May 31, 2005

I was doing a little drive by on the current events tip today. Which basically means on my way to an appointment, I saw a courier reading a newspaper box and shaking her head, and decided to take a peek myself. Thisis what I read;

Homolka 'unrepentant' 'Arrogant' killer dyes and cuts hair before release, say former inmates

I have subsequently read the rest of the article.

It's weird because Homolka wants to move to a neighbourhood about 20 minutes from mine, and my actual first impulse was fear. Which is ridiculous for so many reasons I don't even want to go into here. I mean frankly the woman is in more danger than she presents to others, based on the tenor of the news media surrounding her release.

This article wasn't the first time I have thought of the Homolka issue, its just the first time I have wanted to mention it in this forum.

We have this culture of punishment/justice(if thats what you want to call it) that doesn't create a framework for the act of forgiveness.

Many people would argue that what Ms. Homolka did is unforgiveable, and I am inclined to agree wth them. However, we have created a system in which people who do unforgiveable things can be released to take their place in society, which basically means we have no choice but to forgive them, because if we don't it creates a toxic atmosphere and makes their re-integration completely impossible. I mean, that's why so many felons re-enter the system, once you have it on your record you don't get a second chance.

Because the justice system f__ed up large on this one (Homolkas plea bargain), we have to let Karla out, and its not going to help anyone making her life impossible.

It's like the media is goading her into proving their fears true so we can lock her up again, proving all sorts of nasty brutish lessons such as;

- Change is impossible

- People should not be forgiven

- If you say someone is going to screw up enough times, they will eventually prove you right.

Worse yet, none of these lessons are true. However, the way justice is carried out on this continent and the way criminals are protaryed in the media perpetuates them.

Forgiveness isn't condoning someones choices for one thing. In part, I believesthat Homolkas lack of repentance could be tied up in the fact that no-one has truly forgiven her, so she feels justified in sticking her transgressiveness back in our faces. If someone were to truly offer her some kind of absolution, and try to forgive her. She would probably go mental and actually start to understand the true measure of her guilt.

I can't really explain the process because I am no theologian, but that's the basic notion of all sorts of forgiveness rituals. One cannot actually begin to repent in themselves until they have been forgiven by their comunity, and if we can't forgive Karla what does she owe us except more of the same?

What part of Cappolli did I just eat precisely?

Okay this is probably tacky, but I wanted to write something funny too...

So a couple of nights ago, I had this terrible indigestion from a cappoli chicken burger, which was like a shnitzel frisbee covered in Kimchee made from boston lettuce and which hurt me in more ways than I can stand to remember.

And I was lying on my sofa trying to get over it because it hurt too much to try to sleep, and I was mentally composing an elegy to the chicken frisbee which involved a long story about being on a kibbutz near beersheba in Israel, and going to the market and buying oily blocks of hash and hash pipes and on the way back to the kibbutz we passed the head cook carrying several large baskets full of live sqwuaking (how in gods name do you spell sqwuaking?) chickens.

Later that evening, having made a significant dent in our hash collections. My friends and I sat down for dinner in the mess hall of the kibbutz and were greeted by steaming plates of roughly prepared chicken schnitzels, many with feathers still poking from their breadcrumb wrappings..

I think one of the skolnik twins might have puked into her new naots.

aaah isreal land of milk, honey, and recently deceased feathered schnitzels.

Anyways, (look I digressed aren't I sneaky?)

While on the sofa, and clutching my stomach. I thought to myself. This thing has hit me harder than puberty.

So that's it; "hit me harder than puberty." I never have to search for another pithy simile ever again, and neither do you my dear readers.

We can all use it. "Dude those 18 tequila shots last night, hit me harder than puberty"

My third divorce hit me harder than puberty, but you shoulda seen what it did to the kids.

etc... don't thank me, just never make me eat a capolli burger again.

It's true great brilliance is tempered in the fire of even greater suffering..(or whatever)

hyuck.

May 29, 2005

I want to introduce this story with a little pre-story. I was eating brunch with my friend Nadine and talking about updating her site. She said at one point;

"I don't want any more of that grey colour on the box of action." (Nadine is francophone - I should add)

"What's a box of action? - you mean the content area?"

"yes"

..at which point Sienna, Nadines partner, and I get to laugh hysterically and act out some "Box of Action" type moves in the cafe.

...of course what makes this even funnier is that La boite (the box) in french is slang for an area of the female anatomy that is also related to a certain action.

Whatever, from here on in, I am referring to what I do as creating a "box of action" for my clients, it soooo sounds worth the money.

The real reason for this entry (and maybe I am just a naif) but there's this
site called blog shares fantasy blog share market I mean WTF, really. I thought human stupidity and boringness had a cap, but I was wrong. the stock market is a weird narrow terrifying measure of value at its best. We used to play stock market at camp and then try and roll pine needles in the fake money and smoke it - that's what a fake stock market is for. capiche? Jenn wants to know if ragging on blogshares raises your blogs share price or lower it? My blog is a collective farm if we want to give it a fake economic identity.

And Jenn just showed me a blog called Clusterfucknation which is where I will get all my political commentary in future purely on the basis of its title alone.

Invented Eden is a book by Robin Hemley about a "Lost Tribe" of indigenous peoples discovered in the Philippines in the 1970's. The above title is also a department at the Smithsonian that was used to study "short-lived hunter-gatherer tribes" as they were discovered and then almost as quickly went extinct.

From the Authors Introduction:

ABC's 20/20, britains Central TV, the BBC, and PBS all did documentaries on the Tasaday, some in support of the hoax proponents, others favoring those who claimed the Tasady were "authentic," though the word "Authentic" leads to the question, Authentic what?

This book then, is an investigation not only of the Tasaday controversy but of the language we use to describe others. the story of The Tasaday is as much about us (the industrialized world), who we perceive ourselves to be, as it is about a band of 27 souls in the Philippines, who became stand-ins for the worlds hope dreams and fears.

I can't say I am loving the writing but I think the idea really dovetails with this new meme I have been smelling which is that blogging sucks.

How does it relate? I suppose to me the question of authenticity in an analysis of blogging inherent value would have to take apart the idea of "truth" and "self-presentation" as it functions in the blogospheres environment of both total media saturation and also sort of "extreme" individuization.

I always question whether my writing is authentic in this forum, because I am constantly aware that I am being observed by someone. In fact I was thinking of trying my hand at fiction, so that a) I would be writing for an invisible audience and in not in a text entry field immediately. and b) I could experiment with voices not immediately associated with my own experience.

Invented Eden reminds me, that cultures will always create mythological spaces in which "truth" is a commodity and "true truth" is in shorter supply than what we want to hear. I wonder if the problem people have with blogging is that it's claim to authenticity and individuality threatens a meme about the impossibility of that kind of authenticity existing in a media saturated environment.

Or is it that no-one is authentic on the web? This is straight out of my po-mo art theory classes, but I think there is a grain of truth here. We create identities for our on-line selves that fit inside the frame of the tools we are using to create the stories (blogs rss the 400 word story sound bite) and have not as much to do with the reality of our lived experiences as we think. Kind of like the Tasadays story as it compares to the reality of the Philippines indegenous peoples actual history. Which is laced throughout with a history of colonization and control.

Which brings me to the next item on my list and my new category heading: from Ned. Things that come from Ned now have their own category, I feel he deserves it, he spends so much more time looking for the good stuff on the internet, while I just fuss about writing blog entries. This is my first post with a from Ned categorization but doubtless not the last.

So last night we watched this sad, scary and funny Flash animation about Googles eventual take-over of the entire world

And again it made me think of the Tasaday and this time about how they were thought to be "off the grid" and how that fired the publics imagination. Here was a band of people who still wore leaves and didn't have guns or sample size bottles of shampoos or burt reynolds, who were pure and unsullied and "Good". The public wanted to see authenticity on that level because they were already dealing with the vietnam war and watergate etc..

I am struggling to find words to explain why I see the discussion of bloggings political and cultural merits as naive like the Tasaday and also kind of a hoax, but without actually saying it that way because I truly do love this forum for human expression. I just can't look at it as the saviour of information politics.

En plus; now our choice isn't whether we want our experience of the world mediated through a giant living breathing syndication engine, it's what kind of media syndication and search universe we want... What's going to happen to experiences that don't fit into an RSS feed, or a pod-cast?

May 27, 2005

It's true, I just woke up and now I am writing a blog entry first thing in the morning.

It's just that my cat was being really snobby over breakfast.

No, that's not true.

What is true, is that I was trying to figure out how to get to Hampstead by metro so I can go to a Shabbaton with my grief counsellor and I found out you can download wicked-awesome (the reference to a shabbaton makes me think in the lingo I was using the last time I attended a shabbaton in Montreal, which was in 1994 and as Jane Shulman may well remember, Ruth and I set the paper table-cloth on fire with our spirited hi-jinks, which were also wicked-awesome.)

Sorry that was the digression that ended the paragraph. So yes, you can download amazing STCUM wallpaper for your computer, which is great cuz I have had the same desktop for ages and it's time to mix it up a bit I think..
Why wouldn't I want my computer to be my own personal little metro station?

Presently I favor the action shot of Rosemont metro for the Model-T g4 at home.