The CNE, otherwise known as the Canadian National Exhibition, runs for a little over two weeks at the end of the summer. The grounds are very near the northern shore of Lake Ontario in Toronto, about one to two kilometres away. One of the highlights of the CNE is the Air Show that features U.S. and Canadian Forces jets and planes. Sitting on the border of downtown and midtown in Toronto gave the neighbourhood a good chance to see the roaring jets flying overhead. Amid the cicadas, birds, insects, and random comments, the jets drowned out nature. Have a listen to the sound scene I captured of the air show overhead on its second to last afternoon, ahead of Labour Day 2023. Best listened in a quiet room with headphones.
Listen Here: 12.1mb 05m05s
U.S Navy Blue Angels F18 Super Hornets
Hardware and Software: Zoom H4 Recorder in 4 channel surround sound, Windows 11, Audacity 3.1.3, Samsung s22 Ultra for photos. Best listened to on headphones.
Hardware and Software: iPhone 12, Windows 11, Audacity 3.3.3. Original recording by L.E.E., postproduction editing by Ninja Notion. Best listened to with headphones.
Joe Rogan and Madge Weinstein Discussing Conspiracy Theories
Ninja defends Buck Angeland Madge defends Dave Chapelle . Madge doesn’t see the point of fanning the flames of the culture wars. Ninja frets about her powerlessness over the existential threats facing humanity. Those threats include AI, climate change, and nuclear destruction. Madge imagines in a thought experiment that she could be the only conscious being in the universe. We discuss the ethics of using AI to create a show where Joe Rogan interviews Madge. Madge likes that idea and asserts that we could use AI to subvert the messages of Donald Trump. Check out the Madge’s version of this show at YR1609.
Other Important Links: Pride48.com, mynoise.net – bespoke soundscapes, meditation, and tinnitus relief, www.drobo.com – Direct and Network Attached Storage solutions (DAS and NAS), Lily Pons
Tea Being Poured (AI generated image i made just for this podcast)
At the end of January, Special K and I went to the Toronto Tea Festival. The last time we were there was February 2020. It’s the first time it has been held since the pandemic started. Speaking of the pandemic, we are still in it as I post this episode in February 2023. It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost three years since the pandemic was declared, but here we are. I know, you possibly think it’s over. Maybe you’re not wearing a mask anymore. Anywhere. Well, I still am. Everywhere I go. Five vaccine shots and one Covid infection later, I am still wearing my mask. It was no different going to the tea festival. The venue was very small. And quite crowded. Everyone there wanted to taste the best teas the world has to offer. So, with the few exceptions where I tasted tea and talked to vendors, Special K and I kept our masks on. The festival has been held annually except for 2021 and 2022 since, well, sources differ on when it first started, but it might have been 2014. It is set up in what I think is too small a space for the number of people who attend, in the Toronto Reference Library steps from one of the most famous intersections in Toronto – Yonge and Bloor.
There were a total of 41 vendors at the festival and I started my journey at table 41 Daniel’s Chai Bar. Daniel has even served tea to HRH King Charles III. I asked him to share a few words for ninjaradio and then moved on to talk with Isabelle and Nickola who have what I can only describe as the smoothest teas I have ever tasted. A more frothy mellow matcha latte I have never had.
We then headed over to the David’s Tea booth where we chatted for a long time with Nadia, the Director of Sustainability for the company. We were rather intrigued that a Tea company would have such a position defined. But they are committed to fair trade and eco-responsibility. They have a partnership with Teahorse.ca, a women led indigenous owned company out of Thunder Bay. The featured tea from this partnership is Manoomin Maple. Manoomin is Ojibway for Wild Rice. 10% of the proceeds of their maple tea will go towards the David Suzuki Institute to support Indigenous communities.
Finally, we tested the award winning Cream of Earl Grey at Blink Tea, where I had a chat with the President, Michael Prini. It is astounding how many different types of tea there are and the history and rituals that surround them. I’ve put some links in the show notes if you want to explore further. Have a listen here to my conversations with experts in the field. Enjoy the show.
When Special K and I stepped into the AGO in Sep 2022, the dulcet tones of Jónsi, the Icelandic artist and singer/guitarist for the band Sigur Rós, reverberated in the hall. Drawn onward by the music I listened and poked my head into the dark room. The exhibit is called Obsidian in English and Hrafntinna (Hrawftinna) in Icelandic. The piece I was about to see is inspired by a volcanic eruption in 2021. The text panel says that Jónsi ’s, “…work in the visual arts draws on the genre-blurring atmospheric effects of his music.” In this installation, Jónsi “…imagines the sensation of being inside a volcano…” Also on the panel is a description of the installation: “A single circular light stands in for the summit of the volcano. A sixteen-channel audio composition resonates through 195 speakers; a sweet and smoky scent fills the air…” In bold, the panel warns the participant that it features low lighting [which did take a few minutes to adjust to], scents, sound reverberations and occasional flashing lights. Visitors should exercise caution.” It’s described on another panel as a “…sound installation…” with “…chandelier, speakers, subwoofers, carpet, and fossilized amber scent.”
I take issue with the term “visitor”. It is too immersive an experience to not be a participant. I’m hoping my audio keeps to the spirit of what my experience was. Let me explain further. There is a video on the Art Gallery of Ontario website about the exhibit. The audio in that video is very different from what I actually recorded. The promotional video no doubt used many mics and professional mixing to convey the aural message the artist wanted. I love the sound on that video – of course- it’s Jónsi , but I like the sound my Zoom audio recorder captured too. I lay back on a carpeted circular platform that others were laying back on, listening, watching the light show, and smelling the smoky scent. The only mics were on my two ears in a particular position in the room. As a participant, I felt the reverberations directly. I hope the audio I captured achieves something close to that same experience, if you listen to it in a relaxed quiet location with headphones. You might just feel the rumble and explosions of the volcano. You will hear what I heard, from my vantage point, using binaural earbuds, albeit, rendered digital.
If you live in Toronto, or even if you don’t, I recommend this installation. I can only provide an audio interpretation of what I experienced, and sound is only one aspect of it. Missing is the darkness that surrounds the participants, the amber scent that evokes ash and fire, the sensations of a moving earth, and the light above, sometimes dark, sometimes bright, sometimes flashing. We were after all, supposed to be inside the belly of the volcano. It’s not clear when the exhibition leaves the Art Gallery of Ontario. You’ll have to check the AGO website for that.
Maracatu Mar Aberto at the International Drumming Festival at Wychwood Barns, Toronto, Oct 17, 2021
On October 17, 2021 an International Drumming Festival was held at the Wychwood Barns in heart of what we now call midtown Toronto. Mostly, a cool and windy day, later in the afternoon, it rained which ultimately drove Special K and I home. But before we left I captured soundscene audio of some of the performances, presented here for your enjoyment.
T-Dot Batu at the International Drumming Festival Wychwood Barns, Toronto, Oct 17, 2021
Hardware and Software: Zoom H4 Recorder in 2 channel surround sound, Windows 11, Audacity 3.1.3, Hauwei P30 for photos. Best listened to on headphones.
Distracting myself from the end of the world, I do some gardening. Famous anti-semitic poets mentioned: T.S. Eliot. Apparently his anti-semitism is a matter of debate so I can no longer say for sure that it is so. Other subjects broached: Autism, rescue dogs, removing suckers from the pear tree, how long the 1918 pandemic lasted for, a rolling stone gathers no moss, dandelion pulling, up by the roots. Keep some to attract bees, not leaving cars sitting for long periods of time, gas prices, flying ants, Japanese knotweed, the dangers of raccoon poo to your health, smoke trees, hot tamales.
I may know some things about gardening, but all the same, fact check me.
Listen to the episode below (HotFRM 238 137mb 59m51s)
More depressing discussion about the end of the world. The beautiful people of Tik Tok. Boostagrams. Premptive Strikes. Abortion. Building love into robots. Deep talk about the consciousness of biological beings. Trying to simulate life on earth. The impossibility of humans to think in terms of deep time. Retirement. Overnight Chia.
Today I have another conversation with Madge Weinstein of Yeast Radio. The conversation will be cross-posted there. And will be slightly different so listen there too.
Birds Nest Fungi in Our Rock Garden at Summer’s End
Things don’t start well for me. I have numerous technical problems despite the fact that I tested my setup before the show was to begin. The problems started when I noticed that the battery was drained on the crappy computer I was going to use. Actually the computer isn’t that crappy. But the power cable is flaky. The laptop rebooted when I reconnected the power, delaying me further. I had to swap laptops and cables, and reset all my inputs, outputs and levels. But that’s amateur podcasting for you. Raw and real. You know like Prince coughing in his Raspberry Beret video or Lucy misting up when Desi kisses her on air. Even so, you might thank god for the fast forward button. There are a few other minor glitches you’ll hear, but we soldier on.
Also. Trigger warning. Our sometimes stream of consciousness conversation is guaranteed to offend everyone in some way. We mispronounce some names and we swear. I also get the bomb that is dropped on England, in the movie Threads wrong. The bomb goes off 20 miles from Sheffield, not in the South China Sea. The South China Sea one goes off in the TV series Years and Years.
Madge asks me to explain Andrew Gallimore’s concept of the Hypergrid which I fail at miserably. I think I need to have Gallimore on the show so he can explain it himself. Also we wonder how the plural of fungus is pronounced. I love the English language. Do you know it has the largest vocabulary of any language in the world. Why? I think because English speakers have absolutely no shame when it comes to just making up words as they go along. It’s a long tradition You know like quark and smog and snog and laser and google and irregardless. (Sorry about that last one. Speakers of a certain age will not accept irregardless as a word and will view you with much disdain if you use it around them). English speakers proudly steal from every other language, (French and German are favourites), and such words are promptly incorporated it into the lexicon. Other words can crop up without warning ,and suddenly, crowdfunding, deplatforming and whataboutism are things. Don’t even get me started on English spelling.
Madge and I cover a lot of ground. Listen to the show right here:
In this episode it’s Sunday June 27, 2020. In the absence of a 2020 Pride celebration, some of our neighbours organized our very own pandemic Pride street party. Several streets were invited. Complete with floats, music, face painting, and a poem by Zoe Leonard. Voices in our heads. Angry drivers. Supportive drivers. Abba. Children. Dogs. We are family. You make me feel mighty real.
Small Float for a Small Parade
Just for fun, here is my hardware and software: Zoom H4, Roland CS-10EM Binaural Microphones, Windows 10, Audacity 2.3.2, Hauwei P30 (for photos).
Dragon speaking virtually from Anne Lister’s Shibden Hall
My guest today is Dragon, a dear friend and Uber Fan of the British television Series Gentleman Jack. The series is based on the actual diaries of the landowner Anne Lister, who lived in early 19th century in Halifax, England. She lived, as much as 19th century England would allow, as an openly queer woman. There may be some debate about what queer means, but I would define it here as someone living against the expected gender roles and sexual norms of the time. She documented, in her own secret code, her private thoughts, opinions, and romantic escapades with a score of women. At more than 26 volumes it is a fascinating chronicle of the life of a female landowner in a time when options open to women were extremely limited. Dragon enlightens me on why Anne Lister’s story is so important to British history and what makes a Gentleman Jack fan.
Other things discussed: Rhubarb Liqueur,Downton Abbey, Diversity in the entertainment arts, The sacrament – of marriage, English laws of landownership, epigenetics.
Today, I have a conversation with one of the bravest people I know. Buck Angel is a transman who began his transition from a woman to a man twenty-five years ago amid personal turmoil, against the tide of social convention, and during a time when little was understood about how to medically transition from female to male. He was a trailblazer in the pornography industry and became famous for his work in that space. He was then and still is an activist. Today, he considers himself the Tranpa and an elder of the transsexual/transgender community. He spends his energy working with the LGBTQ+ community, with youth, the homeless, and others. He has developed sexual and other wellness products exclusively for the transman community and has a cannabis business in California.
We talk about how he feels about this time in American history, possible ways to heal the divide, and what his fears and hopes are for the country and for the transgender community.
In this episode I talk with long-time friend and pod-colleague Madge Weinstein, of Yeast Radio, who happens to be my cousin about 30 times removed. After all, we are both descended from the same 350 people that may have originated from the middle east and settled in eastern Europe around the fourteenth century.
Keeping roses in cold water. Trump. Biden. Pence. Harris. Authoritarianism. Ancestry. Eudaimonia. The end of democracy. Lack of critical thinking skills. Yuval Noah Harari. Global Warming. Marvin the Depressed Android. 23 and Me. Being kicked out of the middle east because we ate with our mouths open. Shtetls. Audio tech. Genderqueerness. Stonewall. The fly on Pence’s head. Political theatrics. The narrative is what it is. Nonbinary should extend beyond gender. Don’t stay in your ideological bubble. Health Care Terrorism. Canadian Health Care that we pay for with our taxes which I completely omitted to say – so sorry to mislead. ObamaCare. Money talks. Activism. Direct action. The end of democracy. The Green New Deal. Did I say, the end of democracy?
Shelter In Place, Physical Distance, and Wash your Hands Unless Otherwise Instructed
Last week a friend sent me a link to a removed YouTube video and the question, “Censorship?” That sent me on a search for the video by Drs. Erickson and Massihi, two Californian physicians who want sheltering-in-place ended in their state. The doctors provide unsubstantiated claims about the virus SARS-COV-2 and one even goes as far as suggesting that there will be gun violence about this issue. This video is full of misinformation, pseudoscience, false hopes and fear-mongering. You are free to watch it, do your own research and make up your own mind, but I give you this rant in any case on a sunny cool spring day during my lockdown. Let me know what you think. (Have I ever said how much I love spring in Canada?)
Special K and Ninja meet Charlie at the St. Lawrence Market. Ninja waits for the balalaika player to begin and it seems like it will never happen. Special K and Charlie entreat Ninja to spare you this visit but Ninja maintains that every moment is a podcast moment. They help Charlie choose hors d’oeurves for an evening soiree. Ninja concludes that the world is full of Eleanor Rigbys.
I read Life Hacks by Keith Brandon so that you don’t have to. There are 1000 so-called life hacks in this book. I share my review that is more of a rant against misinformation that Brandon is guilty of shamelessly spreading.
Extra Info you may want to know:
Link for hack number 317: “Daytime naps help to improve your memory and cut the risk of heart disease” can be found at ynquiz.com.
Despite the disclaimer that the author and publisher accept no responsibility for misadventure caused by following any of these hacks, this reader thinks that it is extremely irresponsible and unethical to publish this book without rigorous fact checking. There is no excuse for propagating false, incomplete, or misleading information. And the author shouldn’t be profiting from it. If he wanted to maximize his credibility, citing sources and proof would have helped. Save your money and time and skip this one altogether.
Did I Say “street” in the Podcast? I Meant Avenue.
This week Special K and I, by chance, happened upon an apartment building that was top to bottom inside and out done up with colourful and original Halloween decorations. Debbie Andrews and Gary Smith have been doing up the building at 88 Bernard Avenue in Toronto for thirty-five years. This year was the last time they would be doing it. Every year they have had hundreds of children and adults visit their haunted building. They bring home buckets and pillowcases full of candy after being scared in all manner of ghastly goulish ghostly ways.
Now they are on to smaller but no doubt better things. They are leaving the building and moving out to a smaller town in the province. Debbie says they won’t be doing this ever again but I say never say never. Have a listen to the interview I did with her about the joys the last thirty-five years have given her and the neighbourhood.
Community Service Hours: High School Students in Ontario have to accumulate a minimum of 40 community service hours of approved types in order to graduate.
Also there is no such movie I can find that is called What a Wonderful Nightmare.
On Friday, September 27, 2019, Special K and I participated in the Climate Strike. We headed down to Queen’s Park, home of the Ontario legislature, to take part in the rally and march. I spoke to a number of interesting people about their thoughts on the Climate Crisis. Jagmeet Singh, leader of the nation’s New Democratic Party (NDP), calls it the Climate Crisis and I think it is apt. If we don’t take action, I am not sure what the future holds. In this episode we debrief on the strike and I share audio of the people I interviewed or otherwise talked with. Enjoy.
November 11, 2018 was the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I, the war dubbed as the war to end all wars. In honour of the Armistice, Special K and I went down to what we, in Toronto, call the old city hall, where the Cenotaph, one of our war memorials, was erected in 1925. In this country, more than two generations have lived in a time of peace and have no first hand knowledge of the realities and horrors of war. What would another world war look like? In the face of some 14, 000 nuclear weapons spread over nine countries, one deployed bomb would almost certainly result in the deployment of many others, decimating the world population and ending civilization as we know it today. Sobering. So I think it is important to reflect on the sacrifices made by others and past generations to mitgate the ravages of military confrontation.
During breakast at a local cafe, Special K and I had a chance meeting with a woman who was from Sweden. We struck up a conversation with her and found out she had never experienced a Remembrance day event. We invited her to join us and I think we may have overwhelmed her with our non-stop anecdotes of Canadian history and military efforts.
This Sunday November 11, at the Cenotaph, we observed the customary two minutes of silence at 11:00am followed by poem recited in English, Oji-Cree, and French, a thought provoking address by our Mayor, and a reading of the poem In Flanders Fields, written by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae in 1915.
Have a listen to my sound scene audio of an historic remembrance day.
Part of the program is reproduced here:
Committment to Remember (read in English, Obi-Cree, and French)
They were young, as we were young,
They served, giving freely of themselves.
To them we pledge, amid the winds of time,
To carry their torch and never forget.
We will remember them.
Address by Mayor John Tory
Hymn to Freedom
When every heart joins every heart and
Together years for liberty,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
When every hand joins every hand and
Together moulds our destiny,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
Any hour any day, the time soon will come
When men will live in dignity,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
When every man joins in our song and
Together singing harmony,
That’s when we’ll all be free.
In Flanders Fields
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
In 2008 Rebecca Belmore created piece of art called Fringe. It’s a photograph of a woman, reclining, her back to us. Sown into her back are fringes, hanging down, some red, some white. You might see these on the bottom of a skirt for instance. The scar running the length of her back is obvious and disturbing. She says of this work:
As an Indigenous woman, my female body speaks for itself. Some people interpret the image of this reclining figure as a cadaver. However, to me it is a wound that is on the mend. It wasn’t self-inflicted, but nonetheless, it is bearable. She can sustain it. So it is a very simple scenario: she will get up and go on, but she will carry that mark with her. She will turn her back on the atrocities inflicted upon her body and find resilience in the future. The Indigenous female body is the politicized body, the historical body. It’s the body that doesn’t disappear.
The Canadian Encylopedia says this about her:
Increasingly recognized as one of the most important artists of her generation, Rebecca Belmore’s performances, videos, sculptures, and photographs starkly confront the ongoing history of oppression of Indigenous peoples in Canada…
Rebecca Belmore was raised in a large Anishinabe family in Upsala, Ontario. She left her small hometown to attend high school in neighbouring Thunder Bay. During the summer, Belmore migrated northwest to spend time with her maternal grandmother — who maintained a traditional lifestyle of trapping and fishing and spoke only her native Ojibwa — in the Anishinabe district of Sioux Lookout.
Ostracized as an Indigenous woman in a largely white high school, Belmore dropped out in her midteens to work a number of odd jobs before deciding to complete her secondary education. Upon returning for her final year, she befriended the high school art teacher who encouraged her to submit a drawing to a local competition where she won first prize. Buoyed by the positive response, the following year Belmore enrolled at the Ontario College of Art (OCA) to pursue a degree in Experimental Arts; she remained in the program from 1984 to 1987…
In 2005, Belmore was chosen as the first Indigenous woman to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale. The piece she produced for the show — a two-and-a-half-minute video loop back-projected on a curtain of flowing water in the darkened room of the Canada pavilion [called Fountain] — took her over a year and half to complete. The video depicts the artist frantically filling buckets of water from the Strait of Georgia and throwing its contents…at the screen.
And she said this about her art in 2008:
Part of my interest in making art is to provoke a viewer to think about certain issues. And I do that through creating images that may, on first sight appear to be – hopefully!- beautiful. But when you look closer you may see something that’s a little out of sync with that beauty. That’s where I hope to get people to think about the image they’re looking at.
At Pelican Falls 2017 – Rebecca Belmore
I saw Facing the Monumental, which featured these and more pieces by Rebecca Belmore on Aug 5, 2018 at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Here is the audio of my experience with her works.
I am an avid and passionate art appreciator. If there is a genre or artist I like that’s being shown in my city (or anywhere I’m visiting), I’m in. But I should have known better in this case. I should have realized and read the fine print. I should have paid attention when posters read “unauthorized”. As soon as I stepped into the Banksy Exhibit in Toronto, I saw it right away. The so called 80 original pieces, were mostly photographs of Banksy attributed works taken in various cities. At worst they were photographs of other people’s photographs. There were very few original pieces. I dutifully went through the spaces in the warehouse wondering whether anyone else was feeling the way I was. Special K was feeling the same way. So was Drag-On. I asked Drag-On. She didn’t want to talk about it in public. I wanted to spread the word that we were all being ripped off. Forty-four hard-earned dollars to see how an opportunist exploits someone else’s art for profit. Well maybe it was partly my experience at the Yayoi Kusama exhibit. That was massively well attended and disappointing for many who wanted more time in her infinity rooms. Now there’s someone who got the last laugh. But that’s for an entirely different podcast. Then there is the question of the theft of a piece of the art just three days before the opening. Some are reporting that it was a hoax. A publicity stunt to entice people into the show. Well I don’t know. All I know is that I wasn’t expecting mounted photographs out of context.
I wonder if he is just using Toronto to see if it’s viable to take it elsewhere. I guess we’ll find out at the end of the summer. This is just a money grab by Steve Lazarides, So, please don’t waste your money if this hits your town. Stay away. Here is my sound scene audio of our visit to the event and how we reacted to it. Enjoy or rather buyer beware.
People’s Names I forgot: Samuel L. Jackson
Details I left out: Everything I saw at the Banksy exhibit you can easily find, for just the price of your data provider, on the internet.
Titles of this show that ended up in the Bit Bucket:
There are so many things happening in the news every day, that I can’t keep up. I’m not even going to try. But what I can do is explore how the big picture is shaping up, because it will unfold regardless of the rapidity of the day to day events that are confounding, confusing and unrelenting. I hope that my podcast today will be an historical record of a failed prediction.
In the opinion of some journalists, historians and philosophers, America is headed towards authoritarianism and dictatorship. As Timothy Snyder points out in his book On Tyranny,“…no doubt the Russians that voted in 1990, did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country’s history which thus far it has been.” The situation unfolding is not about this president. He is merely a symbol of what has been percolating for decades in the United States. Snyder’s book On Tyranny provides twenty lessons designed to help us cope with this time. These lessons draw on the historical record of the twentieth century. With the book, he is attempting to prevent dictatorship and all that goes with it, the suppression of the media and free speech, control of the judicial systems, control of policing, control of education, suppression of the arts, a crackdown on dissent, oppression and violence directed against targeted minorities and other scapegoats.
Dictatorship happens in small steps, so that each step along the way becomes normalized. As freedoms, rights and privileges are removed, we become acclimatized and complacent, until we are taking part, colluding, and consenting. It’s happened before many times. There is no reason to assume that it will not happen again. Snyder is not alone in his thinking. Critics such as the educational theorist Henry Giroux, journalist Chauncey DeVega, and retired American naval Chief Petty Officer Malcolm Nance have similar views. And their views are informed by many others who have written about the loss of freedoms and the dangers of authoritarianism. These others include the political theorist Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, sociologist philosopher Zygmunt Bauman, and activist poet Abdulmajeed K. Nunez just to name a scant few.
We must stop focusing on only the president as the enemy of freedom. We must also stop discounting him as a buffoon. Now is the time and it is more important than ever to keep these things in mind. The president is the noise. His tweets and missteps are the shiny pennies we keep turning our attention to while forces around him, including Russia, attempt to dismantle American democracy. He may be signing bills and executive orders, but he is not drafting them. And, everything we know about him tells me he is not even reading them. He is, however, as Malcolm Nance said, “[P]art of a wrecking crew that appears to be designed to destroy the government for a foreign power and for his own personal gain.” It is that wrecking crew against whom we must resist. Our vigilance must not wane regardless of the fate of the president himself. Maybe he will be impeached. More probably he will not, but should he be brought to account for his behavior, actions and irresponsibility, it still won’t be time to breathe a sigh of relief. At that point, the fight may only be starting in earnest. There are those in his circle, flying at and under our radar, who are harboring ways to turn America into a one-party, totalitarian state that suits the purposes of homophobia, misogyny, racism, antisemitism, anti-intellectualism, anti-truth, climate change denial, and oligarchy. They would continue to be a threat we don’t recognize until it is too late.
Snyder reminds us that the founding fathers of America installed the checks and balances not as a one-time, fait accompli prevention measure, but to ensure that Americans are ever vigilant against the destruction of democracy, freedom of the press, equality, and free speech. The current regime wants to dismantle those checks and balances one by one until what is left bears little resemblance to the protections Americans are used to having. We each must defend the freedoms we enjoy. Each can be taken away in the blink of an eye.
Snyder hopes that he is wrong, that his book will have been cautionary advice. I hope so too.
There are three podcasts I urge you to listen to: First, listen to episode 127 of The Chauncey DeVega Show. In it, DeVega talks with retired naval officer Malcolm Nance. Nance is a cryptography expert. He has written extensively on terrorism and ISIS. Next listen to episode 133 where the educational theorist and cultural critic Henry Giroux looks at the current situation in America and frames it culturally and educationally. For him, how we teach our children, the language we use, and the culture we create can all contribute to effective acts of resistance. Also listen to episode 79 of the Waking Uppodcast hosted by Sam Harris in an interview with historian Timothy Snyder. Chauncey DeVega also speaks with Timothy Snyder is episode 134 of his own show.
All these men and the scholars and experts they refer to warn against what they think will be inevitable if we don’t keep resisting, reacting, writing and talking. To do my part, I am going to tell you what I found most compelling about what I heard and how it resonated with me. Henry Giroux in episode 133 says a lot of things. Halfway into the interview, he invokes Zygmunt Bauman and says, “There is no society that is just enough.” He is not suggesting that there is a perfect solution – just that there are solutions and we are obligated to work towards them. “This administration,” he says, “is about terror and terrorism.” Chauncey DeVega wants to know what we should be doing to force issues. They discuss the merits of active disruption such as general strikes and nationwide protests. What, Chauncey DeVega muses, does the future hold? Giroux is clear that he believes that “every facet of society…will be criminalized”. The state will become a punishing state. He quotes the poetry of Abdulmajeed K. Nunez from Occupy Belmopon II, when he tells that we have already “tipped over into neo fascism…” It’s just more subtle. Neo- Fascism. Neo-fascism comes in different forms. What about “mass ethic violence?” DeVega asks. Giroux tells us that “…neo Nazi and white supremacists are already in the highest reaches of government. What is the end point of that?” Will there be mass “…learned helplessness of the public?” He drops what I wonder is his favorite phrase, “public pedagogy”, “…a term he coined to describe the nature of the spectacle, the new media and the political and educational forces of global culture,” according to Wikipedia. Pedagogy, if you don’t know what it means, is the method and practice of education. DeVega says that he is “…trying to write for history.” Simply put, he wants it on record that he has tried to fight this unjust regime. He wants his descendants and future citizens to know that he did not sit by watching or implicitly collude. I’m not sure that it is true, but Giroux says that there is “no precedent for what has happened in America” now. I am confident instead that history will show that there were similarities with movements in Europe and elsewhere in the world. One thing is certain, there are danger signs and we all must face them. One of the main danger signs is that the president has never stopped saying and doing things that give the public license to express their distrust of facts and hatred of other groups, promote ignorance of economics, the current health care act, and environmental issues. Giroux says that we must face the dangers. And make peace with the consequences. Giroux reminds DeVega that “…as a public intellectual…” DeVega is “…a model for others…” He tells him “…[l]ive with dignity. Don’t turn your back on the requirement for justice, on the question of justice.” He is telling all of us this.
They talk about the media. Because media is driven by profits, Giroux suggests that we go to web sites that “…demonstrate dignity and courage.” Some websites he mentions are Salon, Truthdig, Counterpunch and Alternet. Giroux wonders what has happened to historical memory. What a great question. Snyder in his book shares an editorial that appeared in a German Jewish newspaper in 1933:
We do not subscribe to the view that Mr. Hitler and his friends, now finally in possession of the power they have so long desired, will implement the proposals circulating in [Nazi newspapers]; they will not suddenly deprive German Jews of their constitutional rights, nor enclose them in ghettos, nor subject them to the jealous and murderous impulses of the mob.”
Indeed, this is exactly what happened. The quote continues:
They cannot do this because of a number of crucial factors hold powers in check…and they clearly do not want to go down that road.
They did. The quote ends with:
When one acts as a European power, the whole atmosphere tends towards ethical reflection upon one’s better self and away from revisiting one’s earlier oppositional posture.
Ethical Reflection?! Naïve and chilling.
Giroux says we must “apply matters of the past to the present in ways that offer a new language”, a new political language that mobilizes people. For example, he believes we should not be using terms like fake news or alternative facts. Call it out for what it is: “lies”. It is very Orwellian to make up names to sanitize, negate or distract from the true meaning of what someone is saying or claiming. To call something out as a lie means that sooner or later the liar will have to defend that something. That requires work and research. According to Giroux, Paul Ryan and the rest of the cabal “…are not looking for literature that informs them. They are looking for literature that confirms them and their existing ideology.” He continues, “The new model is American Psycho. Ayn Rand’s model was Wall Street and that’s over; about celebrating heroes that moved up the ladder and didn’t care about other people. Ayn Rand was [entirely] about self-interest. Today it’s about sadism and cruelty and psychopathology. Things that only Wilhelm Reich understood.” When DeVega mentions the Purge series of movies, Giroux links it back to how we might be soon living, in a “…cage-like existence in which fear becomes the only commodity that matters and then gets translated into a kind of violence that is so spectral that it actually captures something about the soul of a society that can no longer exist, in a way, except through sadism, a kind of precarity, and an unwillingness to even remotely examine itself, in terms of its own potential for social and political responsibility.” According to Wikipedia, The Purge franchise is a series of American dystopian action horror films written and directed by James DeMonaco. There are three films in the franchise: The Purge (2013), The Purge: Anarchy (2014) and The Purge: Election Year (2016).
It may also be worth defining precarity. Precarity is a condition of one’s life that lacks predictability, job security, material or psychological welfare. According to Judith Butler, all human life is one of precarity regardless of government, economic, or historical context. All life to her is precarious, because we depend on each other from cradle to grave, on a global scale. I discuss this more extensively in my review of her Frames of War, that you can find on my site or on Goodreads, so I won’t repeat it here. Giroux continues. He mentions the movie Elle, for which Isabelle Huppert was nominated for an academy award in 2017. It is about a woman who eventually enters into a relationship with her rapist. It is, in his words, “…the ultimate expression of the assumption that the only path to intimacy is through violence… [it’s a] …celebration of sadism.” DeVega refers to another movie, Blue Demon,apparently a self-reflective B-movie about narcissism and fashion. Giroux asserts that “[w]e live in a culture of precarity.” DeVega changes the subject by musing, “Teaching is a political act.” Giroux responds that “Academy is an enemy of the Trump state.” Well that’s perhaps an understatement to be sure.
At the beginning and end of every Chauncey DeVega podcast, DeVega vents, rants and otherwise muses on whatever subject he pleases. At the beginning of podcast 133, he asks, “Trump!? Is it madness? Is it incompetence? Is it incompetent genius? He has surrounded himself with white supremacists…plutocrats…He will never be impeached. Jeff Sessions, a product of Jim Crow, enemy of the…rights of black and brown people. He’s dangerously effective. Mainstream, so called liberal, corporate news media focuses on trivialities, foolishness.“ At this point, let me give you a taste of some of the things that Malcolm Nance, retired naval officer, who I mentioned earlier, had to say in episode 127 of the Chauncey DeVega show. Nance tells us: “Moscow has a three-point strategy:
The dissolution of NATO
The breakup of the EU and the common market
The belief that Russia should be able to whatever it wants in Eastern Europe”
“Russia,” he goes on “[practices a] neo-soviet capitalism.
[they practice the] management of dissent
It is a dictatorship
[they practice] perception management” and,
“[they practice] the weaponisation of information”
He goes further. “[It’s an] uprising of the stupid…we are living the first step of [an] idiocracy… [Russia is] a mafia with atomic bombs.” We want to make note of Aleksandr Dugin, “a political philosopher, the Rasputin of Putin, [wants] to bring down democracy…Trump controls 4,000 atomic weapons. Trump is part of a wrecking crews that appears to be designed to destroy the government for a foreign power and for his own personal gain.”
I am going to cycle back now to minute 26 of Podcast 133 where Giroux continues to talk about what is wrong with America. He says, “…the left has refused to really engage this discourse in ways that embrace the comprehensive politics that get beyond the fracturing of single-issue movements and [he] began”, Giroux says, “to understand both what the underlying causes of this authoritarian movement and what it might mean to address it. This thing with Hillary Clinton that went on in the face of Trump. This Hilary bashing, [not that he supports or supported HRC]…there was something much darker on the immediate horizon that should have been addressed and that while the policies that the democrats produced, this complete blindness to that issue and to the notion of education.” What he means by education is that America has to have a pedagogy that supports critical thinking and a relationship to the truth – provable truth. Then he invokes that political theorist Hannah Arendt. She “was a German born Jewish-American political theorist…often described as a philosopher. She rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with ‘man in the singular’ and instead described herself as a political theorist on the grounds that ‘men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world’.” That was from Wikipedia. Giroux says that Arendt said that there is, “…the notion that thoughtlessness is the precondition of fascism.” He asks us to think about the following things: “What are the forces at work in the United States around civic culture? Around celebrity culture? Around the culture of fear? Around the stoking of extremism and anger about issues? About a media that creates a culture of illusion? About the long-standing legacy of racism and terror in the United States? Around the self-interest, the unchecked individualism? How did that all come together, in a way, to produce a kind of authoritarian pedagogy that basically isolated people, made them feel lonely? As Hanna Arendt would say, ‘loneliness is the essence of fascism’. People need a movement. They need to belong to something. The debate around fake news and fake facts – that’s nonsense. The real issue here is that the populist movements like this, they don’t care about whether something is right or wrong. All they want is a coherent fictional narrative that they can belong to. So, whether it is right or wrong is irrelevant. What’s really important is all of a sudden they find themselves in a community of believers in a public sphere in which they can affirm themselves and no longer feel that they are isolated.”
DeVega intervenes, “Regardless, Trump voters voted to hurt people.”
Giroux seems to agree, “It was about racism, white supremacy, white nationalism. It was about inflicting pain on people. It’s about taking away social provision that even they would benefit from in the name of false appeal to freedom and liberty. One. What’s the form of the culture that turned these people into barbarians, in some ways? Two. They are responsible.” By this he means the voters. “Three. What would it mean to figure out what it is that drove them, so these questions can be addressed in ways in which these people are not simply dismissed as victims, but actually become capable of being mobilized in a very different way?” It seems that there is no mechanism or appetite to tackle this. Republicans and other representatives would have to agree with Giroux’s line of thought. There would have to be an answer to how to mobilize them in a very different way. What would convince them? How would the politicians get them there? I am assuming that it would have to be the politicians. But voters are not listening to educators and certainly not academics or the science community. He continues, “If they don’t become part of the script, the transformation, then we’re done. It’s not going to work.” Absolutely. “The polarization will be too great and the possibility for violence will be outstanding…how do we make the political more pedagogical while at the same time not painting the people, who in fact voted for Trump and put us into this place, simply as dupes? I want to know how agency got constructed in the name of fascism – neo-fascism. That’s really the central question. That doesn’t absolve them of responsibility, but it does place an enormous burden on all of us who are concerned about these issues, about how we address it.”
DeVega responds, “…at least at this moment in the U.S. context, the left has an inability to craft a powerful narrative in terms of the use of language. The republicans didn’t vote against [the Obamacare repeal] because it was morally objectionable and cruel. [They voted against it because] …it wasn’t cruel enough. The media failed us in not recognizing this. The media is playing checkers and the regime is playing chess. Media and liberals and progressives and democrats are no better. The media cannot win if they think they are dealing with reasonable, rational people who believe in empirical reality.” We see glimpses of it, for example, when the media recently kept saying “you mean Russian hookers”, when people interviewed insisted on calling it by the more watered-down term “salacious material.” I wonder what it would cause or look like if the media did what DeVega is suggesting. Would it be powerful and raise awareness or would they be suppressed, controlled, and threatened by the regime? Are they afraid that this would give the regime an excuse to shut them out of press briefings? The way the media has been behaving, it certainly looks that way to me. How far can they push Spicer before he just stops answering or ignores the press more than he does now?
Giroux continues to address the problem of public transformation, “We need an overriding vision. We need to talk about radical democracy. We need to name cruelty when we see it. These people are killing people. Language translates in policies that affect people in very specific ways.” America has a “crisis of civic literacy, crisis of cultural literacy, agency, civic, culture…commercial interactions are the only ones with meaning…Anti-intellectualism has taken over the country. Critical reflection becomes not just simply an object of disdain, but an object of contempt.”
“And treason!” DeVega adds.
Giroux continues, “What happened to the formative culture that offered resistance to that? In what way are the schools contributing to this? What does it mean when language succumbs to the esthetics of idiocy and vulgarity? What does it mean when celebrity culture confers more authority than higher and public education? What does it mean when happiness becomes a private right – or when people can no longer translate individual problems into larger public issues? This is a crisis of civic liberty…you’re talking about mass produced ignorance…when a formative culture disappears that makes self-reflection possible, then you get people saying and doing things that are incomprehensible with respect to the question of reason.”
DeVega finally says what almost certainly is a shared reality, “I think Donald Trump has unleashed something that has been bubbling beneath the surface.”
Giroux addresses this in terms of violence. “Violence becomes the cohesive element that brings people together. Violence becomes a sport. Violence becomes policy. It’s a spectacle. Violence is the language of disposability. We just get rid of people. Violence becomes the driving force which is one of the few forces left by which people can feel anything. Violence and idiocy – a lethal combination. Agency will be weaponized.”
DeVega feels that, “Donald Trump is the crystallization of everything that is wrong with this country.”
Giroux expands on this sentiment. “He is the distillation of an attack on democracy that has become more cruel, more virulent, more poisonous, more militarized and more violent since the 1970s. To simply view him as eccentric…as some kind of clown, who now has tapped into a certain element of culture is really to miss the point. Flawed democracy has been transformed into a new form of neo-fascism…You combine the authority that a celebrity culture confers with the utter isolation that people are feeling and the precarity that people now finds themselves – a neo-liberal culture – couple that with a culture of spectacle – of immediacy and entertainment and man there is really not a lot of wiggle room for democratic formative culture to emerge in a way that have resisted them. “The regime has people like, “…Bannon and Gorka driving policy. Trump doesn’t have the attention span to think through policies like this. [The m]ainstream press won’t call them out…in the next two years, they will attempt to destroy, with a vigorousness and aggressiveness, every major element of the social contract and every provision, policy, social relationship, public good that basically the corporate elite sees as a burden on their own resources. If the left fails to take up and develop a commanding vision, a new language about civic culture, about the possibilities of democracy and gets away from the…fractured politics that they’re involved in and be able to build a social movement, an educational movement, we may get somewhere.”
Giroux’s offers a recipe: “Liberals have to bang home that Trump is elite. There is no politics without identification. Policy goals to win over voters: National Health Care Plan. Social Wage – Guaranteed minimum income plans. Jobs programs. The commons matter.” Ok. There are two things I’d like to provide a definition of. First here is how the Oxford dictionary defines Identity Politics: “A tendency for people of a particular religion, race, social background, etc. to form exclusive political alliances, moving away from traditional party politics.” What that means is I’m gay so my political positions are informed and influenced by my interests and perspectives with respect to my identity as a gay person. I agree with Giroux that my identity is completely reflected in my politics. How can it be otherwise? What I think has importance is how we respect each other’s identities so that we can come to shared and fair public policies and visions. Second a refresher on what the commons are. According to Wikipedia it is, “the cultural and natural resources accessible to all members of a society, including natural materials such as air, water and a habitable earth.” It’s not a leap to suggest that we as a species have struggled to protect and share our commons and may be losing that battle.
Giroux continues in a passionate way, “Bernie”, he starts, “argued for progressiveness within a party that is actually reactionary. He didn’t get the power of the Democratic party to embrace the third way…third way equals neo-liberal…Democrats [are] not liberal. [They are] very conservative…party of the neo-liberal capitalism…erasure of historical memory. Historical memory does not matter…in our culture of short term gains, being the only thing that matters, culture of immediacy. Speed has overtaken the possibility for thought itself… [It’s a] very dangerous scenario…anti-intellectualism and cruelty…lapse of being able to draw any relationship between action and social cost. Our age [is characterized by t]he politics of disappearance…” He then lists all the things that have or will disappear in his opinion:
“Disappearance of memory
Disappearance of racial justice
Disappearance of immigrants
Disappearance of young people who are poor
Disappearance of people who don’t buy into the logic of capitalism
Disappearance of intellectuals
Disappearance of media who have the possibility of holding power accountable.”
And in what I think is a natural extension of these ideas is as DeVega responds, “Phil Zombardo says we can ‘other’ people. ‘Othering’ is necessary for evil.” You can find more on this by reading Judith Butler’s Frames of War and Precarious Life.
Giroux agrees, “In a criminogenic society, that society is organized for the production of death; that civil society is organized for the production of violence. We have so individualized these problems.” We act as though the president is the cause and not the system or society. “Trump as eccentric, just stupid – it’s a diversionary tactic. The press picks up on the diversion. Who’s going to die? Repealing of Healthcare, rolling back environmental protection. State violence is being produced. “
And DeVega feels that, “Our media lies to us. We have a culture of spectacle and disposability…lack of civil literacy.”
Giroux picks up on this by talking about the importance of education, his specialty. He tells DeVega, “This is where the question of education and literacy becomes crucial. We have produced a culture that is contemptuous of truth, leading to a situation where democracy cannot function. We can’t hold power accountable because there’s no such thing as the value of argument. There is no such thing as ability to know when people are being fooled, when they are being used as fodder in the interest of concentrated power, that basically will say anything to create a cohesive narrative that allows people to believe somehow that narrative benefits them when actually it’s just the opposite.” I don’t think Giroux feels that the media is necessarily complicit and without courage. Media has just been corrupted by wealth. They are driven by profits and what gets me to their media outlets be they TV, the internet, newspapers or magazine stands. Giroux continues, “Youth can’t just criticize culture. You have to be a culture producer.” Finally, Giroux tells a marvelous story of how his father taught him about appreciating diversity. “You ought to realize,” his father had said, “that different people be in the world in different ways. They have different languages and different skills. When you realize that your language is not the only language, then you’ll be able to listen to people and you’ll be able to understand where they come from.”
Are we looking at the end of democracy, at a new western dictatorship? At some dark dystopian future? I don’t know. In today’s world, I think we have a duty to be courageous and fight to protect the freedoms we have come to know.
“Imagine all the people living life in peace.” Photo taken Sunday September 21 2014.
On Sunday September 21 2014, Special K and I attended the first international People’s Climate March. It was an event held around the world with a special focus on New York City two days before the U.N. Climate Summit was set to begin. It was organized by 350.org an environmental group founded by writer and activist Bill McKibben. 350 represents the parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that scientists say we need to stay at to keep further climate change at bay. Earlier last year there was a point where the parts per million of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere was recorded at 400ppm.
Wikipedia records an estimate of 311,000 people attended the People’s Climate March. There were numerous staging areas for different groups that started at Central Park West at 59th street and went as far as 86th street. Special K and I ended up joining the designated area for the generational groups at around 66th street. Among the participants we marched with were families, the elderly, and students. It was intended to be a peaceful march and it was. I interviewed several people: One of the peacekeeper volunteers, some students, a carpenter, an urban planner and a TV film editor. Join Special K and I as we take you through the march on that humid cloudy day. Enjoy the show.
Listen up (36m45s) :
Other things discussed:
Hegemony – “…is the political, economic, or military predominance or control of one state over others.”
Star Child (Taken at the Kubrick Retrospective at TIFF Lightbox November 2014)
I am not an expert on these matters. I merely know what I like and what I don’t like. And though there were movies of his that I absolutely did not like, I cannot ignore the profound impact his movies have had on me. I don’t know anyone who will deny, if they have seen the movie, that when they hear Also Sprach Zarathrustraor The Blue Danube they can think only of 2001 – A Space Odyssey. There are those of us who saw A Clockwork Orange who will never be able to see it again because of its assault on our morality, senses, and emotions. I have a friend who can’t listen to Beethoven’s 9th, Ode to Joy, or theWilliam Tell Overture anymore after seeing the movie without seeing the most vicious and disturbing scenes in her mind’s eye. We don’t understand what some of these movies were about but we simply cannot forget them. He arguably redefined the relationship of music to American film, camera work with American film, and even redefined how to tell a tale. He turned the ghost story on its head with The Shining and confused us about war and violence with Full Metal Jacket. I am speaking of course about Stanley Kubrick, one of the greatest American filmmakers of all time. He made only sixteen movies in forty-eight years, three of which were documentary shorts made very early in his career. Fans waited eagerly for years between movies. Disappointed or not by what I saw, I know that there was great depth and thought put into every inch of film he shot. There is so much to say about him as a filmmaker, that I could probably study him for years and still not understand his films or his process. But I cannot stop being compelled and drawn to his work. In November 2014, the Toronto International Film Festival, mounted a retrospective of his work at the TIFF Lightbox location in Toronto. I eagerly attended and was surprised by the mashup curation of the main exhibit. I got a new perspective on the man and his movies and learned about some I had yet to see. My show today is separated into two parts. The first takes place in the main exhibit. I sometimes compete with the cacophony of music that surrounds me, and try to provide a sense of how the exhibit takes you through his body of work. The second takes place in a quieter section of the exhibit where various people share their opinion on select works by this master.
The Twins Costume from The Shining (Taken at TIFF Lightbox – Kubrick Retrospective)
It took me more than two years to get through this book. I put it down after page 42 in 2012 because of its dense content and academic language. I am a fan of Judith Butler because she has some unique and thoughtful ways of looking at difficult questions. In this book of essays, (some of which she gave as lectures), she is looking at how we frame war and violence to justify it and give it meaning. She touches on how the media manipulates our emotions to reinforce or create our sentiments. This is not a new idea. Of course we all know the power of propaganda. But she has more to say about how we frame the idea of war so that we can bear its negative affects.
According to Judith Butler, each of our lives is “…always is some sense in the hands of others”. She points out that we are nothing but social creatures that depend completely on each other for everything in our lives. And she means everything. From the survival of each infant born to the food on our plates to the infrastructure that provides the food on our plates including the plates. Each of our lives is necessarily dependent on others. She makes a case that our global social entanglement shapes how we view each other as human beings. Or not. Consider that she makes this observation:
“…war [divides] populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived…it has never counted as a life at all.”
In a war where the one side (say Hamas) stores armaments in schools, community centres, and houses of worship, the destruction of those armaments means that the people in those places, be they children, women, holy men or teachers do not have grievable lives. Their lives have and had no meaning because they were already dead before they were born. They are not alive and never were. We may believe that the people in those places are being used by the enemy as human shields. Therefore if the enemy does not give their own people the status of living beings worthy of being mourned, missed or valued, why should anyone else? So the bombing of these places becomes justifiable. Butler makes the entire idea of killing ludicrous when seen from this point of view. She is coming from the position that all human life, all interconnected on this planet, is grievable. Yet,we divide the world into those who are worthy of being grieved and those who are not. Otherwise we cannot justify war and violence. In one of her many brilliant statements she writes,
“…war seeks to deny the ongoing and irrefutable ways in which we are all subject to one another, vulnerable to destruction by the other, and in need of protection…[via]agreements based on the recognition of shared precariousness.”
She goes on to assert that “[w]ar is precisely an effort to minimize precariousness for some and maximize it for others.”
Apart from these ideas and some interesting discussion of the impact of media and photography, the essays for the most part left me cold and wanting. I was distressed by her use of language. For example, she uses the word alterity at one point when otherness would have made her point much more accessible. There are also statements and ideas that I found completely incomprehensible. For example, I could not make sense of this:
“The point is not to celebrate a full deregulation of affect, but to query the conditions of responsiveness by offering interpretive matrices for the understanding of war that question and oppose the dominant interpretations — interpretations that not only act upon affect, but take form and become effective as affect itself.”
If you can decipher this, I’d love to know what it means.
I was also shocked that she actually used the (non)-word irregardless (page 178 for anyone that cares). I will give her the benefit of the doubt and consider that an incompetent editor or grad student made the slip-up.
In matters of our global attitudes to war, violence, hatred, and non-tolerance, accessibility of her ideas is important for real change in my opinion. I am not sure she is interested in changing the world so much as she just wants to explore it philosophically and for the fun of it.
(note: this review, slightly edited, was cross-posted to Goodreads on Aug 31 2014)
This week I caught up with a Brazilian drumming troupe practicing in the park for their summer season. They call themselves MaracaTall. This is a play on the word maractu, a type of drumming, song and performance genre popular in Brazil. The twist on this Toronto troupe is that they perform on stilts. Their next gig is in Toronto at Harbourfront Centre near the Redpath stage 1:30pm on Canada Day Tuesday July 1 2014.
Listen here for my conversation with several members of the troupe:
I was very saddened to hear about Mark Peacock’s passing. He was known in the podcasting world as Special Delivery Mark. He was someone I met early in podcasting and up until a few years ago, enjoyed lively and interesting dialogues with him across the internet. He was a troubled but very sweet soul. I know he struggled with his diabetes and drinking. I received more than one drunken, oftentimes incomprehensible, chat, text, or email in wee hours of the morning from him. I missed him over the last few years – but he wasn’t interacting much on social media anymore and I stopped receiving emails from him. I hoped he was ok, but didn’t really have another way of getting in touch with him. I know other acquaintances of his had the same challenges. He passed away on April 30, 2014 at the age of 48. Here are excerpts from his obituary courtesy of Matt Burlingame :
“Mark Frederick Peacock, 48, was a 36-year resident of Sonora California. He was born Jan. 18, 1966 in Walnut Creek, Calif. He died April 30, 2014 in Unit 7 of Sonora Regional Medical Center after fighting a long battle with complications of diabetes and liver failure. He worked for Sonora Community Hospital while in high school; IT Recycling, Sonora Florist and again at Sonora Regional Medical Center. He is survived by his mother, sister, brother, half-brother and many others. Mark volunteered at Interfaith Community Social Services, Community Christmas Eve Day Dinner, Tuolumne County Humane Society, Old Mill Run, Red Cross and numerous community events in the Sacramento area. He enjoyed fishing, camping, geocaching, being with family and friends, taking in lost or abandoned cats, photography and astronomy, kite flying and attending Sci-Fi events. When Mark was in Sonora High School (graduate of 1984), he saved his money to purchase a computer. He then taught many teachers how to use computers in the classroom. Mark is best known for his politeness and kindness to others, his love of adventure, stretching his mind and the ability to laugh at his own flaws. He has been an integral part of his family, supportive and reliable friend, a coach in geocaching and computers, and a haven for abandoned cats.”
I also know he loved electronic music and did some composing of his own. In honour of his memory, here is some of his original music he sent to me with his own commentary on it.
Still from “Beekeeping for All” by Myfanwy MacLeod and Janna Levitt at the Royal Ontario Museum January 26 2014
On January 26, Special K and I were scheduled to participate in an event at the Royal Ontario Museum called Carbon 14 – A Day of Dialogue – The Changing Arctic Landscape. The Arctic government and policy makers are very concerned about the changes they anticpate in the arctic latitudes and have seen over the last several generations. As a prelude to this, I visited the exhibit Climate is Culture at the museum where I viewed installations inspired by climate change. My podcast today is a soundscape of my visit to that exhibit.
I’ve been away now for quite a few months, and I am sorry for that. Life has been busy. But today I am back with some more soundscene audio, this time from our travels in Scandinavia last spring.
As Molly Oldfield says in her new book The Secret Museum, “As a work of art, it is a masterpiece, but as a warship it was a disaster. You can see the entire distance it ever sailed from the roof of the museum.”
She is talking about the 17th century Swedish warship, the Vasa. In 1628 it sank just 1300 meters into it’s maiden voyage. The king at the time, Gustavus Adolphus, effectively overrode his designers, engineers and expert shipbuilders to have them construct a battleship that was dangerously unseaworthy. The cannons put in the gun ports may have been too heavy than was usual for that type of ship. The ship was ultimately weighted with insufficient ballast. Ballast is used to ensure that a ship can stay steady, counteract the wind and momentum of the ship and otherwise keep it upright. Sometimes ballast can be the weight of the crew and passengers. Sometimes it is objects. Sometimes it is a characteristic of the way a ship is constructed. In the case of the Vasa, it was built top heavy with no counteracting design. Or perhaps the boat was simply too big to support the king’s intent against the Polish that his men were sailing to fight. With all this, it is a magnificent construction. Here’s Vasa by the numbers: It is estimated to be about 69 metres long. That’s 226 feet or 75 yards. The width of the ship is 11.7 metres or 38 feet. The height is roughly 52.5 metres or 57 yards. It originally had ten sails of which six, in various states of disrepair, survive. It held 64 bronze cannon. Well over 26,000 artifacts of all kinds were also found. It is adorned with over 500 sculptures, designs and enormously detailed reliefs that must have been spectacular in their original colors. Those colors have been washed away by centuries in the clay bottom and currents of the harbour waters.
The technology that made it possible for the Vasa to be raised did not exist until the 20th century. It was confirmed to be 32 meters down in August 1956. In the words published on the Vasa Museum website, we know that:
“The [Swedish] navy’s heavy divers were able to cut six tunnels through the clay under the ship with special water jets. Steel cables were drawn through the tunnels and taken to two lifting pontoons on the surface, which would pull the ship free of the harbour bottom’s grip. In August 1959, it was time for the first lift. There was great uncertainty – would the old wooden ship hold together? Yes! Vasa held. She was lifted in 18 stages to shallower water, where she could be patched and reinforced in preparation for the final lift, to the surface…At 9:03 AM on the 24th of April, 1961, Vasa returned to the surface.”
In order to preserve the wood, the Vasa was sprayed with polyethylene glycol, a chemical compound that replaces the water in the wood. This was to prevent shrinkage and cracking. This process took an astounding 17 years. The ship had to be kept purposely wet in order that it not dry out and crack. More than 90% of the ship was recovered intact.
Archaeologists think that 150 people were on board, mostly mariners, and no soldiers, (300 were to board the ship eventually). When the ship sank, about 30 died. The skeletons of about 16 persons were found in and around the ship. The skeleton exhibit seemed to be the busiest with dozens of children gathered around the glass cases containing them. The museum curators have given names to the skeletons, tried to reconstruct what they may have looked like, and created stories about what their lives may have been like aboard the boat and off.
Now that you have the background, sit back and enjoy this soundscene of our visit to this amazing one of a kind museum:
“Why can’t we just do everything we can while we’re here for one another?” – Pearl Goodman, 2013
On today’s show I interview Pearl Goodman who has written Peril: From Jack Boots to Jack Benny. In 300 pages, Pearl gives us portraits and vignettes of what it was like growing up in the nineteen-sixties and seventies. This was a time when many holocaust survivors had ended up in cities like Toronto putting geographical if not psychic distance between them and the horrors of World War II. Everything about her childhood is coated, clouded and influenced by her parents’ experience during the war and after.
Her parents were survivors of the Nazi’s attempt to exterminate the European Jews. The remainder of their lives was infused with this terrible knowledge, the death, the suffering of entire family members, friends, neighbors and many others left behind. As we roll ever closer to the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the numbers of survivors who can still remember and tell us anything of those times are dwindling to a precious few. All the stories we can find, first-hand, must be sought out, recorded and shared. And those who can relay much of those untold stories and insights, as the survivors of World War II pass on, do so as translators, interpreters and paraphrasers of the original tellings. Ms. Goodman and other children of survivors must speak for them because they no longer can.
It is said often that we are doomed to repeat history if we do not learn from it. Indeed, genocide has been attempted and succeeded many times to greater and lesser degrees before that war and after. And Jews throughout history have been no stranger to attempts to being eradicated and removed from everywhere we have ever called home. We see the story of the holocaust repeated over and over again in small and big ways in the modern era in such places as: Cambodia, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, The Congo, and Pakistan.
In that sense, Ms. Goodman is not just telling her parents story and her own, but the story of all survivors and immigrants trying to overcome the persecution and oppression of their birth country. Join me in my conversation with the author, on a pleasant spring evening in a local restaurant on the very street that Pearl grew up on.
NinjaRadio 