Wave of stupification

As those who know me well can attest, getting angry at the letters page is one of my favourite activities. Nowhere is the absurdity and abject stupidity of the average member of this misbegotten species more prominent than in the letters page (well, talk radio is probably worse, but I don’t pay attention to that crap. Okay, anonymous internet commentators are pretty bad too, but, since that would fuck with my thesis, I’m just going to ignore them.) I love letters pages and the like because they illustrate why democracy is such a terrible idea in a society made up of drooling half-wits. By giving people a public forum in which to proclaim their stupidity for all to see, they show that human beings cannot be trusted to manage their own affairs. (And thus, a paradox: without such democratic forms of communication, we might soon forget the ignorance, self-absorption and blindness of our fellow man and start to demand they be given a voice. There’s also the argument that allowing stupid ideas to be exposed to the world negates their power, but I think the current state of the mass media and a supermarket checkout aisle featuring 15 different magazines with the same six or seven spoiled, drug-and-venereal disease addled “stars” on their covers disproves that idea. Stupidity unchecked begets more stupidity. But anyway…)

Today’s funny pages produced a couple of fine examples of the genre. I should stipulate that I’m talking specifically about the Edmonton Journal, as the Sun’s letters page content is about as erudite as a wet fart; stunning, I know.
The letters in question were prompted by a recent triple homicide at a downtown Edmonton nightclub. This nightclub is-how shall I say it?-frequented by a demographic with a higher statistical probability of committing or being victimized by violent crime. On Saturday night, someone bush-league gangbanger wannabe got tossed out and decided to come back to the bar and start shooting, killing three random bystanders. Civilized stuff. But let’s go to the letters page and see who gets blamed? The “kids”? A youth culture that glorifies violence? Males aged 18-29?

Nope. Let’s go to the tape

“Downtown no place for nightclubs, bars.”

Another three slayings at a downtown bar in Edmonton. How surprising given that it has been happening almost weekly for months now.
…
Edmonton used to be a safe place to live. We’re rapidly losing that sense of safety, and there is something truly grotesque in this latest bloodbath happening as it did in the shadow of one of Edmonton’s largest churches.

Presumably, getting killed away from a house of worship is not as bad. But I want to address the idea that these murders indicate Edmonton is getting less safe. Now, if you go by the numbers and not the headlines, you’d see the overall crime rate in Canada fell from 1991 to 1999 and has been relatively stable from 2000 to 2005 with a few ups and downs along the way. In fact, in 2005, the national crime rate dropped five per cent. “But wait,” you cry. “Homicide was up four per cent in 2005, following a 13-per-cent rise the year before. Aggravated assault was up 10 per cent and assaults with weapons were up five per cent. And a much of that increase was due to an increase in such crimes in Toronto and Edmonton!”

True. But that leads me to the question: who is it, exactly, that’s affected by crime (either as victims or perpetrators)?
If you look at the murders in both T.O. and Edmonton, many are gang-related and most of them involve young men (the notable exceptions being the crazy sonofabitch who is murdering streetwalkers and the all too frequent incidents of domestic violence that lead to murder). The same holds true with violent crime in general. In other words, there are very few examples of so-called “random acts of violence”. What we’re talking about is what a sociologist or criminologist would call “high-risk groups”. If you’re a member or close associate of such a group (say, low-income, minority males aged 18-25), your chances of committing or being on the receiving end of a violent criminal act are statistically greater than that of someone not in the group (say, a soccer mom in Terwilliger Towne.) Violent crime is simply not a broad social problem. For the majority of us, the streets are quite safe.

But that’s not the really stupid part. That would be this:

“Nightclubs of this type really have no business in the heart of the city. We’ve seen what happened to Whyte Avenue with its preponderance of bars. Do we really want this downtown, where we are trying to encourage people to live and businesses to set up?”

I’m not sure what they mean by “nightclubs of this type,” and I’ll agree to a point that bars are killing Whyte Ave. (more on that in a bit). But they don’t leave it at that.

“I would encourage government to make alcohol the next ‘tobacco’ and run it right out of public spaces.”

Public spaces? Lady, bars are private spaces. Unlike enlightened Europe and, uh, Las Vegas, booze in public is a no-no. As for banning booze, well, it’s been done, remember? The word "prohibition" ringing any bells? And we know how prohibition helped curb violent crime, right?

After that pearl, and a brief caveat about “good” bars and nightclub patrons, we’re presented with the crown jewel of the stupid.

“Let’s face it: these bars do not contribute anything to society and are a magnet for misfits. If you want to watch the game over a beer with your buddies, do it in your own home.”

Thankfully the writer already refuted her argument earlier by bringing in the example of Whyte Avenue. People tend to forget that back in the day (I’m talking 20-odd years ago when The Princess was a rundown porno theatre), Whyte Ave was a shithole. There were a number of factors which contributed to its revitalization, such as the preservation and renovation of historic buildings, the creation of pedestrian friendly streetscapes and small business-friendly development policies, policies that allowed for the establishment of more up market watering holes. Any smart urban planner (well, both of them) will tell you that the best way to revitalize an area is to bring in young people with money. And guess what? Young people with money like to drink. Whyte Ave would never have become a destination if it turned into a dead zone after all the clothing stores and knick knack shops shut down for the night (like downtown today). And the fact that the people responsible for maintaining Whyte Ave have forgotten the formula that made the place successful and attractive in the first place (hint: it’s called balance, people) does not mean a lively bar scene contributes nothing to society. On the contrary: the evidence shows it contributes a lot.

Now, I wouldn’t have quite as much of a beef with this person if they were merely calling for the city to be smart about what kind of bar it allows into the downtown core. I would also agree that some of the dodgier establishments downtown need to go. But once you start turning newspaper headlines into broad generalizations unsupported by fact to justify a bunch of sour-faced, meddlesome, anti-fun, statist policies, well, you’ve proven yourself stupid enough to make the letters page. Kudos, dick. I hope that one ends up on your fridge.

Long Winters

Holy shit did it ever snow a lot this weekend. Well, not that much, but enough to cause some major carnage on our roads. I guess people forget we live in a northern city and thus a little snowfall should be expected as November draws nigh. In spite of the crap weather's best efforts to bugger up my weekend, I actually had a pretty good one. Friday, me and D headed to Bistro Praha for Czech beer and schnitzel the size of my head. Oh, and crepes, delicious, boozy crepes. Then we checked out Clint Eastwood's "Flags of our Fathers" which was only okay. Well shot (especially the action bits) and competently acted, it just seemed rather trite, which is off considering the subject matter.

Saturday, I defended the honour of the Moustache at the first ever Covered In Oil/Battle of Alberta ball hockey extravaganza. It was rather wet. That evening featured a somewhat tepid Halloween party, the highlight of which was yours truly's brief reign as karaoke king (99 per cent on "Hey Jude" and "It's Not Unusual, bitches.) And then we got a flat on the way home, in the midst of the snowstorm with help (the AMA) tied up everywhere. Fortunately, we were able to snag a ride home with G's missus' parents, so it worked out in the end. Well, for me anyway: ain't my car stuck on the west end with a buggered-up tire. Finally, Sunday was he kind of Scotch and Guinness drinking, beef-stew making, sexy movie watching day that befitted such a snowy Sunday. There. Don't you feel better for knowing all that?

Las Ramblings

This abortion by our own Clown Prince of Media Nepotism perfectly demonstrates the fatal flaw in the thinking of most of Edmonton's civic boosters:

But I can’t because I’m in love and it makes me cry that I have to look at Telus ads and the same Tim Horton’s litter that makes Todd Babiak upset. Our city, which I will love forever, needs to find a theme that’s actually not shitty and run with it. It’s our duty as the living to make it more beautiful, to add to it so that someday down the road people will flock there for reasons other than a mall that looks like it was bought at a garage sale. Over here, thanks to history, people gladly make civic sacrifices to embolden their public spaces further. Ralph bucks, anyone? Though I don’t like its gift shop Gehry-of-the-glacier look, I’m glad we’re getting a new art gallery. Baby steps.

Leaving aside the fact that Barcelona is highly overrated as a city (it's redolent of damp armpit, it's expensive and, worst of all, full of tourists like, well, Fish) and the general dinkness (that’s a new word: like it?) of Fish's writing (like how he peppers his column with Speedy Gonzales Spanish to show what a man of the world he is), Grikowsky is operating with the same flawed logic of ex-Mayor Bill Smith and countless other nabobs whose fumbling attempts to turn a geographically isolated backwater into a "world-class" city have actually turned us into something of a civic inside joke.

Basically, these well-intentioned idiots think that civic identity (or “theme,” as Fish puts it) can be slapped on a city like a fresh coat of paint on a park bench or rammed into place with no consideration of history, geography, culture, whatever. The end result of such thinking is initiatives like the new Alberta Art Gallery Grikowsky mentions. It’s a shameless ripoff of the famed Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, the construction of which helped spark a renaissance in architecture and tourism in a crumbling post-industrial city. The logic behind the choice of a derivative design for the new AAG is thus: if a fancy Gehry designed art gallery can do such wonders for Bilbao, then Edmonton should be able to tap into some of that hoodoo by building a lil’ Guggenheim of its very own. The flaws are pretty obvious. For starters: Bilbao is in Spain. There, they have beaches there where people can bask (Basque?) in the sunshine. It’s in Europe and thus easily accessible to millions of potential visitors. Edmonton, on the other hand, is cold. It’s in Canada; northern Canada, to be precise, and the only way you can access it is via an airport several dozen kilometers away across a frozen steppe broken up by cancerous housing developments and big box retail complexes (all of this after you catch a connecting flight from Calgary because Edmonton’s airport has very few international flights coming in or going out.)

Other examples of Edmonton’s starry-eyed, never-think-things-through, “If you build it, they will come” mentality are depressingly numerous. The hated Mall is one. The redesign of Churchill Square, carried out to try and lure Edmonton residents downtown to breathe life into a moribund core, is another. In this case, the city fathers decreed that the old square (a tree-and-grass filled area popular mainly with summer festival goers and hobos) was in need of a facelift, ostensibly to mark the city’s centenary, but also because the costs of replacing the grass after its annual trampling were getting prohibitive (Paris, home of some of the world’s largest and meticulously maintained urban greenspaces, addresses the problem of grass abuse with a byzantine system of tiny fences and signs reading “Please keep off the grass.”) Edmonton’s vision/solution was to pave the fucking thing with slate-grey concrete (giving the square the appearance of a Stalinist military parade ground or-and this is the more likely aesthetic inspiration-a parking lot), throw up a few picnic tables and some second rate public art pieces (all prominently featuring the names of the corporate sponsors: who doesn’t like whiling away a sunny summer afternoon beside the sparkling waters of the EPCOR waterfall?), and put up a café, presumably to give people somewhere to go to escape the oppressive, empty feelings the new square invokes. Of course, the café in question is only open until 6 p.m., so if you fancy popping in for a coffee after a show at the Winspear or a trip to the gallery, you’re pretty much fucked. That’s what Second Cup is for, I guess. There’s other examples, like our propensity for bulldozing/burning down historical landmarks and putting up condos and Starbucks (a problem everywhere, to be sure, but in a city with such little history to begin with, a much more acute one), but the point is this: you can’t import an identity. What works in one location won't necesarily work in another. Aping another city's successful projects is like the jock meathead who digs the Killers and buys his ironic tees at Urban Outfitters: unoriginal and kinda douchey. Cities are living things. A city’s identity, its heart, its soul, won’t spring forth from the mind of a city planner, architect, politician, Chamber of Commerce-type or “edgy” “Gen X” “visual artist” like Athena bursting from Zeus’ forehead.

It has to grow.

I reject the idea that this can be done through consensus and careful planning (again: the “theme” of which the Fishman speaks). To return to the original example of Barcelona, Gaudí never set out to make art that would bring tourism bucks to his city: like so many other greats, his work was reviled in his time and he died penniless, his work finding popularity only after he got run over by a tram. Some of his best loved works, notably Park Güell and La Sagrada Familia, are accidental icons: the former was designed as a housing project that was never finished because they ran out of money, the latter is a church that has never hosted a Mass. Other examples of this phenomenon are easy to find. The wide, tree-lined boulevards of Paris were designed, not for strolling lovers, but to facilitate the movement of large masses of troops and cannon. Berlin’s cutting-edge modern architecture was made possible by the city’s almost total destruction in the crucible of the Second World War and its subsequent division. On the other hand, attempts to build greatness (the local examples above, any planned community anywhere and, uh, Nazi Germany) tend to fail miserably in their purpose or otherwise come to grief in the end. Civic greatness, then, is an unintended consequence, an accident of circumstances requiring a quicksilver-slick mix of history, vision and timing. Together, these factors can coalesce and shape a city’s identity, which is about so much more than concrete and stone, blueprints and paint. It’s a feeling you can’t fake.

Which brings me to my final point: Edmonton already has an identity. It’s in the brutalist angles of the buildings of the last boom, the sad, dirty parks, the decaying infrastructure, cheap condos, crap transportation system, and the downtown street corners where the snow and trash fly by horizontally borne by the Arctic air that whips through the concrete and glass windtunnels of the government offices. The things we hate are as much a part of this city as its river valley, festivals and whatever the hell else we like about this place (cheap rents?)
(I’d like to think this makes Edmonton like Manchester or Detroit, but they are decrepit drunks warming themselves on the fading embers of their former glory, while Edmonton is a baby born with its brain on the outside of its skull.) To do away with the flaws, then, would be to destroy part of this city’s soul, or at least whatever passes for it.

Not that I wouldn’t love to see some improvements. We’re a city that, unconsciously or not, embraces all the worst aspects of North American urban culture while neglecting or deliberately attacking those things that could make life bearable. What can you say about a city that holds endless focus groups on downtown revitalization while approving endless new subdivisions on the distant fringes of the city to be served by billion dollar freeway projects? Or that brags about the passion of its hometown sports fans, but sends black-clad thugs to thrash drunken teenagers for stepping off a sidewalk during an impromptu victory celebration? But I suppose that’s to be expected from a city (even a allegedly “liberal” one like this) in the heart Conservative Bizzaro World where public money is earmarked for private gain and where the Powers That Be clench their ass cheeks around the public purse so tight that no amount of probing or lube can pry a few coins free for faggotty shit like “art” and “culture”. But I digress.

In the end, I can agree with Fish’s rather fatuous point that people in this town need to work at making this city better: the city, as the saying goes, is not going to improve itself. A sudden and wholesale shift in out cultural attitudes so that we approach life more like, say, the French, is unlikely at best. And since we can’t count on The Man to help us out (at least not unless we want our ideas bludgeoned to death with a focus group), I guess this is the part where I put forward my great plan for making Edmonton better. But I’ll be goddamned if I have one. I’d kinda like to see a little less breast-beating about how crap this place is and a little more art that is about this place and its people, not shit designed to propel the creator out of Edmonton and to Vancouver or Toronto as fast as humanly possible. By the same token, I’d like to see a helluva lot less fawning over every dink who puts paint to canvas or who picks up a guitar: let’s have a little quality control, people. That old bus ticket stuck to a canvas with random splashes of paint isn’t great art just because you saw the guy who did it down at the Black Dog. Your band really does suck. And the people who snicker at your knock off Warhols aren’t jealous haters cutting you down to make themselves feel good; they’re genuinely concerned with the proliferation of lousy art made by pretentious assholes. Nothing personal and thanks for trying. Just do better next time. For my part, I‘ll try to be a little more open minded and do more to sample the fruits of others’ labours, while doing my meager part to keep the wheels turning. Not to make a statement, or to cram my “vision” of Edmonton down anybody’s gullet and certainly not because some dickwad hack writing for a no-bit weekly told me to, but because of the hope that something good might grow out of it so that when I’m dead a little piece of me might live on. And hopefully that little piece will one day rise up and destroy you all.

What?

(This post was inspired by Devon and Gauloises Blondes)

Ein kleine crap muzik.

Very disappointing CD haul this week. Grabbed the newone's from TV On the Radio, The Hold Steady and Kasabian. I picked up TVOTR on the strength of awesome single "Wolf Like Me" and the good reviews. Alas, it sucks ass. Unlistenable art-wank at its worst. Which is really my own fault, given my prior knowledge of the band's work and the 9.4 rating Pitchfork gave it (Pitchfork approval being a good sign of something's suckiness). The Hold Steady is even more disappointing. The tinny production had me checking the stereo wiring and fucking with the equalizer because I was sure no Hold Steady record could sound so thin. Then there's the music itself, which is slopppy and ugly. Maybe it'll improve with further listens, but, unlike the ant in the song, I don't have high hopes. The Kasabian disc, I haven't given a listen to yet, but I'm really hoping it's good so that I didn't piss all my money away on crap. Stay tuned.

Rage, remixed

I'm fucking sick of remixes. All I want is the mp3 of the Gorillaz's "Dare." I don't want the Soulwax remix. I don't want the DFA remix. I don't want the DJ Dinkmaster mash-up with some ironic bad pop song. I just want the fucking song. Why is that so much to ask?

Work, Work, Work

I'm gone three weeks and have managed to slide back into doing fuck all at work like it ain't no thing. What can I say? I have a gift.

Oh those crazy Arabs.

Brother Schlayden sends me the latest from the desert, land of sand, camels, military dictatorships and incredibly lazy people:

Ramadan ends Monday with Eid which lasts three days and has these guys doing even less work, which I assume would start into negative numbers, causing lawnmowers to spit out grass and paint to go back into cans. And hamburgers eat people.

I just really liked that last bit. Reminds me of when the Simpsons were funny. Is that show even on anymore?

So, I'm back from three weeks in Europe (a lovely country). I may post my scribblings from the trip. But then I might not. See, I like to keep folks guessing.