March 19, 2005
March 18, 2005
The Art of Travelling Nude (Hommage to)
After that long of more named pavements than he’d care to count, Profane had grown a little leery of streets, especially streets like this. They had in fact fused into one abstracted Street, which come the full moon, he would have nightmares about.
What does the haunted want? The way the question is posed conjures Freud. But this is the way the mind works. To make things easier we develop concepts, put things into clusters and forms. Forms that are abstractions, generalisations. But don’t these concepts in general fall short when it comes to represent the real (which we can only talk about in a form of mimesis anyway) Anything we can come up with, any form of representation leads us further away from the real thing, furthering our desire to be precise, to subject the subject.
I am getting into a phase in my research that is dangerous. I am tired of travelling and researching. I am wary and want to go home. I pretend to think I have enough. Enough material, enough knowledge, enough experience. Whatever I read merges into the same. It all sounds the same. It all points to a hand full of answers. The ones I have already come up with. The ones I have grown accustomed to/use. But the danger lies in not seeing what might be special. In having already commodified the material for my purpose without bothering looking at it. I am becoming a critical slop. It is time to come home (for a while). The absurdity of any quest will get the better of you. I will get over it.
[can I get the voyager theme here]
East main, a ghetto for Drunken Sailors nobody knew what to Do With, sprang on your nerves with all the abruptness of a normal nights dream turning into nightmare. Dog into wolf, light into twilight, emptiness into waiting presence, here were your underage marines barfing in the streets, barmaid with a ship’s propeller tattooed on each buttock, one potential beserk studying the best technique for jumping trough a glass plate window (when to cry Geronimo? before or after the glass breaks?)
VVVV
VVV
VV
V
March 3, 2005
Video killed the Radio Star, Or, the State of Canadian Culture
This is another rant. I have waited a couple of days to put it down due to the break-down of my hard drive. It also gave me time to vocalize my frustration.
Scene 1
Girl in her early twenties enters train. She spots the only place available next to a guy in his late twenties reading a book and sits down. A little later
Girl: What are you reading?
Guy: I am reading a history of the CBC
Girl (after a pause snorts): Now that I think about it -- gee -- they do have a history, eh. Is it any interesting?
Guy (sighs): Yeah, you know. How they put up the programming, the content regulations, what they thought appropriate ...
Girl looks puzzled
Guy: How they made the sounds with no electronic equipment. For example, horse sounds with coconut shells.
Girl: I heard about that. Cool.
I consider myself a left-leaning intellectual. Someone that for the last years violently opposed the distinction between high-brow and low-brow culture. Someone that loves it when people can draw on both, who believes that education needs to be accessible for anyone and that being taught to think critically makes better human beings. Lately, I have found myself to use arguments about culture, history and heritage that sound conservative. I am complaining about the lack of cultural and historical knowledge; I have argued for the need to restore a sense of sensibility of traditions and culture. But that is a different topic. Or maybe not. But certainly, I am going to use this space to whine about what I have found in Montreal.
All the archives I have visited with the exception of the national ones have been exceptionally helpful. But especially the CBC Script Archive at Concordia University. The archival personnel -- even though the collection can only be consulted on two afternoons a week -- made arrangements to accommodate me there every day of the week I was staying there. They were happy someone cared. Yes, cared. Except for the research fellows and a few graduate students from Concordia and Laval the archive suffers from a decline of attention to what I consider to be a major part of Canadian heritage. CBC's impact cannot be underestimated. It's programming has formed two generations. And even my generation can name at least five popular programs and recalls with a certain fondness broadcasters and shows.
The manuscript archives host every script (or the remains) from the beginning of public broadcasting in Canada to Peter Gzowski scripts and they are rotting away. yep, rotting. [Talking about scandals there, Joy]. Since the archives have been assigned new rooms, the manuscripts in their general paper carton storage boxes are shelved in a locker in an open parkade the size of our living room. And not to mention, the parkade is wet. It's winter in Montreal. Paper doesn't take that climate too well if you don't store it properly. Toronto might store the sound reels, but the manuscripts are rotting away. And with their comments, cuts, and stage directions reveal as much as the actual broadcasts. So much for the diminishing of funding for cultural institutions that [hear the conservative word choice] preserve a national HERITAGE.
Having left Montreal over a week ago I can finally put it into words: that carelessness enrages me -- and I as a European couldn't care less.