Free Trade

It ain't trade, and it ain't free.

Hand from gurney

Satire

I've been revisiting SCTV. I watched it quite a bit through high school and a little while thereafter. Its got me thinking about satire and what makes it good and what makes it not so good. One of the reasons I've been thinking about it is because I was equally acquainted with Monty Python, both the show and the films, but I never found them funny, never got them, in spite of trying. I had friends who were total Monty Python geeks and I wanted to get it, but didn't. But I found SCTV very funny, and sometimes found it so funny the show seemed a miracle.

I'm pretty sure this is what makes good satire: the one wielding the scalpel can wield it, by necessity, only from the source of some initial openness that is uncomfortable because it is a place of anticipated humiliation, and the anticipation is already humiliating. It can't be conjured. Evelyn Waugh was such a great satirist because he had this ability, which within the satirist feels like a disability. You see it especially in the acting of John Candy. I watched an interview of him on Letterman in which he seems to be painfully aware that he's starting to come across as a bore, and suddenly, almost in spite of himself, he turns it into a source of laughter for the audience. It's like he didn't even need to try. He was just funny. Joe Flaherty and Martin Short were also great in this regard. Those three guys were just so damn funny.

Monty Python always seemed too easy, too towering, too one-sided, too overbearing. SCTV though had a certain light regard that was a two-way scalpel. That special zone they were able to create, light as a feather, was like an endless progenitor of cutting satire that was deadly funny yet didn't injure. And that's the greatest laughter. The more it cuts, the more the healing laugh, and vice versa.

Today there is absolutely no good satire whatsoever - at least not mainstream. Certainly there are good comedians out there. Kevin O'Brien is one actor/satirist who I find very funny. But mainstream like the way SCTV was mainstream, there is nothing. All of it is just a competition to see who can out-vulgarize the other.

I wonder what that says.

Golden Oldie III

"In September 1931 England found it impossible to maintain her gold reserves and was forced off the gold standard. Since then, every other gold-standard nation has either been forced off gold or has abandoned it voluntarily. Those countries which bowed first to this pressure were also the first to recover from the depression. France was among the last to abandon gold; and she is still suffering from her mistake in waiting so long.

The depression experience of all countries under the gold standard has shown that it is scarcely worthy of being called a “standard” at all. It has shown that the so-called “stability” of gold and of foreign exchange destroyed the stability of the buying power of money and thereby the stability of economic conditions generally. In fact, the effort to retain gold as a “standard” has had such disastrous results all over the world that, for the time being, international trade has been deprived of some of the useful services which gold might sill render it...

After the experience of the past decade, it is improbable that many countries will want to give their currencies arbitrary gold values at the cost of domestic deflation and depression...

Some countries, especially the Scandinavian and others included in the so-called “Sterling Bloc”, have gone further than the United States in formulating and in carrying out these new monetary policies.

On abandoning the gold standard in 1931, the Scandinavian countries took steps to maintain for the consumer a constant buying power for their respective currencies. Finland’s central bank made a declaration to this effect. The Riksbank of Sweden has done the same, and its action was officially confirmed by the Swedish Government. As a result, since then people of those fortunate lands have never lost confidence in their money. The buying power of their monetary units have been maintained constant within a few per cent since 1931. At the same time, these countries have made conscious use of monetary policy as an essential part of their efforts to promote domestic prosperity. They have been so successful as to have practically eliminated unemployment, to have raised their production figures to new peaks, and to have improved steadily the scale of living of their people." --From A Program for Monetary Reform, July 1939

Golden Oldie

"When I was moved by many arguments and forces in 1925 to return to the gold standard, I was assured by the highest experts, and our experts are men of great ability and of indisputable integrity and sincerity, that we were anchoring ourselves to reality and stability, and I accepted their advice. I take for myself and my colleagues of other days whatever degree of blame and burden for having accepted their advice.

But what happened? We have had no reality, no stability. The price of gold has risen since then by more than 70 per cent. That is as if a 12-inch foot rule had been stretched to 19 or 20 inches....Look at what this has meant to everybody who has been compelled to execute their contracts upon this irrationally enhanced scale. Look at the gross unfairness of such distortion to all producers of new wealth, and to all that labour and science and enterprise can give us. Look at the enormously increased volume of commodities which have to be created in order to pay off the same mortgage debt or loan. Minor fluctuation might well be ignored, but I say quite seriously that this monetary convulsion has now reached a pitch where I am persuaded that the producers of new wealth will not tolerate indefinitely so hideous an oppression....

I therefore point to this evil, and to the search for the methods of remedying it as the first, second and third of all the problems which should command and rivet our thoughts" --Winston Churchill, 1932

The "economy" as we know it is really only about a few people consolidating the world's assets - oh yes, and then grinding the people into dust

Mark Mallett has a good post on secret societies: Mystery Babylon

Card. Turkson on GMOs and High-tech Agriculture

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- If farmers in Africa had greater access to fertile, arable land safe from armed conflict and pollutants, they would not need genetically modified crops to produce food, said the head of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace.

Making growers reliant on proprietary, genetically modified seeds smacks of "the usual game of economic dependence," which in turn, "stands out like a new form of slavery," said Cardinal Peter Turkson.

The Ghanaian cardinal's comments came in an interview with the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano Jan. 5.

It is "a scandal" that nearly 1 billion people suffer from hunger, Cardinal Turkson said, especially since there is more than enough food to feed the whole world.

Crops and livestock are destroyed because of strict trade restraints or in order to keep food prices high and, in wealthier countries, edible food "is thrown in the garbage," he said.

"All it would take is a little bit more solidarity and much less egoism" and there would be enough food to nourish even twice the current world population, he said.

The cardinal said high-tech agricultural practices and techniques are all but useless in areas of conflict and areas that are ravaged by the exploitation of natural resources.

"In searching for and extracting petroleum, gold or precious minerals present under African soil, multinationals cause enormous damage: they excavate large pits and irreparably devastate fields and forests," he said. Whether such areas would ever be arable again is uncertain "even if one relied on genetically engineered plants."

Cardinal Turkson said some multinational companies are actively engaged in trying to persuade bishops in Africa to support greater use of genetically modified organisms.

"I think that the real issue is not being for or against GMO," he said.

There would be no need for such crops if African growers had access to fertile land that was "not destroyed, devastated or poisoned by the stockpiling of toxic waste" and if growers were able to benefit from the fruits of their labors by being allowed to set aside enough seeds for planting the next year and not be forced to continually buy genetically modified seeds from abroad, he said.

"Why force an African farmer to buy seeds produced in other lands and by other means? I'm beginning to wonder if behind this there isn't the usual game of maintaining economic dependence at all costs," he said.

Cardinal Turkson said he is not opposed to scientific and technological progress, but it's important to evaluate whether there is a real need for genetically modified crops.

He said people should "honestly ask themselves whether it's more about business trying to make somebody rich," which was "a reasonable suspicion" given the many examples of similar exploitation in Ghana.

The rest at: CNS

H/T: Spirit Daily

Would like to see this

Dive! Trailer from Compeller on Vimeo.

H/T for the video: The Aesthetic Elevator

The simple answer, which I'm sure the documentary gets to, is that grocery stores throw the food away instead of giving it away because otherwise people would be asking for the throwaway stuff before buying it. There's also the liability factor.

Of course it's wrong. The wrongness of it runs deep into the underpinnings of our society and culture, and does not just exist as a matter with the grocery stores themselves - something which I'm sure the documentary gets into as well.

A close friend of our family who we called uncle (and his wife, aunt) immigrated here in his youth from Denmark with his wife, and they homesteaded up northeast. They were in a sense pioneers. When they had retired, the time at which we knew them, a good few decades before they both died, they were pretty well off. But he, our uncle, dumpster-dived to the end of his days - and more so after his wife died. I went with him on a couple of occasions to help.

Knowing scarcity of food, or the acquaintance with labouring to make and get food and to preserve it - its existence in your life being entirely dependent on your time and effort - I guess that's something which does not really leave you, even when you have the money later on. At least that's what I understood, observing my uncle.

The grocery store at which he dumpster-dived later reconfigured their bin system, so that it was basically connected to the building and could not be accessed by anyone other than employees.

The waste of food is intimately connected with the production of food as a commodity. Many will say, but food is a commodity. In fact, you might say that, in the end of things, food is the only real commodity. Yes, in many ways it is. But the "commodity" we're talking about right now is something vastly removed from Harry walking to Tom's farm and saying he'll exchange some cedar shakes for a sack of potatoes. The very principle on which today's industrial farming is based is a monster. Hundreds upon hundreds upon thousands upon thousands of acres of land get literally raped - milked solely for profit. That's the short of it of course, but it's true.

And when corporations like Monsanto come along and try to tell us that they are feeding the world and keeping us all from starving, just remember certain things: how much goes to waste in such a system, not only after the grocery stores but before them, through transportation and packaging. Remember the multitude of things that go wrong when we are so disconnected from the production of what we eat. We become slaves. That's the main thing: we become servile. And people still starve. In fact, I think that after the right to life, the deep-seated issue of abortion, the issue of food and its control (and all the related issues of stewardship and creation) is the next big one, which for all the talk concerning it, to me is the baby elephant in the room that we are going to find, perhaps shortly, has suddenly grown to full size.

The Exhibition

July 2nd was the opening reception for the Arts 2010 juried exhibition, in which my painting was included, and which runs until August 29th. While the gallery was pretty well packed upon arrival, after at least 30 minutes the number diminished suddenly, it seemed, by half. One really cannot blame the vapid post-modern attention span too much, when the collective non-aura of the work in the gallery is taken into consideration.

The opening address was so blandly ethereal and unmarked by any hint of boldness or any common connection with human life that it was the very extension of what is called "applied art". I don't know if this is part of some purposeful and conscious effort to neutralize all manifestations of truth with the very language that employs words like diversity, expression, creativity and so forth, into a politicized ghetto where subjectivism rules (and where even subjectivity is annihilated).

Our cultural ghetto is not one of suppression, at least not in the explicit sense. It is one of a very deadly and subtle assimilation. And the artist who makes pretend that he is positing truth and diversity against the flattening effects of this culture does not understand that he is merely feeding it - that is to say, he does not understand that the de-spiritualizing, anti-incarnational operatives are coming from that assimilative field which is at its most deceptive when it appears as some kind of neutral ground. If the artist wants to create portals that open onto the infinite, he must come out of the boat like St. Peter.

I was certain there was going to be at least one homo-promo painting in the exhibit, as this has been a usual course with the gallery over the years; but there was not one - I hate to almost say - sadly. Because when you look at work like the following,






the initial thought that comes to mind is that a few of those propagandistic paintings would be practically welcome.

In the above works, guess which won first place in the "works on canvas" category. Now guess which won second. Now guess which got honourable mention. I'll make it easy: the pictures are in that order, starting from top to bottom.

Notice I discluded third place in that list. Third place - and showing that not all is lost - was the painting shown here, of the oranges, in between the two others (and hey, they placed my painting beside it!):


What is sadder is that a good chunk of artists who won awards or honourable mention did not even show up at the reception to receive their recognition. Is so-and-so here? So? Alright, on to the next one. Now, some years back, when a painting of mine was included in the exhibition, I didn't go to the opening reception. It didn't win anything, but I realize now that the good thing to do is to show up, whether one gets first, second, third, honourable mention, or is simply included in the exhibit.

But what kind of arrogant indifference rules when a second place winner doesn't show, along with a bunch of other "winners"? And please don't give me any of that humble anonymity foulness. Talk about a cultural event that is a lie in every respect. It's rather diabolical; for what is a worse dismantling of our sense of cultural event - and thus of community - than a cultural event that negates itself - playing out its symbolical inversion as though it weren't inversion? But it's a lie.

Winners were hesitant to show up, and viewers were quick to leave. The opening speech almost implored the audience not to listen too hard, and the top canvas picks of the jury sucked donkey shit. A big pile of donkey shit would actually be more interesting, to one who has the contemplative gumption, with the flies that buzz around it and land thereon, laying their wormy progeny within; how it mixes with the rain, and how it bakes in the sun, the pathogens being killed off, and its final blessed withering into the soil that produces life and nutrition.


I went back to the gallery a couple weeks after the opening to take pictures. This exhibition I was pleased - or at least not exasperated - with how my painting appeared:


And I liked this landscape:

Be Newly Taxed and Be Newly Consuming: Problem Fixed!

If he were alive today, Jim Varney could possibly, possibly single-handedly "resuscitate" the economy through consumerism (for a little while at least) but since he's dead (God rest his soul) that option is totally out - know what I mean?

Hirst and the Collectivist Fall from Art

Falling Man, By Max Beckmann (photo source: http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/l09HZ3pUpdxjW_T-ESC-kA)

There is an alright article by Barbara Kay in today's National Post on Damien Hirst's four month London exhibit, No Love Lost, Blue Painting; a "radical departure" from Hirst's studio-produced conceptual exhibits (i.e. actual rotting copulating cows) in that he has painted, solo, twenty five paintings.

There's an even better, earlier article here in The Independent. The best line from the author (in which he mourns the blindness of those who attempt to connect Hirst's canvases with the works of yore and thus reduce the works of yore to superficial egoism):

"So many things obscure a pure attention to good art."

Ah, the inability to meet the demands of real art: the post-modern reward for our divestment of cumbersome, physical reality with its multitudinous array of objects, symbols and figurative species. The reward we now get for this divestment is an endless and cumbersome cacophony, obscuring the ability to see beyond the self - how paradoxical.

In the midst of all warranted criticisms against Hirst and his ilk, that pithy line remains like the last standing word - the only word that these kinds of exhibits deserve - while these nihilistic exhibits (and they are nihilistic) pull down with them into the pit, or nearly so, the critics who spend too much time and too much energy railing against, and detracting them.

The likes of Hirst ought not to ruffle or disturb us or even cause us to be indignant. The time to be disturbed was long ago, when only a few took up that prophetic role. Now is the time to re-build - or simply to build.

I find myself more indignant towards the critics (who I agree with) who come up with terms like "Retrogardism" (a turn on Avante-garde) as a "counter-movement" that brings “a multidisciplinary attempt to retrieve techniques and genres that fell into disuse during the modernist period.”

What? Do you not, even now, get it yet? Do you not understand that you are assuming a post-historical stance as much as Hirst assumes, by talking in the same bunk language of art history?

So many things obscure a pure attention to good art.

I believe that Max Beckmann was one of those prophets who came to be horrified by the sudden takeover of "pure abstraction" (which led to "conceptual art") in his day and yet understood the alternative trap of making a false counteractive art, "painted purely intellectually without the terrible fury of the senses grasping each visible form of beauty and ugliness."

If I was an art teacher I would make Beckmann's "On My Painting" and "Letters to a Woman Painter" required reading.

Beckmann saw in the rise of "pure abstraction" not so much the ruination of tradition, but the ruination of individuality.

"The greatest danger which threatens mankind is collectivism. Everywhere attempts are being made to lower the happiness and the way of living of mankind to the level of termites. I am against these attempts with all the strength of my being.

The individual representation of the object, treated sympathetically or antipathetically, is highly necessary and is an enrichment to the world in form. The elimination of the human relationship causes the vacuum which makes all of us suffer in various degrees - an individual alteration of the details of the object represented is necessary in order to display on the canvas the whole physical reality.

Human sympathy and understanding must be reinstated." (Emphasis mine)

Beckmann wrote these words in 1938. And now so many, many worthless things obscure a pure attention to good art - and so we are impoverished and distracted, unable to expand the self because we are unable to meet the demand of looking beyond and through the self -to what?

What is there to deserve our princely and jaded gazes? What could there possibly be outside of the slaughterhouse, except to say that art the likes of Rembrandt only points to his personal genius and points to nothing else and then that anyone can paint like Rembrandt?

It breaks the heart

to see the desolation in the variety of Halloween candy. When I was a kid, not too long ago, you simply did not know what you were going to get, from house to house. Nibs, twizzlers, wagon wheels, tootsie rolls, toffees, assorted suckers, cracker jack boxes, candy corn, sweet tarts, little chocolate bars, and even little toys, like glow-in-the-dark vampire teeth, and various other obscure candy that I can't remember the names of. The open-air magic would set in upon visiting the houses of the neighbourhood and further, along the familiar streets now like new; houses that you were familiar with, but only from a distance; now going up their driveway and seeing their jack-o-lantern up close then the door opening and seeing the inside of their house, then the bestowal of Lord knows what kind of candy; and the candy having some sort of associative virtue as to what kind of person it was that gave it out: I found all this so exciting and so much damn fun that I would almost pee myself.

And now what is it? Everyone has bought their damn candy from Wal-Mart, and it's all the same - mostly little chocolate bars. This is seriously wrong. And when I go to plunder my nieces' or nephews' Halloween hoard - when visiting a sister's house - I want variety damn it, variety.

A slick, grandiose speech white-washes well

After reading Obama's speech that he gave at Notre Dame, I have to say this:

They are the 'fair-minded' words that precede the onslaught of a major persecution.

His words are the 'fair-minded' solidification of pro-life, anti-abortion traditional Catholics and Christians as not only holding absolutely untenable 'views', but an irrational force standing in the way of collective peace and harmony. Oh no, it's not there explicitly; he leaves that for the listener to develop within the context of his speech's presentiment of a fuzzy world where the 'crossroads' of conflict don't ever, well, conflict.

As absolutely as the sacredness of every human life, born and unborn, being protected by law is the basis for all other law and debate thereof, so Obama absolutely solidifies his pro-abortion 'inflection' and pro-abortion 'laws' in the elusive sleight-of-hand that there exists some equal neutral ground where we simply just don't agree. Uh, no. Remember, uhm, you guys are the ones enforcing and keeping in practice abortion? You guys get what you want while you tell us about some common ground where we just don't agree?

Is the arrogance for real?

Open-Pollinated + Distributism = Sustainable Living. Whoa, like far out man.

"During the period from 1984-1987, 54 of the 230 mail-order seed companies in the United States and Canada went out of business. The majority were smaller companies that had been rich sources of unique varieties. The loss of those 54 companies resulted in 943 non-hybrid varieties (19%) becoming unavailable. The collections being dropped, which sometimes represent the life's work of several generations of seedsmen, are often well adapted to specific regional climates and resistant to local diseases and pests. Far from being obsolete or inferior, these may well be the best home garden varieties ever developed. It is entirely possible that half of the non-hybrid varieties still available from seed companies could be lost during the next decade...

Most of today's breeding programs produce hybrid varieties for commercial growers, often designed to facilitate mechanical harvesting and long distance shipping. Commercial hybrids exhibit highly uniform characteristics, often ripening almost simultaneously. Hybrid uniformity is essential for commercial growers who must mechanically harvest huge fields with a single pass, but is often poorly suited for the home gardeners who wish to spread canning chores and fresh produce over the longest possible harvest season. Many commercial varieties rely on tough skins and solid flesh to withstand mechanical picking and cross-country shipping. Gardeners, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with tenderness and outstanding flavor.

The old varieties are threatened today, not because of any defeciencies, but because they are not suitable for factory farmers and the food processing industry. As long as food crops are being bred for machines and large commercial growers, the needs of the home gardener will be of marginal importance. The old varieties will survive and flourish only if they continue to be grown by backyard gardeners and sold by local farmers markets, organic food co-ops and CSAs." --Suzanne Ashworth, Seed to Seed

Keep awake and watch

"Television is about visible fallacy, something that appears real but is not. Adoration is about invisible truth, something that cannot be seen but is present nonetheless. Worshipping the Holy Eucharist in silence is profoundly countercultural in an age filled with electronic sound and fury signifying nothing. But to present that presence as a digital image on a glowing box is to thrust it back into the realm of the unreal. To remove adoration from physical proximity to the Real Presence is to neuter it entirely."

--Daniel Mitsui in a good essay, The Eucharist and Mass Media.

Look into Google's eyes

You want this. Now repeat it again: you want this. You do not see your hardware as hardware anymore. You see it as an open-ended medium by which you access information, and by which your life will be miraculously simplified. Repeat after me: you want this. You will lift up your hardware information into The Cloud so that it will no longer be susceptible to your earth-bound computer crashes. You will see in this nothing but benefit and convenience. After all, you have nothing to hide. Repeat after me: you have nothing to hide. You want this. You must have this. You like streamline; you like the Singularity.