The actors we’ve been working with all year have graduated and are off into the world to do their thing, which includes huge amounts of self promotion. I just noticed that one of them is using one of my photographs, taken with my own equipment and on my own initiative, on her personal site, without my permission. So I stole it back:

It’s also been poorly cropped, or else the original is incorrectly composed (haven’t checked) — but at first I was actually pissed off! Somewhere along the process of learning to be an imagemaker I bought into the idea that I should get compensated for imagemaking. This forced me to confront my own hypocrisy: I steal intellectual property pretty much every day. I actually have my computer set to steal it automatically, whenever it’s turned on. I’m actually stealing some right now.

No one likes to confront their own hypocrisy! Talk about awkward.

I started to consider watermarking my photos, which in private life I think is effing weak. Perhaps best to calm down and realize that, in a sense, she’s pimping my work by pimping her own. I might ask for an image credit though… And try to sell her some web design consulting (and more shots from the set) while I’m at it. There’s always a win-win sales opportunity.

But yeah: I used to have less-than-no sympathy for the other side of piracy. But now… It’s personal.

I find the joy and frivolity in the culture surrounding Osama’s death to be disgusting. This is not a response to Jared’s post (except in the literal sense).

Marshall McLuhan wrote that media are inherently violent (the telephone amputates your voice) and that a search for individual identity often manifests itself in a bit of the good old ultra-violence: “[people] have to kill to know if they’re real or if the other guy’s real.”

Violence, whether spiritual or physical, is a quest for identity and the meaningful. The less identity, the more violence.

So now I can finally answer the question of why I — and presumably lots of other white (ie, nonmarginalized suburban) fans — like hip hop. It’s not just an interface with “the other”, though it is that. It’s a dark mirror through which we can find our own identity — or maybe our internal perceived lack of identity calls out to, craves, the violence in the music as a kind of self-definition: I don’t stomp faces, but boy do I have faces I’d like to stomp.

My fantasy life is needlessly over-violent, and I do feel marginalized by my utter, bland lack of marginalization. Maybe conservative social politics helps create the countercultural forces it rages against. You can clearly see that, for example, in the Reganomics-Gangsta-Rap-Dan-Quayle cycle of hip hop in the 80s and 90s.

Plus, nothing jazzes you for a business meeting like murder music. Note that 50′s Many Men is entirely set during the course of a boardroom meeting.

Almost 40% of Canadians abstained in the election. Philosopher Jason Brennan’s book The Ethics of Voting (summarized in this paper) applauds their decision.

His argument is that although everyone has a political right to vote, they have a moral obligation not to vote badly. A bad vote is one that is not rationally justified. Votes based on emotion (eg: fear), immoral beliefs (eg: racism) and random selection are bad. Because bad votes cancel out good votes, they are harmful to society.

Brennan puts forward a number of metaphors:

• Voting is like surgery: surgeons have a moral obligation to be well-trained and to do their best, but we don’t hold it against them when they make honest mistakes.
• Bad voting is like pollution: although a single car does not have a big impact, we have an obligation to reduce emissions because of their collective harm.
• Voting is like friends choosing a restaurant: if one of them knows more about local restaurants, the others should abstain from offering unfounded opinions.

So if you’re in favour of universal voting, it is not enough to argue that people have a moral obligation to vote, they must also have a moral obligation to be rational and informed, which has a much higher opportunity cost: “there are myriad worthwhile life goals, which, due to time scarcity, are incompatible with becoming a levelheaded amateur social scientist”.

Brennan argues, “what contemporary democracies need most to preserve equality and liberty is not full, informed participation, but an electorate that retains a constitutional culture and remains vigilant enough that it will rise against any leader that tries to abuse their liberties.” The rest of the time, you should leave voting to the experts. Those 40% of voters said “I don’t see the difference between these parties, so I’ll let the rest of you decide on nuance”.

Well, not new, but new to me. It’s one of those brutally atheist-socialist-existentialist ones:

I have an essay somewhere, unpublished I think, wherein I marvel at Heath Ledger’s merging with the Trickster-Godhead through his portrayal of Joker.

Via BB, here is an interview with Russell Brand in which he treats the same ideas:

Narrative is deeply spiritual. The archetypes we use to understand reality help, also, to construct it for each of us individually. The old gods have been made incarnate. Who is Brand if not Dionysus?

I don’t totally agree with Brand — celebrity isn’t necessarily glittered-up grey infosludge* — but it’s an interesting converstion nonetheless. Caveh Zahedi’s hyperreal self in The Waking Life makes the point that the celebrity system is actually deeply spiritual if you’re something like a monist physicalist pantheist because celebs transcend and link the characters they play and help to realize a photographic worship of the always-changing face of God — The Great Mandala.

We consume our artists, our celebs, our creatives, as a society. Not only are people down-rendered, or reified, into icons for easy digestion, but the drive to drink and drugs and self destruction is, I think (and so does Dr. Drew) to some extent externally motivated. Perhaps it’s the idea that Brand talks about, above — that celebs come to believe in their own reified media personas over their actual identities, and that vacuousness destroys their minds.

Gilbert’s TED on nurturing genius talks about our culture’s artist-grinding too.

But in short: celebs are our Greek gods (or, as a professor once extolled, gods were the Greek celebs). That’s why they can fight and die and fuck and love over and over again in infinite, immortal combinations. That, and the art of film.

It’s the same reason comic book structures work, and are so easy to move onto the screen.

… when I say that the nullity of your vote should also be private.

Whatever you think of Trump, publishing his record as a voter is a cheap ploy.

Here’s an article on misotheists, people who believe in God and hate him/her/it. I just want to talk about the last sentence in this paragraph:

When it comes to God-hatred, a collective blindness seems to settle on us. First, we lack a generally agreed-upon name to refer to this religious rebellion. And anything that doesn’t have a word associated with it doesn’t exist, right?

Um, no. Hell no! Is that actually an idea that people have? Both language and its limits are terribly important, especially for anyone trying to understand — well, anything.

I’ve run into this idea and some similar variants quite a lot. A director gave us an amazing lecture, and then asserted that anything could be conveyed through language. “OK,” I said, “orgasm.” That shut him up — if language could predictably convey orgasm (and I’m sure it can for some) then phone sex operators would be the highest-paid profession on Earth and radio would be illegal.

In this case, words don’t describe all of reality — ask anyone who’s invented anything. That would require that The English Language was handed down from on-high, full of words we now use for concepts that, at the time, were reserved for future definition. “No, Heinrich, don’t call that a ‘computer’. They’ll need that word in the 20th century.”

Last, language is woefully insufficient to describe the sensorium. Anyone who’s been blessed with mushroom poisoning or who has seen a photograph, or heard music, or smelled a flower, or tasted literally anything, could tell you that.

The beauty of photography, as Marshall McLuhan points out in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, is in delving deeply into particular moments in time. Henri Cartier-Bresson called this “the decisive moment”.

With advanced cameras, like the one used to shoot this, we can explore moments that, while apparent to our eyes, pass too quickly for close examination.

Film-video adds a dimension of variable time to photography, allowing us to explore perceptual “frame rates” far higher than the ~30-60 FPS which we naturally experience. It allows us to get closer and closer to the maximum “frame rate” of the universe — the infinite now of imperceptible direct reality — the difference in time between a photon being “here” and being “there” — the instant in which “will” becomes “is” becomes “was” — a liminal space existing inside and wholly apart from the day-to-day — a forced mindfulness practice — faster that the speed of sense-system nerve firing, faster than its inherent delay — an irreducible analog explored digitally, like a poet trying to describe direct experience in an insufficient human language — what André Bazin might have called “a record of The Face of God”, or Caveh Zahedi “The Holy Moment”.

There’s this constant tension in Canadian cinema: what makes a picture Canadian? I just watched a documentary about Claude Jutra within which Saul Rubinek commented to the effect:

Canadian films are often criticized for not being artistic. If they’re artistic they’re criticized for not being commerical. If they’re artistic and commercial, they’re criticized for not being Canadian.

Because, I suppose, haters gon’ hate. Luckily, as I’ve been arguing in an essay about The Fly tonight, we have this French cinematic idea called auteur theory — the idea that the director is the person most responsible for the final artistic product of the filmmaking process. Essentially: Hitchcock films are possible to tell apart from Scorsese films are possible to tell apart from Jarmusch films, etc.

This theory is arguable — Tarantino claims that Beatty is the auteur of McCabe & Mrs. Miller rather than Altman, and George Lucas basically stopped directing after the original Star Wars while clearly still playing the auteur in his productions — but it is a good rough guide.

In order to put the issue to bed in my own head, here is my functional definition of Canadian cinema: films made by Canadian auteur-directors.

As simple as this is, it flies in the face of Canadian cinematic tradition, which claims common aesthetic themes amongst “Canadian”-national films. The problem with that is most of the films with that shared aesthetic suck.

It’s impossible to say whether this is because American cinematic aesthetics have colonized my own, though they probably have. And I’m not sure I really care — it sounds like a difference of no-difference: I’ve been influenced, okay, but that bears less on my own Canadian-ness than on the types of pictures I like to watch.