The Inevitability of Nightmares, Research Time, 10/06/2018

I was too busy with the last few days of the provincial election in Ontario to produce any blog posts. I was working on a campaign, and it took up so much of my time and energy in that last push.

Then in the days after the election, I was recovering. A Conservative majority government in Ontario led by Doug Ford will turn a significant chunk of the machinery of the state against vulnerable people. Within the Ontario Conservative party, a key part of Ford’s support base are social conservatives, and outside the official party many bigots and racist extremists are quite happy for his victory.

I’ll be the first to admit that many edgelords across all demographics drank my liberal tears that night.*

The stuff of nightmares. Hidden in the deepest crevices of our homes,
our lands, where the most destructive and cruel tendencies of our
natures are cultivated and so flower. They will eat us alive.

* Even though I’m totally not a liberal. To them, everyone on the left is a liberal. It’s part of the widespread complete misunderstanding among most of the modern conservative scene of how progressive thought actually works.

It’s easy to feel discouraged by elections like Doug Ford’s, Donald Trump’s, Binyamin Netanyahu’s, or Theresa May’s. There are plenty of profound philosophical sources that justify and explore that pessimism about real social and political progress.

As well as the Frankfurt School figures of Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, and Walter Benjamin, there’s the Situationist project. I’m thinking in particular of the project as laid out in Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle.

He developed a union of political demonstration and theatrical exhibition that influenced techniques of protest around the world. But much of the Situationist perspective remained limited by its own pessimism. Protest created a space for the imagination to roam free – it was a space where, for a few moments, a different kind of life was possible.

But that possibility could never become reality. It was always an act of imagination, a performance, an act of refusal to acquiesce facing the inevitability of its own defeat. Protest, on the Situationist model, is a demonstration of a dream from material, but which will always be a dream, a performance, an image. Not a real system of economic, cultural, and ecological activity.

There is no one more fearful than the richest of men. That fear is why
they hate and destroy. And also why they become grotesque neurotics.
Maybe they're absurd germaphobes. Maybe they subsidize an insane
scientist's quack research on human urine as an aid to rejuvenating
us into near-immortality.

It is so difficult to find guides for philosophical creativity that also considers material success possible. Recovering and maintaining optimism is the most difficult task of progressive politics.

The secret to overcoming pessimism is to identify the real material relationships and dynamics that maintain an unjust system and people’s support for it. It’s an inherently empirical act, but it needs the precision of a philosophically-trained mind to identify the keystones – the relationships of a social-moral-economic system without which it will fall to chaos.

Here’s a key idea that Jeremy Gilbert – along with an old influence of mine, Manuel DeLanda – has identified. You can have markets without capitalism. What turns a market system into an exploitive capitalist system is crossing a threshold of accumulation. When your markets have produced oligarchs – the absurdly rich – those central power figures are able to turn the entire system to serve their personal goals.

Markets are places where people experiment with new ideas for economic activity, moral thinking, and ecological development. People have the social and economic space to adapt to changing circumstances. People in markets on fairly equal terms have the power to take risks, knowing that a risk gone sour won’t be a disaster because they can fall back into the community.

An oligarch operates by a selfish fear. They’ve accumulated so much that their kingdom is more important than the prosperity that produced it in the first place. They become risk-averse and greedy. It’s the irony of massive accumulation – the weight of wealth perverts you with paranoia.

When you’ve been taken out of a community, you’re no longer capable of trust, because your wealth has alienated you from those who are different from you in the most important way.

You’ve become an alien to the non-wealthy. You imagine that they hate you, and so you fear them. Your actions from that fear makes them hate you. You’ve fulfilled your own nightmare.

Becoming Memorable by Becoming a Landmark, Research Time, 09/03/2018

There are moments, when you’re researching a big project, when a few key ideas all come together. I’m having a moment like that now, looking back at some notes on an essay about Félix Guattari.

Stephen Zepke wrote it – he’s a scholar of Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work, who focusses a lot on their aesthetic theories. It has a mouthful of a title – “From Aesthetic Autonomy to Autonomist Aesthetics: Art and Life in Guattari.” Despite that in-your-face blast of technical vocab, it’s actually quite an interesting study.

Arinze Stanley with my favourite of his drawings.

Zepke talks about how Guattari explored art as a revolutionary process. Start from one key fact – if you want to start a successful art movement, you have to run against the mainstream.

You could bring up lots of examples from history. But most of the historical examples I know are Western, and in the spirit of my iconoclastic colleagues, I want to talk about a more global example.

Contemporary installation art, over the last few decades, has been dominated by the overtly shocking – blasphemous, stomach-churning, deranged. Photographs like Andres Serrano’s Piss-Christ, or installations like Damien Hirst’s famous The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.

Back in the 20th century, this kind of provocative sublime surreality was a sufficient shock to mainstream European visual and installation art that it ushered in a whole new way of thinking about what art was acceptable. It reminded popular culture that art is supposed to push boundaries.

As Zepke follows Guattari – art is a deterritorializing medium. The most remarkable art movements are the ones that forcefully reject the norms of an ossified mainstream. They create a whole new set of common principles for thinking about what art is.

Yes, it's a zebra in formaldehyde. But is it art?

The conceptual and social territory of – in the most extreme cases like Hirst, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Kenneth Anger, or Henri Matisse – what counts as art at all. In most cases of historically remarkable art, you’ve at least helped create an exciting new movement that sweeps away a redundant mainstream. Or at least gives people the impetus to see how redundant and stale the mainstream had become under their noses.

Here’s the wider lesson for any social revolution. Every deterritorializalization ends up reterritorializing. It’s a fundamental aspect of life. Every departure has to set itself down somewhere, unless it just wants to fly to pieces. Maybe you want to fly to pieces. But you don’t have to.

What was once a provocative new artistic movement becomes a staid, drab mainstream. In the example I’ve been talking about, the once-shocking sculptures and installations of the Young British Artists are now old hat. Damien Hirst was becoming a punchline before the last century was even finished. Now, his new work is dismissed as “a showroom for oligarchs.”

What do I contrast to the bizarre shock of surreal that’s Hirst limping aesthetic? Hyperrealism. Massive canvases of charcoal and pencil still-life drawings with more detail than a photograph.

Chiamonwu Joy and her remarkable images.

Hyperrealism is a global scene as well. Notable figures are Nigeria’s Arinze Stanley and Chiamonwu Joy, Germany’s Dirk Dzimirski, Canada’s Jeannette Sirois, and plenty of others. Hyperrealist images are more emotionally powerful than Hirst-ian provocations could ever be.

The best of them, of which I count Stanley, creates images of faces that tear you from your complacency – human drama rooted in the individuality of real people. An image of reality hand-crafted in such detail that the devotion to completed, perfected art impresses you almost as much as the faces that root you from your self-interested museum-goer’s detachment.

Don’t think hyperrealism developed purely in reaction to the decadent excess and greed of Hirst-ian installation art. I chose those two art movements because I’ve been looking into hyperrealism over the last six months or so. I’m late to the party, but that was only when I discovered Arinze’s work.

Hyperrealism is a global movement, and the artists who are part of it each have their own motivations and techniques. Deterritorialization – ripping a mainstream out of its prominence to pursue utterly different directions in creativity – isn’t about taking the “opposite” of that mainstream.

What would be the opposite of a cow suspended in formaldehyde? Does it even make sense to talk about opposites of artworks? No, only different artworks. If a cultural movement is influential enough to spawn a ton of mediocre imitators, then eventually some other movement will gather enough energy to blast the old corpse out of social prominence.

Third Format’s a Charm, Composing, 25/02/2018

I’ve had a super-stressful week, and I’ve dealt with it as best I can in a few ways. Most of those involve writing about Félix Guattari, getting some research work done where I can, and lots of coffee.

I’ve also taken another artistic decision. I’ve laid my project of Doctor Who essays to the side – I still want to write philosophical reviews of the new series on the blog as episodes come out later this year, but I don’t think my energies will work best on major statements about the show.

Reasonably accurate depiction of myself. Once I get into a groove
anyway.

On Saturday, I outlined how the novel version of You Were My Friend will go. And I made a symbolic gesture for myself – I wrote its first sentence.

She wasn't doing much of anything at all when the knocking came from the door.

I’ve been trying to do justice to this story since I first developed it – it’s been about four years since I first pitched the idea. I hoped that You Were My Friend could be the ground of work as a theatre writer.

But we had virtually no box office – we were swamped by audiences flocking to see Billy Bishop Goes to War at the higher-budget theatre down the road from our production in Hamilton. They had a higher promotional budget – and more experience marketing theatre. Hamilton was consumed by mournful patriotism after Nathan Cirillo’s murder – which happened less than two weeks before our debut.

The director and crew I worked with on the play You Were My Friend returned to the more sure bets of bigger-budget productions of established content. It suited them well – I approached Mel and Jeannette because I’d seen their brilliant production of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal the year before, and she was already a friend.

Beyond the poor luck of our debut, I also think the story was still incomplete. Its presentation was powerful, but having to stick to one set and two actors may have been too much constraint. When I adapted You Were My Friend into a film script, I expanded its world.

You saw key background events that were only described in the theatre. You met other characters at the supporting or bit level who I could flesh out in more detail than I could when their only existence was as a name in someone else’s dialogue.

You can only do so much on a stage. I mean, you can do so much on
a stage, but not all stories are suited to it – at least not without some
serious changes in expression. Could you do a stage adaptation of,
for example, War and Peace on minimal budget and with only four
or five actors? Maybe. But a lot would have to change.

I hoped to ground the abstract quality of the play in the material reality of Toronto as a city. You Were My Friend began with a single set that became surreal nightclubs and Albertan mountains.

But I wanted to shoot in Trinity-Bellwoods, the streets of Kensington Market and Chinatown, surreptitiously in the back of city buses. It never worked out, though.

In nearly three years, I could never get the damn thing shot. Shooting a film takes equipment, crew, and actors. Acquiring all those takes money and time. I didn’t have the money, so I didn’t have the time as I was too busy trying to make sure I had enough money.

I first started working on the project with Sam, the lead actress from the first version in the theatre. We had a few conversations, but eventually we decided to part ways on the project. I think it was largely down to me – Looking back, I think I appeared dismissive and argumentative when we would critique each other’s work and ideas. I didn’t mean to, but I did.

Oddly, it's the lowest-investment and most isolating form of art that I think lets me create the most expansive world. You Were My Friend the novel can let me fill out the characters’ minds and memories as well as the world they move in. The labyrinths of the narrative can wind deeper into time, space, and thought.

All thanks to being able to string the whole world together with words alone. As for publishing, I’ll soon start reaching out to small publishers in Toronto, but may ultimately publish and promote independently.

This story began as an artistic inspiration from some of the struggles the GF went through earlier in her life, when she was underemployed and had little to no family support – just like my lead character Vicki.

I want You Were My Friend to be reasonably successful not just to honour her in this powerful figurative way, but also to share that struggle with other people who’ve experienced it in my society. It's a work of artistic and ethical solidarity. I want it to breathe and live beyond those nine forgotten performances in a Hamilton indie theatre.

Let the pages fly.

So Real It Could Never Have Existed, Research Time, 10/01/2018

Marcel Proust’s Combray never existed. James Joyce’s Dublin never existed. Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld’s New York never existed. Jacques Audiard’s Paris never existed, no matter how real it feels.

The experience of reality through art, when the art is good-quality, is always more powerful than real experience of the places. This is the point about art that Gilles Deleuze made through his last analyses in What Is Philosophy?.

What would David Bowie's world be, if we tried to say he created a
world – like Audiard's Paris, David's New York, and the others? You
could say he invented a world called David Bowie, with diverse,
strange, and ordinary lands and creatures. A world that can contain
more multitudes than he did himself, as we add to it with our own
creations, through sampling and inspiration. A world that can
outlast him as a monument and as a life in a billion minds.

When you create an assemblage of pure affectivity – percepts distilled into an arrangement in space and time of sensory data – you’ve created an experience more essential than the real city.

A few months ago, I was in Paris, and I found it a beautiful city, even though my experience was dragged down a little by the filth of the subway system and the smell of diesel smoke and particulates that hung in the air like the carcinogenic flatulence of a concrete dragon.

Now watch A Prophet or Dheepan, and you’ll experience a more visceral Paris than you ever could by flying there, walking around, and eating at the wonderful restaurants. The digestive problems of their excessive bread consumption doesn’t hit you when the banlieue towers become venues of small epics of war and justice.

The production of artworks separate real bodies from the affects through which we experience them – replication in artistic media takes care of the separation.

Like I said yesterday, the medium itself doesn’t matter. The stereotypical artistic medium is painting, but that’s only the most obvious method of replicating bodies and processes in a medium through their affects alone. An individual painter produces visual affects with paints on a canvas.

Cinema, for example, does the same with moving images on film or in a video file. It differs in being a collaborative medium, but they’re replicating reality with affects alone, creating a more visceral, powerful experience than the contingent movement of reality could manage.

Even when an actor's performance is so deeply inspired by the real
events of his life, what goes on film is a replication of that life. The
real life of a Tamil Tiger child soldier is a messy, paradoxical,
boring, slow, tedious life bumping from one port of call to
another as a stateless refugee barely recognized as a person under
any law under whose reach he falls. On the cinema screen, he's
distilled that life into a narrative, into a glare that brings all
the intensity of that driftwood existence to a fleeting
relationship between you and a camera.
Antonythasan Jesuthasan, star and story plotter of Dheepan.

An actor, when the cameras are rolling, is performing a character. Quality performance comes from profound emotional mimicry – even Method acting is mimicry, it’s just more soul-wrenching mimicry. But a good actor knows that she’s producing work meant to be experienced for an audience, through the camera.

So if you want to argue over how well a particular work of art reproduces the real experience of its subject matter, you’re going to argue uselessly. Spin your wheels. See how far it gets you in understanding how artistic production actually works.

Deleuze understands this replicating production as constituting a territory from the relationship between the artwork and its viewers. Sensation itself constitutes a new territory – not in the floors of the museum or the screens of a cinema, but in the dynamic interaction of an experiencer and the bodies and processes producing her sensations.

Experience itself is territory. If any of you reading Gilles Deleuze for long enough to get this far* still thinks experience only ever happens in your head, I severely doubt that you’re paying any attention. Or else you’re just trolling a man who’s been dead for more than two decades.

* Or start with What Is Philosophy? like I did.

Experience is a relationship of an organism with its world, constituted from a dynamic field of sensory affects. Art is the experimental, creative, progressive craft of pushing the boundaries of what the field of experience can do. Not nearly all the time, of course. But that’s what art does at its most intense.

Always look to push limits. Or at least give them something of a nudge. It doesn’t have to be the limits of an entire artistic tradition – very few can manage that balance of genuine virtuosity and the social networking skill to make your work prominent enough to be noticed at that scale.

But as a creator, push yourself. Keep trying something different, no matter how well the same old dance will pay. Life is at its most noble when it’s pushing limits.

Playing With Sensations, Research Time, 09/01/2018

There’s no way to write about Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of art – or theory of art, or conception of art, or however you want to categorize it depending on context – without sounding dirty. So let’s agree that there are going to be double-entendres all over this discussion and move on.

As he writes in What Is Philosophy?, there are three ways to capture the diversity of existence in human activity. He calls these ways chaoids, then never talks about them again because the phrase comes in the conclusion of his last book.

The most puzzling, strange films, like Nicholas Roeg's beautiful The
Man Who Fell to Earth, are often only difficult when you try to
understand their stories and images as having some explicit,
straightforward meaning. But the best artists rarely make meaning
the central point of their works – those who do end up writing
horribly pedantic screeds. Polemics in disguise. Let the images
play out before you, see how they all fit together, then you'll
likely understand a puzzling, strange artwork better than when you
were trying to understand what it meant.

Chaoids because they’re three different ways humanity has of hooking into the flows of chaos and making chaos into sensible reality. Those three forges of chaos into reality are philosophy, science, and art. They transform the relentless churn of chaos into, respectively, variations, variable, and varieties.

What does that mean for art? It means that art captures and preserves all the varieties of sensations in complex media in a pure manner. This even includes narrative art like fiction and non-fictional writing, and the stories of movies and television series. It includes the aural arts like music, singing, and audio narrative.

Examples of visual arts like painting and sculpture are easy to embed in a written blog post, but Deleuze would never be so reductive about something like this, and if you think he is, you’re misunderstanding his writing.

What could Deleuze mean by ‘pure’ in this case, though? That art preserves sensations in all their varieties in a pure manner. Think about it this way.

If you want to build most things, you have to add something – some material, some representation – to the event that you want to preserve. A monument is the preservation of an event, whether it’s a person’s life or a moment in history. But monuments themselves never preserve the event itself.

Artistic works don’t have the same ambition. You can interpret the hell out of an artwork, looking at what it signifies and represents, of course. Entire intellectual industries are built on this kind of interpretive work, for better or worse. But the art itself doesn’t exist for the sake of what it means or represents.

An exploration of the ideologies that were interwoven with the Futurist
art movement in Italy will still be important to Utopias, I've just put
them to the side for a bit, while I work on concepts and currents for
other parts of the book. But part of any philosophical engagement
with art is the resistance of artwork – ontologically meaning-neutral –
to any ideology. The tension is especially present in Italy's Futurism,
where a terrifying ideology was deeply interwoven with the
motivation of the artistic creations themselves.
The City Rises by Umberto Boccioni.

Art puts the events themselves in the medium – an artwork is an assemblage of sensory affects. Whatever meanings exist in them, even in narratives and explicitly linguistic artworks, are secondary to the affects themselves, the sensations.

Even in reading and narrative, meaning becomes sensory, and meaning only returns through more complicated critical readings and interpretations. Interpretation is a separate contribution to the sensory assemblage of an artwork – an assembly of sensation.

His explanation of this in What Is Philosophy? actually did fit with the way I’ve made art – my stories, novels, scripts, and plays. As I outline a story, conceive of a character, interpretation and appearance play back and forth in my mind as I think about the possible meanings of what I’m assembling.

But ultimately, a character is an assemblage of action and thought, and a story is an assemblage of events, whether of plot or of more dynamic character collision. As a machine of interlocking components – characters, plots, settings, imagery – my fiction works in different genres and media build their own logic, their own structure.

An artwork is a machine. Its reality is its functioning, the dynamic interlocking of all its components. Meaning comes later, if at all. Its existence is brute. There-ness. Enter the gallery. Pick it up. Press play.

Desire Creates Us, A History Boy, 16/10/2016

I'm one of those people who always reads a bunch of books at the same time. A little while ago, I finished reading Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. I came to the book in a very simple way, but came to the author in a bit of a roundabout path.

Not the cover of my edition, but I think it's my
favourite. The smoke is the sign of the productive
energy that unites the steamship that united the
narrator's grandparents, the city where she
lived, and the relationship that helped her
fully understand his identity and nature.

Turning From Small Worlds

Eugenides is typically lumped in with David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen – sensitive white male chroniclers of the angst and narratives of the suburban American culture heading for an existential crisis through the 1990s and early 2000s. 

They were the most prominent writers in a clique of American authors that were called a coherent cohort in New York Magazine in 2011, their society and wider meaning unified by in how their culture made sense of Wallace’s suicide a few years earlier. 

Eugenides never had much meaning to me when I first discovered these writers. I bought Wallace’s masterpiece Infinite Jest practically by impulse in a mall bookstore when I was 16. 

When I first read it, I was overwhelmed, bowled over by the massive scope of his literary creation, which was wedded to a narrow focus on his characters’ deep, personal, singular pain. I’d later think of Wallace as prefiguring the drive to sincerity. That cultural drive jacked up seriously after Sept 11, as the ironic reflexes of late 20th century popular culture* weren’t adequate to process America’s intense societal trauma.

* Key example: the cool, smirking, distance of authors like Thomas Pynchon from the interiors of his characters, the postmodern focus on technical and formal experimentation, characters as plays of tropes and pure ideas instead of personalities.

I grew tired over the last decade of both postmodern experimentation and the insular interiority of the Wallace-influenced approach. The deal on Wallace was sealed when I read D. T. Max’s biography of him last year – Wallace spent his life tortured by mental illness, frequently unable to escape his own head and most often a mess. 

His characters fell into such deep and detailed pits of interiority in their depression because that was the arc that kept repeating in Wallace’s own life. His research on settings would be comprehensive. I was especially impressed by how much he learned about tax accountancy for The Pale King, but the story was always the same. A subject's fall into their own sadness. Usually never to emerge.

Eugenides has become my favourite of that cohort of
white novelists of the midwestern suburban
American subjective interior. He breaks their
crushing sameness.

I felt the same about Franzen's work, except on a social level. Wallace and Franzen had convinced me that this crew of writers couldn’t escape their heads and their own, socially isolated worlds. The precious interiority of the middle and upper class white American male of the mid-sized town.

Writing Difference – Imagination at Last!

That article I linked earlier, describing Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot as an adaptation of the sick relationship Wallace developed with Mary Karr, made me think he was little different than the others. But with a little reflection, I thought differently.

I remembered The Virgin Suicides. Not the book itself, which I still haven’t read, but the film. I often thought of it primarily as a Sofia Coppola film – her personality was all over the film. But so much of Eugenides’ narrative voice survived her adaptation. Literally, in the film's narration.

That voice expressed a mind that sought to understand difference. The Virgin Suicides could sound like a journey that never leaves a skull at first sight, because it remains the voice of the boys who followed the Lisbon girls. Boys who follow girls. Say it, and you can hear how easily it can fall into the unseemly.

Yet the voice in that film preserved the love that always disappeared from the true solipsists. Wallace’s writing never escaped the black pits, though he depicted the abyss brilliantly. Whenever I try to read Franzen, I have to stop for the choking odour of mothballs. Eugenides seemed different.

The Virgin Suicides was an attempt to narrate the radically different from the outside. That little boys’ choir narrator wanted to explore this world that was so close to their own, but diverged so radically. 

The steel oppression of social conservatism, even for such a basic, insular neighbourhood society as theirs – and the silent howls of pain as they clawed into a familial coffin – the desperation of the realization that an actual coffin is the only escape. 

A story of the relentless drive of love to uncover an alien neighbour.
The film is a masterpiece you can never watch twice, its violent
sadness overcomes your guts.

The entire narrative was an exercise in the refusal to understand what’s different from you on your own terms. The beginning of the ethical imagination that I know now is the purpose of art. If that was Eugenides’ first novel, then how far would he go afterward?

Thousands of Stories in Each of Us

So one day, I saw Middlesex on sale for $1 at a United Way fundraiser table at my local liquor store. The story and its narrator intrigued me – a young girl grows up in 1960s and becomes a man after realizing that she’s intersex with interior testes. And it also flowed through the story of hir grandparents fleeing war in Greek Turkey to settle in Detroit.

After I bought the book, I looked through reviews. Some of the negative reviews thought that a novel was too unwieldy to contain a Greek immigrant story and an intersex awakening story at the same time. 

But that overstuffed excess of narrative was a selling point for me – real life is always intersectional. Every actual person has multiple heritages and stories within them. I look among my own old and new friends in Toronto for examples. 

A young artist leaves the “new world” for the country of his parents’ birth and sees it undergoing a renaissance, while he also works through the complex heritage of a deceased parent and another whose work sometimes exposes him to the poorest of the poor.

In the introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari
write that they wrote the book together and each of them were several
people themselves already. It made their room very crowded. Each of
us is just as crowded as they were.

A woman climbs out of poverty while also growing distant from her earlier religious awakening thanks to hypocrisies in the community, grows alienated from family, and lives through the tension of her own trauma and the mental health issues of her partner.

A man finds financial success and builds a new multicultural family while living the precarious neighbourhoods of a gentrifying city.

A man leaves a dictatorship for a democracy, where he finds love. Only a few years later, he finds himself at the forefront of activism to democratize his old country and bring victims of war to safe shores.

All these overflow the simple narratives that a straightforward literary treatment would make of them. That’s life. It’s what art should depict – the beautiful excess and diversity of human life on its own terms. 

Desire Creates Us From Sludge and Rock

The Greek-American immigrant story of Middlesex blends with the intersex-awakening story of Middlesex even better than simply through an embrace of life’s excessive meaning. I’d actually call it a very Deleuzian book (some relative spoilers coming, though, maybe, depending on your definition).

At many times in the book, Eugenides’ narrator describes himself and his family as assemblages. Particularly, assemblages of genes, phenotypes, hormones, and proteins. We’re chemical as well as psychological and narrative. That doesn’t detract from our humanity – it's part of what constitutes humanity.

Life is physical, an assemblage of forces, imperatives, and tendencies. They all run actively under our intentions and personalities, shaping who we are. We aren’t passive before them, because we’re the actors of our own desire. But those drives and forces, channelled through the personalities they constitute, become desire.

Eugenides depicts a Detroit that becomes a vibrant centre of industry
and a hollowed-out husk within a generation. The Detroit that really
exists. This is Central Michigan Railway Station, abandoned to rot
by 1988.

That's the desire that the narrator’s grandparents Desdemona and Lefty have for each other. Their desire is the vehicle for the proliferation of intersex people, in the deep physicality of their metabolisms and cell nuclei. Their intense sexual desire and deep love for each other drives them to their incestuous marriage. 

It’s kept secret from everyone around them because they’re the only survivors of their home village, destroyed by the nationalist Turkish army. That same desire appears in their son Milton, who seduces his cousin by playing clarinet against her skin. Jazz has rarely been so properly erotic. 

The narrator, faced with the prospect of genital surgery that would destroy her capacity for pleasure, flees and begins living as a man. He’s already been awakened to sexuality through falling in love with a female classmate, and understands that his nature can’t fit in the strict definitions of life in mid 20th century middle America.

That’s another beautiful line of Eugenides’ story – the tension of real human difference with the conservative determination for simplicity and conformity. That’s another way that the immigrant and intersex stories blend together. 

The grandparents flee massacre by a nationalist army – their city Smyrna is burned to the ground and rebuilt as Turkish Izmir. Lefty faces constant company propaganda to abandon his Greek culture and assimilate to WASP Americanism while working at Ford Motors. Desdemona runs an indoor silk farm for a clothing business of the early Nation of Islam.

They give birth to a son who joins the army, takes over his dad’s restaurant, becomes an Eisenhower Republican, and moves his family out to the suburbs when too many blacks settle his neighbourhood. Then that son has a precocious little daughter who grows into a young man by age 15. Every drive to conformity and conservatism is ultimately shot to hell by life itself.

Humans are constructs of desire – made from forces that are prior to our individualities, and always roil beneath our identities and everyday thoughts. That desire pushes us in singular directions, uniquenesses that can’t be tied down to a single code or conform to a unified nature. No matter how much you might believe in the morality that says you must.

That's the story of Eugenides’ Middlesex. Depicting such singular existence is the point of art.

Freedom Speaks With Light From a Screen, Jamming, 16/09/2016

Tonight, I’ll be busy with a fundraising event I’m organizing with the Syria Film Festival. For lack of a better name, it’s the SYFF Cultural Party, and it’s actually going to be a pretty fun night. 

When we were planning the fundraiser, we had our eye on a comprehensive menu of entertainment. We’ve arranged an art auction, and our Festival Director AtoZ’s band is playing a set of traditional and contemporary Syrian music. 

But the centrepiece of the Cultural Party is the screening of a film that one of our partners produced, My Dream My Right. Faisal Attrache is a documentary director who's made several shorts following the lives of people at the Za’atari Refugee Camp just over Syria’s border with Jordan.

Over 80,000 people live in Za’atari, making it Jordan’s fourth-largest city. It’s a city made of United Nations tents in the middle of the bloody desert. It’s existed for four years. And it’s a pretty typical refugee camp in that it’s an enormous limbo for its residents, trapped by the international laws of citizenship that keep them from seeking a better life elsewhere.

The Europeans certainly don’t want any more Syrian people coming to their country, so everyone is just sort of stuck there. That’s what refugee camps are – places where people are stuck. 80,000 people.

Some of those people are youth who’ve taken part in a set of filmmaking workshops that Attrache – and his organization, Voices of the Children – have set up. My Dream My Right is a collection of several short films that these young people made themselves. Each is only a few minutes long, and expresses an aesthetic style unique to each of these young directors.

One of the founding activists and officials in the UNHCR, Thomas Jamieson, had a saying that I discovered a while ago. “If you can close a camp, do it.” A refugee camp is a living purgatory, stuck in a place where your citizenship and your humanity isn’t even fully recognized. 

It reminds me of one core truth behind my own political ideas – We can’t rely on our states to protect us and bestow us rights. We deserve full rights and legal recognition as people, regardless of citizenship and the laws of whatever government issued us our papers. You're always in some minimal danger of a government that cares nothing for you leaving you out to dry.

Well, Za’atari doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. But these young people are sick of the limbo of life in a refugee camp.

The Cultural Party will also now be the first stage in fulfilling a promise I made to the documentary’s producers at the Voices of the Children non-profit. Figuring out how to get these people out of the god damn refugee camp. 

Because if you've been stuck in a refugee camp in the middle of the Jordanian desert overlooking the Syrian border for four years,* you’ll want to get the hell out. It’s not a nice place to be for a month, let alone for four years.

* Four fucking years. I mean, seriously.

Four fucking years. I’d have had it. I’m not surprised that these guys have too. So I plan on introducing (virtually) some of SYFF’s donors and immigration activist partners to the young artists behind My Dream My Right. 

If they can produce such remarkable cinematic beauty in the generally shitty conditions of Za’atari, they’ll be able to weather pretty much anything in the name of art. Especially if they can get the resources of a country and society like Canada working for them.

Some of the heirs to Werner Herzog’s pragmatic existential cinematic process could be in Za’atari right now. We owe it to the world, humanity, God, to get them to make as many films as physically possible.

God would owe them. God should owe them.

Once again, here’s the Facebook event for the Cultural Party tonight. Never stop pushing and nudging the world toward freedom. Even if it’s just a $20 cover charge.

May the Myth Free the Mythmaker, Jamming, 14/08/2016

I have high expectations for the power and weirdness
of this film.

I’m planning on seeing Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation when it comes to Toronto. The reason is simple – because I think it looks like one of the greatest movies of the 21st century. 

Some preview images alone evoke surrealist masterpieces like El Topo, but with a political consciousness and philosophical knife to fit our current revolutionary era. I also love what a full-bore assault it is on the racist history of Hollywood – down to the title, it overwrites D. W. Griffith’s masterpiece of hate with a genuine story of America’s greatest spirit.

That's the quest for justice for the downtrodden that accompanies every great crime of the country's history. America as a culture knows what freedom is, even if so many of its people fight real freedom to their cores.

Then, weeks before its official release, information about Nate Parker’s rape trial resurfaced. The narrative of events make what really happened pretty clear. It describes exactly the kind of situation that happens all-too-frequently on college campuses today – alcohol, questionable consciousness, and a lack of consent. 

It’s exactly the sort of situation that we know to be rape – but exactly the sort of rape that our criminal justice system is completely incapable of convicting anyone for. We know this is a terrible problem in the legal system today. 

Parker is in many ways a good person, doing wonderful
things like funding a film studies scholarship for
black youth. Good works don't erase evil acts.

All it took was a years-long social movement of feminist activism by a new generation of young campaigners driven by the immense media equalization of the digital-social era. But in 1999? This would never have gotten on anyone’s radar. 

It makes perfect sense that Parker and his roommate (and eventual Birth of a Nation co-story developer Jean Celestin) did rape a woman. The trial itself exonerated them, but only because our legal system can’t handle most rape trials justly. Parker having to move from prestigious Penn State to Oklahoma shows that everyone accepted the truth of the rape that he couldn’t remain in that community.

Given his youthful crimes, I also find it quite plausible and believable that he believes or has believed many of the homophobic things he’s said. He did once say, and I believe that he believed at the time, that his taking on roles as gay men or less masculine characters did harm to black culture. That it would contribute to black men becoming less manly.

That is a horrible, stupid, disgusting belief. And I think Nate Parker has believed that (at least he did in the past, though he seems to have learned better). Just as I believe that Parker did rape someone.

So why am I still seeing his film? Why would I still endorse the work of someone who I know has committed terrible crimes?

Have you ever seen El Topo? It is some seriously weird
mythical crazy shit.

Because I know that an artistic achievement can transcend the person who made it. The social, symbolic, cinematic, and artistic power of Birth of a Nation, if it achieves everything that those who saw it at Sundance say it does, will be literally mythological. Parker's achievement will have overcome the man who made it.

Perhaps he regrets his violent actions as a youth. Perhaps he no longer holds the homophobic beliefs that he once proudly professed. Maybe he had to learn the hard way, after years of career stagnation typecast in exactly those meatheaded roles he once praised.

In an industry where so many major players have always been gay, publicly expressing those kinds of attitudes would have rightfully earned him some retribution from producers and studios. Nate Parker as a person deserves that and more.

So criticize him for his violent past, keep him on the proper path to eradicate the last of his homophobic feeling. Making Birth of a Nation makes you part of the struggle for freedom, and freedom will never be achieved if a single oppression vector remains. 

That means: Don’t criticize him for being some kind of weird race traitor because of his interracial marriage. Because a community that endorses that kind of ethnic nationalism can never free itself from the ethnic nationalisms that oppress them. All must be free together.

The masterpiece is bigger than Nate Parker, how art becomes our civilization’s living myth. More than what it was as just Parker’s idea. Let it push Nate Parker to become more than the man he was, and is.

My First Theatre Production Was Probably My Last, Composing, 21/03/2016

Just under a month ago, I read a review of a piece of theatre that I’d quite like to see. It’s in London, so I really hope they record it and make a version available online eventually. It’s called Cleansed by Sarah Kane, and directed by Katie Mitchell.

It is an apparently very disturbing piece of art – deeply symbolic and filled with visceral violence and torture. Actors masturbate on stage. There are graphic murders and horrifying violence throughout the story. Anal violations, mechanical tortures, brutal stabbings. Nudity is a constant, and this nudity is disturbing and unsettling – as far from erotic as you can get. 

A scene from Cleansed, some seriously weird shit.

Yet compared to what I’ve learned of the most remarkable theatre of the last century, Cleansed actually fits in quite well with its history of provocation and the tradition’s recent desires to push the boundaries of art forward. Despite this, there seems to be a limit to the artistic innovation theatre can achieve. 

You can see this in the descriptions of the audience at the Cleansed preview. Its political content is challenging, but its on-stage violence amounts to nothing more unusual than a live theatre Hostel. It’s violent, but no more bloody than a typical horror or action film of the 21st century.

But audience members were hissing and walking out in disgust. The audience was composed entirely of refined, upper-crust, and frankly ignorant theatre buffs. The folks who, as far as the VICE reporter could tell, still tittered nervously at the double entendres of a farce like The Importance of Being Earnest. 

It seems to be the same conundrum that I hit two years ago when I produced my first play, You Were My Friend. I still thought about the theatre as a place for challenging, powerful art. That’s why I wrote an uncompromising story about two women struggling against the financial erosion of under- and unemployment in modern Toronto.

My whole crew and I thought the story was wonderful, and that (it’s my blog, so I’ll blow my own horn) the script itself was pretty damn good. What audiences were got were appreciative, and many people approached me after performances to say how affected and touched they were. It hit people in the souls and the guts. 

When I first thought of the story of You Were My Friend, I wanted to make a visceral, powerful theatre experience that depicted the struggles of so many people in this rough economy, and showed how low we could fall – financially and ethically – if we didn’t support each other.

English theatre director Sarah Kane

And we succeeded. Me, the director, the designer, our technician, and our two actors, we all succeeded. But the audiences were all at Theatre Aquarius down the road watching the feel-good Canadian patriotism play Billy Bishop Goes to War. 

Of course, a serious factor in Billy Bishop’s success was the terrible and tragic timing of our theatrical run. Barley two weeks before we opened in Hamilton were the Parliament Hill shootings, whose only fatality (other than the shooter himself) was Nathan Cirillo, a Hamilton-born soldier who was only in his mid-20s. 

The entire city went into a period of collective mourning. A city in that mood wouldn’t be drawn to a story like You Were My Friend, but would sit in the collective cushion of happy patriotism. But thinking about the reaction to Cleansed helped me understand that there was more to it.

The art of playwrights like Antonin Artaud, Henrik Ibsen, Dario Fo, Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Tennessee Williams, and Harold Pinter could shock a popular audience because they had a popular audience. But theatre today is priced largely beyond the reach of ordinary people.

Most young people in my generation and with my cultural tastes – fairly intelligent hipsters raised on Quentin Tarantino, basically – love to watch these kinds of emotionally powerful and sometimes viscerally violent stories. We’re the generation who loves series on Netflix like Jessica Jones, television shows like Breaking Bad, and I hope movies like the film version of You Were My Friend. 

I’m finishing the script over the next couple of weeks, and then we’re searching for enough funding to get this thing produced. My lead actress Samantha from the theatre version is keeping her role and will direct as well.

Because people like Samantha and me (and our collaborators on the play version, Mel, Jeannette, and Hannah) are drawn to stories like this. They’re the kind of stories people love from artists like Greta Gerwig and Lena Dunham. But you put them on the theatre and they go nowhere. 

Theatre audiences largely aren’t young people anymore. The tickets are just inaccessible to them, especially in the most prestigious venues. So the biggest theatres in my current home city of Toronto – despite having a major large theatre district – play mainstream musicals and mainstream adaptations like Spamalot. Anything more experimental – even the classics – ends up on the margins.

So I’m probably not going to produce theatre again, unless it’s a trial run or some related part of a project that will be recorded and distributed more cheaply than live performance. There just aren’t the same possible returns. And I want to aim big.

An Industry’s Peculiar Character, Composing, 29/01/2016

Here’s an idea that Antonio Negri didn’t think of himself, but he explained it really well. An economy's dominant industry becomes the model for the corporate practice throughout the economy.

My explanation won’t be as pithy as Negri’s own. He illustrates the relationship poetically and precisely. If I wasn’t under some ethical obligation to produce blog posts on this project regularly, I’d just post the citation.* But I’ll at least throw a few hundred words together.

The model of work that dominated the 20th century, at
least in its framework of principles. It came with some
perks, like creating a physical common space for easy
worker organization. The pressure of organized
worker demands led to the corporate obligation to
provide workers with a decent living and benefits.

* Empire, section 3.4, pages 285 to 290.

Here are the main examples. Back when manufacturing employed most people in North America, the factory was the dominant model of business. But not just in the quantitative sense that a healthy plurality of people works on factory floors. 

Business people in many different sectors of the economy adapted essential elements of the Ford factory style to their own businesses. In the early to mid 20th century, business leaders and self-styled gurus advocated that the best businesses ran by hierarchical, centralized, bureaucratic management, and a culture of conformity. 

When I was a child and a teenager, I absorbed a lot of the artwork and comedy that attacked this working culture. That’s why I keep referring to Brazil in my posts about the conformity of 20th century corporate culture. 

Aside from perfectly distilling that culture and its most profound critique,** I saw Brazil at a key time in my young life for it to impact my own personality significantly. And on a societal scale, the critiques of bureaucratic corporate culture were in the hearts of millions of workers and entrepreneurs.

** What is that critique? That a company man can never ask for justice, and can never dream.

The end of the 20th century saw the Western economy transition away from the hierarchies and centralization of the Ford model. Instead, the advent of computer technology, and especially the power of the internet facilitated a new way of working. 

Even so, the modern model of total autonomy has its
problems too. We may avoid the cultural conformity of
the Lifelong Company Man, but we've seen a collapse
in the stability of our work and the obligations of
employers that organized workers fought so hard for.

Companies became deterritorialized, if you’ll allow me to speak Deleuzian for a second. It’s a long word, but it has a very real definition. The work that was once done in a specific building can now be carried out among any set of points on Earth.

Most of us in the information industries – computers, technology, design, the arts, communications – work by distance a lot of the time. Or at least we can. There’s actually no need to have everyone in the same building anymore, so few are. This style of flat hierarchies and labour flexibility is now spreading throughout North America’s businesses.

Even factory floors are adopting these principles of the information economy – collaborative management styles, an embrace of individuality and creativity. That’s the nature of an economy’s dominant industry. It’s not just a matter of most people working in such industries, but the adoption of that industry’s style of work in other sectors.

You’ll notice that this is another facet of the purely cultural argument I made earlier this week. Conformity and regimentation has given way to creativity and flexibility as the ideal nature of corporate culture, the best style of running a business.

Returning to the same transition, understanding it from a different angle because you focus on a different aspect of the transition. It’s the same phenomenon, though. The transition from an industrial to a post-industrial economy and style of work.

The whole phenomenon is too complicated to deal with every aspect all at once. You need to move slowly from one way of understanding it to another. Chapter by chapter. Allow a reader time to reflect on one aspect of the social shift, then let the shift in the context of your own writing reveal something else when you return to that phenomenon.

Unable to experience and think through a complicated concern all at once, we understand the whole by reflecting on many different snapshots.

The First Step of Justice Is Reaching Out, A History Boy, 21/12/2015

I thought I'd write a short follow-up of this weekend’s post about how abstract, theoretical thinking can blind you to real suffering. Because it isn't just complex theories of literature that make you think others’ suffering either doesn't exist or doesn't matter.

I’ve started working on a script for a film version of You Were My Friend, the play I wrote and helped produce in Hamilton last Fall. The story applies to this problem of indifference, in a lot of ways. It’ll take a few tangents through my memory to explain fully.

All the terror of our current century has followed from
the effects of this day. We should never take its
power for granted, or think of it as ordinary.

Don't worry – I won't spoil the story.

Let's start with yesterday's main topic. Lisa Ruddick ends her article about the moral coldness of modern literary theory with an appeal to heart, which is a little vague when you think about it. Aside from getting back into a more generally sympathetic frame of mind, how would you analyze or understand an artwork this way?

It reminds me of a conversation I had with my old friend D shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks about irony in art. So much of the most popular art in the 1990s had a thick veneer of irony and misanthropy, which were sources of humour. 

We sat and wondered what would happen to art, whether irony would be dumped, inadequate to the trauma that had just been inflicted on our culture. We imagined a new era of art whose primary tone was a heart-rending sincerity.

Because 18-year-old students can be really pretentious sometimes. 

But I sometimes think we were onto something. At least in terms of tendency. Intelligent art isn’t always drenched in disdain or contempt. Being a dedicated Seinfeld fan was appropriate to my self-absorbed teens, and it's not like that show stopped being funny. 

Throughout my 20s, I've been more drawn to works of art that explore real struggles, and either find humour in them or depict them in all their gut-wrenching intensity. The most remarkable TV comedies of the early 2010s, Community and Parks and Recreation, mined cartoonishly absurd humour from narratives of love, friendship, and dedication. 

Community was probably the perfect example of how
to combine thickly referenced media literacy, hip
sensibility, healthy irony, and genuine ethical
sympathy with its characters.

These are examples that impacted me the most anyway. Being able to take part in the online communities that grew around these and other shows also contribute to a powerful sense of belonging. These were our communities.

Able to reach out and form fandom communities with people all over the world. Where more and more of the best cultural entertainment properties combined humour, satire, and love. These intensely social environments and sympathetic ideas have shaped how I engage with art. 

So I’m trying to bring that same attitude to You Were My Friend. The warmth of watching a friendship come together, but in a world constantly haunted by the worst economic and family traumas that Mike Leigh or Lars Von Trier could come up with.

I’ve told Samantha before that her big moment in the storyline is when I go “the full Von Trier" on her. One of the most powerful moments in cinema that I think I've ever experienced is the end of Dancer in the Dark. I saw it in a theatre, and it left me frozen in my seat for at least 10 minutes. 

The ambition of You Were My Friend is to combine that kind of emotional power with moments of ridiculous levity and warmth in one movie. It tries to depict how real friendship can develop and fall apart in the pressures of the real economy and urban life.

So if I can venture an answer to Ruddick’s question. What would a literary theory with heart be? It would move away from finding significations that conform to a theory that sees liberation in the total explosion of personality and history. That’s what it's not.

It would understand an artwork in terms of its affects and its mission. What an artwork makes an audience feel, and what they learn from it. In my own case, they feel the real pain of people cast adrift in an economy and a business world more obsessed with empty buzzwords and quick cash than real struggles. They feel the real joy of the friendships that are our life rafts in these harsh times. 

And they understand the world where all this happens. It’s ours.

Cinema Is Life, Advocate, 13/11/2015

The Syria Film Festival opens today at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. It's the culmination of the internship I've worked since the end of July, a project that's been incredibly fulfilling to me in what has otherwise been an incredibly stressful time in my life. 

There has never been such a film festival in Canada before, celebrating artistic voices throughout the Syrian diaspora.* It even includes a short film called Diaspora. The films of SYFF are about Syria, produced by or in collaboration with Syrians, and the organizers aim for the film festival to express the voices of ordinary Syrians. 

* Well, there was a Syria Film Festival organized in Toronto in 1995, but that was on behalf of Hafez Assad, not the people of Syria.

Word that the Trudeau government will facilitate 25,000 refugees from the war in Syria and Iraq to land in Canada in the next few months is wonderful. I wish that was all we needed, and all the people of Syria needed. 

It makes sense for Canadians to consider this good news, a sign of the country embracing its humanitarian traditions after the casual universal cruelty of the Harper years. But there’s still a lot of work to do if we want to build firm trust between the Syrian refugee community and the wider Canadian population. 

Some already fear that refugees are liars. I've come across this in the rapidly deleted comments of racist abuse that the SYFF Facebook page receives every now and then. Twitter feeds like EU Militia Watch stoke public fears that every new arrival from a war zone is a militant terrorist, a violent radical coming to Canada solely to infiltrate, kill, and destroy.

The Syria Film Festival is an antidote to that fear and hostility. One of our slogans is, “Hear the stories behind the numbers.” We all hear reports of 12-million internally displaced, 9-million having fled outside Syria, 150,000 asylum-seekers in the EU. But those reports of statistics are easy to dismiss, because numbers rarely tell who these people actually are.

They are fathers, children, grandmothers, young professionals. Maybe they were part of the uprising against Assad. Maybe not, and they’re simply fleeing bombs and rockets. 

When we want to describe someone’s character, the best way is to tell a story about them. Art reminds us of another’s humanity. The Syria Film Festival offers its audience several such stories.

There’s the story of a young woman who feels herself compelled, against her and her family’s own better judgment, to join the street protests against Assad. That’s Morning Fears, Night Chants.

There’s the animated story of the Civil Defence Volunteers, the brigades of volunteer paramedics who are the first to rush into buildings where missiles and barrel bombs have just fallen. That’s Goal to Syria.

There’s the 40-minute documentary 50 Feet From Syria, following two weeks of Syrian-American doctor Hisham Bismar’s time at a field hospital just over the Turkish side of the border. It is unsparing in its details of the suffering and horrifying injuries that the Syrian war visits on its people. 

Syria Film Festival is also proud to be the Canadian premiere of this Oscar-shortlisted documentary short.

These are just a few films at the festival. While our full program is fantastic, it’s still nowhere near a complete picture of the human stories that emerge from the crucible of this Third World War. That would take millions of stories. But it’s a start.