Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
The category, Spleen, is for posts that make us angry.
In tone and general outlook, Kaku’s book reminds me of I. M. Levitt’s 1956 book, A Space Traveller’s Guide To Mars. Although published more than 60 years apart, the books share a sentiment of optimism, an absolute faith in technology’s capacity to overcome all obstacles, and a penchant for the speculative.
So what is all this kerfuffle around the Toronto Public Library (TPL) renting space to Meghan Murphy? And why should it matter to someone like me, a cisgendered, middle-aged white male i.e. the ideal symbolic stand-in for privilege in all its manifestations?
Malcolm Gladwell is a public intellectual for people who don’t feel any pressing compunction to think.
IBM reveals that it has developed its so-called Diversity in Faces dataset, a face database of approximately one million images to assist researchers in developing less biased facial recognition algorithms.
A strange literalism has infected our world. We have blinded ourselves to the distinction between a thing and the representation, between a person and the image. This has produced perhaps the most egregious erasure of all—the erasure of a numinous surplus that inheres in all beings. Thus the seemingly innocuous act of tearing a poster from a board becomes an act of violence.
A poem to mark July 4th, 2018, and the celebration of American Independence, or whatever. As a Canadian, I find it hard to give a flying fabrication.
For legal reasons, I don’t want to come right out and say “Doug Ford was a drug dealer”, but there are so many stories circulating in the GTA smog that people generally take it as a given: Doug Ford’s claims of business acumen and entrepreneurship stem largely from his experience dealing drugs.
For me, as a street photographer, shooting a homeless person is an ambivalent act. It plays along a line of tension between the need to document lived conditions and the need to protect our most vulnerable citizens from exploitation. As our missionary forebears demonstrated, it’s often difficult to tell the difference between compassion and colonization.
Once, Pride was Protest. Pride was Social Action. Pride was a Play for Justice. The whole Loud and Proud and Out in the Streets thing was a strategy to draw our eyes from the centre to the margins. Now it’s a party. It’s a celebration. It was one thing. Now it’s something else.
#BlackLivesMatter was a thing, just like #OccupyWallStreet was a thing before it. And now those things are done. The problem with turning chronic social injustice into a media concern is that once it loses its traction in the media people get the idea that somehow it’s been dealt with.
Last October, I posted a little rant about the Breitling Bombshell that sits in the Canadian corporate headquarters for a Swiss men’s watch manufacturer. The bombshell is a blonde woman with exaggerated breasts and a skimpy red dress who straddles a large bomb. I think the gist of my rant was: what the hell happened to feminism?
One report quotes a witness as saying: “The strange thing was there was no screaming, there was no shouting, there was no running away – people were just gathering around in front of him and in front of the paramedics that were working on him.”
I’m working on a photobook tentatively titled The Disposable City. It’s a vehicle for exploring urban concerns like ephemera, waste (garbage, demolitions, pollution), and the commodification of everything, including people.
I pointed my camera straight up with the monopod sticking out in a vaguely phallic pose. The geese flew overhead. They were really moving! I tilted back and back and … I fell over. Sure, I looked like an idiot, but I got this photo which (I think) exemplifies one of my photographic aims.