Matt Cahill's blog
Ingrid is having an art piece presented as part of the Gladstone Hotel’s 3rd Annual “Hard Twist” show. Opening night is November 7th (this Friday). She put a lot of time, energy, and commitment into this work and I hope it is received well. For all of you local visitors to this blog (or out-of-towners who find themselves in Toronto this weekend – hey, you never know), I encourage everyone to make it out.
You should also check out her unique photo blog, Unbought Stuffed Dogs.
Go, Ingrid!
As previously noted, Ingrid and I submitted “re-branded” book covers to Bookninja for their contest. Guess what? Even with a handicap of -10 (she is, after all, a professional book designer), Ingrid took first place by popular vote! But wait, there’s more – a selection of the submissions are profiled in the (bloody) Guardian!
Congrats to her. As for my submissions, I placed somewhere in the honourable mentions, but sadly did not have any pieces profiled on the Guardian. I shall live vicariously through her success today.
As reported in the news over the weekend, spilling into the papers this week, American novelist/essayist David Foster Wallace took his life. He had hung himself in his home, only to be discovered later by his wife.
To be honest, I’ve only read one piece by Wallace – an essay in an issue of Harper’s almost ten years ago on the release of the revised Oxford English Dictionary – and yet it left an indelible impression on me. It made me laugh out loud with its quirky honesty and his style was unique and strong; in short, it made me take notice of writing and writers at a time when it simply was not on my radar (for various reasons). I always swore I would read one of his books, but the prospects of picking up the one he is best known for, Infinite Jest, all 1,000 pages of it, was intimidating. It still is, but that has more to do with the fact that I’m in the middle (or, factually, just past the middle) of War & Peace with Joyce’s Ulysses staring at me from the bookshelf longingly.
Wallace’s suicide is the second in the last few years by an artist who’s work I’d kept an eye on. The first was that of American humorist and performer, Spalding Gray, who – it is assumed – leapt from a ferry into the Hudson River and drowned. I saw him at Massey Hall (one of the most venerable venues in Toronto) many years ago. As with Wallace’s essay, I remember crying with laughter during Gray’s droll monologue.
Which brings us to the question of artists and suicide.
Someone on Bookninja had this to say in reaction to the story:
In my work (psychiatry) I’ve seen so many creative people who are so tortured inside. I’ve often wondered if, given the choice, they’d choose peace over creativity. Maybe suicide is exercising that choice.
I thought about this. I wanted to respond, because I had something to say, but in the end I decided it would only be a tangent and while tangents are allowable in most online situations, an obituary is not exactly the place for one.
The answer is that artists do not want peace, or at least an artificial peace. To do so would be to abandon the tension which is inherent in art (and science, for that matter). In their art, over the course of their lives, artists attempt to resolve this tension; to articulate what it is that is at the centre of a storm which motivates them to create. The tension is the artist. Them against an outside world which does not work. Art becomes a philosophical expression of an existential dilemma. With this as the case, how many artists would willingly barter peace for creativity if such a trade were even possible? Not many, I would wager. What is peace when art allows you to reach higher than ever before, to touch the cookie jar of euphoria with your fingertips?
Like Wallace and Gray, I too suffer from depression. Their passing gives me pause, to put it lightly. Last night over dinner, Ingrid and I had a long talk about this – Wallace, Gray, art, and suicide – and she used a quote from Wallace that she’d read in one of the obituaries, that suicide happens very slowly. He is right. It is not, as commonly portrayed, an impulsive decision, but rather something which gestates very gradually within the mind of the sufferer. The danger is that this internalized dialogue, over the course of years, may eventually lead to the rationalization or acceptance of suicide as a logical option or self-fulfilling prophecy.
Art, however, is not depression, and depression should not be construed as something which only afflicts those in the arts. When you are depressed, anything can inflame the situation. Both the fire and the water used to douse it. It is for this reason that I take a moment to bring this up. So that people may understand what is, for lack of a better term, a mental illness. Allow me to suggest a wonderful series in the Globe and Mail, perhaps the best collection of stories and first-person recollections on the subject to be found in any newspaper.
I tip my hat to Wallace, to Gray. I mourn for the grief experienced by their loved ones.
Allow me to spotlight one of those articles that is sure to disappear from the news as fast as it was posted. Andrew Carey, a journalist with CNN, posted the following:
Let me outline some relevant quotes from the CIA’s Annual Threat Assessment, always a February ritual on Capital Hill:
“Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat.”
Iran has shown a “willingness to use terrorism to pursue strategic foreign policy agendas…”
In Afghanistan, the “chaos here is providing an incubator for narcotics traffickers and militant Islamic groups.”
In Pakistan, “Musharraf’s domestic popularity has been threatened by a series of unpopular policies that he promulgated last year. At the same time, he is being forced to contend with increasingly active Islamist extremists.”
The Internet enables “terrorists to raise money, spread their dogma, find recruits and plan operations far afield,” and “acquire information and capabilities for chemical, biological, radiological and even nuclear attacks.”
Does any of this sound familiar? It should, they are direct quotes taken from the threat assessment as released on February 7th, 2001, a full 7 months before the U.S. ‘homeland’ was attacked. All of it was practically rewritten for the 2008 U.S. Threat Assessment.
The highlights of the 2008 Threat Assessment, as delivered before a U.S. Senate committee on Tuesday, are depressingly void of detail or anything that approaches real insight into the virulent threat now faced by the U.S. and its Western allies.
Skepticism is a good thing, cynicism is not. Unfortunately I confess to feeling much of both as I listened to what the best minds in the U.S. intelligence community had to offer on the state of the threat.
They seem unwilling to share any of their material “intelligence,” the kind that would have potentially tipped off a few suspecting citizens as mass terror plots have unfolded around the world in the last decade. The intelligence community would doubtless argue that to do so would compromise operations and compromise important individuals. I would argue that without real and specific information to enhance their threat assessment, the entire exercise is essentially meaningless, as the 2001 assessment so tragically proved.
I don’t think there’s anything I need to add to this, other than (by-now-predictable) metaphors involving Orwell, the film Brazil, or the book I’m currently reading, We by Eugene Zamiatin.
For those of you living in the south (south of Canada, that is), I hope to see some changes come November, eh?
Tomorrow (Sunday April 30th) there will be a series of rallies happening around North America to raise awareness of the terrible situation in Darfur, Sudan.
You can find out where in your vicinity this rally is happening here.
It is important that our political leaders, who have all cut back support to this region recently, understand the gravity of the situation: routine killings, rapes, and ethnic cleansing.
Is this the only place in the world (or Africa for that matter) that needs attention – no. It’s easy to say “What about Somalia?” or “What about this other country?”. The thing is, in the absence of a perfect solution to those questions I would rather err on the side of helping than sitting at my desk trying to address an impossibly large problem that satisfies all criteria.
If you live in Toronto, the rally starts tomorrow @ 1pm at Queen’s Park. Info located here.
If you are interested in getting involved, please do.
(for context on this problem, please see this entry in Wikipedia)
I have a link to the Internet Movie Database on the sidebar.
One of the things I try not to foster – one of the reasons this blog is here to provide an escape from – is useless bullshit. By useless bullshit, I mean stories about Tom Cruise, shark attacks, cats in trees, product porn, etc.. We are inundated with it. It used to be that the only place you would find it was on daytime television and the checkout counter at the local grocery store. Now it’s everywhere. It is for this reason (as well as to sponsor critical thinking, etc.) that I started this blog. I’m still not even comfortable saying that I have a blog because so many other blogs are filled with useless bullshit.
Anyhow – I will admit that the IMDB can be a source of useless bullshit from time to time. However, strikingly, they are one of the few widely-read web publications to carry reports on the plight of journalism. In particular, these are found in their mid-day Studio Briefing report. Much is said about how a ‘fake news show’ like The Daily Show can pose more challenging questions than all of the other networks combined. In the same way, IMDB’s Studio Briefing – usually a list of box office reports and summations of TV/film biz news – stands as one of the few places I’ve seen (and I sweep the net’s news sites every day) to carry releases that categorize corruption and manipulation in the media in a way that is decidedly non-partisan. Studio Briefing, for the record, is a syndicated daily report, edited by Lew Irwin.
Iraqi Journalists Say They’ve Become Targets
The revelation that the U.S. government has paid Iraqi newspapers to plant favorable stories has increased the danger for Iraqi journalists, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi photojournalist told a Reuters forum Wednesday. Appearing on a panel discussion in New York, Abdul-Ahad remarked, “How do you expect decent Iraqi journalists to go into the streets and write a positive story? Everyone would be pointing at them saying, ‘You’ve been paid by the Americans.'” Zaki Chehab of the London-based Arab newspaper Al Hayat remarked that Arab or Iraqi journalists now must work secretly for fear of being suspected of collaboration. Meanwhile, CBS News said Tuesday that the U.S. military has agreed to Iraqi cameraman Abdul Ameer Hussein, who had been held in custody for one year without charge after he was wounded by U.S. forces in Mosul while covering clashes with insurgents for the network in Mosul. After Hussein was cleared by an Iraqi court, guards stated at the courthouse threatened journalists covering the trial, with one guard reportedly shooting a gun into the air, then pointing it at a camera before the journalists scattered.
The fact that this only shows up prominently on a headline-list dedicated to TV/film info is distressing, but I’m thankful that the editorial team at IMDB is carrying it. Kudos.
Studio Briefing also provided another interesting tidbit:
Corporations Placing Fake News on Local Stations, Says Report
Television stations throughout the country, including several in the largest markets, are continuing to air video news releases produced by large corporations without disclosing the source, according to a study by the Wisconsin-based Center for Media and Democracy and reported in today’s (Thursday) New York Times.The Center, which monitored news programs on 69 stations over the past 10 months, said that the stations attempted to blend the fake news into their broadcasts by having reporters or anchors read scripts supplied by the corporations that produced the videos and in some instances introduced company publicists as if they were actual reporters. The Center said that it plans to post some of the original video news releases, along with examples of how the stations used them, on its website, www.prwatch.org.
Just goes to show that you don’t have to be the Globe & Mail or CNN to carry something pertinent.
We have never lived in a more duplicitous age of mass-communication.
Partisan propaganda is becoming more insidious and sublime than
ever before.
Here’s the classic setup:
1) First, the delivery: matter-of-fact, neighbourly, and gently
authoritative.
2) Second, the offence: more than just choosing a random offender,
but an offender who acts as a subtle metaphor for a greater (more
dire) concern. For example, rather than choosing someone who (let’s
say for naive reasons) refuses to honour fallen WWII soldiers,
choose someone who is also a university student. Student council would be
perfect: corruption at the root of education. Suddenly (seamlessly) your target
becomes indicative of a classic hate-mongering cliche: the
ungrateful and radical liberal post-secondary environment. This is
the classic stereotype – worked great in Cambodia.
3) Third, compound the offence with a black and white conflict:
heroes and villains. Follow the naive student’s debacle with an
earnest recapitulation involving inarguable tales of those who
bravely fought for our freedom from fascism. Talk about how evil
lurks at every corner and does not care about the democratic rights
of civilians, and how the only tonic for this insidious evil is a
militarised environment: soldiers, police, guards, controllers.
Slowly draw this together with the events proceeding September 11th
2001 and proudly unfurl the [place country here] flag.
4) Fourth, summarize. Condemn the naivety of post-secondary
environments – portray them as liberal oases for myopic elites, while
our downtrodden guardians fight without asking for thanks, against
an all-pervasive evil which is thankful for student dissent.
5) Conclude with a question for the general public: who’s side are you
on?
This is the overarching style indicative of news media formats
today: rhetorical, manipulative, and hate-mongering. It’s all in the
packaging, not the individual stories themselves. Who wouldn’t
believe the student is a naive idiot? Who wouldn’t believe that
soldiers put their lives on the line everyday? Put the two together
and you have cause to be suspicious about what goes on in
post-secondary environments – about the students, teachers, and
those who defend their rights.
It’s similar to documentary filmmaking: there’s no such thing as
objective. The minute you edit footage you are making an intentional
move to direct the discussion in a particular way/format. Words like
‘fair’, ‘balanced’, and ‘objective’ have been twisted like toffee in
the last five years. The end result is: you’re on your own.
Utilize critical thinking at all times. Ask yourself if you’re being
shown the big picture or simply baited. Ask yourself if there is a
perspective that isn’t being allowed into the picture. Ask yourself
if the questions asked are not actually questions, but assumptions
(ie. How long until Quebec separates?).
When you turn on the news, you have no friends.
