|
Lorna Mills and Sally McKay
Digital Media Tree this blog's archive OVVLvverk Lorna Mills: Artworks / Persona Volare / contact Sally McKay: GIFS / cv and contact |
View current page
...more recent posts
| New page here for occasional posts about bicycle fun and transportation, as well as related topics such as social justice, police, and one day getting rid of boring old cars. |
Thanks to friend BSL for the following quotes from lefty cartoonist Ted Rall on Common Dreams
CARQUEFOU, FRANCE -- Why do they hate us? And where do they get their hatred from?
These questions haunted me and three other American visitors as we studied a huge display of cartoons drawn by local schoolchildren assigned to convey their impressions of the United States. Panel after grisly panel depicted the United States ... as murderous, predatory and gleefully vicious.
We repeatedly explained that there's more to the United States than George Bush. We pointed out that most voters supported Gore in the last election, that hundreds of thousands of Americans marched against the war. We argued that Americans are kind, big-hearted people. French attendees listened politely, and we were treated with the utmost kindness and hospitality, but their kids' cartoons screamed: we hate you. That hurt.
From Better to Have Loved, by Judith Merril and Emily Pohl-Weary, Between the Lines, Toronto, 2002. pp.208.
I did not want to be a Canadian nationalist, I did not even want to see nationalism increase in Canada. I feel that, to the extent that I am a Canadian nationalist, I am so because of my anti-American tendencies. Interestingly, that sentiment is the same one that keeps me from being a whole-hearted Canadian nationalist. When I left the United States, nationalism had reached the status of religion. I would even say nationalism had become the new American religion.
Canadian Art Quote #1
Dot Tuer
From Dot Tuer's essay, "Is it Still Priviledged Art? The Polictics of Class and Collaboration in the Art Practice of Carol Conde and Karl Beveridge" in the anthology But is it Art? The Spirit of Art as Activism, Seattle: Bay Press, 1995.
Known as the Massey Report, this Royal Commission presented recommendations to the Parliament in 1957 that formalized a role for subsidized culture as the guardian angel of national identity and led to the founding of the federal funding agency for the arts, the
Canada Council. In the process, it also drew a dividing line between high art and popular culture - the former designated as Canadian and in need of state patronage, the latter as the vulgar materialism of an American consumerism in need of state regulation. Positioning state funding of the arts as simultaneously anti-imperialist and anti-populist, this policy officially sanctioned distrust of mass culture and initiated a series of contradictions between elitism and democratization of the arts that deepened over time.*
* For further analysis see Dot Tuer, "The Art of Nation Building: Constructing a Cultural Identity for Post-War Canada," Parallélogramme, 17 #4, (Spring 1992): 24-36.
Here's a piece of Canadiana. My friend NSL and I are avid fans of the Canadian TV show Da Vinci's Inquest. Da Vinci, played by Nicholas Campbell (who played the corrupt, killer cop in Cronenburg's Dead Zone), is this Columbo-style coroner only he's hot, he's off the booze and he's got a big social conscience (his main platform is safe injection sites). The show is set in Vancouver and the stories are intricate, political, and complicated like a British cop-show. Not only that, the character of Da Vinci is modelled after the real-life, left-wing mayor of Vancouver, Larry Campbell (he used to be the coroner). How often do you get good fun drama based on contemporary, honest-to-god real life? Okay, so now I must admit that Da Vinci's Inquest is an acquired taste. The acting is really really mannered. There's this old-fashioned, stilted, CBC-drama, Candian-cliché style of acting that's terrible and that I think is caused by a sad and sorry lack of conviction. Da Vinci's Inquest sounds like that at first, but this mannered style, while initially unnerving, is clearly intentional. Da Vinici is pure conviction, rollicking fiction, based-on-real-life, leftwing suspense. A crazy hybrid, and I love it . Yet besides NSL (who got me hooked) I barely know anyone else who likes it even a little bit. The show's 9pm Sunday night time slot is apparently up for grabs, and Da Vinci gets pre-empted by everything from Christmas specials to professional figure skating. So... whence came this Queen West (hip downtown Toronto) poster campaign? I get that there's a cult following, but I thought there were only two of us...and we count as old ladies if you're invoking cults.
I am going to break my own NO POETRY rule because its January... and February is coming up...so freakish desperate acts are allowed, and even welcomed. I accidentally read this poem by Dylan Thomas a few years ago and have been re-reading it frequently ever since.
A PROCESS IN THE WEATHER OF THE HEART
A process in the weather of the heart
Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
Storms in the freezing tomb.
A weather in the quarter of the veins
Turns night to day; blood in their suns
Lights up the living worm.
A process in the eye forwarns
The bones of blindness; and the womb
Drives in a death as life leaks out.
A darkness in the weather of the eye
Is half its light; the fathomed sea
Breaks on unangled land.
The seed that makes a forest of the loin
Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
Slow in a sleeping wind.
A weather in the flesh and bone
Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
Move like two ghosts before the eye.
A process in the weather of the world
Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
Sits in their double shade.
A process blows the moon into the sun,
Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
And the heart gives up its dead.