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A Manifesto for Averting Global Collapse
Reviewed in this essay: Humanity on a Tightrope by Robert Ornstein and Paul Ehrlich. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010. For many, humanity’s position on Earth appears to be growing more precarious by the day. The threat of global pandemics and nuclear war hangs over our heads; the population odometer continues to rise; the forward agents…
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TRB Podcast: Bonnie Mak at the TRB’s e-Reading Symposium
On March 31, Bonnie Mak delivered the keynote address at the TRB’s e-Reading Symposium, presented in collaboration with U of T’s Book History and Print Culture program and the Toronto Centre for the Book. Her lecture, entitled “Reading the ‘E’ in E-Reading,” examines the impact of new technologies on reader engagement and the future of the…
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Our Neoliberal Inheritance: Visions of Crisis in Detropia
Reviewed in this essay: Detropia, directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady. Running Time: 94 minutes. Screened at Toronto Hot Docs Film Festival. Toronto general release in September. 91 minutes. All non-fiction seeks to use a close engagement with a specific subject as a lens to tell a story about larger, abstract issues. Filmmakers have no choice:…
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An Editorial Occupant
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Mask Panic: Past and Present
Listen to the author read this essay: [audio:issue4/reid.mp3] On January 7, 1514, the Parlement of Normandy, the royal court of appeal for that prosperous French province on the Channel coast, issued a decree banning the wearing and owning of masks. “It is prohibited for all persons […] to wear or purchase any false visage, mask,…
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Occupy The BBC: The Work of Adam Curtis
A million acts of reportage, programming and documentation have left the BBC with the planet’s most complete video archive of the twentieth century. BBC writer and documentarian Adam Curtis’s technique is to obsessively sift through these uncountable hours of footage looking for connections. He shuffles through the BBC’s memories like its regretful conscience, imbuing each…
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Occupying Prisons: Canada and the Future of Incarceration
Films reviewed in this essay: Herman’s House (Canada, 2012, 81 min.), directed by Angad Singh Bhalla Hunting Bobby Oatway (Canada, 2004, 45 min.), directed by John Kastner As the Canadian government prepares to close Kingston Penitentiary, the oldest pen in the country, Whiggish history-telling has already begun to frame its wake. Virtually all the major…
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100 Years of Occupation: Leacock in Orillia
Robertson Davies’s Salterton was inspired by Kingston, and Mordecai Richler immortalized St. Urbain Street. It’s hard to imagine these books set elsewhere: Duddy Kravitz could never come from Vancouver. But no place takes as much pride in being a setting as Orillia does in its starring role in Stephen Leacock’s Sunshine Sketches of a Little…
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OF NATURE: A Poem
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The Impermanence of the Ordinary: Full Frontal T.O.
Listen to the author read this essay: [audio:issue4/meermass.mp3] Reviewed in this essay: Full Frontal T.O. (Coach House, 2012), photographs by Patrick Cummins, text by Shawn Micallef Cities have been photographed since the birth of the medium, but camera lenses have tended to focus on urban life: its characters, opulence, industry, and grime. Where architecture was…
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Made in Occupied Japan
Recently an acquaintance I’ll call Eric gave me a chrome-plated naphtha lighter similar to a Zippo. The lighter was manufactured by Atomic. Engraved on the bottom were the words, “MADE IN OCCUPIED JAPAN.” Shiny as a trophy, at 60-plus years, the relic still functioned like new. Inquiring as to how he came to possess the…
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Christopher D’Arcangelo’s Occupations
In recent months, the Occupy Wall Street splinter group Occupy Museums staged an alternative, barter-based art fair outside New York’s annual Armory Show, and released a fake press release under the guise of the Whitney Biennial disavowing the exhibition’s corporate sponsors and apologizing to the exhibiting artists “for allowing them to be exploited by the…