Mis Amigos en La Grid

I have made my first contribution to The Grid. It's a short Bulletin piece about the 40th anniversary celebrations of the Galleria mall at Dufferin and Dupont, for which I have an inexplicable soft spot. Or perhaps not so inexplicable, if the piece does its job.

The dudes on the left are Amigos de Dundas. The dancer is Maria Cipriano -- "no. 1 baliarina."

I will soon begin Tweeting

I have been accepted as one of sixteen producers selected to participate in TIFF's inagural Studio industry program. As such, I have adopted a Twitter handle, and shall be thus @jrmcconvey.

What is the ideal length for a story? Does such a thing exist? Very long stories can be exhausting but hugely rewarding, while short ones can be like a decadent sweet, thrilling exactly because they don't last. It can be difficult to find places that publish short fiction over 3000 words, and while the limitations of space and curation are understandable, I find it an oddly arbitrary number for any publication that also exists online; it suggests we are not using the online space to its fullest potential. Meanwhile, comic book films begin to push the three hour mark and good television series or novel cycles stretch out stories over years.

Twitter forces admirable restraint. But can it capture the real beauty of language? There is so much beauty to be found in rhythm and flow, in words that cascade and bounce and tumble along like ripples in a fast river -- when, for example, "riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs"   -- and sometimes it seems to me that 140 characters isn't quite enough to capture how lovely it is when language works like a song as well as a message.

But we shall see. @jrmcconvey.

A Home of Your Own

We love to label ourselves. The language of jobs, taught at an early age as a way to understand the adult world, provides the most common means for self-definition (I am a doctor, I am a garbage man). But there are other labels we apply to ourselves, and whether they are framed as trophies or burdens, they usually indicate an advancement towards self-fulfillment that is supposed to come with normalized adulthood, as judged by the expectations of the society in which an individual lives. 

Many of the various labels we adopt are connected by economics. The example I am thinking of at the moment is the holy duality of the taxpayer/homeowner. 

I recently, as they say, purchased a home. It’s a funny thing, to think that before this, all the places I lived were just homes I paid for the privilege of occupying temporarily, making them not really homes at all, but waystations on the path to a genuine home, which, by the “homeowner” definition, necessarily involves owning property. You will regularly hear people speak about buying a house, but we do not use the word “houseowner.” That would perhaps be too impersonal for the market, which needs us to believe that only once we buy a house does it become a home, even if it was just as much a home for the people we bought it from as we hope it will be for ourselves. This is echoed in the language of retail business rooted in, as the phrase goes, home improvement: it is not “House Depot” or “House Hardware,” even though I had what I thought was a home for years without having to patronize these places much, but have had to make several trips a week ever since I bought a house. 

Taxpayer is a word that we would seem to earn once we own property, the way an author earns the modifier “bestselling” or an athlete “all star.” Which is to say, it is usually framed in terms of having reached a certain level, which allows us to claim certain rights. Renting, we might look at a thing that will affect our ability to move from place to place in a city, like public transit or the construction of roads, and shrug; what right do we have to weigh in on these things? Our lives are uncertain, lacking permanence in the public record. But once we own houses and find ourselves paying annual lump sums to the municipal government, we jump at the chance to proclaim, “I’m a taxpayer! My opinion counts!” Politicians know this, and use it to their advantage whenever they can. It's no coincidence that Rob Ford became the mayor of Toronto by proclaiming his respect for taxpayers; if his slogan had been “Respect for People Who Pay Tax,” which, by the rules of common understanding, would likely include everyone who pays provincial sales tax on their morning coffee rather than using the word “Taxpayer” to single out those who own property in the city and therefore pay property tax, chances are it wouldn’t have been so effective. 

(I have no clear answer for why so many low-income residents who rent appear to have voted for Rob Ford.)

There are other examples of this, some of which are also connected. Around elections, we tend to become Voters. In news stories about traffic, people who drive to work are called Commuters. In an amusing and revealing link, both the lingo of drugs and computing refer to us as Users. 

Labels in themselves are useful; categorization is one of the tools science uses to effectively help explain the world, and many of us have had fun with genre tags applied to music, film, literature and so on. But I like to be careful when choosing when and how to adopt certain popular definitions. I own a house, and that’s nice; I’m lucky enough to be able to afford it. But Wikipedia says that a home “is a place of residence or refuge.” (In keeping with the standards of consumer society, it then goes on to specify that, “When it refers to a building, it is usually a place in which an individual or a family can rest and store personal property.”)

I like to think that if disaster struck and I had to sell my house – or even if I lost my ability to afford permanent shelter – I’d still have a home, be it a certain neighbourhood, the city in which I live, or the country I was born in: what Wikipedia calls “the geographical area (whether it be a suburb, town, city or country) in which a person grew up or feels they belong,” or, even better, “a mental or emotional state of refuge or comfort.” In equating house with home, we further marginalize those who have trouble finding places to sleep, but are still members of our community, however hard their lot may be.

Besides, I know that, regardless of whether I own a house or sleep in a shelter, I’m still required to pay taxes on my morning coffee. 

One of my favourite songs about what we mean when we talk about home:   

SOPA Opera

From the CBC, a very telling paragraph that breaks down the great corporate debate over SOPA:

SOPA's backers include the film, recording, media and pharmaceutical industries while internet and technology companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Mozilla, Yahoo and eBay have voiced opposition to the bill.

Ironically, while the issue at hand is ostensibly the ability of individual users to access free, unregulated information and pursue the creative and economic potential of the Web as a genuinely democratic marketplace, the argument has become more about which generation of mega company has the right to profit most off the public.

Even more rich is a Tweet from Rupert Murdoch about "Silicon Valley paymasters who threaten all software creators with piracy, plain thievery." This guy trying to take the moral high ground is like George R.R. Martin teasing some kid with a bowtie for being a nerd.

Although they both like speaking on behalf of the righteous mass, the truth is that most of the companies that power the media industry are highly secretive, suspicious, exclusive and run by very  wealthy people who don't spend much time using Wikipedia because they're too busy figuring out how to use the Internet to make money. That, in a nutshell, is why people like this are necessary.

Sideshow Rob

Rob Ford: step right up!

Presumably to distract people from his mess of a city budget, Mayor Rob Ford and his brother Doug have started a campaign to lose weight. What's telling is how the campaign has thus far mixed elements of the spectacle of professional bloodsport with the aesthetic and language of the circus sideshow.

This week, the Fords staged a boxing-style weigh-in at Toronto City Hall. The mayor came in at 330 pounds. "As you all know, over the past year I've worked hard to cut the waste here at city hall," he said. "Now I'd invite all Toronto to join me in cutting a different type of waist." Ford has promised to keep a scale outside his office throughout the campaign, so he and his brother can weigh in once a week, and members of the public can come in and join him in his mission to become slightly less than 300 pounds of fun.

Everything about this screams PR stunt, and as such, it serves as a further indication of how Ford really sees his role as mayor: less a civil servant in charge of the operations of Canada's biggest city, and more a kind of ringmaster, salesman or huckster in the P.T. Barnum mode. He won the election on a platform built from slogans repeated ad nauseam. Now, as his support on city council is beginning to waver, he's resorted to a personal campaign that uses a flippant play on his use of the word "waste" (in Fordspeak, a synonym for city services used by lower income residents), and takes visual cues from the carnival weight-guessing booth, to try and distract voters and media from the train wreck that his regime is turning into.

This should make us all wary, given that the term "mark," meaning a sucker or dupe, comes from the carnival sideshow, where carnies who ran rigged games would mark anyone that fell for the bait by slapping a chalk handprint on their backs, making them easy targets for fellow cheaters.  

Rob Ford seems to believe he can sucker the people of Toronto with a carnival sideshow centered on his big gut. It makes him look like a clown -- as long as we don't fall for it.

At Home with a Housecarl

Welcome, 2012.

Winter is coming. What better time to turn to the grand escape of high fantasy? I spent the waning days of the dead year ranging through the world of Skyrim on my new PS3.

While it's easy to mock RPGs for their nerdiness, I'm continually intrigued by the ways they integrate arcane and archaic language into their storylines. At the moment, my character -- a High Elf called Squiddaro, which seemed like a good name when I was high on coffee, Bailey's and adolescent video game nostalgia -- is traveling with a companion known as a Housecarl. The character is great for helping me take down trolls, but it's the word I love.

According to The Free Dictionary, a Housecarl is "A member of the bodyguard or household troops of a Danish or Anglo-Saxon king or noble." Wikipedia expands, telling us that the word comes from the Old Norse húskarl, meaning "free man." Housecarls from history appear to have performed a variety of administrative and martial tasks in both medieval Scandinavia and Anglo-Saxon England.

Alas, although Lydia has helped me fight giants, dragons and Skeevers, general consensus among the Skyrim fathful is that she is a less than ideal Housecarl, and that I should really be looking to enlist the services of Uthgerd the Unbroken -- "a female warrior with an insatiable lust for violence." A gentle place, Skyrim is not... but then, neither is Toronto in the slush-soaked depths of February.

The Outstanding Leader

Update on yesterday's post: according to The Toronto Star, the Korea Central News Agency -- the official news apparatus of the North Korean government -- has begun referring to Kim Jong Un as "The Outstanding Leader." I like this; as much as it continues the tradition of undeserved superlatives, according to the OED, "outstanding" can also mean:

• "A jutting out or projection," which gives the sense of Kim Jong Un as a gargoyle or piece of propagandistic statuary, and
• "Remaining unsettled," which pretty much sums up both the shady circumstances surrounding Kim's succession and the feeling the rest of the world has towards the DPRK.