celebratory dirge for Kim Jong Il

If I could take you up in my hand,
as though you were a grasshopper,
and slowly close my fist
feeling your legs twitching and scratching on my palm
as I gently crushed the life out of you
until the juice of your guts ran out down my wrist,
if I could drop your broken frame
down on the concrete floor
and flatten it under my boot heel,
would you love me then?

If I could take your last bowl of rice
and trade it in for a handful
of shiny buttons and bobbles,
and I could feed you on parades
and fearful colours,
would you love me?

Terrible Christmas Songs- Volume 1: Happy Christmas (War is Over) by John Lennon

It goes without saying that every Christmas song ever written is a piece of crap. If the song is about baby Jesus then the lyrics are bound to be both insufferably saccharin and, at the same time, so bloated with obnoxious Christian dogma that prolonged exposure (for example more than 15 seconds) is bound to lead to temporary brain damage. This brain damage usually take the form of an inexplicable urge to run to the nearest mall and buy bags full of crap that no one wants or needs and then give it to your friends with the delusional belief that this will make them love you more.

If the song is not about Jesus, but simply celebrates the joy of winter life and the magic of the season; and is therefore accompanied by a bouncing beat, a sappy melody, and a whole bunch of bells jingling and tingling in the background, then you should walk up to whoever put the music on and punch them in the face. What kind of sick individual would even write a song like Frosty the Snowman? Believe me, I feel for the employees of stores who have to endure nearly two months of continuous Christmas music playing in their workplace. I feel for them as they are forced to stack plastic wreaths and boxes of red candy and inflatable snowmen up onto shelves. I feel for them as they are forced to debase themselves by trudging into the office every bitterly cold dark morning dresses in green elf vests and Santa hats.

But I digress, as usual. One of the very worst of the Christmas songs is the one by John Lennon: "Happy Christmas (War is Over)". This song is bad, not just because it has the usual number of clanging bells and merrily singing children's choruses, but also because it is by John Lennon and therefore it appears to be targeted at people who might feel that Christmas songs are usually silly, but that this one must be ok because it was written by someone who is sort of cool.

It's hard to come out and say that this song sucks because then you have to contend with both the Christmas defenders (who are insidious enough on their own), but also the defenders of John Lennon. It makes attacking the song a mini-sacrilege. Also, because it is a John Lennon song and a Christmas song at the same time it means that it gets almost universal radio play—not only will the radio stations that have completely bowed down to broadcasting consumerist propaganda by blasting Christmas carols 24 hours a day play it, but also rock stations will play it …and basically everyone plays it.

I wish people would just stop and think about it for a second and say to themselves: "you know what? I hate this song. It's really bad. I know John Lennon wrote it and I'm supposed to worship every act of musical genius he ever committed but, in this case, I believe he has composed a genuine piece of shit. I'm going to stop singing along to it as though it's something special and just get on with my life".

We’re going to lose this election.

Sometimes I fool myself into thinking that the world is going to get better; that people will wise up about the damage being done by genetically modified foods, and mass consumerism, and fossil fuel dependency, and corporate excesses. I think I am delusional about these things because I have surrounded myself with people who share my outlandish opinion that the wave of conservative governance breaking out around the world is a turn for the worse. These people, when I have them around me, appear like a majority to me, but they are not.

I remember that I travelled from Quebec (which is, ironically, now the last bastion of the old vision of Canada yet untouched by Stephen Harper's Reform Party) to Ontario, during the last election, honestly believing that the NDP had a chance to win. I sat down outside Union Station in Toronto watching a crowd of people coming out of an afternoon baseball game; column after column of potbellied swaggering men with sunglasses balanced on the brims of their baseball caps, flanked by their mulleted wives and medicated children, digging around for the keys to their pick-ups and sport utility vehicles, satiated by their short trip to the exotic city core and primed and ready to drive back to suburbia to catch the game highlights on a giant screen TV down in the rec room, and I suddenly had a vision of Canada as it actually is:

I saw chain after chain of Tim Horton's restaurants, glowing on the map like urban areas viewed from outer space, I saw the lines drawn between glorious Canadian military service and donuts and I saw the insularity of it all—the blackening disinterest in anything other than a life of sequestered extra-urban comfort—the death of the arts, the death of compassion, the death the silent North under a blazing din of small lawn tractor engines—and I thought to myself, "we're going to lose this election, you know."

And, do you know what? We did lose.

****

haiku

 

he’s the type of guy

who never brings anything

to potluck dinners.

down a crowded street
hot food smells most enticing
to empty pockets

Poor Toronto

 

link

It's sad what is happening to Toronto with the massive shift toward privatization of essential public services and at the same time the corporation of almost all public space in the city.  I especially feel for friends and family who live there and are going to have to watch the city slowly fall apart as the interest in making a profit in return for as little service as possibly gradually causes the city to erode.

At the same time, it's good that this is happening because in 10 years when Toronto has completely disintegrated, is utterly unliveable, and has driven off all its working people (who can't afford to survive there anymore) we will be able to look back and say: this is a text book example of how the delusion that the private sector is competent to run things is completely false.

But then again, there's really no winning either way. It's true that government run institutions tend to become highly inefficient bureaucratic messes if left long enough, and also they are always the victims of governmental budget cuts if they are in any sector other than the military yet…

If public run institutions (by which I mean crown corporations and government run institutions) are bad, private ones (by which I mean corporation entities)  are worse. The is absolutely no motivation for any corporation to provide service to places where it is not profitable for them to do so. Their mandate (no matter what lies they tell in business school) is always to get maximum profit from minimum investment. Things like public parks, schools, garbage collection, public libraries, etc just can't be run like that because the end result will always be unequal access to things that should be (if we live in a democracy where every vote is an equal one) distributed equally.

Another thing public institutions have over private ones is that at least, on some level, they are accountable to the people they serve as customers.  The shareholders of a public institution are all the people who pay taxes and they can (ideally..and I know it is a rarely exercised ideal), technically speaking, make the institution accountable for its actions either by petitioning the government or by election a new government that better serves their interests.

With a private corporation, however, the shareholders are often not the same people as they customers and thus the accountability for what the corporation does is in the hands not of the people who are affected by what it does to make money but instead by the money it makes.  Shareholders, though, might not necessarily care that their corporation they own shares in employs people in sweatshops or poisons children with toxic plastic or puts chemicals in its milk or anything, as long as the money keeps coming in.

like cats, do houseplants
watch intently through the glass
at the unfelt rain?

rainy day ode

laura laura laur
a you are sweeter than the
dark lindt chocolate bar

i bought and i put
in my fridge in case
you came to visit

some rainy old night
dying to kiss me amid
the heaps unsorted

of itinerant
detritus scattered widely
but evenly round

the jolly chambers
of my humble little home
la casa cantor

in case and in case
your imperial teeth deigned
to spare my fingers

their bout with danger
in the amphitheatre
of your pearly jaws

placating the beast's nips
with chocolatey bites of well
won liberty

The danger of individualistic thinking

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/asia-pacific/rate-of-aborted-female-fetuses-increases-in-india/article1968017/

1:

The above article is a classic case of individualistic thinking.  This is to say, a case where an individual imagines his or her own good to have no relationship to the greater trends that are occurring within the milieu in which he or she lives.  The individual is aware of the milieu, but at the same time does not imagine himself or herself to be a significant part of it.  Here is an example of this logic at work: "Having a female child will be a financial burden for me because of dowry, etc.  Also, female children don't have the earning power of men and can't carry on the family name or stick around and take care of us when we're old." 

Obviously, some of these arguments are compelling in that they do secure and improve the welfare of the individual in question (assuming that he or she is able to eventually produce a male heir).  What these individuals don't take into account, however, is that they are not alone in their thinking and that this same act of self-preservation is being committed at the same time by thousands and probably millions of other people who share the same concerns and cultural values.
 

wherefore art thou, insomnia?

wherefore art thou, insomnia?
pulling them lids up on my peepers
to catch the first crusty rays
of hateful sunlight
blaring on the back of the drawn curtains
like a fist of glorious light
streaming
over a radio crackling
and cheerfully droning
through its seventh hour
of reassurance that
there is surely no hope for humanity

for one second i get a dream
here or there
and then you pull me up again
like a shoe off hot gum
the sun melting my beautiful repose
till it hangs down off my heel face
in long gooey strands

Making sense of the Predator series.

Making sense of the predator series isn’t that easy because there are a lot of contradictions and problems related to the temporal continuity of the films.  A lot of these problems come from the fact that, at a certain point, the Predator films were merged (kind of) with the Alien films.  Since the first point of contact between humans and "aliens" takes place in the distant future and the first contact between humans and predators takes place in the present (well the 1980s), any attempt to understand how exactly the timeline works is going to be a waste of time. 

I'm sure that there was some attempt to explain these matters in Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predators, but I don't remember what the explanation was exactly.  Still, it's worth saying something about Predator (and Alien) because beneath the sprawling parasol of these two series are some of the best and worst movies ever made.

Timeline:

1979 – Alien.  Pauline Kael wrote a beautiful review about this film and explained that what makes it so scare is the amount of time spent by the director simply letting the audience get to know the dimensions of the space ship that the lead characters are on.  The advantage of this is that it gets the audience into the claustrophobic gloom of the ship and allows us to begin to see the psychological cracks between the characters before the real horror begins.  This way, then it all does begin, we truly have a sense of how trapped these people are. 

The other good thing is that the horror builds up very slowly and because the species is so incredibly unfamiliar (yet really cool in its conception) we have no idea as viewers exactly what it is that is going on.  The alien just keeps getting bigger and bigger.

As a side note, this is the first movie I ever watched on video…but that's a story for another time (although it's a great story).

The reason the internet is great…

 

insomnium infinitum est

1:
i know if i just lay down in the dark
i will sleep in seconds
but the light is so far away
and who knows if i can still straighten my back?

i know if i let my blankets wash over me
they will draw me out into surfy sleep
like a pebble that is sucked off the beach
and into the brine

but i don't know if my feet
are ready to leave the floorboards yet.

2:
maybe if i just wait a while longer
the sun will show up like a long tardy lover
and the first footfalls of the working set
will crunch briskly past in the snow
huddled up in well coated shoulders
against the thin mean morning light

maybe they'll bleed by the thousands
down the concrete drains of the city
into the core with its towers and cubicles
and blinking florescent pettinesses
and its coffee rotgut
and egg and cheese sandwich gas
and slow slow ticking hours of simmering discontent

clock-watching, paper-stacking, hum-drumming,
pacing, typing, ringing, buzzing, hammering,
drilling, steaming, chattering, grinding,

maybe i'll sleep better through that
...at least until they come to get me too.

I don’t need to tell you the Pope is an idiot, but…

http://www.montrealgazette.com/life/created+Bang+pope+says/4069177/story.html

Look at it this way: if the Catholic Church decides to accept the theory of the Big Bang then what they are saying is that they accept a model of the universe that runs on scientific principles.  Now, if the universe runs on scientific principles then it must be governed by laws of physics which, being laws, can not change. 
This means that whatever the laws of physics are at the start of the universe, those laws must continue to be the case throughout the existence of the universe.  Therefore, anything that is contrary to those laws (like walking on water or coming back from the dead, for example) can not be possible.  Any intervention of God, in fact, in the affairs of reality after the Big Bang must be impossible.