Dogspotting

A favourite hobby of mine, on the street or from a car, is dogspotting. I would define this activity as: "looking at dogs in an admiring way." Distinctive traits, signs of personality I enjoy include: apple-domed skulls, waggity tails, lolling tongues, dopey eyes, map-like fur patterns, blenheim colouring, oversized pupils and a graceful gait. I also like the diversity of canine shapes, from the pony-like Borzoi to to the weiner-like weiner dog.

Franz Kafka observed: "All knowledge, the totality of all questions and all answers is contained in the dog." In the future I would like to expand on this insight by writing a book called Canis Numinous: The Mysticism of the Dog. It would contain aphorisms, anecdotes, kōans and parables pertaining to the mystical significance of the dog from prehistory to the present. It would also contain photos, because dogs are a visual phenomenon too. Hence the pleasure derived from dogspotting.

I like dogs because they combine the individuality of man with the purity of intention of animals - or at least have enough evolutionary quirks to create the illusion of such. I've never met a hypocritical dog, a backstabbing dog, a two-faced dog or a dog who kills in the name of an ideal. There has never been a canine Eichmann or a canine Judas, and even Hitler's poor dog, whom he poisoned in the bunker, could not have known the evil all around her. They may roll around in feces when their owner isn't looking, but even then, the dog's aura is clean.

Of course, vicious dogs do exist; but there is no inherent duplicity to their viciousness, even when the consequences are horrific. They are what they are bred to be. It was man who created the pit bull, man who molded the beast for his own intentions. If trained for violence, a dog will dumbly look to its master for approval after the fact. It does not kill for pleasure, it kills for a purpose: and if this purpose is warped, it is because somebody warped it. They are animals when they commit evil as surely as they are animals when they commit good.

Dogs cannot transcend their bestial natures, but they can sometimes help people transcend theirs. In the Mexican film Amores Perres (Love is for the Dogs), a character who achieves redemption with the help of his Rottweiler observes: "Masters take after their dogs." His dog causes him to spare a life, and there are surely far more lives dogs have saved by example than lives they have taken by malice. If this is a calculation one must take by faith, then I will take it by faith.

We must not falsely humanize dogs (that does not mean being inhumane), and we certainly should not infantilize them: to dress them in sweaters and bows and stuff them in handbags. Dogs are animals, proud if sublimely ridiculous animals, and should not be reduced to the status of benevolent dwarves, "little people," substitute children or interactive toys. They don't need spas, gourmet food or nannies. They need rough play, treats earned through tricks and packmates.

Without a respect for canine dignity dogspotting degenerates into a diminutive form of people-spotting: entering the realm of fashion police, celebrity gossip, exclusive video footage and the reductionist gaze of Big Sister. You don't need magazines or cameras to capture canines in their natural habitat, you simply need eyes and a heart. I like to keep my dogspotting as simple as its subjects: seek, spot, smile and salute. Silently I say, Walk on noble beasts, walk on.

Illustrated Quote Of The Day

"Lesbian lust is supercondensed female sexuality, all smooth, soft, shiny surfaces, evoking for heterosexual men a subliminal memory of the lost paradise of the maternal body, where they blissfully floated in the warm, sensuous bath of the womb. Man-made lesbo porn is a journey to the heart of creation, where the All-Mother is magically replicating herself by parthenogenesis."
- Camille Paglia

White As The Driven Snow

There's a blog making the rounds called Stuff White People Like. It has its charms, but of course it's really Stuff White Urban American (and Canadian) Liberals like. I don't know the writers' background, but it seems part of the Vice magazine-style hipster self-backlash movement. While entertaining, this brand of bourgeois anti-bourgeois irony is in itself a white person trope. As with postmodernism, affectation and self-recognition becomes an excuse to carry on exactly as before but smarmier. Where I'm from, Hamilton, the "stuff white people like" list would look something like this: hockey, Tim Horton's, classic rock, meat and potatoes. But those kinds of white people don't read or write blogs. I'm obviously not one of them, but I'm not the target audience for SWPL (white people like acronyms) either. At least I hope not.

By accident of birth I've been enough of an insider to live comfortably in the culture but enough of an outsider to realize how crucifyingly corrupt it is. I'm from a smaller urban center (Hamilton) neighbouring a big urban center (Toronto) and from a smaller laboratory of Western decline (Canada) neighbouring a big laboratory of Western decline (the U.S.A.). I'm also white but not Anglo-Saxon, so I could use that as an excuse to check myself off the target-list; though I won't because it seems disingenuous. As much as I occasionally enjoy railing against blonde hegemony, I'm not enough of a Women's Studies major to mistake private whinging for universal truth. As the homeless black man in San Francisco who cursed "you and your white family and your kids and your grandkids etc." when my dad brushed away his request for change proved, for all intents and purposes I am white.

In urban Canada at least, upwardly mobile Asians are gradually inheriting the yuppie white culture lovingly criticized by the site, and I look forward to the day when the process is complete. Then we can all get over the tired left-wing racial obsession-cum-anxiety cliché and stop worrying and love the bomb. In the meanwhile, for the sake of full disclosure, I do like the following items on the list: coffee, traveling, the Daily Show/Colbert Report, breakfast places, indie music (not exclusively), art degrees, living by the water, t-shirts, dogs, et al.

A Plea Across The Ether

There's a reason why spyware and spam keep literally popping up on the Internet. It is because someone, somewhere is falling for it. Someone really believes that they are the contest winner, that the fortune of an African prince is waiting for them in an offshore bank account, that their penis can be expanded to colossal proportions through a series of pumps and tubes. I don't know who this someone is, but he is giving the merchants of spam enough of a success rate to keep their foul art profitable. I call him the Global Village Idiot and I want him bound, tarred and feathered. In whatever order. Barring that a head of a major spam organization should be publicly hanged as a warning and example. Slowly, like my computer when infected with spyware. If the many should be punished for the one, the one should be punished for the many. I realize I have no extralegal jurisdiction to enforce my whims--yet--so I all I can do is make a humanitarian appeal. If either the Global Village Idiot or the Pablo Escobar of spam is reading this, please report to the nearest woodshed and commit hara-kiri.

Ten Conspiratorial Tracts I Wish I Could Believe In

. . . Because then I wouldn't have to think. To anyone who suggests they know how the world really works, my standard reply is: It doesn't.

10.

Title: The Cult of the All-Seeing Eye
Author: Robert Keith Spenser
Thesis (in brief): Sauron worshipers run the world!

9.

Title: The Secret History of the Jesuits
Author: Edmond Paris
Thesis (in brief): Jesuits are crypto-Nazis . . . and run the world!

8.

Title: Marxist Minstrels
Author: David A. Noebel
Thesis (in brief): Communists orchestrate rock n' roll!

7.

Title: Mind Controllers
Author: Dr. Armen Victorian, veterinarian
Thesis (in brief): Fat guys with chips in their heads run the world!

6.

Title: The Leftist ESP Conspiracy
Author: Nino M. Volpe
Thesis (in brief): Leftist telepaths run the world!

5.

Title: Behind the Lodge Door
Author: Paul A. Fisher
Thesis (in brief): Freemasons know how to party!

4.

Title: Fourth Reich of the Rich
Author: Des Griffin
Thesis (in brief): Monacled Nazi plutocrats run the world by zeppelin!

3.

Title: The New Age Secret Plan for World Conquest
Author: Salem Kirban
Thesis (in brief): In between spending forty dollars on Lemurian mood-enhancing crystals, New Agers run the world!

2.

Title: Psychic Dictatorship in the USA
Author: Alex Constantine
Thesis (in brief): Psychic dictators run the country! Also: "A stunning chapter investigates the history and effects of the artificial sweetener Nutrasweet, and its role in the dumbing of America."

1.

Title: None Dare Call it a Conspiracy
Author: Gary Allen
Thesis (in brief): Red star hippie communist capitalist United Nations occult black power the letter O with a line through it Winston Churchill run the world!

Mad Albanian Airborne

I sat next to a crazy person on a plane. The man appeared to be from the Albania end of Europe, alternately raving, mumbling, arguing, lecturing and singing foreign melodies to himself. His hands fidgeted, fumbled with a cigarette carton, played with the latch on the fold-out tray and otherwise went through the motions preceding a full nervous breakdown. One of the few garbled words emerging from his heavily accented incoherence (I call it Schizoslavian) was "terrorists," a bad sign. Sitting next to a crazy person without inadvertently contributing to his craziness takes a careful balance. On the one hand, making eye contact or exchanging pleasantries with him is liable to encourage his mania. On the other, acting visibly perturbed or affected by his presence could offend him, and an offended crazy person is a crazy person liable to take crazy measures to challenge your notion of him being crazy.

So studiously ignoring him in a nonchalant manner seemed the best approach. Still, I was annoyed. A quote from Albert Camus came to mind: "Nobody realizes that some people expend a tremendous amount of energy merely to be normal." I expend that energy. I have an internal dialog with myself, I feel the urge to sing to myself, I feel like fidgeting wildly a times: but I restrain myself. I engage in calming thoughts to loosen my nerves. I catch myself when my hands are doing weird things. I promise myself I won't blow my top: I make that sacrifice for the sake of civil society. So why can't he? I realize there's a difference between being eccentric and schizophrenic, and we likely fall on different sides of that divide: but still, that's what I thought to myself. It's not that I felt better than him because he was crazy and I'm not; I felt better than him because his craziness was undisciplined while I could at least restrain mine on an airplane.

I don't know this potential-Albanian's life story. Maybe his entire village was raped and pillaged in front of him, earning him a refugee status in Canada that gave him material comfort but none for his mind. Maybe he was a boy-genius headed toward a career in neurosurgery in Bratislava until he began experiencing signs of schizophrenia at age 16, causing his parents to send him away to be raised by nuns. Maybe these nuns had just sent him away for the first time on an airplane, to find a new life in a distant province. All I can say for sure is that he had no people or even bags with him, and no one waiting for him at the airport. He took a cab and disappeared into the city.

Reality Check-Cum-Stabbing

A recent article in the National Post with the snappy headline Man stabbed for saying hello on TTC bus caught my eye:

A west-end Toronto man was stabbed by a fellow bus passenger angry he had said hello, sparking a debate on how friendly Torontonians should be with strangers.

The 30-year-old-man greeted the fellow rider as he took a Lawrence Avenue West bus to work at 12:30 p.m. yesterday, police said yesterday.

“He said a courteous hello and was then asked ‘Why do you say hello to me, I don’t know you?’” Detective Jim Brons said. “This attack was unprovoked. It was a very weird thing.”

The still-angry young man followed him off the crowded bus at the Bolingbroke Road and Lawrence Avenue West, and then stabbed him three times.

Police are looking for a slim, 18- to 20-year-old black man, 6’2” tall with short, dark braided hair. He was wearing silver loop earrings with diamonds, a black toque, a brown or tan coat with the words “State Property” on the left side and dark blue jeans with a green bandana hanging from the rear left pocket. He carried a black mesh bag on his back.

Det. Brons said the two were sitting side by side when they made eye contact, and the victim decided to say hello. ‘‘He didn’t respond. Ten minutes later, the suspect blew up at him and asked him why he said hi when they didn’t know each other.”

The victim apologized on the bus, and again when they got off the bus, but the man pulled out a knife and stabbed him. The victim was taken to hospital and received numerous stitches.

In the spirit of honest racial dialogue called for by Barack Obama, I would like to openly state that when I see a 6'2” black guy on the bus with diamond loop earrings and a green bandana hanging from his pocket, I try not to make small talk. A large part of me of course would like to ask him if the “State Property” coat was meant to be an ironic statement about slavery, but I'd still resist. One of Ghandi's pithier statements was, “Be the change in the world you want to see.” Well, although I'd like to see a world where strangers of different races say a casual hello to each other, I'm not going to risk a stabbing to make that happen. Maybe that helps explain Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam's findings:

The results of his new study come from a survey Putnam directed among residents in 41 US communities, including Boston. Residents were sorted into the four principal categories used by the US Census: black, white, Hispanic, and Asian. They were asked how much they trusted their neighbors and those of each racial category, and questioned about a long list of civic attitudes and practices, including their views on local government, their involvement in community projects, and their friendships. What emerged in more diverse communities was a bleak picture of civic desolation, affecting everything from political engagement to the state of social ties.

In his findings, Putnam writes that those in more diverse communities tend to “distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

“People living in ethnically diverse settings appear to 'hunker down' -- that is, to pull in like a turtle,” Putnam writes.

In documenting that hunkering down, Putnam challenged the two dominant schools of thought on ethnic and racial diversity, the “contact” theory and the “conflict” theory. Under the contact theory, more time spent with those of other backgrounds leads to greater understanding and harmony between groups. Under the conflict theory, that proximity produces tension and discord.

Putnam's findings reject both theories. In more diverse communities, he says, there were neither great bonds formed across group lines nor heightened ethnic tensions, but a general civic malaise. And in perhaps the most surprising result of all, levels of trust were not only lower between groups in more diverse settings, but even among members of the same group.

“Diversity, at least in the short run,” he writes, “seems to bring out the turtle in all of us.”

Maybe the solution is as simple as saying a friendly hello to a member of another race on the bus!

Wait . . .

Biblical Prophey Comes To Pass!

MTV Greenlights ‘A Shot at Love With Tila Tequila' Season 2

"And you, O Asia, who share in the glamour of Babylon and the glory of her person - woe to you, miserable wretch! For you have made yourself like her; you have decked out your daughters in harlotry to please and glory in your lovers, who have always lusted after you. You have imitated that hateful harlot in all her deeds and devices."
- 4 Ezra 15.46-49

Love Is Not Enough: Against Lennon-McCartneyism

I am against Lennon-McCartneyism. I believe you need more than just love. Now that Paul McCartney's lack of prenuptual agreement with his one-legged ex-wife has cost him several dozen millions, perhaps he feels the same way. The Beatles have promoted every easy answer since their inception as revolutionary propagandists for hand-holding. Coming together, strawberry fields, taking a sad song and making it better: a mop-top of luscious fiction over a misshapen bald reality. I don't deny a place for love and togetherness. But I can't imagine the world of no possessions and no religion lasting for a second before implosion and civil war, despite the soothing piano melody. At least Marxism-Leninism recognized the practical need for a dictatorship of the proletariat before the arrival of the imagined paradise. The psychedelic daydream revolution of Lennon-McCartneyism jumps straight into the saccharine pipe dream. While it may be unfair to blame the Beatles for the failed legacy of sixties utopianism, they were its undoubted figureheads and their naive vapidness symbolic of the times. In his memoir The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin recalls that at a mass meeting over a campus anti-war strike, some union activists started singing “Solidarity Forever,” but few knew the words. Only when someone else began singing “Yellow Submarine,” could the hippies and activists unite in song.

The sixties was a love boat without captain, crashing into the shores of Altamont, the Manson murders, the decline of Haight-Ashbury into a cesspool of crime and its own inherent futility. Sympathetic in other respects, Theodore Roszak called the sixties search for psychedelic meaning “Counterfeit Infinity.” Turning off your mind, relaxing and floating downstream was painted as a revolutionary act in order to forgo the need to implement actual social change. Visiting Timothy Leary's declining psychedelic commune at the Milbrook estate, Charles Slack asked the important question: “Who was going to do the dishes?” Nobody wanted to do the dishes, and that's why every sixties experiment in better living--communes, open relationships--failed. I appreciate what some of the sixties radicals did as sheer performance art--conscripting shamans in an attempt to levitate the Pentagon at a protest, nominating a sow named Pigasus for President. But the only political consequence of Jerry Rubin's call for “A new man, the Marxist acidhead, the psychedelic Bolshevik” was to create a backlash that brought Ronald Reagon into the governor's mansion in 1966 and gave Richard Nixon an overwhelming majority in 1969.

The story of Timothy Leary, whose campaign for California governorship the Beatles song “Come Together” was originally written for, embodies the rise and fall of sixties idealism. Leary was a respected psychologist at Harvard, and his experiments with LSD were originally conducted scientifically. He discussed his findings with Aldous Huxley (author of The Doors of Perception, from which Jim Morrison got the name), who warned him: “The artistic elite, the intellectual elite, the economic elite. That’s how everything of culture and beauty and philosophic freedom has been passed on.” But Leary was too much of an aspiring prophet and populist to listen, and took up Allen Ginsberg's acid-fried cry that, “I’ve come down to preach love to the world! We’re going to walk through the streets and teach people to stop hating!” He advocated that the right to seek an expanded consciousness be guaranteed in the Constitution, and in 1963 was kicked out of Harvard for sharing drugs with students. His showmanship and subsequent infamy, while making for an entertaining story, succeeded in almost single-handedly destroying the academic legitimacy of psychedelic experimentation and getting it nationally banned.

After being arrested for spurious drug charges, Leary was busted out of jail by a group of nihilistic terrorists called the Weather Underground or Weathermen (inspired by the line from Dylan's “Subterranean Homesick Blues”), whose politically mature agenda was to be “against everything that is good and decent in honky America.” They would later declare 1969 “The Year of the Fork” in honour of the utensil used in the Manson murders. Their prescribed “merger of dope and dynamite, flower and flames” made Leary a perfect spokesman, and he was recruited to deliver lines like: “Dynamite is just the white light, the external manifestation of the inner white light of the Buddha.” After an over-the-top entertaining international flight (the biography I'm basing this on, Timothy Leary: A Biography by Robert Greenfield, reads better than fiction) with stop-overs with the Black Panthers in Algeria, Leary ended up in a cell next to former aspiring songwriter and friend of the Beach Boys Charles Manson, where a legendary conversation took place.

Conversing through air shafts, Manson told Leary, “We were all your students… When I got out of jail there were millions of kids cut loose from the old lies just waiting to be told what to do. And you didn’t tell them what to do… You showed everyone how to create a new head but you never gave them the new head. Why didn’t you?” When Leary replied that his purpose was to let everyone decide their own reality, Manson told him “That was your mistake. No one wants responsibility. Everyone wants to be told what to do, what to believe, what’s really true and really real.” Manson had taken on that role himself, filling in the gap where old values had once filled his follower’s lives. His “Family” consisted mostly of young girls lost in the haze of psychedelic freedom, runaways unmoored from mainstream society and easily exploitable by a charismatic manipulator in tune with the times. Manson believed that LSD had given him powers of mental control, radically interpreting the Beatles' White Album as a New Age Testament for psychopaths and seeing himself as a sort of psychedelic acid Christ. In a dark reflection of Ken Kesey’s famous bus journey, Manson and his followers traveled the American West in a school-bus painted black, fulfilling the psychedelic dream of free sex and drugs. He may have been mad, but in his conversation with Leary, he was right.

In addition to the Manson slayings, the free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont helped bring the innocence of the psychedelic era to a brutal ending. The Hell’s Angels, who were romanticized by Allen Ginsberg and Hunter S. Thompson as heroic outlaws, served as security at what was to be the Woodstock of the West Coast, attended by countercultural figures like Leary and most of the key players in the acid rock scene. Ken Kesey had once told a group of Angels “We’re in the same business. You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,” and the Angels had also been used as bouncers by the Grateful Dead. But the Altamont show proved to be a disaster, as the Angels used sawed-off pool cues to control the crowd. A fat Chicano kid on an acid trip took off his clothes and began dancing, and was clubbed by the disgusted Angels. More seriously, four people died at the concert: two whose car plowed into a bonfire, one who was stabbed by the Angels and the other drowning in an irrigation canal while on an acid trip. Anti-authoritarianism caused some attendants to interfere with doctors trying to help people on bad acid trips, causing Todd Gitlin to ask “If there is so much bad acid around, why doesn’t the contaminated culture, many of whose claims are based on the virtues of drugs, help its own brothers and sisters?” Greil Marcus of Rolling Stone noted that the concert was an “extraordinary complex and visceral metaphor for the way things of the Sixties ended… producing violence instead of fraternity, selfishness instead of generosity, ugliness instead of beauty, a bad trip instead of a high.”

Lenin called communism “socialism plus electricity.” I'd call the sixties ethos I've termed Lennon-McCarthyism “platitude plus LSD.” Of course the British naifs are not to blame for the failures of the sixties, but it was the valium slogans of their songs--“Let it Be,” “All You Need is Love”--that defined its dopey utopianism. The fact that John Lennon and Yoko Ono held a “bed-in for peace” is emblematic of the whole failed approach of the sixties youth movement. Holding a bed-in for peace is not a subversive act--it's what most people would like to do if they didn't have jobs they could get fired from. Real revolution takes more than acid trips and publicity stunts. Some great music and films came out of the sixties, and it does sound like it was an interesting time to be alive. But as far as actual values, actual ideals, an actual legacy--it's a vapour cloud. The fact that the Beatles' Apple label inspired the name of a major corporation is not so much ironic as it is completely predictable. Perhaps the irony of Paul McCartney divorcing his wife when he's sixty-four will do something to undo the rubber-ideology of Lennon-McCartneyism before it ensnares another foolish millionaire into marrying a beautiful younger woman without contractual stipulation. Contrary to the hummable protestations of its advocates, love was never enough.

Fun Facts About The Irish

Irish scarecrow.

I have no Irish heritage. However, I've long admired the pluck and outsized accomplishments of that island race. In celebration of this St. Patrick's Day, I present a list of interesting facts and anecdotes concerning the Irish:

• In Lebor Gabala Erenn (the Book of the Takings of Ireland), the account of Irish history that the medieval Irish told themselves, the first settlers in Ireland were Noah's disreputable niece, Cessair, and forty companions; all were promptly drowned in the Flood. The Irish or Gaels arrived much later and are descended from one Nel through his son Gaedel. Nel learned all the languages that came into being at Babel, borrowing the best features from each to invent Irish. Settling beside the Red Sea, he entertained Moses and his people the night before they crossed. Moses invited Nel and his family to come with them to the Promised Land. When Nel declined, Moses assured him that his descendants would one day reach their own promised land in the western ocean.
• One legend states that the Irish were descended from Míl Espáine (coined Milesius, from Latin "Miles Hispaniae", meaning "Soldier of Hispania"). The character is almost certainly a personification of a migration by a groups from Hispania to Ireland. There is a genetic similarity between the Irish and North Iberians, including Basques.
• The Vikings founded many of the most important towns in Ireland, including Dublin and Cork.
• There is a long if slight history of a Jewish presence in Ireland. The earliest reference to Jews in Ireland came in the year 1079, with the Annals of Inisfallen recording: "Five Jews came from over sea with gifts to Tairdelbach [king of Munster], and they were sent back again over sea". The modern Irish Jewish community essentially came into existence between 1880 and 1901 with the arrival of Ashkenazim from a single Lithuanian village, Akmene, fleeing Tsarist pogroms. Dublin legend asserts that many of them had booked passage to America, and were landed in Dublin by unscrupulous ship captains who assured them they had reached New York. In the 19th century, Irish political leader Daniel O'Connell noted: "Ireland has claims on your ancient race, it is the only country that I know of unsullied by any one act of persecution of the Jews". The sixth President of Israel, Chaim Herzog, was born in North Ireland and was the son of Ireland's Chief Rabbi, a friend of independence leader Eamon de Valera who on occasion hid him when on the run from British police.
• In 1828 German and Irish soldiers recruited fight in the Argentina-Brazil War of 1825-1828 revolted due to poor barracks conditions, non-payment of wages, accusations that they had been recruited under false premises, and the taunts of black slaves, who called the Irish "white slaves." The mercenaries took control of large parts of Rio de Janeiro before being quelled. This is known in Brazilian history as the Great Mercenary Revolt.
• The Fenian Brotherhood, an organization of Irish nationalists in the United States, made several attempts in the 1860s to invade Canada in order to force Britain to give Ireland independence. A suspected Fenian, Patrick Whelan, was hanged in Ottawa for the assassination of Irish-Canadian politician, Thomas D'Arcy McGeein 1868. This was the only political assassination in Canadian history.
• In the mid-19th century large numbers of Irish immigrants to the U.S. were conscripted into the army at the time of the Mexican-American War. Many defected to the Mexican army and eventually settled in Mexico in order to escape anti-Catholic discrimination in the U.S. The "Patricios", or Saint Patrick's Battalion, are commemorated in Mexico on Saint Patrick's Day and on September 12, the anniversary of the first executions of the defectors by the Americans. Vicente Fox, former president of the Republic of Mexico, is of Irish descent.
• Large numbers of Irish people emigrated to Argentina in the 18th and 19th centuries. Irish-Argentines number over 500,000. Famous Argentines of Irish descendent include Che Guevara. Guevara's father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, said of him: "The first thing to note is that in my son's veins flowed the blood of the Irish rebels".
• A small fascist organization known as the Blueshirts formed in Ireland during the 1930s, led by General Eoin O'Duffy. They advocated corporatism, used the Roman straight-arm salute (shouting "Hail O'Duffy") and attended the International Fascist Conference in Switzerland in 1934. An attempted "March on Dublin" in 1933 ended in failure. O'Duffy and 700 volunteers went on to fight for Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
  
• In 1937, French playwright Antonin Artaud obtained a walking stick of knotted wood that he believed belonged to St. Patrick, but also Lucifer and Jesus Christ. Artaud traveled to Ireland in an effort to return the staff, though he spoke very little English and was unable to make himself understood.
  
• Seán Russell, leader of the Irish Republican Army travelled to Berlin upon the outbreak of the Second World War in order to press for troops and arms to be sent to Ireland. In response, several German agents were parachuted in the Republic of Ireland. Russell died in a U-boat off the Irish coast. Nevertheless, the rural population in the West were eager to find German spies, and several who were landed from submarines were collared within a few days, one after ordering "a glass of stout and a pint of whiskey" in a Dingle pub.
• The Republic of Ireland remained neutral throughout the Second World War, being the only country to extend official condolences to Germany on the death of Hitler.
• There is an apocryphal story of a German bomber pilot who was flying between Ireland and Great Britain and saw on the Irish side an arrow made of burning barrels, pointing precisely in the direction of nearby English cities.
• From 1987 and for many years after, U2 as a corporation were the 2nd biggest industry in Ireland in terms of revenue.
• "Irish Confetti" is the street name for mid-flight bricks used as weapons.
• Newfoundland is one of the few places outside Ireland where the Irish language was spoken by a majority of the population as their primary language. Newfoundland Irish is even its own distinct dialect. Newfoundland is also the only place outside Europe with its own distinctive name in the Irish language, Talamh an Éisc, "the land of fish". Irish author Tim Pat Coogan has described Newfoundland as "the most Irish place in the world outside of Ireland"
• The St. Patrick's Day Parade in Montreal is the oldest in North America, dating back to 1824. The Irish constitute the second largest ethnic group in the province after the French, and it is estimated that 30 percent of the French-speaking Quebeckers have some Irish ancestry.
• 12.9% of the Canadian population and 12% of the American population claim some Irish descent. The largest number of people of Irish descent live in the United States -- about ten times more than in Ireland itself. Irish in the Americas number around 60 million. They are the second largest self-reported ethnic group in the United States, after German Americans. In Canada, Irish Canadians number around 4 million.
  
• The tiny Caribbean island of Montserrat is the only country or territory in the world, apart from the Republic of Ireland, Northern Ireland and Newfoundland to observe a public holiday on St. Patrick's Day. The population is predominantly of mixed Irish and African descent.
• The Irish diaspora, maximally interpreted, contains over 80 million people, which is over fourteen times the population of the island of Ireland itself (5.9 million in 2006).

Of Cold Juice & Memory Loss

Drinking is fun
It makes me want to throw up
The evil that I've done

Waves of nausea
Will sink California
Diminishing coastline
Like sweat off a brow
Sinking saunas
and ritual baths

It feels good to swelter
Makes you feel the hidden meaning
Of words like Helter Skelter

The colder the drink
the drier the throat
Awake before dawn
Feeling like desert
in the land of plenty

Who placed morning
so close to night?
Drown me in floods
of cold juice and memory loss

Song Of The Day

'Bad men have no songs.' -- Then why do the Russians have songs?
- Nietzsche

Kino - Gruppa Krovi [Blood Type]

It's a warm place here but the streets
Are anxious for our footprints
Stardust on our boots sparkles and shines
There's a cozy armchair with a checkered blanket
The trigger hasn't been pulled in time
Sunny days in blazing dreams

My blood type is marked on my sleeve,
My ordinal number is marked on my sleeve,
Wish me luck in the fight,
Wish for me not to remain in this grass,
Wish me luck . . .

I can pay, but I do not want victory at any cost
I don't want to put my foot on someone's chest
I would rather stay here with you,
Just to stay here with you,
But the star high in the sky is calling me on my way

My blood type is marked on my sleeve,
My ordinal number is marked on my sleeve,
Wish me luck in the fight,
Wish for me not to remain in this grass,
Wish me luck . . .

The Psycho-Futurism Of J.G. Ballard

J.G. Ballard’s psychological and literary diagnoses of the future, expressed through works influenced by surrealism, psychoanalysis, semiology, collage art and his experiences as a boy in war-torn Shanghai, have made him a secular prophet of modern man’s fate. The range of Ballard’s influence is exemplified by the fact that the adjective “Ballardian” has been included in the Collins English Dictionary, defined as “resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in J.G. Ballard's novels and stories, especially dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.” Key texts by Ballard include Crash, exploring the psycho-sexuality of mechanization through car crashes, and later made into a film by David Cronenberg; High Rise, detailing an urban paradise descending into savagery; The Terminal Beach, following the psychic degeneration of a man fleeing to an island used for nuclear weapons testing, and The Atrocity Exhibition, an experimental collage of surreal imagery from within an insane asylum. Ballard’s work has been a seminal influence on the literary cyberpunk movement; inspired the bleak aesthetic vision of British post-punk and early new wave music (Joy Division have a song called “The Atrocity Exhibition”) and has been praised as prescient by thinkers as disparate as Jean Baudrillard, who called Crash “the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on: a non-symbolic universe but one which, by a kind of reversal of its mass-mediated substance (neon, concrete, cars, mechanical eroticism), seems truly saturated with an intense initiatory power.”

While many science-fiction writers have probed technology’s effects on humankind on a macro level, it is Ballard’s focus on the effects of mechanization on the psychology (and often psychopathology) of everyday living in a hyper-modern wasteland that renders his work perennially relevant to studies of the future. Ballard has described the subject of his work as being, “. . . the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a colour TV set, the conjuncture of musculature and chromium artefact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator.” Inextricably tied in with these seemingly mundane concerns are broader issues of social manipulation, the death of affect, mass media bombardment, the dehumanization of the technical society, the thin veneer between civilization and barbarism and the spiritual and psychological decay of the West amidst unprecedented material prosperity. As much as the modern West has looked to technological improvement for salvation, for Ballard, there is no piece of technology with as much destructive or revolutionary potential as the human mind. Ando Arike explains that J.G. Ballard’s world is one where, “. . . on the one hand, technology and media colonize more and more of our inner space, so too, on the other, are our interior psychodramas projected across the media landscape as hijackings, assassinations, massacres and the spectacles of celebrity.” This is hyper-reality, as Baudrillard would put it, less a place or time than a seemingly irreversible process of forward motion towards the edge of the malfunctioning treadmill.

In The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard describes a psychological patient who wants to “start World War III, though not of course, in the usual sense of term. The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.” This picture of psychic warfare, of a future where hallucination and hyper-reality compete for internal and external dominance, is central to the Ballardian vision. Paranoia is simply heightened perception, inner space and outer space equally great unknowns. As Ballard put it, “The biggest developments of the immediate future will take place, not on the Moon or Mars, but on Earth, and it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored. The only truly alien planet is Earth.” This alien world is one where progress and decline work in tandem, where technology is as often a tool for human perversion as it is a tool for human growth. Dystopia is as close at hand as the nearest cord or switch. In his decades-spanning, taboo-shattering work, J.G. Ballard describes the present as much as he prophesies about the future, in the process making clear that the distance between them is rarely more than a matter of degrees in pathology.

The Coming Blok

I dislike the word "blog." First of all, it's guttural and ugly-sounding, like something to be spit out - "I have a blog in my throat." Second of all, it comes with a bunch of automatic implications I don't like. When people hear "blog" they think self-obsessive spewing of daily minutia (though Livejournal remains the gold standard) or partisan hack political punditry. I don't deny the self-obsession aspect of my experiment in blogging, but I think it's fair to say that it's of a different style than that of frequently updated pictures of cats. So what's the alternative? Web-journal is too long and pretentious, but I do like to think of this as a journal rather than a "log." Log implies I'm keeping track of something, and except in the loosest sense I'm not. This is in a rough sense a log of the evolution of my consciousness, but that isn't readily apparent to the reader and nor is it meant to be. So where does that leave us?

Nowhere. Utopia means nowhere and the Internet is surely the most advanced form of nowhere yet to be invented. Who was the perfect inhabitant of nowhere? Why, early 20th century Russian poet Alexander Blok! Author of such lines as, "Go on and live another quarter century - Nothing will change. There's no way out. Night, icy ripples on a canal - Drugstore, street, lamp." The connection between Blok and the word blog is readily apparent, but it was not I who came up with it. Rather I give credit to erudite Bulgarian expatriate Ipchuk at Winter House for noting the sublimely obvious.

So why Blok? It is guttural-sounding like blog, but in a harshly evocative rather than cloyingly bland way. There are also the puns on "bloc" and "block," and I do like to think this of journal as the Anglophone equivalent of the Bloc Québécois, or my own personal block of the Internet. Another bonus? The K implies a linkage with Kafka, the forerunner of the modern condition who kept a diary of a literary quality all "bloggers" should aspire to reach. So, following Ipchuk's suggestion, I'd like to second Blok as an appropriate term for those journals that don't quite fit in to pre-existing archetypes for what blogs should be. A sort of nihilism is implied by the word's origin, but this can take a variety of forms: struggles against meaninglessness, an embrace of meaninglessness, the search for new meanings.

It is easier to define something by what it's not, so let's say no: redundant regurgitation of already oversaturated links, purposeless recitation of day-to-day details of living (e.g. "Went to the Mall today, saw Brendan, bought a tiara"), inside jokes, tech-geek indulgences, animated graphics, family albums, crass political partisanship, intertextuality in place of content or frequently updated pictures of cats. The occasional picture of a cat is allowed, however.

The Sublime Pause

The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep, somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh. (He laughs) Let us not then speak ill of our generation, it is not any unhappier than its predecessors. (He pauses) Let us not speak well of it either. (He pauses) Let us not speak of it at all.
- Pozzo in Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot

Sex Power Politics

Reading about the latest American sex scandal involving New York Governor Elliot Spitzer shtupping a high-class prostitute, I was reminded of a quotation from the indomitable Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno: "Where Semitic blood flows, there is an overly carnal sense of virility." Considering the mixed bloodlines that resulted from repeated Iberian conquests and reconquests, I can only assume his statement was at least somewhat self-referential. However, after exhausting the possibilities of this admittedly fun train of thought, I was then reminded of an article I read from Psychology Today:

Betzig has written on the mating behavior and reproductive success of politicians and other political leaders in history. She points out that, while powerful men throughout western history have married monogamously (they had only one legal wife at a time), they have always mated polygynously (they had lovers, concubines, and female slaves). Many had harems, consisting of hundreds and even thousands of virgins.

. . .

From Betzig’s Darwinian historical perspective, the question that many Americans and others throughout the world asked in 1998, “Why on earth would the most powerful man in the world jeopardize his job for an affair with a young woman?” is a silly question. Betzig’s answer would be: Why not?

. . .

In other words, reproductive access to women is the goal, political office is but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it. The purpose of earning money is to spend it. The purpose of becoming the President (or anything else men do) is to have a larger number of women with whom to mate.

I don't agree entirely with the reductionist conclusions, but there's certainly something to the link between sex and power. We can call our more enlightened rulers Presidents and Prime Ministers instead of Sultans, but that doesn't mean they have any less of a desire for a harem. At periods of historical uncertainty, the masses tend to desire a leader who projects virility: John F. Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau in the near past, Nicholas Sarkozy and arguably Barack Obama in the present. So why act astonished when that virility is expressed in the traditional manner? I've read up a bit on cults, and a recurring theme is the sexual power that inevitably flows from the spiritual/political power of the cult leader. The cult leader may not have formed his sect for the express purpose of sexual conquest, but when the opportunity presents itself - quite literally, in some cases - the link is natural. If nearly everyone acted submissively toward you, would you not test the limits of that submissiveness? As Browning put it, "A man’s reach should exceed his grasp / Or what’s a heaven for?" When it comes to politicians whose whole careers are devoted to incrementally exceeding their grasp, why should we be surprised when that grasp should fix itself on a supple, extramarital bosom? I wouldn't paint every man with the brush of a mania for sexual power, but certainly it takes a unique sort to rise to the level of political power. And that unique sort is not more than human, but perhaps, rather, excessively so.

Ten Most Evocative City Names

After spending weeks combing through atlases and spinning my out-of-date globe (whither North and South Yemen?), I have compiled a list of the ten most evocative names of cities. Without even knowing what they mean, these city names conjure up a circus of colourful imagery, from lions and zeppelins to opium dens and high-class prostitutes. I realize my associated imagery is probably highly inaccurate, but I've always been one to prefer imaginal Morocco over real Morocco. Onward:

#10 City Name: Odessa
Imagery: Stone staircases to the sea, palace-sized opera houses, catacombs containing hidden White Russian treasure

#9 City Name: Kinshasa
Imagery: Elephant-riding royalty, roads paved with ivory, up-market animal skins at down-market prices

#8 City Name: Sarajevo
Imagery: Shining cathedrals filled with medieval iconography, international assassins at the precipice of history, ethnic cleansing

#7 City Name: Kuala Lumpur
Imagery: Temples of high finance, tropical zoos atop skyscrapers, escalators to the sun

#6 City Name: Casablanca
Imagery: Casbahs on fire with rock n' roll, crypto-Nazi espionage, star-crossed lovers under the desert sun

#5 City Name: Kathmandu
Imagery: Subterranean monasteries, free-roaming tigers, inter-dimensional portals to Shangri-La

#4 City Name: Brasília
Imagery: Interactive architectural super-parks, government-run pleasure-domes, monuments to people yet to be born

#3 City Name: Godthaab
Imagery: Ice sculptures of Cthulhu, polar bears sacrifices over pagan altars, secret entrances to the Hollow Earth

#2 City Name: Addis Ababa
Imagery: The spiraling castle of Prester John, ancient gnostic churches, saffron and spice

#1 City Name: Ulan Bator
Imagery: Horsemen running down pedestrians, desert ziggurats, walls made of human skulls

In Defence Of The Inner Life

"The man who has no refuge in himself, who lives, so to speak, in his front rooms, in the outer whirlwind of things and opinions, is not properly a personality at all. He floats with the current, who does not guide himself according to higher principles, who has no ideal, no convictions--such a man is a mere article of furniture--a thing moved, instead of a living and moving being--an echo, not a voice. The man who has no inner life is the slave of his surroundings, as the barometer is the obedient servant of the air at rest, and the weathercock the humble servant of the air in motion."
- Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Postmodernism: Some Working Definitions

post·mod·ern·ism

1. The secular mysticism of superfluous (wo)man.
2. A paradigm shift away from the oppressive dichotomies of Orientalism, patriarchy, Eurocentrism and heteronormativity in favour of the liberating dichotomies of Occidentalism, matriarchy, Afrocentrism and homonormativity.
3. Transcending the false meta-narratives of race and gender by seeing them everywhere in everything.
4. The critique of hyper-reality and consumer fetishism through the critical perspective of hyper-reality and "ironic" consumer fetishism.
5. The (en)gendering of crypto-linguistic auto-fellatio.
6. Opening the gates of Rome to the barbarians and expecting them to greet you as liberators.
7. The ultranationalism of deterritorialized borderlands.
8. Beating the horse that drove Nietzsche mad.
9. Escape from the hidden oppression of language through the dialectical process of making it more obscure.
10. The cultural (il)logic of late Marxism.
11. Applied Spenglerianism.
12. The close reading of signifiers within a text for the purpose of diassembling their significance thus rendering the entire process a self-consuming hermeneutical circle-jerk.
13. The radical problematizing of the false possibility of practical solutions.
14. White mythology for whites who think they're above mythology.
15. Queering the birth process and expecting the womb to bear.
16. Revolt against the threat of the scientific social engineering of society through the unscientific social engineering of students.
17. The decolonization of the mind from Western thought-patterns and internal power structures through entirely non-Western mediums like the novel and the secular university.
18. Academia's critical shield against the hegemony of relevancy.
19. The deconstruction of the human spirit.
20. The self-lobotomization of the Western mind.

The Ballad Of Elliot's Deflated Erection

In the story “Helping,” Elliot is, to quote a title by H.G. Wells, a mind at the end of its tether. The aching of sobriety and the soul-crushing weight of bourgeois mediocrity combine to drive a splinter into his soul. He is fed up by his self-righteous, sow of a wife; by the banality of his weakling patients with their drive-by-night stories; and by the smirk of his happy neighbour cross-country skiing across the arid desert of his soul. He wants to take a shotgun and blow a hole in his whole system of perception, and so he does, but only scares some ducks. Drinking makes him dynamic, alive with danger and the thrill of an urban Vietnam. Without it his life is work, couch, television, death. Whiskey is a seductive brown god, a Vishnu for the modern polytheism of Western decadence. His wife is named Grace but she offers none. She is a dilapidated husk of femininity, sucking away his virile man-soul like the leeching proto-sentience of a Venus flytrap. Why focus on defeating his interior demons when the demons of the exterior world do a Saint Vitus dance over the cracking tectonic miasma of his soul? A small gesture of connection, he seems to be asking his wife; that would be enough to save me from today. But what of tomorrow, of the asphalt horizon spewing twitching embryo-toxins like a Vesuvius after the decline and fall. The gun fires blanks like cancer-ridden sperm, the neighbour continues to ride a paradise dream as false as Nordic Thule. After this deluge, what rainbow can there be?

Hebrew Jazz: The Forgotten Soundtrack Of The Elders Of Zion

Jewish Jazz musician Chaim Chimpowitz

According to former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad, Jews invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy. Yet amidst all this praise for the political innovations of the Hebrews, their contributions to the world of music have often gone underreported. In the 1930s, would-be New Age American Hitler William Dudley Pelley sought to change that:

Jews, Pelley maintained, were the source of all the world's supposed evils, from Communism to "Hebrew Jazz."

Henry Ford also rather poetically paid tribute to the musical innovations of his Yiddish-American compatriots:

Jazz is a Jewish creation. . . the superficial charm and oriental persuasiveness of Hebrew art, its glitter, its violently juxtaposed extremes of passion, its poignant eroticism and pessimism. . . are the vital nucleus of the American temper.

If Blacks can claim to be the true Israelites, I don't see why Jews can't claim to be the true originators of Jazz. To wit, here is the track-listing for the upcoming Ford-approved release, Hebrew Jazz: The Forgotten Soundtrack Of The Elders Of Zion:

1. "Israel" by Miles Davis
2. "The Cantor" by Al Jolson
3. "Shtetl (Ghetto Life)" by John Zorn
4. "Friend Of Kafka" by Naftule's Dream
5. "White Christmas" by Irving Berlin
6. "Bei Mir Bist Du Shein" by the Benny Goodman Orchestra
7. "New York, New York Medley" by Mel Torme
8. "Beer Sheba" by Masada
9. "Dawn over Israel" by Sun Ra and His Arkestra
10. "Sholom Aleichem" by Irving Fields Trio
11. "And the Angels Sing" by Ziggy Elman
12. "Belz Mein Shtetele Belz" by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass
13. "Jewgitive" by Steve Lacy
14. "Let My People Go" by Steve Bernstein

See also:
From Shtetl to Swing
Jazz in Germany 1919 – 1945
Jewface: The World's First Compilation of Jewish Minstrel Songs
The Jewish Influence in Blues & Jazz
Tzadik Records

Ten Book Titles That Grab You By The Jugular

10. Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison


9. Devil Worship in France by A.E. Waite


8. Novel with Cocaine by M. Ageyev


7. Royal Parchment Scroll of Black Supremacy by Rev. Fitz Balintine Pettersburgh


6. Briefing for a Descent into Hell by Doris Lessing


5. I Was a Kamikaze by R. Nagatsuka


4. Rape: A Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates


3. White Niggers of America by Pierre Vallieres


2. I Spit on Your Graves by Boris Vian


1. God is Laughing at the United States of America by R.A. McConnell, M.D.

Song Of The Day

This song simply makes me want to dance the Snake Dance and shed my skin, no questions asked. Favourite non sequitur: "Break the heart of my very soul." Na-na-nas, piano breakdown, dual male-female vocals . . . if you don't like this song you have no understanding of dark pop sublimity.

March Violets - Snake Dance

Take my hand said Cleopatra
Take me to the fires to burn
Save your passion and your kinship
Take me to the flames the flames
The flames the flames

Pay my price in pearls of wisdom
Tell me stories of my fame
Scented oil on troubled water
Take my love in vain

Break the heart break the heart
Break the heart of my very soul
Cast it on the desert sand
This dance catches fire with me

Take my body clean of blame
I am the heat inside the flame
Take my body clean of shame
I am the heat inside the flame
I am the heat I am the heat

Play my song the serpent whispered
Golden skin and eyes of flame
Painted heart and painted nails
She ran her fingers down the scales

Just back from the snake dance baby
I love you when you shed your skin
Just back from the snake dance baby
Open the door, let's go in

Just back from the snake dance baby
I love you when you burn me up
Just back from the snake dance baby
This dance catches fire with me

Snake dance