviews bring. What knowledge or understanding of literature have they given us? Ryan Bigge insulting Leah McLaren in the pages of the Toronto Star, Carmine Starnino insulting whoever doesn’t happen to share his preference for certain kinds of verse, Philip Marchand expressing the opinion that poets shouldn’t write novels. The discussion is rarely helpful in building a shareable aesthetic. One of the very few clear opinions shed by Philip Marchand, for instance, is his belief that anyone who does not appreciate the greatness of Tolstoy is “deficient in taste, period.” A dubious opinion, given that Henry James, who has as great a claim to “taste” as Marchand, disliked War and Peace, and the late-career Tolstoy felt that his own early work was too verbose. As with all Metcalf’s children — and all of the critics I’ve just mentioned have been edited or published by him — Marchand’s statement is about himself, his belief in War and Peace’s greatness. He offers no defence of his opinion, believing that none is required. And so, we have come to the point where the mere fact of an opinion is more important than the basis for it. This is neither criticism nor reviewing but autobiography. Marchand is telling me something about himself. Starnino is telling me about his sensibility and how much he believes in his beliefs. Bigge is settling a personal vendetta with McLaren.

I can appreciate that my infamous review of McLaren's book was problematic, but it would be fair, or at least useful to point out that I've provided thoughtful, nay, intelligent reviews of dozens of books since I began reviewing in 2001.

It might also strengthen Andre Alexis's argument to actually quote from a review I've written.

And I've never spoken with, emailed with or otherwise conversed with John Metcalf -- which makes the claim that he has "encouraged" me fairly weak, unless you consider publishing me in Canadian Notes and Queries to fulfill that definition.

(Oh, and by the way, I have an essay in the next Canadian Notes and Queries about the 2009 Giller short-list. Rest assured Andre Alexis is not going to like it very much.)

(Full attack here).

(Andre Alexis shows us all how to properly review a book).

The Underground Literature of Toronto Subways

2010-06-14T09:17:00.005-04:00

A picture and 1,000 words: TTC subway stations
Toronto Star | June 11, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

(Osgoode subway station courtesy CHRIS SHEPHERD/BAU-XI-GALLERY)

This fluorescent corridor of shiny yellow tiles was captured by Toronto photographer Chris Shepherd, who specializes in the deserted nooks and corners of subways. An empty and eerie Osgoode, along with a dozen other dehumanized subway stations, will be on display at Bau-Xi Gallery (across from the AGO) until June 19.

Subway stations funnel and tilt people toward their given destinations, with turnstiles, hallways and stairs serving as the pinball equivalents of ramps, bumpers and gates. So unless we’re stuck on the platform, waiting for service to resume shortly, we rarely have reason or opportunity to consider the aesthetic qualities of any given station. Here, without the usual clumps of people clogging the view, one is finally free to imagine what might be behind the enticing red double doors.

While Shepherd’s subject matter is quite fashionable, at least in terms of municipal politics, it’s not the first time Toronto’s subways have been transformed through acts of imagination. Our poets and novelists have also immortalized the caverns of public transit, in the process reinforcing the significance of the subway as both a mover of people and a central symbol of our urban psyche.

According to 17-year-old Samuel, the comic-book-obsessed protagonist of Rabindranath Maharaj’s new novel, The Amazing Absorbing Boy, subway stations like Osgoode are the domain of mole people. Which makes The Amazing Absorbing Boy underground fiction in the literal sense. Samuel has moved from Trinidad to Regent Park to live with his estranged father, and his first trip on our subway provides a fresh perspective on commuter psychographics. After paying “a man inside some sort of glass cage” and noting that everyone seems “vexed,” Samuel begins his decent. “The minute I walked down those steps I felt like I had entered a place with a different breed of people. A sort of Bizarro world with all the rules reversed.”

It’s particularly Bizarro, or at least bizarre, anytime after 8 p.m. on a weekend (with the PATH offering a touch of the bazaar). Regardless of how novelists might describe our subterranean transit system, it’s never treated as simple infrastructure. “It is a city that burrows, tunnels, turns underground,” writes Maggie Helwig on the opening page of Girls Fall Down. For Helwig, the arteries that rumble beneath the sidewalk grates reflect and direct our urban character. We might not be mole people, but we are shaped by the subway in ways that are not immediately visible — which is why Helwig’s novel involves a mysterious contagion that circulates through the subway: “The dangers to this city enter the bloodstream, move through interior channels.”

There is also the obvious, symbolic aspect to being above or below — light and dark, heaven and hell (especially if you’re on the subway in rush hour). As well as a clandestine aspect to the subway. In Russell Smith’s new novel, Girl Crazy, a straitlaced community college instructor named Justin goes rogue and finds himself on the wrong side of the tracks (in this case, somewhere north of Lansdowne and Dupont) buying a brick of marijuana that he conceals in a yellow plastic No Frills bag. After nearly getting caught by a pair of cops, he ends up at Lansdowne and Bloor, shaken but relieved. “He was almost at the subway station, which he could disappear into like a gopher down a hole.”

Lucky for Justin that he didn’t wander a few more blocks east. Ibi Kaslik, in a short story called “Lab Rats” (part of the Toronto Noir anthology), explains that the Dufferin Bus makes one feel “like a homicidal dumpling” and leads to a subway station “where no one believes in standing in line for anything, let alone a TTC ticket or a bus.”

Be they crowded or calm, empty or full, Toronto subways serve as miniature urban stages that encourage passengers give their truest performances. It’s no accident that the first scene of Dionne Brand’s novel What We All Long For (winner of the 2006 City of Toronto Book Award) takes place on a subway rumbling along the Prince Edward Viaduct: “People are packed in tightly, and they all look dazed, as if recovering from a blow.”

Meanwhile, three young people giggle and laugh, temporarily disrupting the sombreness of the morning commute. At least until they internalize the “uptightness on the train” and are “finally subdued by the taut silence around them.” Thus, the burrowing of the subway is both physical feature and psychological affliction.

In Girls Fall Down, two former lovers meet after many years apart, but their renewed friendship cannot endure the confined space of transit: “They stood up on the subway . . . neither of them able to accept the tight physical proximity of the narrow seats, appropriate only for close friends or complete strangers.”

Of course, not every fictional representation of our subways is meant to suggest that The Better Way is actually The Bitter Way. Philip Quinn, in his poetry collection The Subway, writes about a benign and cartoonish toll booth collector who “strips and mimes your tokens of affection.”

And Darren O’Donnell, in his 2004 novel Your Secrets Sleep With Me, notes that “If you lay your ear on the tracks you can tune into many of the different conversations that are happening on the various streetcars, the talk reverberating down into the seats, into the wheels, then saved and sent spinning into the tracks which zip them back, forth, up and down the city’s streets.” If this is also true of our subways, it might be reason enough to remove our earphones once in awhile and listen carefully to what our fellow citizens are saying.

Certainly our politicians need to listen more often to the reverberating conversations among Toronto artists. Instead of focusing only on TTC budgets and spreadsheets, those seeking transit solutions should also perform some poetry audits and close readings of novelists and photographers. Because whether you love or hate Transit City, we’re clearly a city defined by transit, with the buried hopes, fears and dreams of our collective unconscious scattered across the dark recesses of the subway.

------------------------------
(Big thanks to Amy Lavender Harris for her literary suggestions).

(Toronto Star link).

My Website Biggeworld.com Returns

2010-05-27T14:46:00.002-04:00

My website biggeworld.com has returned from the brink of death. I kinda let the whole thing decay two years ago, switching to this here blog. But I'm pleased to announce that a trim and simple version of my website is now available for your viewing pleasure.

Reprint of DocuBurst and the Future of the Book Article

2010-05-26T13:45:00.005-04:00

You are looking at an open book
Created as a course project by a U of T student, this conceptual pinwheel could change the way we read and retrieve information
June 10, 2007 | RYAN BIGGE | Toronto Star

Books are wonderful things, but they tend to release information rather slowly. Bound ink and paper remains stubbornly linear, as sentences unspool across the page in an orderly but time-consuming fashion.

Those seeking a shortcut often rely on book reviews (and, as it so happens, this paper prints many excellent ones each week). But if you're an academic or a lawyer or anyone else with a specialized area of interest, reviews are unlikely to address your info niche. The solution to assessing unfamiliar books or articles might reside in the colourful pinwheels pictured here.

Aesthetics might not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking about how to navigate the ever-increasing overload of information. Google Book Search and Amazon's Search Inside feature are great tools – provided you've already read the book in question. For a journalist trying to remember who once boasted about being able to float off the floor like a soap bubble, these databases are a godsend. (O'Brien, as it happens, in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four).

If, on the other hand, you're a first-year university student working on an essay about surveillance, neither Book Search nor Search Inside is likely to steer you toward Big Brother.

For those who spend a significant portion of their lives sifting through the alphabetic silt, DocuBurst (the software prototype that produced these pinwheels) may become as valuable as the scanned pages of Amazon and Google themselves.

At the risk of oversimplification, building an enormous library (be it real or virtual) requires mainly money and time. Effectively navigating the result necessitates innovative approaches to information retrieval and display.

Or, to put it another way, massive amounts of digitized knowledge are useless if they cannot be accessed and assessed quickly and meaningfully.

DocuBurst – the name is a mash-up of document and sunburst – is the brainchild of 28-year-old University of Toronto student Christopher Collins. It's a new method of information visualization (a.k.a. InfoViz) that allows a person to quickly determine the cumulative theme(s) of a given book or document, while at the same time allowing specific keyword searches.

If you're in a hurry, DocuBurst can instantly tell you if a book is sufficiently obsessed with quantum physics, while bookworms can perform detailed literary analysis on a single word, like "nosegay."

"It's a really beautiful book," says Collins, in reference to Jacques Bertin's classic Semiology of Graphics, an exploration of information design that helped inspire DocuBurst. "He talks about the inherent meaning that can be conveyed through data graphics."

The power of information made visual is the difference between an Al Gore speech and an Al Gore PowerPoint presentation. (Of course, in the wrong hands, InfoViz can make things worse, not better, as our indecipherable hydro bills demonstrate.)
Despite their beauty, these pinwheels at first appear strange and opaque, at least without a little explanation. Don't panic. In only a few short paragraphs their mysteries will be fully revealed.

Collins, who is a year away from completing his Ph.D. in computer science, created DocuBurst as a final course project. He began by pouring the contents of a textbook from 1912 called General Science by Bertha Clark into a Java-based toolkit called Prefuse. (General Science, with 20,000 other books, is available as a free e-text download from Project Gutenberg.)

Next, Collins made the textbook searchable. "DocuBurst works like a regular index," explains Collins, "except it's interactive and is able to jump you to whatever part of the document you're interested in."

In normal mode (that is without the pinwheels), a DocuBurst keyword search will include a small window along the bottom of the screen that shows the half-dozen words before and after your search term. This is not unlike the book-scan snippets offered by Google Book or Amazon Inside.

None of this, of course, explains the pinwheels. That's because DocuBurst is two things in one: an interactive index and a method of determining the overall theme of a given book or document. The funky pinwheels will be explained next, after a brief but necessary tangent.

A "treeware" index often includes the infamous "See Also." So if you look up the word Energy, you might be told to See Also: Heat, Radiation and Electromagnetic Radiation.
The structure of DocuBurst pinwheels rely upon an exhaustive type of See Also list generated from WordNet. WordNet is a sophisticated database that groups words into distinct sets of synonyms, a hybrid of thesaurus and dictionary developed by Princeton's Cognitive Science Laboratory. Specifically, WordNet provides "is a" linkages. A cat "is a" kind of pet. Heat "is a" type of energy. This linguistic genealogy provides second, third and fourth cousins removed for any given word.

In the pinwheel pictured on the cover of this section, this results in a See Also list that starts out general and becomes increasingly specific with each additional orbit ring.

Collins isn't the first person to take advantage of WordNet, but he is the first person to transpose the "is a" relationships of a given word across a "radial space-filling graph," that being the technical term for the pinwheels.

From herein, things start getting simpler. Enter a search term like energy and DocuBurst colours the pinwheel based on the frequency of words that are related to the central term. This allows you to visualize the overall theme of a particular document or book.

Without DocuBurst, you're stuck skim-reading or schlepping through the index stuck in the back of a book. Let's say you're interested in intuition, and you picked up Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink. There are about nine entries for intuition, with See Also's for introspection and decision making. Which means you'd need to spend a few minutes flipping back and forth between index and book proper to see if the book met your needs.

Now imagine Blink as a DocuBurst. Given the central search-term intuition, WordNet would create a pinwheel based on synonyms of that word, and then indicate the approximate frequency of related terms and concepts (including, perhaps, ESP) through colouration.

"Our perception of colour ranges is culturally based," explains Collins. "Does red come before blue? I don't know. There's no inherent meaning there. But we do assume that a light colour means less than a dark colour."

Utilizing the same rapid-cognition and thin-slicing skills Gladwell discusses in his book, DocuBurst makes it very easy to determine whether Blink is worth reading.

"We're not particularly interested in people being able to immediately read specific numbers off this graph," explains Collins, in reference to DocuBurst's radial view. "We want to give more of an impression or theme."

The radial space-filling graph can also expand and contract at the click of a mouse. Like most informational visualization projects, DocuBurst is guided by three key principles: overview, zoom and filter, and details-on-demand.

For Collins, information visualization is a tricky mixture of art and science. He borrows techniques from hobbies such as painting, especially colour mixing. In a nod to his M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics, Collins is wearing a red T-shirt with white lettering that reads "I'm a noun!" on the day we meet.

The killer app for these pinwheels will be side-by-side document comparison. Imagine trawling through a legal database, searching for articles about file-sharing. With DocuBurst, you'd be able to see, at a glance, which articles lit up the relevant area of the pinwheel.

This is similar to the relationship between a map of Canada and weather patterns. Superimpose a storm front atop Hamilton and you can tell at a glance that it's a bad day to wash your car. The map is static, the weather patterns fluctuate. In the same way, DocuBurst can take the temperature of a given book or document, thus facilitating rapid pattern recognition.

A cross-comparison feature will require another four to six months of coding, however. In the meantime, DocuBurst's keyword search feature will be road-tested at the University of England this fall, when Collins will be asked to help analyze Victorian literature to determine how often authors used rare words, and in what context. Collins also just entered the Future of the Book contest (www.futureofthebook.org) in which he converted MacKenzie Wark's open source book Gamer Theory into DocuBurst format.

Google anticipates it will take about a decade to scan an estimated 30 million books for its comprehensive library. Which, coincidentally, is about how long it typically takes to implement an interface like DocuBurst so that the general public could comfortably use it at their local library.

Not that Collins is sitting on his hands waiting. He has spent the past year jumping from conference to conference, and is doing a three-month internship at an IBM research centre in New York.

His Ph.D. project, meanwhile, will allow users to compare two-dimensional graphs in a three-dimensional space. Imagine two pie charts able to talk to each other and compare notes, while suspended in space like plates stacked in a dishwasher, and you get some hint as to Collins' ambition.

To try to describe the project further would require many more words that would ultimately fail to convey the elegance and power of the software prototype that Collins let me sneak preview.

Which, come to think of it, perfectly demonstrates the limitations of language and the power and strength of information visualization.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then DocuBurst creates colourful information graphs whose pinwheel patterns are comprised of thousands of words.

(link).

Everyone Loves a Semi-Naked Hipster -- Strip Spelling Bee Debuts in Toronto

2010-05-16T22:17:00.002-04:00

Trends: Strip spelling bees are the latest hipster twist on burlesque
Part nerdfest and part peep show, strip spelling bees gain ground
Ryan Bigge | Globe and Mail | Saturday, May. 15, 2010

Peter, a trim young soldier complete with dog tags, is onstage at Toronto's Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, pondering the correct spelling of the word “caduceus.” Sombre quiz-show music plays over the speakers as Peter is informed that a caduceus, which traces back to Greek mythology, is a staff with a double helix of entwined snakes.

“C-A-D-U,” he begins. And then, with an impish grin, “ampersand, tilde, question mark.”

“You spell exquisitely,” says Sherwin Tjia, founder and host of the Honeysuckle Strip Spelling Bee, as the crowd of 80 roars in rowdy approval. A visibly tipsy Tjia manages to tap at his laptop and switch to a soundtrack of raunchy R&B, since the penalty for misspelling a word at this particular spelling bee is removing a third of one's clothing. After three rounds, two winners are declared – best speller and best striptease – which should make Peter's competitive interests fairly obvious.

A slightly more cerebral variant on burlesque, Tjia's Strip Spelling Bee began in Montreal in March of last year. Although it attracted immediate attention, Tjia says it took a few attempts to “work in the kinks” and tweak the pacing. After its Buddies debut last week, Strip Spelling Bee joins Slowdance Night on the list of events that he has successfully imported to Toronto.

“I didn't expect that so many participants would get completely naked,” says Tjia, a medical illustrator and graphic novelist who enjoys creating quirky events for quirky hipsters in his spare time. Contestants get to decide if they want to keep their underwear on or not, and a strict no-booing policy and ban on audience photography help to generate a safe and inclusive atmosphere. Indeed, some of the biggest cheers of the evening went to Adam, a guy whose non-gym physique can be best described as beautifully average.

Unlike Peter, many of the other 12 contestants desperately tried to keep their clothes on, despite facing words such as “flibbertigibbet” and “bouillabaisse.” “This was for the best,” says Laurie, who won as best speller, “since I'm very good at spelling and very bad at stripping.”

Tjia compares Strip Spelling Bee to events like Toronto Roller Derby, the Pillow Fight League and various burlesque troupes. And given the saucy language and queer-friendly atmosphere, Gay Bingo is another obvious comparison point. One of the evening's highlights – other than seeing a leggy Tjia host the event in drag – is the filthy language employed when a contestant asks for their word to be used in a sentence. An otherwise unprintable Tjia riff concluded with “I was a victim of detumescence.”

While Montreal is a great quirk incubator, Tjia is envious of Toronto's professional approach to indie culture, which invariably leads to websites, merchandise and TV deals. Not that he harbours any animus – Tjia was born in Toronto, moved to Montreal 10 years ago to attend university and feels that both cities have a similar sensibility.

Until Tjia decides to go pro with Strip Spelling Bee, however, he must continue the great Canadian tradition of offering modest game-show prizes. Laurie (the best speller) and a woman named Troy (who was declared the best stripper) each received a bottle of red wine, a CD featuring the sound of cats purring for more than an hour and a DVD of Tjia's friend sleeping in a sexy tank top.

As for the other 11 brave contestants? As Tjia notes, they may have lost, but the audience most certainly won.

(Photos courtesy Sherwin Tjia)
(Globe link).

Toronto Star article about "The interplay between art and Ikea"

2010-05-05T17:05:00.006-04:00

Picture and a Thousand Words: The interplay between art and Ikea
May 01, 2010 | Toronto Star | Ryan Bigge

Courtesy of the artist and Murray Guy, New York

It doesn’t take an umlauted gënïus to figure out where this photograph originated. This despite the fact that German-born, San Francisco-based artist Kota Ezawa has processed and transformed the original catalogue image into a soft pastel cartoon.

But Ikea is so iconic that we recognize its well-designed yet affordable consumer seductions even when disguised or distorted. This might also have something to do with its omnipresence — the company now prints nearly 200 million copies of its lifestyle bible each year, making it almost as well circulated as the actual Bible.

It’s hardly a stretch to suggest that Ikea has a pervasive influence that extends beyond our homes (Billy bookshelves and tea light candles) into popular culture itself, like music (“Date With Ikea” by Pavement) and movies ((500) Days of Summer). This might help explain why its unassembled furniture and the consumer utopia it implies have attracted the critical gaze of various artists over the past 15 years. (And for Ezawa, along with Jeff Carter’s mechanized sculptures of blue Lack tables and Kvist bamboo flooring, Ikea supplies both the problematic and the artist’s raw materials.)

Ezawa’s work is entitled “NEW! ($2.99/EA)” and is currently being shown as part of CONTACT, a photography festival held every May in Toronto (www.scotiabankcontactphoto.com). This year’s event is subtitled “Pervasive Influence,” and while that might sound like a reference to Scotiabank’s cultural hegemony (they sponsor the Giller, CONTACT, Caribana and Nuit Blanche), it instead indicates our current era of photographic saturation. As Bonnie Rubenstein, artistic director for CONTACT, writes in this year’s program guide, “The festival acknowledges the all-encompassing role photography plays in our lives, and challenges audiences to explore how it informs and transforms our experience of the world.”

Ezawa is one of a dozen or so photographers in a curated exhibit entitled “The Mechanical Bride” now at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art. This refers not to a screwball robot comedy from the 1930s, but to the (occasionally) screwball ideas of the late media and literary theorist Marshall McLuhan. In his first book, The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man, McLuhan analyzed various forms of print culture, including newspapers and advertisements, and tried to tease out hidden meanings. For example, a print ad for Berkshire Nylon Stockings containing a pretty girl and a horse is hardly an innocent tableau for McLuhan: “Juxtaposition of items permits the advertiser to ‘say’ . . . what could never pass the censor of consciousness.”

Today we might recognize this observation as obvious, but McLuhan made his observation back in 1951, when the manipulations of advertising seemed more innocent and less apparent. In an essay about CONTACT’s “The Mechanical Bride” exhibit, Janine Marchessault, a film studies professor at York University, argues that artists like Ezawa are continuing McLuhan’s project: “The mechanisms of persuasion in mass media are revealed through a focus on its conventions and politics behind the scenes.”

The problem today is that the mechanisms and politics of Ikea are far more sophisticated, making them difficult to locate and analyze. Even worse, at least for critics of advertising, is that many of us find the big blue barn’s unique style of manipulation enjoyable. Put another way, it can be hard sometimes to find the necessary skepticism to attack a family-friendly company that offers a $1 breakfast (although until just 11a.m. each morning).

McLuhan’s skepticism, meanwhile, remains an acquired taste. By the time he died in 1980, he had generated a mash of genuine insight, contradictory aphorisms and a half-dozen books, each progressively more confusing than the last. And while it’s impossible to accurately guess what he might have thought about Ikea and Ezawa, he undoubtedly would have mentioned his theory of hot and cool mediums from his 1964 book, Understanding Media.

A hot medium, like photography, is typically information-rich and well-defined, thus requiring less interpretative work on the part of the viewer. What Ezawa has done, McLuhan might argue, is take the hot medium of photography and rework it into a cool medium (like illustration), making the artwork more participatory. This “unphotograph” requires the viewer to more actively interpret the image. Or, as Marchessault writes, Ezawa’s “large-scale transparencies in light boxes, that mimic advertising displays, are no longer recognizable as photographs.”

As luck would have it, McLuhan is currently “hot” (in the buzz-worthy sense) thanks to a new biography written by Douglas Coupland. As a media-savvy, pop-culture obsessed renaissance man who jumps between art, novels, television, movies and non-fiction, Coupland is McLuhan-esque in the best sense of the term, making him well suited to the task of wrestling with the infamous thinker.

Coupland also has work in this year’s CONTACT festival, as part of another McLuhan-inspired exhibit called “The Brothel Without Walls” (the title of which is fodder for another essay entirely). And, it should be noted, Coupland has also found inspiration in Ikea. His first novel, Generation X, included an image of a clip art chair with the caption “Semi-Disposable Swedish Furniture.”

The link between art and advertising isn’t much of a stretch, given the work of Richard Prince, whose photographs recombined Marlboro Man ads. And the link between art and Ikea isn’t tenuous either — the company sells thousands of picture frames each year, along with some tame posters and wall art.

Art inspired by Ikea will continue to grow in proportion to the size and dominance of the company itself. Last September, a new piece by street artist Banksy appeared on a wall in the London district of Croydon, and featured a young punk reading the assembly instructions for a “large graffiti slogan” that was purchased from “IEAK.” And in a tidy twist, art is now starting to inspire Ikea. As the March issue of The Art Newspaper reported, Ikea will be commissioning contemporary artists to create work for a huge new Moscow store scheduled to open in 2012.

In a clever irony, Ezawa takes the precise, staged, too-perfect style of Ikea’s product photography and disassembles the image, attacking the fantasy world with a digital Allen key. Where Ikea requires us to self-assemble the furniture we purchase, art offers us a finished product for contemplation, but we must self-assemble its meaning.

(Toronto Star link).

The Dry Wit of MLS

2010-05-04T10:14:00.003-04:00

There are so many minor typos and strange turns of phrase in MLS listings that it would be churlish to point them out with any frequency, even though I'm often tempted.

However, writing "hand dryer" instead of handyman or handyperson is really a mistake worth mentioning. Maybe it was an auto-correct or spellcheck thing. Regardless, quite hilarious. I also like how this particular house is not only being sold in "as in" condition, but "where is." Location, location, location.

Popular Non-Fiction Does Not Earn You Tenure

2010-04-25T17:43:00.002-04:00

In an otherwise sharp article for the Toronto Star, Patricia Dawn Robertson concludes that "Ironically, the publish or perish mandate from the lean and mean 1990s means that once-cloistered academics must moonlight as pundits to garner profile and secure tenure."

Trust me on this -- being a pundit does not help secure tenure. It works against it, actually. Sad but true.

(link).

Grade 8 Giggles: Endowed Professor in Condom Article

2010-04-13T20:18:00.002-04:00

(link).

This Post is Not Useless Junk

2010-04-08T18:09:00.000-04:00

Joke About Bidding Wars

2010-04-08T10:39:00.002-04:00

Actually, a bidding war for a home is a lot less funny that it might sound. Despite this, I managed to make my wife laugh with this post-defeat joke:

Wife: What time is it?
Husband: It's 8:15pm.
[pause for beat]
Husband: No, wait, someone just offered 8:27pm.

Into The Time Machine: Generation X author Douglas Coupland Eviscerated Back in 1994

2010-03-10T15:07:00.003-05:00

Did anyone but myself read Generation Ecch! by Jason Cohen and Michael Krugman? Sadly, I believe the answer to be no. Here’s their take, circa 1994, on the Coupland problem:

The most Ecchcruciating novelist of them all has to be the smug Canadian whose book made “Generation X” the catchall catchphrase that it is today. If Douglas Coupland is the “voice of a generation,” then Kerouac’s cadaver is in perpetual rotation.

Generation X is the story of three disaffected and sensitive children of the eighties who forswear the trappings of conventional society—the profit motive, the meaningless labor, “the odor of copy machines, Wite-Out, the smell of bond paper”—and choose to live on the margins. And where would that be? you might ask. The Bowery? Compton? Haight-Ashbury? Seattle?

Nope: Palm Springs, California.

[…]

Trouble is, the fables that spring from Coupland’s diminutive imagination move at a snail’s pace, and don’t come close to making characters’ “lives worthwhile.” We are graced with kitsch-ridden morality plays or retrofuturistic parables about fantasy lands like Texlahoma, the place where it’s always 1974 (so that explains Ross Perot’s haircut). These piddling little homilies serve to explain, ad infinitum and over and over again, what exactly is so disenchanting about mainstream American life. Dougie places the blame squarely on processed cheese.

[…]

One of the many reasons why Generation X is such a bad novel is that it wasn’t conceived as fiction—Coupland’s publishers originally commissioned him to pen a Preppie Handbook-style Ecch guide. Before he even wrote the first page Coupland decided that such a book was unworthy of his extraordinary talent.

Nonetheless, the book’s Ecchcyclopedia roots are visible in the only vaguely redeeming portion of Generation X, those pithy pseudo-dictionary entries that appear in the book’s margins. Here Dougie uses a made-up lexicon to describe genuine Ecch phenomena. The best-known example would be “McJob”—“A low-pay, low-prestige, low-dignity, low-benefit, no-future job in the service sector.” Thus, a stultifyingly bad book becomes margin-ally interesting.

[...]

Coupland’s work documents the emptiness so familiar from the work of his bratty predecessors, but in his world the emptiness has become so profound that it’s lacking in even the good stuff. At least books like Bright Lights, Big City, Less Than Zero and even, God help us, Fast Sofa offer a certain vicarious joy in the excessive follies of their morally bankrupt, drug-taking, moneymaking, sport-fucking characters/symbols. But Generation X is such a negligible book that one has to believe it’s something like A Brief History of Time or Foucault’s Pendulum for Ecch, a temporarily hip book to be glanced at but not actually read.

What links all the Ecch authors (aside from artistic mediocrity) is their consistent attempts to portray a generation to itself without any special insight, aesthetic integrity or provocative narrative. The tone and attitude of these books do more than simply hold a mirror up to Ecch—they are Ecch, with all the generation’s worst characteristics expressed as literary form, style and content. Just because one is writing a story about a pop-culture-crazed world doesn’t mean it’s sufficient to make pop-culture references the sum of one’s imagining of that world. Just because nothing seems to happen in real Ecch lives doesn’t mean nothing can happen in a novel about those lives.

A Strange Little Book I'd Like To Praise

2010-03-04T11:00:00.003-05:00

Over at The Rover, Mark Paterson reviews The Olive and the Dawn by Ian Orti and begins by saying:

Along with disaster movies of the 1970s and all-night bowling alleys, strange little books are one of life’s great pleasures.

I agree. And while we’re on the topic, I’d like to nominate Etcetera and Otherwise by Sean Stanley as another entry in the category. It's a little book that is strange, sometimes frustrating, often wonderful, quirky without being too quirky:

"I've marketed loneliness within a crowd and ennui within a bottle. I've marketed no-shoe losers and resolution; electric tai chi and gas-powered toques; ceramic cigarettes and plastic passion; laughable longevity and porous parachutes; water with holes in it and Hollywood movies without; sadness and blandness; blueness and coolness; hardness and throughness; not to mention silence and infra-silence, just to name a few."

The problem, if you want to call it that, is that strange and little books rarely achieve a mass audience. As Paterson writes:

Now I’m going to imagine ideal readers for The Olive and the Dawn. The first three that come to mind are:

1. A dude with a red goatee who works at the video store nobody goes to anymore.
2. A 26-year old CÉGEP English teacher who’s anxious about a course on Roman mythology she got stuck teaching this semester even though she knows precious little about the subject.
3. A guy who has tapes dating back to 1989 of himself calling radio talk shows. He goes by the alias “Ron in Chomedey.”

Sounds about right.

Listicle Without Commentary: 23 Phrases From This Morning’s Property Matches

2010-03-02T08:22:00.002-05:00

A True Move In Condition Property
New Hardwood Floors In Living, Dining, And Hallwat
Show & Sell It
Upper Flrs May Contain Some Knoke And Tube
Stop The Press!!
Sparkling Home
Potential Galore
Untouched Character!
Pride Of Ownership Very Evident
Absolute Move In Condition
Truly One Of A Kind
Looks And Feels Like A New Home
Adorable Century Doll House
Much Larger Than It Appears
Mainly Newer Windows 4 Yrs Ago
Plum & Peach Trees, Raspberry & Blueberries Plants
Bullseye!
Quiet Residential Street In Rapidly Gentrifying Location In Downtown West
Mostly Renovated
Bar With Built In Fishtank
Bells & Whistles Please!
Too Much To List Here!

(Listicle Without Commentary is copyright The Awl, a super-awesome website that you should visit).

Reprint of Graham Rawle Profile (author of collage novel Woman's World)

2010-02-28T14:18:00.007-05:00

Using disconnection to invent meaning
Using 40,000 text fragments from women's magazines, British artist Graham Rawle challenges the conventions of the novel
March 16, 2008 | RYAN BIGGE | Toronto Star

Intellectual property, a term that barely existed 35 years ago, along with peer-to-peer file-sharing have become flashpoints in the debate around the nature of ideas and innovations in the 21st century.Time magazine’s selection of “You” (a reference to the people behind user-generated content on the Internet) as their Person of the Year (2006) may be viewed as the tipping point of Internet participation. Blogs and podcasting are challenging traditional media and information-delivery models. Time magazine’s decision to spotlight the participatory Internet leaves little doubt that the issue has moved from the edges of cyberspace into the mainstream. But in order to create new works, artists need to build upon works from the past. And according to representatives from the Canadian publishing, music, television and film industries, Canada is far too lenient when it comes to protecting the intellectual property of its artists.

Let’s stop right there. Notice anything strange or curious about the opening paragraph? Not so much the groovy colours, but the sentiments expressed by the text? You would if you were Toronto Star reporters and contributors Chris Young, Michael Geist, James Motluk or Brett Popplewell. Because the above paragraph is not my own. The first and third sentences belong to a May 22, 2005 article about fair use and creative expression by Young. The second and fourth sentences come from Geist’s Jan. 8, 2007 column about copyright legislation. The fifth sentence is from Motluk’s Jan. 2, 2008 article about free of expression and corporate trademarks. And the final sentence is courtesy of Popplewell, who wrote about Canadian laxity toward piracy on Jan. 25 of this year.

The Toronto Star's digital archives, plus a bit of nip and tuck, allowed me to graft together a reasonably coherent paragraph about intellectual property and its relation to Web 2.0. Now, try to imagine writing an entire novel in this fashion, by physically cutting and pasting words and phrases taken from more than 1,000 British women's magazines of the early 1960s. British artist Graham Rawle did exactly that. The result is Woman's World, a full-length novel consisting of 40,000 text fragments.

Rawle began by writing a rough draft of Woman's World in the traditional way, using computer and keyboard. At the same time, he started collecting bits of text from his collection of magazines, organizing them by theme into a large, numbered scrapbook. He then transcribed the magazine text into the computer, tagging each sentence with the appropriate scrapbook page number. A million words later, Rawle had an electronic database to work from.

Next, he began to replace his own words with approximate matches from his found-text database, a few words at a time, changing tenses and swapping "she" for "I." Once his story had been overwritten by the magazine text, he gave the resulting manuscript to his publisher for editing to ensure the novel held its own. "If the story doesn't work, then it is the most spectacular waste of time known to man," he explains from his studio in London, England. "It's like you've built the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks."

After editing, Rawle started pasting together the book, using the page-number tags imbedded in his word-processed version of the novel as a kind of map to help retrieve the fragments of text stored in his scrapbook.

From start to finish, Woman's World took five years, including 18 months of paste-up, each page requiring three days. While laborious, this final stage was, Rawle found, the most rewarding; he likened it to knitting. Since every word had already been decided upon, he was merely eking his way toward The End, one tiny piece of paper at a time.

"THE WHOLE POINT of doing this, I think, is that you have to be more inventive in the way that you construct a sentence," explains Rawle, 52. "You put two seemingly unrelated sentences together and they come together to say something completely new, something that neither of those sentences had intended to say originally."

Rawle, a graphic designer and artist who teaches at the University of Brighton, admits that the constraints he imposed on the creation of Woman's World forced him to be more creative and inventive with language.

At the same time, he had to avoid the temptation of relying too heavily on the curious language of the recent past.

This is not the first time Rawle has incorporated magazine text into his prose. His previous book, Diary of an Amateur Photographer, is a murder-mystery that includes fragments of found text to supplement the musings of a slightly crazy fellow. In putting together Diary, Rawle started to wonder if it was possible to write an entire book from magazine text.

Divided into 23 short chapters, Woman's World catalogues the adventures of fashion-obsessed Norma Little and her delivery-truck driving brother, Roy. Rawle recombines bits of advertising text, fashion advice, and housekeeping tips into a charming and suspenseful tale involving a job interview, a burgeoning romance, a creepy photographer, and a nosy neighbour.

(Spoiler alert!)

Eventually, it is revealed that Norma and Roy are the same person, and Roy struggles to suppress his transvestite tendencies in order to woo the girl of his dreams.

Part of the reason for using the language of woman's magazines is that protagonist Roy is trying to find a female voice for his alter ego Norma. As Rawle points out, a transvestite living in suburban England in 1962 would otherwise find it difficult to discover how to cross his legs demurely or properly apply lipstick.

"But when you look at women's magazines from the time, they're pretty much a how-to manual for cross-dressing men."

While the novel's narrative arc is relatively smooth, the words on the page are the visual equivalent of jazz, resembling fridge-magnet poetry or an old ransom note. Font types and sizes, along with upper and lower cases, swap every few words, creating a herky-jerky rhythm and tone, akin to listening to an audio book that switches narrators and volume every couple of seconds.

The novel echoes the famous 1956 collage "Just What Is It that Makes Today's Homes So Different, So Appealing?" by British artists Richard Hamilton, John McHale and John Voelcker. "So Different" features a male bodybuilder clutching an enormous Tootsie Pop, while a burlesque dancer in a lampshade vamps before a coffee table with a large tin of ham on it.

Collage, with its unexpected juxtapositions, was, in the words of the 19th century French writer Lautréamont, "Beautiful like the chance meeting of an umbrella and a sewing machine on a dissecting table." It has been a dominant motif of 20th century art, playing a central role in avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism. As Low Life author Luc Sante writes on his blog, Pinakothek, collage "was a symbolic enactment of revolution: taking apart the detritus of the old order and refashioning the pieces into constituent elements of the new."

But since the 1990s, our digital culture of remix and Photoshop has inured us to the revolutionary potential of cut and paste. The result is what Sante calls "denatured surrealism." It's now more difficult to explain why the umbrella and the sewing machine don't belong together than the inverse.

Literary collage, revolutionary or not, is rarer. In the 1960s, William S. Burroughs experimented with cut-ups, which involved taking paragraphs or chunks of his work (and others) and rearranging his thoughts at random. In 1966, inspired by Burroughs, British artist Tom Phillips spent four years re-writing W.H. Mallock's 1892 novel, A Human Document, scratching out words in the original book with a pen and painting imagery to create a new text he called A Humument. Since then, Phillips has continued to rework the book, adding new layers of text and image.

During the 1990s, oddball actor Crispin Glover published Oak Mot and Concrete Inspection, books that reworked texts from the 1800s with overlaid ink drawings and new words.

More recently, Montreal comic-strip artist Julie Doucet has incorporated the occasional word or phrase taken from newspapers or magazines into 365 Days, her frenetic visual diary, which was released late last year. The cover of her book has the title arranged in newsprint letters and, as she writes beside it, "I have spent hours trying to find a 3 that would fit with my 6 and my 5. No joke."

While Rawle's cut-and-paste aesthetic makes reference to artistic strategies of the early 20th century, his work also reminds us of just what it is that makes today's fiction so postmodern, so appealing (or, perhaps for some, so unappealing).

WITH ITS BORROWED language, Woman's World makes literal the arguments of literary theorist Roland Barthes' influential 1967 essay "The Death of the Author." He argues that every piece of writing, or text, is a palimpsest of hidden influences, drawing inspiration from a variety of cultures, slang, modes and styles of writing.

That the author of a novel appears to create a seamless and unified voice is, for Barthes, a fiction in itself. As he writes, "The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture."

To be clear, Barthes is not accusing all authors of being plagiarists, but instead suggesting that an author cannot dictate or assume a fixed, singular meaning or interpretation of their text by readers.

While we're on the topic, I should admit that using a plagiarized paragraph to make a point about cut-and-paste culture is, well, also a kind of plagiarism. Last year in the February issue of Harper's, novelist Jonathan Lethem published "The Ecstasy of Influence," an essay that weaved together the writing of David Foster Wallace, William Gibson and Lawrence Lessig, among many others, to argue against the restrictive aspects of intellectual property enforcement.

Lethem even admits that he is not the first to redeploy the quotations of others to create a collage text, citing Walter Benjamin's unfinished The Arcades Project, the collage-novel Kex by Eduardo Paolozzi, and the essays of David Shields.

Rawle's next project is a coffee-table edition of The Wizard of Oz, featuring L. Frank Baum's original text from 1900, and illustrated with pictures of miniature sets populated by old toys and dolls.

Meanwhile, he's waiting patiently for Woman's World to appear on the big screen. Optioned by Columbia (his book was published in Britain in 2005 but is only now appearing in North America), a script is in the works, with Jean Doumanian (a former executive producer for Woody Allen) as co-producer.

No word yet if the film will be cobbled together from existing bits of film stock.

(Woman's World excerpts courtesy Graham Rawle)

Graham Rawle's website
Richard Hamilton at the Metropolitan Museum

Sidebar
CUTTING EXAMPLES
Graham Rawle's cut-and-paste novel Woman's World includes phrases from more than 1,000 British women's magazines of the early 1960s. As a result, the book is full of colourful metaphors and similes, along with anachronisms, new idioms, and the plain, old weird, including:

"With my heart racing like a little boy in a sack race."

"My voice a light and airy soufflé, straight from the oven."

"Red rage rose within me like mercury in a toffee thermometer and I knew I had to leave before I reached the boiling point for fudge."

"Roy nodded encouragingly, though his concentration had drifted out to sea in a small dinghy."

"His words had flung open the French windows of my mind and forced me to step out on to the balcony of indiscretion."

Thinking of Being a Snotty Bartender? Not Tonight My Man.

2010-02-25T19:32:00.004-05:00

“Let me tell you something. This right here isn’t about researching your next role. It’s a job. In fact, we’re paying you. And I’m gonna tell you something else. It’s proactive. Customers don’t come to a bar for the drinks, they come for the bartender. Any bartender worth a shit knows this, but you, you stand there, got a one-word answer for everything: huh, uh, duh, yes, no, maybe. You make people feel like losers, like they’re your punishment from a jealous God or something. I swear, Cleveland?” Nodding to the Rastahead at the far end now. “The guy makes a martini like he’s got hooks for hands, but he’s twice the bartender you are because he works it. Everybody’s a regular with that guy, and he never stops moving, never comes off like this gig is some demeaning station of the cross on his way to the Obies. I mean, watching the two of you back here tonight? It’s like a blur and a boulder. And to be honest, right now even with the traffic the way it is, I’d rather cash you out on the spot, have him work a solo, or draft one of the waiters or even come back there myself than let you pull this ‘I’d rather be in rehearsals’ crap ten more minutes, you hear me?”

"Yeah." The guy had gone pale.

-- From Lush Life by Richard Price

Less Than Kind is More Than Awesome

2010-02-24T09:19:00.002-05:00

This really says it all. It's from the finalists list of WGC Screenwriting Awards for 2009:

Episodic half-hour

Less Than Kind "The Daters." Written by Garry Campbell

Less Than Kind "Fun." Written by Jenn Engels

Less Than Kind "Happy Birthday Sheldon." Written by Marvin Kaye & Chris Sheasgreen

Less Than Kind "Careers Day." Written by Mark McKinney

Corner Gas "Shirt Disturber." Written by Kevin White & Norm Hiscock

(link).

Reprinted Review of American Photobooth by Näkki Goranin

2010-02-23T12:32:00.004-05:00

A picture and a thousand words
They kissed, and kissed again. How in the public-private space of the automated photo booth we let our guard down, and got a truer picture of ourselves
March 30, 2008 | RYAN BIGGE | Toronto Star

If a picture is equivalent to 1,000 words, then dividing this strip of four photobooth images into 250 words apiece is too tempting to resist. Starting at the top, we see a couple looking at each other, instead of the camera lens. This polyptych is taken from historical photo collector Näkki Goranin's new book, American Photobooth, and like the other little squares of humanity that comprise her collection, this couple is anonymous, the photo undated.

More is known, however, about the history of the machine that took this couple's picture. The first photobooth, known as the Photomaton, cost 25 cents to use when it debuted in September 1925 in Manhattan (at 1659 Broadway, to be precise). Invented by Anatol Josepho, a charismatic photographer from Siberia, it produced eight images (in eight minutes) instead of the four seen here.

Less than two years later, in March of 1927 at the age of 33, Josepho received a million dollars for the North American patent rights to his Photomaton from a group of businessmen led by American Red Cross co-founder Henry Morgenthau. Since Josepho's Broadway location drew crowds of up to 7,500 per day, the payout was a savvy one, and soon the Photomaton spread across America. As the December 1927 issue of Photo Era magazine reported, "You need no longer be dull in Boston if you have twenty-five cents and a face. Go to the new Photomaton, in Filene's Basement, some noon and see how romance and adventure have been injected into the hitherto grim business of having your pictures made."

Not only did the Photomaton eliminate the stilted tableau of formal portrait sitting, its flimsy curtain and corresponding privacy encouraged adventures of a romantic nature. Which helps explain the intimate, passionate kiss seen in the second square. Given the couple's boldness, it is likely that this image was taken after 1934, the year the attendant-free Photomatic first appeared, a gorgeous, art deco-style booth that was sleeker than the original Photomaton.

Previous to the Photomatic, white-gloved assistants were required for maintenance and crowd control. As Photo Era's reporter described it, "From twelve to one is the busiest time for the Photomaton. Then the attendants at the three booths become automatons, herding the prospects in one line with one hand, guiding the immediate sitter with another, while muttering directions to both."

As these attendants disappeared, so too did certain inhibitions and restraint. Without a human photographer or attendant as witness, the mechanized procedure of the coin-in-the-slot photobooth allowed people to challenge (or at least tweak) the conventions of traditional portraiture.

"Just picture yourself!" was the Photomaton's slogan and, safe in the dark, private displays of affection could be preserved for posterity.

Of course, the freedom of the booth was fragile, since these machines were almost always located in public settings such as department stores or train stations. At the same time, this probably added a frisson of danger and excitement.

The couple remains lip-locked in panel three. As we wait for them to run out of air or film, it might be a good time to mention a more recent incarnation of the photobooth. In February of this year, condom company LifeStyles introduced the Makeout Booth, a promotional photobooth that toured a dozen Manhattan hotspots and dispensed both black-and-white photographs and condoms.

The intent of the promotion was only to foreshadow the evening's possibilities, rather than promote immediate incitation. As LifeStyles spokeswoman Carol Carrozza told New York's Daily News in January of this year, "We don't mind a little snuggling and that kind of thing, but there won't be too much more going on right there."

LifesStyles is hardly the first to realize the booth's erotic potential. As Goranin writes in American Photobooth, during the mid-1950s, the Auto-Photo Company started receiving complaints that "people, especially women, were stripping off their clothes for the private photobooth camera." Many Woolworths stores soon removed the booth curtains to ensure that patrons kept the proceedings G-Rated.

Lest you think Goranin is peddling smut, numerous images in American Photobooth feature lone sitters, haunting the mechanical eye with their solitary gaze. As David Haberstich, an associate curator at the National Museum of American History, notes in the foreword, "Many images in this book portray the loneliness of solitary figures, testimonies to the human condition, preserving sad moments, in fleeting or permanent features. Some of the grimmest are the most memorable, the most strangely beautiful."
The final image. The couple faces the camera. Giddy. Triumphant.

Perhaps the couple planned their poses beforehand, in the process creating a flip-book movie with only four frames. Boy meets girl, they kiss, they kiss again, and acknowledge the camera. The end. Roll credits.

The photobooth is as much about ritual and process as result, which helps explain why these machines have survived into the 21st century, where they remain surprisingly popular. (For a North American booth locator, visit photobooth.net.) The photobooth is iconic if no longer ubiquitous, immortalized in films such as Amélie and books such as Beautiful Losers, in which Leonard Cohen describes the Main Shooting and Game Alley on Montreal's St. Lawrence Blvd.: "The Photomat was broken; it accepted quarters but returned neither flashes nor pictures."

Although the photobooth endures, the images it produces are often considered temporary, a disposable record of passing whims, fashions, moods or paramours. While it is advertised as a device that converts coins into small, portable, low-resolution memories, Goranin wants us to think of it instead as an art machine, deserving of its own coffee-table book.

American Photobooth preserves another example of vernacular art, suggesting that informal imagery can often tell us more than the work of professional photographers. Through these self-portraits, we picture ourselves – perhaps our true selves – four at a time.

(Picture courtesy of AMERICAN PHOTOBOOTH)

Reprinted Review of Phonesex by Philip Toledano

2010-02-22T15:03:00.007-05:00

A Picture and a Thousand Words
In an era of DVDs and Web cams, phone sex is regarded by some as an endangered species of erotica. Now, a new book looks at the faces and forms behind the disembodied voices at the other end of the line
November 30, 2008 | RYAN BIGGE | Toronto Star

PHILLIP TOLEDANO PHOTO, COURTESY OF TWIN PALMS PUBLISHERS (WWW.TWINPALMS.COM)

This is Emma. Or perhaps Jean, Stephanie, Trixie, Ashley, Lindsey or Victoria. It depends on her mood – or more realistically, the mood Emma's gentleman caller is in.

If this were a movie review, here is where the Spoiler Alert would appear. Because this woman is a phone-sex operator, one of 30 or so men and women documented in photographer Phillip Toledano's new book, Phonesex. Some are zaftig like Emma, others thin; some are men who talk dirty to women, or lesbians who hot-talk to straight men. They might differ in shape or age or sexual orientation, but they all earn a living one breathy minute at a time.

Toledano's choice of subject matter requires the viewer to confront the disjunction between fantasy and reality, or what he calls "a contract of mutual self-delusion." At the same time, Phonesex preserves what many would consider an endangered species of erotica. Radio used to be described as "the theatre of the mind," back before television and the talking picture came along and ruined everything. Today we live in an explicit era in which gaining access to an X-rated theatre requires neither mind nor imagination, thanks to triple-X DVDs and peek-a-boo webcams.

Yet phone sex persists, with numerous ads populating another antiquarian medium, the porno mag. And its successful deployment still relies on techniques from the old radio dramas of yesteryear. A gentleman in Toledano's book explains the art of phone-sex SFX, including "knocking a chair against the table" (to simulate a bed rocking) and eating a peach (to simulate, um, well, you get the idea).

Emma, in the brief statement that accompanies her portrait, echoes this sense of artistry, calling her work "painting that picture in their mind for them."

Related to the tension between fantasy and reality is the barrier between public and private. In a recent article in The New York Times about Manhattan's Hustler Club, Alan Feuer observes that, "In any act of fantasy – from a feature film to a political campaign – there is a hidden place where the dirty work gets done, where the make-believe is made." While gaining behind-the-scenes access to anything magical or mysterious will invariably tarnish it, our curiosity still overwhelms and compels us.

The irony around the demystification of phone sex is that although these men and women talk constantly, we know almost nothing about them. Spouting very hot air on command requires a mixture of empathy ("You have to be an all-around counsellor"), altruism ("I try to heal the wounds that our closed-minded society inflicts") and pedagogy ("I feel like I teach them how to please themselves").

One woman compares her first few sessions to dating jitters: "Fixing my clothes whenever I got a call, spraying perfume on myself and applying lip gloss every five minutes."

A phone-sex operator wearing lip gloss might sound strange, but that's plain vanilla ice-cream in a drab white bowl in comparison to the fantasies they are asked to fulfill.

"There was a guy who wanted to be my puppy," notes one woman, who complains that creating an hour's worth of dog-related mind theatre is even more difficult than it sounds.

Perhaps such requests help explain why phone sex persists. Despite the nichification of pornography, it is somewhat exciting (and horrifying) to realize that there are still fetishes so rare as to be unremunerative in visual formats. It's a tidy inversion of the classic Penthouse Forum letter cliché. Instead of, "I couldn't believe it was happening to me," puppy guy prompts the response, "I can't believe you would want that to happen to you."

But rather than focus on the contents of our twisted desires, we should instead consider why our capacity for fantasy exists at all. For his recent book Who's Been Sleeping in Your Head?, British psychotherapist Brett Kahr oversaw 23,000 anonymous questionnaires and conducted a significant number of one-on-one interview sessions as part of his seminal Sexual Fantasy Research Project. His conclusion? "I cannot identify a so-called `normal' fantasy."

Or, as one of his anonymous respondents put it, when commenting on their own favourite scenario, "It's a pretty sick one, but I'm sure you've had worse."

Kahr's most intriguing explanation for the existence of sexual fantasies is that they are "extensions of our capacity for creativity, the very imaginal creativity that assists novelists in developing convoluted plots, painters in conceiving new art works, composers in crafting new melodies and harmonies."

A 60-year-old woman captured in Phonesex would no doubt agree. "I'm Scheherazade," she explains. "If I don't tell stories that fascinate the pasha, he will kill me in the morning."

Normality and creativity aside, certain fantasies in Kahr's book are so perverse and discomfiting that their owners are tempted to seek professional help. But after reading case studies in which Kahr details the numbing psychoanalytic detective work required to uncover the unconscious roots of our repressed desires, most would be forgiven for choosing a 976 number over 50 minutes on the couch. Talking cure indeed.

But the 976 solution, alas, is a temporary one, and hundreds of years of human history suggest that fantasies more often control us than vice-versa. (See, for example, Messrs. Spitzer and Clinton.) In the introduction to his book The Plague of Fantasies, critical theorist Slavoj Žižek refers to 14th-century Italian poet Petrarch (from whom the book's title is derived), as he describes "images which blur one's clear reasoning."

For Emma, at least, the reasons for enabling the fantasies of others is that she is able to augment not only her bank account but also her self-esteem. Adds another woman, "Let's just say I have found myself and my sexuality through this."

If the standard critique of pornography is that it objectifies women, then phone sex serves to disembody the operator altogether. In putting a face to the voice, Toledano provides glimpses into the personalities of men and women who are constantly asked to be someone they are not.

(link).

It's Marche. Just Cut and Paste His Name to Ensure Correct Spelling

2010-02-22T11:36:00.007-05:00

(link).

Your Red Tape is Double-Sided

2010-02-21T18:01:00.004-05:00

Here is the City of Toronto trying to ruin something awesome, in this case Dufferin Grove Park, yet again:

Lines of communication are strictly laid down. The recreation supervisor is told to stop working with his on-site rink staff directly. On-site staff are told to work only with the “recreation programmer.” If rink users ask the rink staff when the zamboni crew is coming to resurface the ice, rink staff are not allowed to ask the crew directly -- they must call the Recreation Programmer, who calls the Recreation Supervisor, who calls the Parks Supervisor, who calls the Zamboni Foreperson, who radios the crew and then calls the Parks Supervisor back, who calls the Recreation Supervisor, who calls the Recreation Programmer, who calls the rink staff. Yes, really. Every time.

Beyond the fact that anyone with eyes can appreciate how great the park is, property values in the surrounding park area have dramatically risen because the park is great. So anyone who tries to mess with Dufferin Grove will have to contend with both concerned citizens and concerned homeowners. And in this city, you don't want to mess with the homeowners.

Reader Request: Old Marketing Magazine Column

2010-02-15T09:49:00.005-05:00

I received a DM from @sillpillow wondering if I could re-post the following article. Here it is.

The incredible moreness of everything
When too much product novelty damages product credibility
Marketing Magazine | September 23, 2002 | Ryan Bigge

With the thirsty days of summer now over, it's time to assess the latest cola war skirmish. According to a PlanetFeedback.com survey, Vanilla Coke is doing slightly better than Pepsi Blue. One anonymous wag asked, "...can anyone tell me the appeal of a beverage that looks like Windex?" Ouch. The victor isn't doing much better: "It was quite delicious as the vanilla removes the battery-acid flavour regular Coke has."

This battle is ultimately meaningless, but the trend it illustrates isn't. In a Harper's essay published in April titled "The Numbing of the American Mind," Thomas de Zengotita wrote about the side effects of too much of a good thing. "The moreness of everything ascends inevitably to a threshold in psychic life. A change of state takes place," he argues. "The discrete display melts into a pudding, and the mind is forced to certain adaptations if it is to cohere at all."

We have developed a psychological immunity to excess stimuli, argues Zengotita, and thus we surf from moment to moment, product to product, without pause or reflection. We have to–supermarkets have twice as many SKUs (stock-keeping units) as 1985. The number of produce items has gone from 65 in 1975 to over 250. Magazine shelves groan with niche titles. Et cetera, etc.

But is this orgy of consumer fetishism actually satisfying? Yes and no. Back in 1975, Steve Sanger (now CEO of General Mills) was in charge of Lucky Charms cereal. He introduced a blue diamond-shaped marshmallow. Sales increased noticeably. The same trick worked again in 1984, with purple horseshoes. He later did likewise with Cheerios, introducing apple cinnamon and honey nut options.

Why did the death of cereal monogamy work so well? The answer might be found in the Coolidge Effect, which refers to a reduction in the sexual refractory period of the male when a new mating partner is introduced. According to an apocryphal story, President Calvin Coolidge was visiting an egg farm with his wife, Grace, in the 1920s. Taken on separate tours, Grace learned that roosters procreate dozens of times daily. "Please tell that to the President," she said to her guide. When the President received his wife's message he asked, "Same hen every time?" The answer was no. "Please tell that to Mrs. Coolidge," he replied.

The Coolidge Effect can be quite powerful. Male rats will copulate to the point of exhaustion (sometimes even death) if supplied with enough new female rats. But the consumer equivalent of the Coolidge effect most commonly results in what author Douglas Coupland calls Option Paralysis: "The tendency, when given unlimited choices, to make none."

Even selecting ketchup–until recently a fusty but reliable condiment–is now as numbing a decision as toothpaste selection. Heinz now offers Roasted Garlic, Hot & Spicy and Sweet Basil & Oregano flavoured ketchup, plus an organic version. That's in addition to "Blastin' Green" and "Funky Purple" coloured Ketchup in an E-Zee Squirt bottle. Once the only choice regarding ketchup was family or regular size. Soon, there will be 57 Keinz of ketchup, including tartar control, fluoride and mint varieties.

Buried within the seemingly innocuous ketchup experimentation is the more damaging trend of blurring product definitions. There is already a red-coloured sauce that is Hot & Spicy and made by Heinz. It's called BBQ sauce.

Heinz isn't messing around with something as arcane as sub-brands, flanker brands or sidekick brands. Rather, it is trying to turn a food staple into an impulse item. Potato chips? Sure. Candy bars? Of course. Perhaps even salad dressing can fit within the umbrella of impulse. But after 126 years of loyal service, ketchup is as much a staple as flour or sugar. In attempting to make ketchup into something it is not, Heinz risks brand stability and customer loyalty.

Sometimes shoppers like things that are plain and puritan. Not every product has to tart itself up to encourage a tryst with our cupboards. Customer loyalty can often be maintained through product stability. It's the difference between the comforts of marriage versus the fleeting pleasure of one-night stands.

My solution, however, is to encourage, not discourage, product propagation. For once, I plan to profit from increased confusion by opening a supermarket called Sputnik. In my Cold War, Soviet-style shopping environment, I will offer only one brand of each item. Of course, it was the lack of consumer durables and sundries that contributed to the collapse of Communism. But it turns out that the free market isn't problem-free either.

Thoughts on The Non-Private Person

2010-02-15T09:46:00.003-05:00

Openness is becoming the default social norm
Toronto Star | February 14, 2010 | Ryan Bigge

If you're curious, and you have $20, you can now pre-order a copy of the 2009 Felton Annual Report. When published next month, this limited-edition, 16-page dossier will reveal, among other things, that last year New York graphic designer Nicholas Felton consumed 12 different types of nuts (including pistachio), 65 different vegetables (including dandelion) and 50 flavours of beer (including Red Stripe).

Felton has been crunching and graphing his personal data into whimsical reports for the past five years, promoting his design skills and making oversharing aesthetically pleasing. But these reports also mean that Felton, at least according to writer and transsexual activist Andrea James, is a "non-private person."

If the phrase "non-private person" sounds like a sinister sci-fi label for an undesirable category of extra-terrestrial, you're half right. In a Jan. 6 guest post on BoingBoing.net, James argued that "The reason Kim Kardashian and the Jersey Shore denizens have risen to positions of prominence in popular culture is because they each epitomize the non-private person. They have nothing to hide, so nothing that becomes public knowledge can hurt them."

There's nothing particularly wrong with being a non-private person (although calling yourself "The Situation" is downright silly) provided you avoid private people. Or vice-versa. James suggests that the previously private Tiger Woods was caught cheating on his wife because he began consorting with non-private people. Adam Giambrone, meanwhile, discovered that a seemingly private person can be convinced to go public given the wrong mix of deceit and heartbreak.

Giambrone might take some solace knowing that secrecy and decorum won't be a problem for much longer. As Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg noted in early January, "People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people." Zuckerberg claims that being public, not private, is the new social norm – although even he adjusted his settings last December after Gawker published personal photographs taken from his Facebook page.

Zuckerberg's punishment didn't end with the world being able to see him hug his favourite teddy bear. In mid-January, social media researcher danah boyd responded to Zuckerberg's comments on her blog zephoria.org, arguing that "Privacy isn't a technological binary that you turn off and on. Privacy is about having control of a situation."

(In the spirit of non-privacy, I should mention that I met boyd briefly at an NYU conference in the fall of 2006. We both spoke on a panel about social networks. Afterwards, out by the snack table, she said, "You rock." To which I replied, "No, you rock." Such is the heady discourse of young academics.)

Boyd also chastised Zuckerberg for failing to understand the power, privilege and "huge social costs" involved in living one's life in public. She also noted that "No one makes money off of creating private communities in an era of `free.' It's in Facebook's economic interest to force people into being public, even if a few people break up with Facebook in the process." Or, to put it another way, Zuckerberg's approach to profit and privacy does not "rock."

Andrea James also picked up on the financial aspects of privacy in her BoingBoing.net post, isolating a dichotomy between "privacy as a commodity, vs. privacy as a right." For Felton and his annual report, the divulging of his private life is a literal commodity, albeit a manageable and humorous one. Reality TV stars like Jon Gosselin or octomom Nadya Suleman rent access to their private lives in exchange for fame and money, selling a bit of themselves each episode.

There is no guarantee, however, that becoming a non-private person will be financially remunerative. Toronto's Raymi the Minx (aka Lauren White) has spent the past nine years blogging her every move without quite becoming a household name. But the moment Raymi stopped being public by failing to mention the dissolution of her engagement, The Globe and Mail wrote an article about her sudden silence.

As part of a guest lecture at Ryerson last fall (the spoils of fame for a Canadian blogger) Raymi answered students' questions. "I reserve the right for my own privacy when the time calls for it," she said in a quasi-transcript she posted online. "People are always expecting more and more and then they call you a [expletive deleted] narcissist once you acquiesce. You just can't win, basically."

The inverse of the commodification of privacy is also true. Which might explain why Eliot Spitzer spent $4,300 for a prostitute, instead of a more recession-friendly $100.

"I'm no sex-trade expert, but surely the sex couldn't be 43 times better," wrote Rob Horning on his blog Marginal Utility back in March of 2008. "Spitzer had to pay an extreme amount to ensure the prostitute's silence and trustworthiness. Sort of the same reason umpires make a lot of money, to discourage them from fixing games."

Given his recent admission that he had multiple affairs, Giambrone might want to wait a year and release a tell-all 2010 Annual Report. I suspect he'll sell more than the 2,000 copies Felton offers each year.

(link).

Hack Journalism At Its Finest

2010-02-13T11:17:00.002-05:00

A Photo Caption That .1% of Toronto Life Readers Will Get

2010-02-11T15:53:00.004-05:00

Yes, sure, Kool Thing was somehow smuggled into Guitar Hero III. And Goo was released on a major label. But they're not exactly The Eagles. How many people who subscribe to Toronto Life will get the reference to the Sonic Youth lyric seen below? Less than 20?

(link).

A Crowd-Sourced Book Review

2010-02-08T08:53:00.007-05:00

Andrew Pyper uses Facebook to write a tidy chunk of his February 6 review of the new DeLillo:

Until about a week ago, I figured Facebook was good for little more than checking out how your high-school sweetheart is looking these days, being “poked” by near-strangers and convenient (if useless) one-click political protests. And then I came across a colleague's status update alerting his friends to the publication of Point Omega, Don DeLillo's new novel. The comments this announcement attracted were (unlike those relating to, say, the werewolf kid's abs in New Moon) thoughtful, respectfully contentious and, based on the publisher's description of the book, a little anxious.

The concern was based on the trend, over the past decade or so, of DeLillo producing increasingly static fictions, stories free of story, in which characters are stuck: stuck in revisited death (The Body Artist), stuck in traffic (Cosmopolis), stuck in midair (Falling Man). Some commenters speculated that 9/11 had stolen DeLillo's ability to look ahead, the point of view of his arguably greatest works (Ratner's Star, Underworld). Others wondered if the author's decision to populate his recent books with conceptual-artist main characters was showing where he wanted to go: less action and more theory.

For me, the worry was that DeLillo, one of the finest sentence-makers of the past half-century, had given up on being a novelist altogether to become an art curator. Far worse, he had started writing like an art curator.

From this Facebook pregame warm-up, I opened Point Omega to be immediately met by a discouraging scene: people entering the “cold dark space” of an art gallery to take a look at a work of conceptual art and then walking away moments later, unmoved.

Sure wish we could get a peek at the debate he refers to:

Slacker Article: Insert Pavement Lyrics Here

2010-02-06T09:29:00.004-05:00

How we fell out of love with slacking
Poor George Robitaille. Fifteen years ago, the sleepy TTC ticket-taker would have been embraced by Gen X
Sat Feb 06 2010 | Ryan Bigge | Special to the Star

At the risk of sounding like a cranky, aging Gen-Xer, whatever happened to taking pride in not doing your job? These kids today, with their optimism and ambition, make me sick. As journalist Katrina Onstad noted in a May 2009 Toronto Life article about the surfeit of confidence Millennials have exuded during the economic downturn, "Generation X's expectations out of university ranged from low to zilch, and we were right, met by an early '90s recession and several years of humbling McJobs."

Which is to say that 15 years ago poor George Robitaille (the TTC ticket collector caught sleeping in his booth) might have been considered a hero, at least to the Lollapalooza nation. Being a slacker used to be a good thing. In January 1998, cultural commentary Hal Niedzviecki extolled the emancipatory and creative potential of stupid jobs in THIS magazine: "Set your mind free. It isn't necessary, and it can be an impediment. While your body runs the maze and finds the cheese, let your mind go where it will."

For Niedzviecki, underemployment promised perks such as "daydreams, poems scribbled on napkins, novels read in utility closets." He was not the first lazybones to suggest as much. While defending his 1991 film Slacker, director Richard Linklater, argued that: "Daydreaming doesn't sound very productive, but it's where many of your breakthrough thoughts come from. It's in this daydreaming state that you can imagine an ideal life for yourself or the ideal society you want to live in."

Not every slacker was content with passive resistance, however, as the publication of Sabotage in the American Workplace in 1992 suggested. By 2000, a few years after Niedzviecki argued that stupid was smart, Naomi Klein argued in No Logo that career instability had a political aspect: "It is in the ranks of the millions of temp workers that the true breeding grounds of the anti-corporate backlash will most likely be found."

And then the impossible happened – work became fun. The dot-com era transformed the workplace into a big party replete with rec-room décor. But hedonism came at a price. Clive Thompson, writing in Shift back in 1999, noted that: "By making work more like play, employers neatly erase the division between the two, which ensures that their young employees will almost never leave the office."

After the tech crash, Richard Florida's creative class emerged, free to wear tattered jeans to work or freelance from cafes. But now, instead of making work like play, BlackBerries and abundant WiFi have eroded the psychological and geographical boundary between work and home. We can work anywhere, at any time. And we often do.

Meanwhile, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are pulverizing the final distinctions between work and play. As Rob Horning noted on his blog Marginal Utility last month, "social networks are harvesting and reselling the details of our cultural cry of self, conveniently translated already by our volunteer labour into terms of brands and trademarks already on the market." This process even has a cute neologism – playbor, which was the focus of "The Internet as Playground and Factory," a recent academic conference in New York. "Social participation is the oil of the digital economy," explained organizer Trebor Scholz on the conference website. "It has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between play, consumption and production, life and work, labour and non-labour."

While slacktivism is currently receiving a significant amount of negative attention, the bigger problem is a failure to realize that we are always already working when we're online. Everyone can agree that TTZZZzzz worker George Robitaille cannot effectively perform his job while asleep (even if he was daydreaming a solution to the current shortcomings of our public transit system). But when it becomes impossible to determine where work stops and our lives begin, then perhaps some slack is in order.

At the very least, we should remind ourselves that all jobs are stupid. In his 2005 book How To Be Idle, Tom Hodgkinson argues that: "The idea of the `job' as the answer to all woes, individual and social, is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society." This is a nicer way of repeating something Douglas Coupland (author of Generation X) wrote back in 1992 for the foreword of the Slacker companion book: "People gripe that it's some horrible crime against society not to work in a creepy job that has no loyalty to you and is killing you, anyway."

In other words, less work might be more. Last February, Gen-Xer David Scharfenberg used the recession to vindicate his decade-long experiment with the slacker lifestyle in a Boston Globe article: "In retrospect, it's clear that we did something right. We lived a smaller life, a life we could afford... As the nation rebuilds a crumbling capitalism, it could use a little perspective, a little wisdom. Bet you didn't think you'd get it from us."

Being a loafer is also an effective protective mechanism. Slackers long ago realized that vaulting ambition can overleap itself. Look what happened to Gen-Xer Conan O'Brien. After toiling away for years on the night shift of a dead-end job, O'Brien was finally given his big break, only to have it snatched away by his mortal enemy: a Baby Boomer. True to Naomi Klein's predictions, O'Brien the temp worker fomented a mighty anti-corporate backlash against NBC. "All I can say is I plan to continue putting on a great show night after night," he said in one of his final monologues, "while stealing as many office supplies as humanly possible."

Hark! The slacker uprising is upon us. Let the workplace sabotage and revolution begin ... right after we finish our coffee break.

(link).

Cyclonic is a Great Word

2010-02-04T08:56:00.001-05:00

Here’s what Fox has done, through their cyclonic perpetual emotional machine that is 24 hours a day, 7 days a week: They have taken reasonable concerns about this president and this economy and turned it into full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao.

-- Jon Stewart does O'Reilly

Real Life is Hard to Beet

2010-02-02T17:58:00.002-05:00

Chris Nuttall-Smith is an exceptional writer. His Toronto Life feature on why the ROM stinks ( The Curse of the Aluminum Crystal ) was one of the best things to appear in the magazine in a long while. Don’t take my word for it though – the piece also won a National Magazine Award.

Anyway, Chris N-S has a feature about lunatic control-freak chef Claudio Aprile in the current issue of Toronto Life. Like his other work, it’s well researched, well-reported, well-written. The only thing it lacks is a clear sense that Chris N-S finds the molecular-foodie ambitions of Aprile absolutely ridiculous. I suspect that Chris N-S prefers to be subtle, giving Aprile enough rope to hang himself, while allowing the reader locate their own conclusions. But at the same time, by giving Aprile so much attention to begin with, the reader is left to deduce that he’s a serious, important person. As you read the following passage, try and remember that it is not an except from Russell Smith's latest satirical novel. This actually happened, and, equally importantly, we’re supposed to care:

“What I’m thinking about, to make a statement, and to differentiate from Colborne Lane, is to serve a big, fat beet. Like, just one big beet, peeled, served whole on the plate, right? With everything on top of it. So it’s not sliced, it’s not fanned out, it’s not pretty.” This is Aprile talking, in a menu meeting a few days after what he’s begun to refer to as “the foie gras meltdown,” with Steve Gonzales, whom he calls Steve-O, and whom he’s tapped to become chef de cuisine at Origin.

“So it’s, like, straight up, with accompaniments?” Gonzales asks.

Aprile draws a picture. It looks like something Roz Chast would do: big, round head, frizzy mop on top. “There’s your beet, and then just dump everything on top of it.”

“Makes sense,” Gonzales says. He’s eager. Gonzales has been ready for Origin to open for months.

“So, like, it would be bold. People would go, ‘What the hell is that?’ And we’d be like, ‘That’s your beet.’ ”

“But if you’re eating it, I’m sure it would be great,” Gonzales says.

“Because then you’re getting the meatiness of the beet, and so basically everything—the goat’s cheese, braised red onion, dill, saffron vinaigrette, beet chips—everything’s sticking on top of it.”

There’s a pause. Aprile sees Gonzales differently than Matt Blondin. At 34, Gonzales is eight years older, and he’s been working with Aprile on and off for more than 10 years. He doesn’t push the way Blondin does, either. Gonzales is a good cook, but he’s also laid back—Aprile calls him the guy who all the guys want to have a beer with and all the women want to bed.

“The other thing that would be cool, but again, we’re getting a little trippy if we do it, is to syringe the vinaigrette into the beet,” Aprile says.

“That wouldn’t take long.”

“So we get syringes and the saffron vinaigrette goes right inside it. Because the problem with serving it whole is that a big part of it is not seasoned.”

“So that way it’s all seasoned.”

“No gels, there’s nothing funky. It’s just straight on—”

“Just a fucking beet.”

“A beet. And if we can even, if we can get really professional about this and, you know how the beets have, they have the little stringy root that comes off?”

“Yup.”

Aprile draws another picture, with the root this time.

“Wouldn’t that be amazing if we could leave that on there so it comes out so beautiful, so rustic. It makes a real statement.”
The beet, however it evolves between now and the restaurant’s opening, will make Claudio Aprile’s statement. Steve Gonzales will execute it faithfully.

(link).

The Croissant Detail is Journalism At Its Finest

2010-02-01T14:16:00.002-05:00

What he did not address was the chief concern on everyone’s mind: two days earlier, without warning, he had fired the magazine’s well-liked editor, Roger D. Hodge, in a five-minute conversation as Mr. Hodge was finishing his breakfast croissant.

But was the pastry filled with jam or chocolate? Way to miss the real story, newspaper of record.

I also like how the croissant detail is meant to infer that Hodge is yet another effete, French-loving liberal.

(link).