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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…
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Occupy the Right: Ezra Levant and the Redefinition of Canadian Character
Reviewed in this essay: Ezra Levant, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr. McClelland & Stewart, 2011. Ezra Levant’s jeremiad, The Enemy Within: Terror, Lies, and the Whitewashing of Omar Khadr, is not actually about the eponymous Pakistani-Canadian, but rather about Toronto and the “professional protestors of the anti-war left.”…
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The Land of the Trinity Ad Infinitum: Diaspora Culture in Port of Spain
I Twenty years ago, quixotically pursuing a doomed romance, I moved to Port of Spain, the capital of Trinidad and Tobago. Part of what decided me to go was the time I’d spent among the malcontents of the city’s Woodford Square. On any given day there was a Dickensian cast of cranks, madmen and impassioned…
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The Civil Side of Genocide: Powell’s Barbaric Civilization
Reviewed in this essay: Christopher Powell, Barbaric Civilization: a Critical Sociology of Genocide, McGill-Queens University Press, 2011. What does calling someone a monster accomplish? At a recent human rights panel I attended, a scholar described a series of personal interviews he’d conducted with a group of war criminals—men who had brutally tortured and killed numerous people.…
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How Faber’s App Rescues Eliot’s Masterpiece from the Waste Land of Print
Reviewed in this essay: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land for iPad. Faber and Touch Press, 2011. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/hammond.mp3] It is difficult to describe the shock I experienced this summer on receiving an email informing me that (a) the venerable and comfortably out-of-touch publisher Faber and Faber had teamed with…
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Darwinian Wonder
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/reader.mp3] “Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!” ~Wilkie Collins, The Moonstone I Charles Darwin liked to roam through national galleries smelling paintings. He did not get…
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Disappearing Bookstores: a Letter from Sweden, Toronto, and Iran
I returned to Toronto in May 2010 as a visiting scholar at the University of Toronto. When I find Sweden (where I am resident) uninhabitable, and Iran (where I was born) too dangerous, I take refuge in Toronto, undoubtedly, the most ethnically diverse city in the world. I rented a suite on the southern fringe…
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The World’s Greatest Art Museum is in Hobart, Tasmania
Reviewed in this essay: Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/smiley.mp3] Visit the permanent collection of any national art museum and you will likely find an Impressionist room, with a Cezanne, a Monet, a Manet, and maybe a Pissarro. There will be an Abstract Expressionist…
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Trombone Shorty and the Three Jazzes
Listen to the author read this piece: [audio: issue3/nolan.mp3] In December 2011, Downbeat magazine awarded Miles Davis’s Bitches Brew “Historical Jazz Album of the Year.” What kind of tradition creates an award “of this year” for something from its distant past? Contemporary jazz. In its most commonly known modern iteration, jazz is mostly good, but not…
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Ask Me Anything: How Reddit Perfected the Message Board
Reviewed in this essay: reddit.com‘s AMAs (Ask Me Anything). Buried somewhere under Web 2.0’s endless “personal branding” astroturf, under the rubble of busted dot-com shell companies, and under the dense bedrock of pornography, there lies net utopianism. But all is not lost. If McLuhan were around today and needed new grounds for optimistic futurism, here’s…