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RIP: Jane Jacobs

“The point of cities is multiplicity of choice.”
– Jane Jacobs, 1916-2006


From CBC News:

Toronto-based urban critic and author Jane Jacobs died Tuesday morning.

Jane Jacobs, shown in 2004, influenced a generation of urban planners with her critiques about North American urban renewal policies. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Jacobs, author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and most recently, Dark Age Ahead, was 89.

Her powerful critiques about the urban renewal policies of North American cities have influenced thinking about urban planning for a generation.

Born May 4, 1916, in Scranton, Penn., Jacobs had made her home in Canada since the late 1960s.

Educated at Columbia University, she met her husband, architect Robert Jacobs, at the Office of War Information in New York, where she began writing during the war.

Known for protesting sprawl

The strong themes of her writing and activism included opposition to expressways, including the Spadina Expressway in Toronto, and the support of neighbourhoods. Jacobs has been arrested twice while protesting urban plans she believed to be destructive.

She also explored these ideas in books such as The Economy of Cities, Cities and the Wealth of Nations and Systems of Survival: A Dialogue on the Moral Foundations of Commerce and Politics.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, questioned the sprawling suburbs that characterized urban planning, saying they were killing inner cities and discouraging the economic vitality that springs organically from neighbourhoods.

Inspired ‘Ideas That Matter’ gathering

Jacobs settled in Toronto in 1969. There she supported developments such as the St. Lawrence neighbourhood, an inner-city development for people of all income levels.

In 1997, the City of Toronto sponsored a conference entitled Jane Jacobs: Ideas That Matter, which led to a book of the same name.

Her most recent book, Dark Age Ahead is “a grave warning to a society losing its memory,” jurists said in awarding her the $15,000 Shaughnessy Cohen Prize for Political Writing in 2005.

“In spare, exquisite prose, Jane Jacobs alerts us to the dangers facing the family, higher education, science and technology, the professions, and fiscal accountability. Drawing on history, geography, and anthropology, this book reflects a lifetime of study and observation, offering us lessons to avoid decline,” the jury said.

Dark Age Ahead finds comparisons between our current North American culture and European culture before the fall of the Roman Empire and the subsequent Dark Ages.

Interviewed by Canadian Press when she won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize, Jacobs said, “People really know themselves that the dark age is ahead. They’re worried, and they haven’t articulated it, but they feel it.”

“I think it’s late but we don’t need to go down the drain,” she said. “But we will if we aren’t aware. It’s a cautionary book.”

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Book Review: Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, by Doris Lessing

House of Anansi Press has re-released their excellent CBC Massey Lectures Series. These are expansive, thought-provoking works which aim to push our understanding of society and the individual in the late-20th (now early-21st) century. The series includes works from many different points of view: A Short History of Progress by Richard Wright, The Unconscious Civilization by John Ralston Saul, and Beyond Fate by Margaret Visser are only a fragment of this extremely revealing and influential volume.

Prisons We Choose To Live Inside, a collection of five lectures author/novelist Doris Lessing gave in Canada in 1986, is a fine introduction to this astutely-observed collection. Clocking in at a mere 76 pages, Lessing lays down a sobering, eye-opening conception of the place of the individual in modern-day society. Her points are clear: history (the study of which she advocates with Cassandra-like insistence) clearly warns us against the perils of becoming embroiled in “mass emotion” and the inherent fascism of group-think. Repeatedly, she advocates the need for cool, objective distance from events and society – even at the peril of seeming an elitist.

With succinct skill and a preference to reference personal experience over statistics, she lays down her points consistently throughout:

 

I think when people look back at our time, they will be amazed at one thing more than any other. It is this – that we do know more about ourselves now than people did in the past. But that very little of it has been put into effect.

 

She makes it clear that there is little excuse, living in an age where social sciences (psychology, sociology, social behaviourism) have flourished, for society to not be equipped with an understanding of the basic underpinnings of society and human behaviour. Yet we don’t; the information never trickles down from academia in a way that can be instilled easily in our public schools, perhaps because the message is largely: group-thinking and mass emotions are our undoing – at risk of ostracism, it’s best that you question everything.

 

One of the many examples she lists is how Stalin, at the time when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, was referred to in Allied propaganda as ‘Uncle Joe’ and how the Russians’ defiant struggle was our struggle…only to turn on a dime after the fall of Hitler and turn against ‘Uncle Joe’, decrying every aspect of the Soviet Union not only as backward – but evil. This last word is very important within the context of Lessing’s lectures because historically it tends to come up every time a group wishes to strengthen their moral stance – and eliminate dissent. It isn’t enough to politely disagree – you must denigrate and vilify. Lessing speculates the reason behind this lies with our animal instincts: the instinct to separate into good/bad, black/white etc..

One of her more chilling statements, which she uses when talking about her childhood in war-torn Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), is that we have to accept that there are people in all parts of the world – in every society – who quite simply enjoy barbarism. They enjoy it, and, when society is on the verge of a conflict, these same people will move to the forefront to push things towards violence.

Again, sobering – and pertinent – stuff. Lessing’s tone is unapologetic, yet she does pepper her lectures with humour (albeit darkly at times). One thing to be aware of is that the original lecture was given in 1986; her examples refer to the British mining strike of ’84, the Falklands War, and then-Communist Russia. Obviously, for those not born early enough to remember these conflicts, it may be good to have Wikipedia nearby for a little context. However, her analogies and references are universal and certainly applicable to the debacles we face today. Her speculations are haunting in their honesty and relevance, and I am reminded of someone’s reference to John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards as “a hand grenade disguised as a book”.

Quite true, and we are all the better for reading books such as these.

Prisons We Choose To Live Inside is available for sale at a fine independent bookstore near you, as well as…Powell’s, Amazon, Chapters.

Published by House of Anansi Press (ISBN: 0-88784-5215)

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Context: Reality-TV

I was reading Theresa C’s comment, and felt inspired by her saying how “Un-Reality TV is mind numbing”. I largely agree, and thought that people should know where this medium came from.

Let’s start with some history, because reality-TV, currently trickling down from the peak of its popularity, neither came about accidentally nor without reason.

In 1988, two of the largest television-industry unions went on strike: SAG (Screen Actors Guild of America) and the WGA (Writer’s Guild of America). With a long and protracted labour action underway, television producers (whose job it is to raise money, oversee production, and sell their shows to networks) were left potentially without any means to do their job: produce. They were seemingly hog-tied by the fact that they couldn’t hire actors or writers.

There were three means that evolved by which producers (and networks) could work around this: the newsmagazine program, the daytime talk-show, and the so-called “reality show”. The former was a variation based on existing (and relatively successful) programs such as “60 Minutes“, only with a stronger emphasis on real-time/ENG-style aesthetics (which evolved from the increasing portability of video cameras and the emergence of the one-man newsgatherer technique pioneered by such TV stations as City-TV in Toronto). Utilizing a stronger visual style rather than talking-head interviews, with an emphasis on flow rather than a strict focus on content, both CBS and ABC rolled-out “48 Hours” and “PrimeTime Live” respectively. Eventually, this verite style merged into existing and new 60 Minutes-Lite programs such as “A Current Affair” and “Inside Edition“.

The second way producers diverted the use of actors and writers was creating more daytime talk-shows which, unlike the comparatively tame examples set by Oprah Winfrey and Phil Donahue, focused on live conflict and on-stage humiliation. Shows like “The Maury Povich Show” and “The Jerry Springer Show” lead the ground in a confrontational and largely exploitational style, utilising supposedly real everyday people as their guests. Of course, real everyday people aren’t consistently exciting, so often the focus was on Neo-Nazis, domestic family conflicts, and, well, idiots.

The last format was the “reality tv show”. The difference between this and the newsmagazine/talk-show formats was utilising a day-in-the-life-of style, where the camera (usually just one) was always on, following its subject, hoping to capture excitement. The progenitor of this was “COPS“, which aired on the FOX network in 1989. COPS, ostensibly a means for producers to side-step using actors and writers, turned into a phenomena from which much of the current streams of reality-TV can be drawn from: intense, outrageous, cheap to produce.

(Note: almost every show mentioned above – with the exception of “A Current Affair”, a show which soon devolved into the same scare tactics and exploitation of its brethren – started as a direct result of the SAG and WGA strikes, circa 1988.)

In other words, aesthetics aside, what started as a way for producers to produce during the labour-action ended up as a cost-efficient way to create cheap programming which the public took to very quickly and the networks gobbled-up: it was engaging, often enraging, and allowed the audience to peer into the seamy side of society from a safe (if voyeuristic) distance.

It was only until recently – ten years after the SAG and WGA strikes – when any modicum of creativity was injected into the medium, when programs such as “Survivor“, “Blind Date“, and “The Apprentice” took the elements of all three of the above mediums and went primetime against ensemble dramas and sitcoms to astounding success.

Of course, every fad must die, and slowly this newest generation of the reality-TV mould is fading away into obscurity, reminiscent of the last days of Jerry Springer when even the most outrageous bullshit didn’t get the ratings it used to. Too many shows, too little fresh ideas, the medium has devolved into self-parody with the likes of “The Simple Life” and “American Idol“.

Reinvigorated by the success of harder-hitting dramas on HBO (like “Six Feet Under“) the public is coming back around to ensemble drama and network television has responded with a better-than-average crop of programs in response. So what will the next metamorphosis for reality-TV be? Possibly a return to live performance on television, in the style of the great Sid Caesar and Jackie Gleason. Ironically, what television started out with in its infancy – an extension of vaudeville and theatre – may come back some 50 or so years later to reclaim our attention. That I would look forward to seeing.

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Article: Telefilm in the Hotseat

In the latest Maclean’s magazine, Brian D. Johnson writes a perfect summation of what is wrong with English Canadian filmmaking: not one thing, but several – and most paths lead back to the government-backed, taxdollar-fuelled funding agency, Telefilm. The article in question isn’t available online, so I suggest you purchase your copy at the local store.

Titled “The Lost Picture Show”, Johnson articulates exactly the frustration amongst established and independent filmmakers who’s goal is to shoot commercially accessible films; this stands in contrast to the long line of edgy/anti-hero ridden/low-key releases which have largely gone straight to video with little mainstream acclaim and fewer people who could vouch to have seen them.

As Johnson notes in his interview with Paul (Due South, Men With Brooms) Gross:

‘English Canadian cinema is wedded to an auteur model based on the early festival breakthroughs of some “really terrific filmmakers like Atom Egoyan.” Then [Gross] adds, “It’s been stuck in that mode for a while. Festivals are composed of audiences that you never see replicated in a normal theatre. We’ve hidden behind this intellectual rampart. And we end up in this perverse situation where we assign to any failed film a great deal of intellectual integrity.”‘

As much as I love/support/appreciate the dark, edgy and ultimately hard-to-market work of filmmakers such as Guy Maddin, I admit that it cannot be our only cultural sustenance. We cannot survive soley on a meal of dark introspection (though it makes for such a wonderful – somtimes necessary – dish from time to time).

The thrust of much of the article is the war between producers, distributors (roundly accused by many of taking the money and running), and the English-language arm of Telefilm – whose opaque methods and logic would astound even The Knights of Templar.

As would be predicted, the producers want distributors to take more risk (to discourage the habit of flipping their investment by selling broadcast rights to films and then spending a fraction of their profit on a weak/token theatrical release that no one will see), the distributors want everyone to take more risk, and Telefilm, recently headed by semi-autonomous robot Wayne Clarkson, can only field the disgruntlement by reacting not like the head of a company (as we would expect) but like your typical corporate lackey:

“Is there any issue? Absolutely. Is the present system working? Not to the degree that we all wish it would. Do there have to be changes? Absolutely.”

Great stuff, Wayne.

Some modest suggestions of my own:

1) Non-Quebec film exhibitors must be obligated to devote 10-15% of screen time to Canadian-made features (English and/or French-language). If Can-Con (Canadian content regulations) can apply to radio and television, it makes perfect sense that theatres should shoulder this as well.

2) Telefilm should drop the “envelope system” (whereby a successful film’s producer is granted a no-strings $3.5 million each year for three years to invest as he/she wishes). It only leads to the anemic creative impasse we’ve been stuck with for the past 10 years: the same people support the same people and there is no incentive towards quality or success.

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"Wild Speculation"

…is the response from the president of the U.S. regarding a recently published report detailing alleged White House/Pentagon preparations to preemptively attack Iran.

In The Iran Plans, published in the latest New Yorker, Seymore M. Hersh outlines conversations with several leading Pentagon advisors and international diplomats privy to the escalation of a military plan to ‘address’ the problem with Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Some excerpts:

One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for
the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was
premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will
humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and
overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it,
and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ “

Good question. Although there are politically moderate movements in Iranian society – contrary to the country’s depiction in news snippets – bombing the country would probably do more to antagonize these potential allies.

In the words of a Petagon adviser:

He warned [the administration], as did many others, that bombing Iran could provoke “a chain reaction” of attacks on American facilities and citizens throughout the world: “What will 1.2 billion Muslims think the day we attack Iran?”

I would replace ‘1.2’ with ‘6’ and ‘Muslims’ with ‘people’, otherwise – in the grand scheme – we slide into an ethnocentric us vs. them dialogue.

The Pentagon adviser said that, in the event of an attack, the Air Force intended to strike many hundreds of targets in Iran but that “ninety-nine per cent of them have nothing to do with proliferation. There are people who believe it’s the way to operate”—that the Administration can achieve its policy goals in Iran with a bombing campaign, an idea that has been supported by neoconservatives.

(*cough* like Dresden?)

According to a “government consultant with close ties to civilians in the Pentagon”:

The broader aim […] is to “encourage ethnic tensions” and undermine the regime.

As if “ethnic tensions” can be turned on and off like a switch (furthermore – as if they couldn’t come back, a la bin Laden in Afghanistan, to bite the encourager).

I’ve been debating this report with some associates today. One of them thinks that the US will make a move prior to the elections later this year, in the hope that a refreshed ‘wartime administration’ can survive falling polls and drooping support at home. He argues that if the Republicans lose the power of Congress it will be harder for them to make the offensive possible. I personally think this is a very tall order and that, Congress or no Congress, the current US administration will use any means necessary to justify their interpretation of the foreign affairs.

One thing is for sure – the drip, drip, drip of a complacent American media will help to foment support via the usual techniques: a sense of inevitability, fear, and profound doubt in anyone (ie the IAEA, the UN) being able to offer a better solution.

In related news, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is insisting on visiting Germany to boost Iranian team support at this summer’s World Cup. A bit of trivia: the last time the U.S. met Iran at the World Cup, Iran beat them 2-1. Although both countries qualified for 2006, they are in separate groups and neither will find it particularly easy to progress for a possible re-match. Dare to dream.

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Profile: Caspar David Friedrich

Man & Woman Contemplating the Moon, 1830-35

From Wikipedia :

“Caspar David Friedrich (5 September 1774 – 7 May 1840) was a 19th century German romantic painter, considered by many critics to be one of the finest exemplars of the movement.”

I’ve always had a natural attraction to Friedrich’s work: there is a lonely, spiritual stoicism at play in which the natural world becomes our cathedral.

Samples:

The Wanderer Above a Sea of Fog, 1818

The Sea of Ice, 1824

A good link for more images: The Paintings of Caspar David Friedrich
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A Blow To Useless Bullshit

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.

From today’s Studio Briefing:


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.

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Comment: Watch the Packaging

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.

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