Drumpf as blunt instrument
2016-10-14
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
i am usually loath to comment on specifics of American politics. As a Canadian, i am conscious that i have no standing in the affairs of another country. Mostly though, i wish for a Canada where those affairs don’t matter to us. More than enough politics that directly affect me and my neighbours, on the federal, provincial and municipal levels, to worry about.
Nonetheless, this article is remarkable to me because i think David Wong has the US situation exactly right.
The level of despair that brings people to support a complete, thorough and utter tool like Donald Drumpf is staggering. This despair is certainly not unique to the USA. (Brexit is a similar situation in some ways…)
What are the differences between rural America and rural Newfoundland, really? Lots of things, i guess, but one comes to mind: in Newfoundland, the desperate were still mobile enough to emigrate; mostly to Alberta, but right now Alberta is stagnant. In the long term, climate change may make the petroleum industry obsolete, and a resource-based economy untenable overall, while manufacturing in Canada has been just as dead as in America.
What irrationality awaits us if things get worse?
“Blood and Guts TV”
2016-10-13
MOVIE REVIEW: Christine is an arresting biopic about a reporter’s on-air suicide
Indeed, seeing both movies is a richer experience than seeing either one alone. One says nobody should make a Christine Chubbuck movie. The other defiantly says, “We’re gonna make it after all.”
Wellbeing ideology
2016-10-13
Life-Hacks of the Poor and Aimless
[…] obsessive ritualization of self-care comes at the expense of collective engagement, collapsing every social problem into a personal quest for the good life. “Wellness,” they declare, “has become an ideology.”
Chabuduo
2016-10-06
What Chinese corner cutting reveals about modernity
If what you’re making represents a world utterly out of reach to you, why bother to do it well?
via reddit
Jerusalem by Alan Moore
2016-10-06
An embress of textistence and embiddyment aflight
[…] the nature of the book means that there will be two types of reviews of it. The first type will come from comics and geek-culture websites, whose reviewers have rarely read anything more taxing than X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills. A 1200+-page literary novel is, pretty much by definition, going to overwhelm them, and they’ll say so.
The other type of reviewer is the writer for the arts pages of the broadsheets, and they will compare it to books like Infinite Jest, Gravity’s Rainbow, Lanark. They’ll mention the chapter written in the style of Finnegans Wake. They won’t say “this is a big, hard, book” explicitly, but they’ll only refer to it in the context of famously-difficult works.
The fact is that Jerusalem does merit comparison with all those other books — like them it is a monstrously clever, awe-inspiring book, an omnium gatherum that uses different literary styles and genres, that ties together all the author’s thoughts in one massive explanatory, exploratory, novel.
astrology
2016-09-11
When had astrology become our irrationality of choice? Probably sometime around 2012, when things were not so good for us. When you’re feeling stuck, one way to convince yourself change is in the near to middle distance is to read a horoscope. It didn’t matter that the mechanism by which it worked was dubious: cosmic forces emanating from the ordered motions of celestial bodies, wiggling down through the atmosphere in invisible rays to be inspired by human lungs. A broken clock is right twice a day, and weren’t there plenty of things we took to be true without understanding how they worked—GPS, menstrual synchrony, gluten? Our horoscope, at least, gave us something to look forward to. We weren’t idiots, just a little depressed, and comforted by this garrulous pseudoscience that advised, encouraged, cautioned.
bad record contracts
2016-08-27
Why Canadian bands (sometimes) can’t make it in the States
“It doesn’t fucking matter that The Hip had limited success in the U.S.,” wrote music journalist and broadcaster Alan Cross in the days after Downie’s diagnosis went public. “There’s only one reason why things didn’t work out: bad record contracts. It had nothing to do with the band being ‘too Canadian’ or the inadequacy of their music.”
A theory
2016-08-25
The Berenstein [sic] Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe
In 1992 they were “stEin” in 1992, but in 2012 they were “stAin” in 1992.
Some explanations have been proposed.
via A.V. Club
“Monica”, by Hera Lindsay Bird
2016-08-23
The Friday Poem: “Monica”, by Hera Lindsay Bird
And to be able to maintain a friendship
Through the various complications of heterosexual monogamy
Is enormously difficult
Especially when you take into consideration
What cunts they all were
A nightmare of the future
2016-08-06
[Almost a year since i’ve used this. Facebook is too comfortable.]
Priced out of rental market, Simon Fraser students sleeping on campus – The Globe and Mail
“There is a lot more going on, with people who just want to keep their kids in school. We’ve all lowered our expectations. I don’t know anybody who wants a house. These parents aren’t bad parents. There’s just no end in sight, and it pisses me off when people say this is a first-world problem.”
