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Bob Lake

David Barker — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:42:21 +0000

Who is Bob? Remember the crazy killer named Bob on Twin Peaks? Maybe the lake was named after him. Or maybe it was named for someone even more insane, my uncle Bob Barker, the guy who loved to kiss women and talk about the price of refrigerators and what was behind his doors. Whatever the source of the name, it’s a lovely lake. The early morning light wasn’t as good here as when I took the photos on Lake Catchacoma. In fact, it started to rain, but that presented opportunities too. I was on an inlet on the north end of the lake when the rain started to come down and it created a much more intimate effect. Then a beaver appeared, obviously miffed because I was too close to its territory. It would swim back and forth in front of me, getting closer each time until it was about as far away as from me to my fridge.

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September 03, 2010

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Lake Catchacoma

David Barker — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 21:03:37 +0000

By the end of the summer in southern Ontario, there’s enough daytime temperature variation that you’ll get a misty condensation above the water in the early morning. If you’re lucky, you’ll get a photographic orgasm, as I did, on Sunday morning looking east across Lake Catchacoma in the Kawartha Lakes region. The water is glassy still as the sun first spreads across its surface and goes a lot further than any librarian to keep people hushed.

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September 03, 2010

Ghostbusters – a privatization propaganda film?

David Barker — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 13:00:19 +0000

On planet Dave, there is a special governmental agency called the Department of Epidemiology and Immigration. I’ve come to regard these two disciplines as sub-specialties of the same concern. One worries about foreign bodies that are microscopic; the other worries about foreign bodies that are human-sized. And so, by divine fiat, I’ve fused the two concerns.

To my knowledge, the first writer to recognize a connection between germs and aliens was H.G. Wells in his War of the Worlds. Martians invade but are thwarted, not by human ingenuity, but by bacteria to which the aliens have no immunity. Vampire and Zombie lore also engages both concerns: foreigners proliferate at the expense of locals and they accomplish this through the spread of “disease”, by biting necks or eating brains as the case may be.

All these scenarios can be interpreted as coded vehicles for conservative political ideologies: keep foreigners in their own countries so they can’t steal our jobs and ruin everything with their strange customs and funny ways of speaking. It is arguable that the message of invasion books and films has infected mainstream culture. For example, one wonders if it is a coincidence that more restrictive immigration policies (e.g. the Harper government’s refusal to allow appeals from Immigration Review Board decisions) appeared fast on the coat tails of a nation-wide hand sanitizing explosion. Yeah, I know, Toronto had SARS. But what about the self-sealing envelopes at banking machines? They were a response to the dreaded anthrax attacks. Ditto for self-adhesive postage stamps. And gays gave the world HIV/AIDS. And zebra mussels will devour the planet. As for the Quebecois, don’t get me started …

In my view, the threat of foreign invasion has had its run. Arizona is fifty years behind the times. More subtle expressions of conservative political ideology have been oozing their way into pop culture for years now. Ghostbusters is a good example. Ostensibly, it’s a variant of the invasion film, but look closely. Something else is going on. Remember when Walter Peck arrives from the EPA with an order to shut down the power grid? He claims the Ghostbusters are running an unlicensed hazardous waste containment facility. They claim they use the grid to warehouse ghosts, but Peck is the consummate bureaucrat, incapable of thinking outside the box of his regulatory bloat. Everybody knows there’s no such thing as ghosts. In his faithlessness, he shuts down the grid and all hell breaks loose. We, of course, cheer for the Ghostbusters who have come to cut through the red tape and get the job done.

Through the haze of a hundred clichés we see the film for what it is: an anti-government pro-privatization call to arms. It portrays the bureaucrats as bumbling fools who don’t know what they’re doing. The motivated experts embrace private enterprise. They’re the ones with the incentive to act in the public interest. Everybody knows that corporations always stay lean to avoid the kind of bloat and inefficiencies that inevitably infect public institutions.

BP is an excellent example of how this works. Operating without the annoying interference of civil servants, and obviously uninfluenced by subsidies and tax breaks, BP has responded effectively to environmental concerns in the Gulf of Mexico. After all, private experts always have the best ideas and access to the greatest resources. It’s like there’s an invisible hand at work — an invisible ghostly foreign hand helping to scrub clean the Gulf Coast and to make sure everything is shining and lovely again. Thank you, BP. And thank you, Ghostbusters, for saving us from the likes of Walter Peck.

The Film Club, by David Gilmour

If Reading is Consumption, then Writing is Excretion

David Barker — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 13:05:24 +0000

E-ink is a lie. It tries to persuade us that writing is black. While I don’t doubt that some of it is black, the very best writing appears in brown ink. That’s because the very best writing is smeared on the page in shit. Romantics say the author writes from the heart. Intellectuals say the author writes from the head. But a true author — a warrior-poet, a prophet of divine judgment, a heckler of earthly powers — such an author writes from the ass.

When silk-tied fops speak of the publishing industry as if it were an oil field with wells sunk into the heads of writerly men and women, and when their soulless acolytes speak of consumers, I can’t help but think they’ve lost control of their metaphor. There was a time, before idiots took hold of the word, when consumption was something we did at the kitchen table, and the economy it supported went no further than the front door of the house. Now we speak of consumption the way priests speak of the Eucharist. We take our holy products on the tongue and by a miraculous consubstantiation, we become the things we swallow: I am Apple; I am Motorola; I am Nike; I am Coca-cola.

Or more to the point: I am Harper Perennial; I am Harlequin; I am Chapters/Indigo; I am Barnes & Noble; I am Amazon.

While consumption begins in the kitchen, it ends in the toilet bowl. This is a fact the priests of the new economy omit in their liturgies. After 9/11, when his holiness, G.W. Bush, instructed the faithful to shop, he forgot to mention this would induce a case of the runs that would fill a cesspool far deeper than the pit left behind after the collapse of the twin towers.

We are a race of gastronomic prodigies who force goods down the gullet in spasms of parastaltic glee, loosening our sphincters all the way down then blasting the half-digested bits wherever we aim our rear ends. How fortunate for those closest to me that I am, before all else, a consumer of words rather than a consumer of plastic and rubber.

Consumption is a neutral activity. A deer consumes grass in a meadow, then bounds to the woods to shit. Without some consumption, every living creature would die.

As with the consumption of food, so with the consumption of words: there is a practical limit to the quantity consumed. Like most people, I can’t eat much more than my hunger allows. Even if I could, even if I had a medical condition that made me feel perpetual hunger, my eating would not be boundless (it would soon exhaust me and my death would put an end to my eating). The same is true of words. I can consume words for only twenty-four hours of every day. That, of course, is a theoretical limit. In practice, I don’t read while I sleep, nor while I floss my teeth.

The problem with consumption lies more in its quality. If I eat too quickly, I might develop a case of diarrhea. If my food is tainted, I might vomit. If my food is thick and heavy, I might be constipated for days. But set before me a well-prepared meal, one with a variety of servings, with a well-planned succession of courses accompanied by an excellent glass of wine, and I will reward you with a firm stool that passes comfortably, presents with a warm brown colouration, and emits a rich odour.

This is the end of consumption: to offer up something fresh and pungent at the end of the day.

The same holds for the consumption of words. Writing is the literary equivalent of a shit in the woods after a session of hearty grazing.

I aspire to offer my readers warm coffee-coloured turds that tingle in the nostrils and send up plumes of steam in the wintertime. But I’ll never do that if all I consume are the words of hacks. If I were to wolf down a pallet of schlock thrillers (strands of dialogue strung between three-word sentences) the best I could offer on my own account would be a case of amoebic dysentery. You would read me as a runny gruel that seeps into the grout of the kitchen floor. Or if I were to subsist on a diet of Victorian novels, they would run through my intestines as naturally as a daily Big Mac through an Inuit, and I would be stopped up until, after weeks of bloated agony, I would explode with a volley of rock-like pellets.

Instead, give me a rich and varied diet. Cook from the recipes of both the living and the dead. Give me leafy greens and pasta. Give me bruschetta and marbled meats, wine and rutabagas, cheeses and coffees and desserts that fry in flaming rum. On such a diet, I can squeeze out nuggets of such delicacy that mothers will bring their children to gawk, curators will beg samples to place under glass for posterity, and revolutionaries will use them as incendiary devices to lob at dictators and CEO’s.

If we are indeed consumers, we cannot help but shit, and the result cannot help but be a mashup of all we swallowed the day before.

Writers are consumers of the first rank, gobbling by the bucket the words of their peers and squeezing out a rich paste. They can’t pull words from the air any more than they can sniff the farts of angels. Instead, they chew on all the words they have gulped, ruminating like cows in the dirt, swallowing and regurgitating, burping and grunting, then every now and again producing a great platt in the pasture.

But now. But now. How things have changed!

The silk-tied fops have arrived with their corks and shoved them up our bums and have told us we aren’t allowed to shit as nature intended by mashing up all we’ve digested. Now, if we want to shit, we must either squat like scatological gods and squeeze our shit ex nihilo or harvest it from a choir of raging aphasics. Whatever we consume, we must hold it in our bowels to fester until we bloat and burst, spewing our poisoned stew on illiterate innocents.

At first, the cork slips, allowing a pale soup to dribble onto the page. This gives writers a piffle to work with, a smear across a sheet of foolscap or a brown ass-shaped imprint for an ebook. But the brown-nosed acolytes are busy sniffing our shit, sending it to the lab for analysis, afraid that traces of our meals may have found their way into our stools. To be safe, they bend us over tables and take sledgehammers to our corks. They weld shut our sphincters. They seal our orifices with nuclear powered force fields. And always, they sniff through the dirt for more shit.

July 23, 2010

Ireland Park & Toronto Railway Lands

David Barker — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 13:00:41 +0000

Opened on June 21, 2007, Ireland Park is a small memorial to the 38,000 Irish refugees who fled the potato famine of 1847 and were received in Toronto (which then had a population of 20,000). Imagine today if Toronto opened its arms to almost twice as many refugees as its own population! The park is at the foot of Bathurst Street, wedged between the waterfront and the Canada Malting Grain Silos. There are five statues by Rowan Gillespie, haunting figures of suffering that stand in contrast to the corporate kitsch that litters our city. 1100 died upon arrival. When the Ireland Park project began, only 30 of the dead were known. Now, the names of 675 have been etched on a limestone wall. Efforts continue to identify the rest of the dead.

Poverty is anonymous because we allow it to be anonymous. If you walk north up Bathurst St., and pass under the Gardiner Expressway, with Fort York to the left and the railway lands just ahead, you can find plenty of evidence that anonymous poverty persists more than 160 years after the potato famine. There are steps from Bathurst St. beside Fort York Blvd. that go down to a path. Cutting back at the bottom, you can duck under the Bathurst St. bridge. There you’ll find firepits, cardboard spread on wooden pallets, old socks, a blanket slung over a fence, a skillet in the dirt, an open jar of peanut butter, a dirty maxipad. And everywhere … graffiti!

When I entered this space with my companions, we stepped into it with hushed tones, as if we were entering a stranger’s house. We felt like intruders. The graffiti seemed like an effort to give warmth to an otherwise stark place, to make it human. It reminded me of students in dorms who cover the cinder block walls with posters and photos. I wondered what happens to the people who live here. What are their stories? What are their names? Surely we don’t have to let them die and then exhume their identities to memorialize on cold stone walls, do we? What good are names on a wall if they don’t spur us on to prevent more names from being etched on the walls?

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The Cloud Economy: Computing as a Social Justice Issue

David Barker — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 17:21:04 +0000

“a writer who doesn’t want her work to be read by everyone doesn’t deserve to be read by anyone”

While the question of cloud computing – is it a good thing? what are its benefits? how will it change the way we interact online? – sounds like it properly belongs in the province of geekdom, I’m of the view that it also deserves to be discussed as a social justice issue. The consequences of cloud computing need to be considered by non-technical activists. Why? Because as cloud computing goes mainstream, it will drive a further wedge between the rich and the poor.

(Note that while my focus here is on text and publishing, the concerns I express apply more widely to the question of access to all digital culture.)

What is cloud computing?

The personal computer began as a stand-alone device. It was like a calculator with a bigger keyboard, or a typewriter that could remember things and check spelling. When I bought a Mac in 1984, I did everything locally. There was nothing on my machine that I didn’t put there myself by copying it from a floppy disk. I didn’t have an internet connection so there was nothing on my machine that came from anyone else’s machine via a remote server. Besides, in 1984, that would have been impossible because there was no such thing as an ISP yet.

For the most part, internet connectivity hasn’t changed things. Even though you may view content that resides on a remote server, that content is delivered to you by copying it to your local machine. When you view a web page, you are viewing content that has been copied from a server to your local machine’s cache. Ditto for YouTube videos. Ditto for emails. And so on.

Cloud computing refers to the situation where your content resides not on your local machine but on a remote server; you use your local machine simply as a point of access to that content. You probably have already encountered limited purpose examples of cloud computing. Online banking is the most obvious example. You access the bank’s servers to obtain your account information and to perform financial transactions. None of this happens on your local machine; all you see on your local machine is the result of your transactions. Another obvious example is pay-per-view TV where your media provider delivers digital content from its servers to your local computer (a PVR box) for temporary storage. After viewing, the program is automatically deleted from your PVR and the only way you can view it again is to access the media provider’s servers.

Kobo introduced cloud computing to online book selling. It learned from the complaints leveled against its competitor, Amazon, that when you lose or break a Kindle, you lose all the books stored on it. Kobo answered this problem by designing a different kind of service. When you buy a book from Kobo, you are buying a particular kind of license. You access your books through the Kobo site. If you lose or break your Kobo eReader, you haven’t lost any of your purchases. Simply access the Kobo site and download your purchases to a replacement device. When you buy an ebook from Kobo, what you buy isn’t a file, but the right to access a file.

Kobo is not a “pure” instance of cloud computing. It still downloads a file to your local eReader. You can’t do anything with the file (apart from read the text) because it’s protected by DRM, but the file resides on your device.

It looks like Google editions is about to change all that by introducing “pure” cloud computing to the publishing industry. While Google has been tight-lipped about its plans, it appears that it will be rolling out a service that feeds content to local devices for consumption without copying files to the local devices.

Why a justice issue?

As literacy goes digital, the barriers to the tools of literacy will increase.

There is a danger that cloud computing will produce a divide in the quality of experience that people have when they engage text. We already encounter this divide in traditional computing. NGO’s have viewed access to hardware and internet connections as a vital part of any effort to promote development. The rise of computer literacy in India, for example, has figured large in the country’s economic boom. Last year I wrote of my son’s trip to Kenya, where a group of students installed thirty PC’s on a LAN in a high school in Nyeri. It was important enough that the Minister of Education flew there by helicopter from Nairobi.

But what good is some hardware and a fast internet connection if you need a credit card to access content? We don’t have to go half way around the world to pose this question. We could ask the same question on behalf of a homeless man in Toronto who keeps himself informed by sitting at a computer terminal at the Toronto Reference Library.

Barrier #1: Access to Credit

Cloud computing makes its money through micro-transactions. People purchase information as a consumable and the purchase is financed by debt i.e. paid by credit card. (Even downloading a free ebook from Apple’s iBook service requires a credit card.)

Marginalized people don’t have access to debt. Or they have so much of it they can’t get any more.

As the meltdown of ‘08 demonstrated, many lower-middle income earners were marketed access to debt in the guise of financial “products”. This was an exercise in exploitation that was allowed to happen because of an absence of market regulation. Yet the marketing reach of Google far exceeds that of financial institutions, and there is no reason to suppose that people who cannot afford a subprime mortgage are better equipped to resist the enticements Google offers in the purely unregulated marketplace it occupies.

In traditional transactions, the delivery of goods on credit has often given rise to an exploitative relationship. Why do we think this will change as more of our activities shift to the cloud?

There is enormous cultural pressure to engage media delivered from the cloud. Those who cannot afford it will be left out, or more likely, will participate beyond the reach of mainstream media.

Barrier #2: Inability to Lend

The lifeblood of cloud computing, at least as practised by Kobo and perhaps also by Google, is DRM. Locked files are temporarily copied to local devices. But a locked file can’t be loaned.

There are many circumstances when it seems natural to lend text:

• sharing a newspaper at breakfast or picking up a discarded newspaper on the subway

• buying a used book

• borrowing a book from a friend

• donating old books for a fundraiser

• libraries

And yet even producers of DRM-free ebooks discourage lending. Smashwords includes this notice with each ebook sold on its site:

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Like recycling, lending is naturally antagonistic to the cloud economy. Lending can be viewed as an act of resistance. But a system that makes lending impossible narrows the avenues for resistance.

Resistance

For the first time in human history, the written word may be deployed as an instrument of enslavement.

This won’t happen because of anything intrinsic to the words, but because of the system by which words are delivered to their readers. As book retailing (and all digital culture) becomes a creature of the cloud, this will foster a dependency based on debt. Those who can afford debt will be unaffected. Those who can’t will pay dearly to participate. And those with no access to debt will be shut out. There won’t be any blurring of the lines as there is now when a man can pull a discarded newspaper from the recycling bin or pass an hour in a library’s reading room.

Although the scenario I present seems alarmist because it presupposes the extinction of print text, nevertheless such an extinction is precisely what large media providers like Google aim to achieve. And while some scoff at the idea that physical books will cease to exist, it is fair to suppose that as more resources drift to the clouds, this will impoverish the catalogs of print providers. While I don’t think we need to resist this trend (after all, a cultural change is, of itself, a neutral event), I do think we need to resist the way this cultural change may be exploited to exclude the marginalized. So here are a couple thoughts about how we might resist these marginalizing tendencies:

1. Writers have power.

There is a venerable tradition that sees the writer as allied with the underclass. Unfortunately, most writers are ignoramuses when it comes to the brave new world of text-in-the-clouds. If authors knew how much they were giving away to publishers and retailers at the expense of their readers, they might negotiate terms differently, or simply circumvent the usual players in the book industry.

I am of the belief that a writer who doesn’t want her work to be read by everyone doesn’t deserve to be read by anyone. Or, to be more blunt: it’s about the reader, stupid.

A writer can better serve the reader by making sure cloud-free copies of her work are available e.g. via personal web space or alternative portals.

2. Libraries matter.

Ideologically, cloud computing fits nicely with libertarianism. There is no such thing as a publicly funded and publicly accessible cloud. A real threat exists that within a short time all literary output will be surrendered to private interests. Conservative interests in the U.S. see no need for public libraries. See for example the on-again-off-again relationship Florida’s libraries have enjoyed with the State legislature. But Americans can’t hold a candle to Alberta, where Ralph Klein’s conservatives instituted library user fees in the 1980’s, the only jurisdiction in North America ever to have done so. The cloud, entirely a creature of private interests, will only work to further erode the position of libraries.

And yet a publicly funded cloud for access to all forms of media seems a natural extension of the public library – an institution dedicated to fostering learning and preserving culture for the benefit of everyone. Imagine what that would look like. Imagine what it would mean for average families trying to make ends meet.

Such an institution might serve as an important counterweight to the overwhelming power of monopolistic global media providers like Google.

Afterword: I note that libraries currently lend ebooks which, thanks to DRM controls, expire after a limited period. However, these assume ownership of an eReader, and so this form of lending can hardly be viewed as egalitarian in the sense of traditional library lending.

July 21, 2010

Canadiana Vinyl Asbestos Planks

David Barker — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 17:56:45 +0000

While searching through memorabilia, I found a magazine the hospital staff gave my mother when I was born (© 1959 by J.S. Hunt Publications Limited). The first item inside the front cover is a syrupy verse titled “God’s Masterpiece.” Yup, that’s me.

The magazine is full of ads for all the latest products a responsible young parent will need to raise a new family. At right is an ad for Canadiana Vinyl Asbestos Planks. Click the image to embigger it. The “Newest idea in decorating …” and “Now in 12 mellow shades!” Ideal for nurseries. Yes, you can have tiles, “but PLANKS are new, new, NEW — and oh so much fun to choose and use!”

I try to imagine what it must have been like for my mother when I was born — or any new mother in the early 60’s. She was younger than most mothers are today. Raised on a farm, new to the city, she was remarkably inexperienced. No doubt she was anxious to do things right, otherwise I might end up being mentally defective, or physically deficient, or I’d catch weird diseases that could have been prevented if only my mother had been more attentive to my needs. In other words, my mother was ripe to be exploited. That was the sole purpose of the magazine. The line about being “God’s Masterpiece” was a bit of flattery to soften up an untapped market — the anxious new mother.

“Your baby deserves the best … an individual Carnation formula”

“Generations of healthy Pablum babies can’t be wrong!”

“Why shouldn’t mother (to-be) choose a baby carriage the way father chooses a car?”

“Baby clothes are the most important clothes you’ll ever buy!”

“McCormick’s Sunwheat biscuits help build strong bones, sound teeth!”

“First shoes are the most important.”

“She is feeding me FRESH MILK ‘Lots of Mothers are as smart as Mine’”

“How bleach helps you prevent diaper rash.”

“Twice as many mothers use Bayswater DIAPERASH Ointment”

“New Anti-bacterial DIAPER PURE stops diaper rash before it starts!”

“Baby’s Own: The duck that cares for babies and children”

“Revolutionary New Nipple”

“Dryceet: The Miracle Diaper Liner”

We may look back and roll our eyes at some of this advertising — especially the asbestos planks — but it’s surprising how little things have changed in fifty years. We continue to market mercilessly to young mothers. Yet our cribs are subject to huge recalls. Toys from China are coated in lead-based paints. Doubt around the efficacy of breast feeding continues to be encouraged by the food industry. And, of course, more young parents own cars than in the 60’s. We know full well that cars are more hazardous to our children’s health than asbestos products (without even considering the long-term global environmental impact of car use), yet we continue to own cars.

Without advertising, much of our culture would disappear. Almost all television programming is financed by advertising. Almost all magazine-writing is financed by advertising. Most web sites either are advertising or are financed by advertising.

Our culture IS advertising. That is its hallmark. Without it we wouldn’t know who we are. We wouldn’t know how to imagine ourselves.

Advertising is an anxiolytic, like Valium or Rivotril. By heeding the advice in the advertising she reads, the anxious mother reassures herself that she is a responsible person. It calms her nerves. It sounds to her a soothing voice. She can mask the not-knowing, the pernicious emptiness that would follow if she had to rely on her own instincts.

July 20, 2010

Hockey Teaches Google a Lesson

Bookselling in 1925

David Barker — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 23:32:23 +0000

My grandfather did his undergraduate degree at Mt. Allison University in Sackville N.B. After his first year, he was seriously short of cash and thought he could make some easy money selling books door-to-door. He was twenty at the time and had never been outside rural New Brunswick. He came east to Toronto in June, 1925 and then was assigned the town of Polk in Pennsylvania as his territory. Although he didn’t make any money, he was able to use his experience as fodder for an English composition exercise when he went back to school.

I post this because, like all windows into the past, it allows us to reflect on the present. Two observations are worth noting:

1) Although we claim to live in a neoliberal post-NAFTA relationship with the U.S., the U.S.-Canada border was far more porous before World War II. (See my grandfather’s account of walking past a sleeping U.S. border guard.) My grandfather was free to work without impediment in the U.S. as he did in succeeding years while studying at Boston Divinity School. Imagine the red tape a Canadian faces today in order to work the U.S. Think of what a hassle crossing the border can be.

2) Although modern book publishers lament the dwindling status of the physical book, there are some elements of the publishing industry that have always been dodgy and deserve an eNail in their coffin. Wikipedia has done us all a great service by putting an end to the largely exploitative practices of the Encyclopedia business.

Here’s my grandfather’s account:

AN INTERESTING EXPERIENCE

In my last essay I mentioned the desire for travel which seems to be born in so many of us; indeed all of us. It seems to me, however, that in no one is this desire so manifest as in the college student. As new avenues of knowledge open up the student becomes dissatisfied with mere book learning, and longs for the experience gained by getting out into the world, seeing new places and meeting new people. Then, too, most college students are at some time in their college “short of funds,” or in other words “on the rocks,” or “dead broke,” and therefore they are led to do various kinds of work in the vacation to earn enough money for at least a quarter of the next year.

Influenced by the two reasons stated in the last paragraph, I was led to try the book agency business as I hoped to make more that way than by ordinary work, and not being content to try it near home, I decided to go to Ontario. The headquarters of the firm that I was selling for being at Toronto, I went there for a few days’ training. I had an aunt living in Toronto and enjoyed my stay there very much. After training there for little over a week, along with a student from Toronto University by the name of Campbell, who had also been lured into the “get-rich-quick” scheme, I started for the territory which we had selected which was in northern Pennsylvania. We had picked for our headquarters a town, Polk, which the map that we were using said, had a population of three thousand people.

After an uneventful trip, save for nearly missing the boat at Toronto and the train at Buffalo and for leaving my raincoat on the trolley that ran from Lewiston to Niagara Falls, as a result of which I must confess that I haven’t seen it since, we arrived at Ashtabula, Ohio, and boarded the train which was to carry us on the last leg of our journey. It was now evening and the extreme heat which had held sway all day was scarcely less perceptible. As a result I remained on the rear platform of the coach to keep cool. Campbell was inside, and when I went in the conductor and the brakeman began joking with us about the place to which we were going and which, as you will remember, the map had informed us had three thousand inhabitants. Upon our inquiries we learned that Polk contained the State Institution for the feeble-minded in which there were two thousand four hundred of the population, and there was not even a hotel there. However , we succeeded in finding a place to stay for the night at the house where the station agent boarded. It was a very nice place too, and I made it my headquarters while I was in Pennsylvania which was a little over a week. Campbell went on to Franklin, about five miles farther, which is a town about the size of Fredericton.

Franklin and Polk are beautifully situated in valleys among high hills covered with deciduous trees. There is hardly an evergreen left in that part of Pennsylvania. Owing to the very low price of coal which, if I remember rightly was about $3.50 a ton, to the fact that the soil was poor for farming and to the fact that the people made a living from the oil wells on their places, very little land was cleared in the adjacent country except the clearings around the houses. The houses in the towns looked quite respectable, but a great many of the houses near Polk were merely put together and that was all. A great many were merely covered with tar paper, although frequently the owners seemed to be quite well off. Of course being on a line about five hundred miles south of us, the winters are not as severe and the houses do not have to be as strongly built.

It might be well to mention how the oil is obtained and sold. A man may have several pumps on various parts of his place. These pumps are driven by rods radiating from an equal number of eccentrics on a single axle Which is turned by a motor of about twelve horse power in a building as central as possible. The motor gets its oil from the oil pumped. The pumps are connected by pipes to a tank on that man’s place which may hold a hundred barrels or so and this in turn is connected by a pipe to the pumping station which may be several miles away. Thus all a man had to do is to run his engine a short time each day – depending on the quantity of oil his wells yield – and when his tank gets full, notify the pumping station which pumps the oil to the refineries which are situated in towns and cities often several miles from the pumping station.

I was quite successful in taking orders for books, but was a poor hand at collecting deposits, so I ran out of money. Campbell also almost had the same trouble but he only received three orders. Under the circumstances we decided to start for Toronto. But here a difficulty arose. We had only enough money to get one of us there and, as a result, having decided to stick together , we decided on walking and getting car rides. It was very easy to get a ride there so we looked forward to the trip with pleasant anticipation. Both of us could have got money by sending for it , but thinking it would be a good adventure we started out from Franklin about half past eleven on the eleventh day of June, after having expressed our suitcases.

It was a beautiful day not too warm, not too cool, just one of those days that makes a person glad to be alive. The Alleghany River, flowing between high hills made a picture which one must see to appreciate. Along the bank of the river Campbell and I made our way for a distance of some four miles to where a company of men were laying concrete along a state road. The state roads of New York and Pennsylvania are nearly all concrete and are fine for motoring. Upon arriving at the place where the men were working and inquiring to see if we could get work – although I think we could have got work – we turned around and went back deciding to walk through to Queenston and depend on getting lifts. In the first place I did not have suitable clothes for that kind of work, in the second place we would have to walk four miles to work each morning, although I suppose we could have taken the trolley which ran past on its way to Oil City, and have had to take lunch. In the third place, I don’t think that either of us cared to work at that kind of job just then anyway. When we arrived at Franklin from whence we had set out, after having spent part of our remaining cash to express our suitcases to Toronto and having had a small lunch in a lunch car opposite the Y.M.C.A. building, we set out on our adventure in high spirits.

The distance to Erie (a city on the south shore of Lake Erie) is about seventy miles, from Erie to Buffalo about ninety miles, and from Buffalo to Queenston about thirty-five miles.

The journey from Franklin to Erie was quite successful as we got quite a number of rides. I started to write down a description of the cars that picked us up but did not continue it. I wish now that I had. At one time it would be a Ford truck, at another a sedan, and once even a wrecking outfit from a garage.

We arrived in Erie about seven o’clock in the evening and after getting a little something to eat at a restaurant we struck out for Buffalo. Here, however the trouble commenced. We were on the State road from Cleveland to Buffalo and on this road motorists do not like to pick up pedestrians, especially after dark, for in doing some have been robbed and even killed. After plodding along until one or two o’clock in the morning, we lay down under an apple tree by the side of the roadside and tried to sleep but the weather which had been so hot only a few days before was anything but hot at night. In fact it was far too cool for comfort. We only had one raincoat between us as I had lost mine and I did not even have a vest on, having expressed it in my suitcase. I finally grew so cold that I left Campbell and went on a little to see if I could find a better place. I did not , however, so we decided to go on. After walking for an hour or so, we came to a sign board which we thought might offer us some shelter from the wind, so we lay down again but it was so cold that in about half an hour’s time we got up and traveled on. At about daybreak we went into a barn and sat down for a few minutes but that is all the rest we got that night.

The morning found us still undiscouraged but we had begun to realize that we had undertaken more than we had bargained for. We got a meagre breakfast in North East: a town in the north-east corner of Pennsylvania which, I suppose accounts for the name. Then we started on again. At eleven o’clock I was still walking. We had separated earlier in the morning. I had gone ahead of Campbell as we thought it easier for one to get a drive than for two; also if the person behind got a lift he could, if possible get the driver to pick up the one ahead, each of us, of course, running the risk of getting separated from the other for the remainder of the trip. We had tried this the afternoon before and it had proved successful, but this time he got a ride and I didn’t with the result that we were separated for some little time.

My! how slowly the miles went by. At about half- past eleven, my feet being almost blistered from walking on the hot concrete and being so tired that I could hardly walk, I decided that I would stop and try to get work enough to earn sufficient money to get to Queenston where I could get a Canadian Postal Note, which I was carrying, cashed. This would give me sufficient money to buy a ticket and take the steamer to Toronto. So I went to a house and knocked on the door, but as no one answered the knock I decided to go on a little farther. It was lucky for me that I so decided for I got a ride and overtook Campbell sitting dejectedly by the side of the road. We picked him up and went on to a little town about four ahead of where we picked Campbell up. This was as far as our driver was going so we had to get out again; but a few minutes later we got a ten mile lift by a commercial traveler.

At this point a road branches off to Dunkirk, a town on the south shore of lake Erie two or three miles off the main road. The driver advised us to walk on ahead on the main road as he had to stop at Dunkirk for an hour. He said that he was going on to Buffalo and that if we got no ride in the meantime he would pick us up again. However we did not go far enough, being so tired, and as a result did not get to the place where the road from Dunkirk comes back onto the main road in time to catch him. We knew, however, that he had to stop for an hour in Silver Creek, a town about ten miles farther on, and we decided that we would have to get there before he left, so, after hailing several cars, one finally stopped, and as it was going to Buffalo we got a forty mile drive which helped us considerably.

We were again set upon our feet in about the centre of the city of Buffalo. All that we had had to eat since morning was a banana and a half apiece which had been given to us by one of our drivers. However, we immediately boarded a street-car which went six or seven miles on our way. Then came the old story, walking, which by this time had become painful. It is wonderful, though, what a person can stand if he has a definite aim in view. Toronto was our goal and towards it we kept going for several hours more. We got two small rides of about two miles each but that was all out of the whole distance to Queenston which would be nearly thirty miles from the place where we got off the street-car. Stopping occasionally for a drink of water, we kept on. This road was lined with cars, sometimes extending for a quarter of a mile without a break. This made it a little dangerous as there was no sidewalk and the road was none too wide. At about eleven that evening we approached what appeared to be a town. We came to a midway and purchased a couple of cones which comprised our supper. Upon inquiring if we were entering Niagara Falls we found to our dismay that it was only Neptune Beach and when we asked how much farther it was to Niagara Falls we were informed that it was six miles. We walked another hour when I decided that I could go no farther. The road was thickly settled here, but we finally succeeded in finding a vacant lot and I lay down in the tall grass. I had intended on getting on the raincoat with Campbell but was so tired I fell asleep immediately.

Two and a half hours later I awoke nearly frozen as a cold damp wind was blowing over the Niagara River and I was chilled to the bone. Since Campbell was nearly as cold there was only one thing to do: keep on walking, which we did and soon warmed up again. In about an hour’s time we reached Niagara Falls after having a dispute as to the direction we were traveling and about the Northern Lights, and after walking through one of the smokiest regions that I was in or ever hope to be. We went into a restaurant and indulged in a cup of coffee apiece. Our money supply was now so low that we did not dare take the trolley to Queenston for fear that we would not have enough left to purchase our tickets for the trip across the lake.

Shortly after we left the restaurant, we met a policeman who asked where we were going, and upon being informed, he told us where we could find the International Bridge, but we first went into the park. Here we sat down for awhile, and then went over and had a good look at the Falls which, in the soft light of an early summer morning, presented a magnificent spectacle to one unused to the splendor of the mighty Niagara Falls. Thence we proceeded to the bridge. The American customs officer, who should have collected the toll, was sleeping peacefully in the office at the end of the bridge so we did not disturb him, but went across where we met the Canadian officer who wanted to know where our tickets were. We informed him about the slumbers of his fellow officer and he, after asking a few questions and charging us ten cents toll apiece pointed out the way to Queenston. We trudged on and had time to go up to the Heights and view the park in which is situated Brock’s Monument and Laura Secord’s monument, before going to the village to board the steamer.

Brock’s monument stands one hundred and eighty=five feet high and can be seen for miles around. I did not get to the top of the monument as it was too early in the morning to gain admittance, but one had a wonderful view even from the “Heights.” It seemed hard to imagine that a hundred and fifteen years ago a great battle took place on that very ground where now such a beautiful park is situated.

We arrived in Queenston village over an hour before the first boat of the day left for Toronto. I got the Postal Note cashed and we bought the tickets which cost us a little less than we anticipated, so we had money enough to get a substantial breakfast.
We both slept nearly the whole distance across the lake and I had to wake Campbell up when we entered Toronto Harbour, or he might be sleeping yet. The way that the trip had turned out it seemed that Divine Providence had kept watch over us for that night it poured. I do not know what on earth we would have done had it rained the previous night, but the fact remains that it didn’t.

Well we may have lost money on the trip but the experience was worth it. I may say that Campbell was a continuing Presbyterian, so the subject of church union was a bit sensitive at the time and while we touched on it we did not discuss it in depth.

From Toronto I went and tried again near Burnt River, Ontario. The people there were of Scottish ancestry which showed when I tried to sell books. But when it came to a place to stay over night and with one couple, Mr. and Mrs. Jack Plett, over the week-end, they couldn’t have been kinder. So, after a futile week, I returned to Fredericton and with one more attempt at selling books in the Springhill area, gave up and spent the rest of the summer haying with the Harrisons in Maugerville at $9.00 a week, room and board.

R.W. Barker

July 19, 2010

The Auto Addiction

A Book-Publishing Venture from Dostoevsky

David Barker — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 18:51:05 +0000

I must be an unwitting member of the slow reading movement — or at least of the long reading movement. As part of my summer reading list, I’ve been enjoying Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment. To my delight, I have discovered that, instead of a dry discourse from a 19th century intellectual, Dostoevsky’s novel is really a schlocky melodrama about an axe murderer who gradually goes insane. I’ve also discovered that sprawling 19th century Russian novels are easier to read in the 21st century. We have the benefit of eReaders. Our arms don’t get so tired holding the book in place. The old Russian literati must have had huge biceps.

More than half way through (Part IV, Chap. 3), we encounter an interesting aside: a proposal for a book publishing business. The protagonist, Raskolnikov, is an impoverished ex-student living in St. Petersburg. His chief supporter is fellow student, Razumihin, who earns a few roubles here and there translating European works. It is Razumihin who dreams of setting up his own publishing business.

Context is important here. Dostoevsky published Crime & Punishment in serialized form from January to December 1866, just five years after Alexander II, Czar of Russia had abolished indentured servitude, liberating 50 million Russian serfs. From our perspective, it is hard to believe that a medieval form of social organization persisted in Russia until the latter half of the 19th century. While Alexander’s legislation was a stunning move in favour of the people, it produced huge social upheaval and led to the obvious question: what next? Poor but literate characters like Razumihin answered that question with their own brand of market capitalism.

History seems to have repeated itself in Russia, for a similar situation has arisen following the collapse of Soviet Russia. However, if an entrepreneurial Russian were to establish a publishing house today, the underlying social upheaval serving as an impetus for this move would be not so much class conflict as technological change. If Dostoevsky had written Crime and Punishment in 2010, Razumihin would be talking about an internet publishing startup that would market ebooks. That would be the “new and untried” venture that would get the characters excited about fresh opportunities.

Meanwhile, established publishing houses would be part of that classist and increasingly irrelevant group who, like 19th century Russian land owners, have less and less influence on outcomes in the emerging social order. Note the problem Razumihin identifies: publishers know nothing about what they are selling. That sounds familiar in relation to the ebook market today.

Here’s a short excerpt:

Then Razumihin began to unfold his project, and he explained at length that almost all our publishers and booksellers know nothing at all of what they are selling, and for that reason they are usually bad publishers, and that any decent publications pay as a rule and give a profit, sometimes a considerable one. Razumihin had, indeed, been dreaming of setting up as a publisher. For the last two years he had been working in publishers’ offices, and knew three European languages well, though he had told Raskolnikov six days before that he was “schwach” in German with an object of persuading him to take half his translation and half the payment for it. He had told a lie then, and Raskolnikov knew he was lying.

“Why, why should we let our chance slip when we have one of the chief means of success–money of our own!” cried Razumihin warmly. “Of course there will be a lot of work, but we will work, you, Avdotya Romanovna, I, Rodion. . . . You get a splendid profit on some books nowadays! And the great point of the business is that we shall know just what wants translating, and we shall be translating, publishing, learning all at once. I can be of use because I have experience. For nearly two years I’ve been scuttling about among the publishers, and now I know every detail of their business. You need not be a saint to make pots, believe me! And why, why should we let our chance slip! Why, I know–and I kept the secret–two or three books which one might get a hundred roubles simply for thinking of translating and publishing. Indeed, and I would not take five hundred for the very idea of one of them. And what do you think? If I were to tell a publisher, I dare say he’d hesitate–they are such blockheads! And as for the business side, printing, paper, selling, you trust to me, I know my way about. We’ll begin in a small way and go on to a large. In any case it will get us our living and we shall get back our capital.”

Dounia’s eyes shone.

“I like what you are saying, Dmitri Prokofitch!” she said.

“I know nothing about it, of course,” put in Pulcheria Alexandrovna, “it may be a good idea, but again God knows. It’s new and untried. Of course, we must remain here at least for a time.” She looked at Rodya.

“What do you think, brother?” said Dounia.

“I think he’s got a very good idea,” he answered. “Of course, it’s too soon to dream of a publishing firm, but we certainly might bring out five or six books and be sure of success. I know of one book myself which would be sure to go well. And as for his being able to manage it, there’s no doubt about that either. He knows the business. . . . But we can talk it over later. . . .”

July 18, 2010

Kirk Newman’s Community and the Importance of Context

David Barker — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 17:07:14 +0000

On Bloor St. E. in Toronto, you’ll find a large bronze sculpture of 21 life size figures titled “Community” by Kirk Newman and commissioned by Manulife Financial in 2001. Here’s what we learn on Kirk Newman’s web site about the sculpture:

“Community” is a spectacular bronze sculpture consisting of 21 life-size figures, standing proudly on the grounds of Manulife Financial’s Head Office in Toronto.

Completed in June 2001. “Community” is a comptemporary [sic] representation that uniquely reflects Manulife’s diversity and international operations.

On his work and methods, we find this statement:

Newman began his exploration of the figure by creating small sculptures of anonymous businessmen. While their suits identified them as figures of power and authority, their crouching, falling, and grasping postures revealed vulnerability. Cast in bronze, the figures took on an unexpected timelessness.

As Newman’s focus shifted toward the whimsical and satirical, the figures suggested the inflated egos and social pretensions of their subjects. By the 1980s the businessmen, now distorted, flattened and shadow-like, conveyed the fast pace of contemporary life.

Let me see if I understand. Are we to suppose that Manulife Financial commissioned this sculpture so Kirk Newman could poke fun at its executives? Is that what’s going on here? Let’s take a look at the sculpture, and then consider its context:

[View with PicLens]

Of the 21 figures, six are children, five are women, and nine are men. One man is a labourer and wears a hard hat. Eight of the men wear suits, although one appears younger and wears a baseball cap and carries a knapsack. Eighteen of the figures are Caucasian. One man is Asian and talks on a cell phone. One woman is Afro-Canadian and carries a child (presumably her own) on her back. The four Caucasian women appear to be professionals.

This was commissioned in 2001.

In Toronto!

Executed by a man raised in Texas.

Who has founded a school in Kalamazoo whose lead sponsor is a car manufacturer.

Is this what diversity looks like? Is this what an international corporate concern looks like?

Where is Kirk Newman’s satire? This looks more like horror to me.

In understanding ourselves, perhaps the greatest challenge we confront today is the reconciliation of our global reach to the fact that each of us exists in a local context. I view Newman’s sculpture as a symptomatic of our struggle to answer this challenge. A financial company with global interests flies in an American artist who has little or no connection to the city. Although the artist is no longer here, his work remains. Like a real person, the sculpture abides in a local context.

Does the sculpture integrate well with the local context? Does the context contribute meanings to the work quite apart from those one might infer by its placement on the gracious lawns of Manulife’s corporate headquarters?

Here are some of my own observations about the sculpture’s context. Take another look at the photo which appears on Newman’s website. If the photographer had stepped back two metres, he would have taken the shot through iron bars. Manulife’s grounds are gated by high wrought iron fences and padlocks. To the north is the community of Rosedale, one of the wealthiest communities in the country. If we walk east along Bloor Street, looking south, we find Cabbagetown, celebrated for its working-class roots in Hugh Garner’s novel of the same name. Now, Cabbagetown has become gentrified so that writers like Barbara Gowdy and partner, poet Christopher Dewdney, can work in relative peace while two streets over, women hook and the homeless sleep on park benches.

Moving further east along Bloor Street, past Sherbourne subway station, there is a sign that says “Nature Trail”. It is supposed to take you down into Rosedale Valley which feeds into the Don Valley River system. Don’t follow the trail — certainly not alone. As the valley descends, the subway emerges from the hillside in a big concrete tube that meets with the Prince Edward Viaduct. The supports for the subway provide shelter for many homeless people, and the concrete surface is covered in graffiti. For a nice white middle-class boy like me, this is a scary place to venture because it’s hidden from city streets, densely wooded, and inhabited by people who fall outside any conventional understanding of what it means to live in community.

Walking east from the “Nature Trail”, we arrive at the western footings of the Prince Edward Viaduct, which looms large in Michael Ondaatje’s In The Skin of A Lion. The first thing we encounter is a Bell pay phone and a sign for a distress centre and the number: (416) 408-HELP. The Prince Edward Viaduct was the once the world’s second most deadly structure (after the Golden Gate Bridge). In 2003, the “luminous veil” anti-suicide barrier was completed. Even so, the distress phones remain.

Mine is a cursory sampling of the context in which Manulife Financial has situated its “Community.” The work is caricatured. The work is sanitized. But most of all, the work is as divorced from local realities as the company which commissioned it. In a world dominated by financial institutions with global interests, it’s increasingly easy to ignore local context. It is increasingly easy to pretend there is no causal relationship between global policy-making and local quality of life. Community is a fine value, but it’s not a static thing to sit in bronze on a manicured lawn; it’s a living network of relationships that requires constant nurture. Otherwise people go missing, as they have from this sculpture. The missing figures are the homeless, the mentally ill, the sexually exploited, the hungry, all within a few hundred metres of Kirk Newman’s “Community”.

July 12, 2010

Ireland Park & Toronto Railway Lands

Photos from Day of Action for Civil Liberties

David Barker — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 23:54:03 +0000

Saturday July 10, 2010 – Day of Action for Civil Liberties. People in cities across Canada gathered to show concern for conduct of politicians and the ISU (i.e. police) during the G20 Summit in Toronto. In addition to showing solidarity with those still imprisoned, they call for an independent inquiry. For me, the highlight came when I passed a man standing beside a scooter and honking his horn while giving protesters the finger. People laughed and told him they were marching to help preserve his right to give them the finger. That’s the point. Democracy is a messy business that creates space for people to express contrarian views without fear. The state cannot step outside the law when administering it — even when it acts against those who have acted unlawfully — otherwise the state allows fear to taint its actions. Fear is the test.

A friend thanked me for posting some of my photos of facebook. It made her feel like she was there even though she was too afraid to go herself. As long as people feel afraid to express their disapproval in public, the state has failed in its fundamental obligation to its citizens — to preserve the conditions in which people can live without fear. A little glass-smashing is insignificant next the damage the authorities have done.

[View with PicLens]

Poem: Watermelon

David Barker — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 14:53:43 +0000

This is a poem about copyright law and my fear (the chilling effect) of quoting other authors (eg. Pigeon & Page). There is something perverse about living in what some describe as the postmodern era, where quotation and mashup are cultural norms, while our laws increasingly operate to suppress these norms. But cultural norms are often internalized; we can’t help ourselves. We might as well legislate that fish can swim, but not in water. What is left but to grow a thick skin and resist impossible circumstances?

Let me launch a fresh poem
from a sturdy pad.
Let me lash my fleas
to the back of a Pigeon
and coax tiny words
to leap from the Page.

I live in trepidation
of the surreptitious buyout
that turns small presses
into kiss-ass sycophants
of big-media empires
where lawyers hide in ice lockers
and jump out on demand
to expel their hoary breaths
over the ground at my feet.
It’s chill or be chilled.

Let me sit like a watermelon
in the desert. I’ll grow my skin
thick to keep the juices
from drying up too quickly.
Let’s hope the buzzards
pass me by. Who ever heard
of buzzards sucking the pulp
out of a watermelon?
They don’t have to, of course.
Even if all the buzzards
fall dead and the melon
thrives, the seeds will never take.

I’ll launch my poem instead
from onion skin or go splits
with a long-dead monk:
a palimpsest, more illuminated
than illuminating, scored
on animal hide, like a brand.
That way I know they won’t
take their imprint with its logo
and sear it into the flesh of my ass.

July 09, 2010

Graffiti: books

David Barker — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:06:17 +0000

I love this little piece of graffiti I found near the intersection of Nassau St. & Spadina Ave. in Toronto. As graffiti, it’s not great. File this one under “it’s the thought that counts.” Maybe this is the tag of a rebel book club. Who knows. Unfortunately, this scrawl has a sad association for me. It’s on Nassau St. not far from This Ain’t the Rosedale Library which suddenly closed when the sheriff shut the place up in distraint for arrears. Yet another indie book store bites the dust and we are all the poorer for it as we tumble into this brave new world of big box bookstores and big media publishing. There has always been a sense in which literacy has been subversive. Literacy has been the primary tool that has enabled people to challenge power. The word “books” properly belongs in spray paint on the side of walls. It doesn’t look right on a big sign atop a monolithic behemoth.

G20 Protester Chased at Toronto Pride Parade

David Barker — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 18:36:15 +0000

Before the Toronto’s 30th annual Pride Parade began yesterday, I caught some drama running past. A protester pretending to be police officer in riot gear ran into the intersection at Charles St. & Yonge. He was carrying a shield with the word “Polite” on it and wore a visor low over his face to mimic the visors the police wore last week while protecting Toronto’s fair citizens from the G20 Summit. In his free hand he carried a soup ladle which he waved around like a police baton. The protester was a little guy who ran around in circles. A least one cop was not amused — a hulking guy who was at least 6′ 2″. He yelled at the protester, then chased him down Yonge St. A couple minutes later, the cop returned carrying the shield and visor. It was a classic case of David and Goliath.

What I found interesting was the crowd’s response. The National Post cited an Angus Reid poll which said 81% of people in Toronto felt disgust at the protesters. The article seemed to lump together all protesters, both the window-smashers and the polite sign-carriers who stuck to the so-called designated free-speech zone. I was expecting that 81% of the people around me would be hostile towards the protester in black who taunted the police officer. But what did I hear? I heard cheers. And when the police officer returned carrying the confiscated items? The crowd booed him. But mostly they laughed. It was like a vaudeville drama.

For me, the incident illustrates the questionable nature of media-commissioned public opinion polls. Do they really gauge the mood of the people? Or are they simply tools to manipulate the mood of the people? The mood on the ground was definitely different than the mood in the armchair.

Photos from Toronto Pride Parade 2010

David Barker — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 14:15:28 +0000

Here are 300 images from yesterday’s 30th annual Toronto Pride Parade which wraps up Pride Week, a nice change from the G20 circus that rolled into town last week. The parade was longer than I remember in previous years, maybe because there’s a municipal election coming in October and each mayoralty candidate wanted to court one of the city’s major constituencies. Political parties also fielded floats. Elizabeth May and Bob Rae were highly visible. Conspicuously absent — as usual — was the Conservative Party. Maybe the largest contingency was Kulanu Queer Jew group which, I expect, mobilized in response to the Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Everybody behaved and stuck to the spirit of the parade — celebration.

[View with PicLens]

July 05, 2010