Author: Alan

Movies as a Problem

I have a strange relationship with movies. Until I was about nineteen I went
once or twice a week with my buddies in Truro as an entertainment. Then I worked
for a few years as an usher at a playhouse in Halifax where I would watch the
same play ten to twenty times in a few weeks and all of a sudden I found my
ability to suspend my disbelief entirely gone. I would go to the movies and find
myself sitting in a room with 200 strangers aimed at a wall where images
flashed. It could be a classic at Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Theater or the
latest crap staring Molly Ringwald – no good: the arse was truly out of it. I
couldn’t get out of my head that people were paying to get emotionally jerked
around collectively. And so much of the experience of crisis, dramatic and often
violent events never experiencable by average folk. Surely something must stick
and displace parts of reality. The only movies I found as I got older that I
could not suffer this trauma were movies I saw before I had this experience or
movies that were so moronic, like The
Wedding Singer, that it didn’t matter – the point being that you were
supposed to giggle out loud to the point that you were aware of acting stupidly
in front of strangers. It all reminded me of Plato’s ban on fiction nicely
summarized here:

Ironically, Plato was no defender of liberty. In his
Republic, Plato states that in an ideal state, all fables would be censored to
protect the minds of the youth. Censors would reject and prohibit tales they
considered to be bad or misleading. Mothers and nurses would be permitted to
read only fables authorized by the republic. In this utopian state, Plato would
also censor those plays and other works which tell untruths of the gods. He
believed the only function of art was to aid in education and believed very
strongly what might be harmful to the young should be prohibited.

I
am not saying we should have censorship but certainly sympathize with the old
toga man. The pre-eminant role of “being entertained” as a principle of a free
and democractic populace then began to trouble. Like military expenditures on
nuclear warheads, money wasted on half of our entertainment could surely solve
37% of our country’s ills.

The condition may be passing as I enjoyed a normal healthy adult relationship
with Master
and Commander one weekend before Christmas and last night I watched a piece
of 1998 global fear schlock, Deep Impact [now in a way
caught in a pre-September 11th and even a pre-LOTR stasis (Ed.: as illustrated)] So I drag my ass all the way into Mordor only to have it flatted by a frickin' comet!?!?! and, afterwards, suffered the obligatory
night of wondering how far a killer wave caused by a comet hitting the north
Atlantic would reach inland up the St. Lawrence. An appropriate response, I
assume – the safe but realistic experience of fear for my safety and that of my
young children. Slightly bothered sleep. Glad to be back on board as one of the
entertainable, I guess.

“Western Alienization”

That is apparently what Belinda Stronach said.    Far be it from me to criticize a person misspeaking but if we wanted a Prime Minister who cannot speak a national language why didn’t we just keep Chretien who, after all, knew something about government before he got the position. Bels Strons, it appears, is looking like the new Stockwell Day already. She may also have a Deanish temper:

Stronach had blunter words yesterday about some of the media coverage of her campaign, saying she should be judged on her policies, not her appearance. Media focus on her hair, wardrobe and personal life sends the wrong message at a time when more women should be drawn to politics, she told reporters at an Ontario Progressive Conservative policy convention in Niagara Falls.

While this is true, what I think we are seeing is a corporate CEO who wants to be treated like one off the job – don’t analyze, don’t expect to be told and for God’s sake don’t presume that anything being done is your business. Front runner Harper to me has this nasty streak as well. What the Conservative Reform Alliance Progressives stand for appears to be this:

  • Alberta ought to be treated like a part of the country that more than about 10% of the population
  • Whatever is being done, do the opposite
  • Is it not the place of the press or ordinary taxpayers to question

The National Post, of course, plays it differently from The Toronto Star but still can only focus on the clothes, the supposed greater interest in her speech compared to a David Bowie concert and the apparent need to determine only if she is “sexy”. What an odd and depressing thing that overused adjective does. I remember George Grant in an undergrad class going off on a small rant twenty years ago on the sexification of society, making such questions sadly inevitable. It almost makes me sympathetic as I watch the wheels coming off so early in a foolhardy campaign – and one, really, only given credibility in the hope of creating some facade of a leadership race to justify what is more and more clearly the final defeat of the Progressive Conservatives by the Alliance.

Snar

Built largely in 1820 as some kind of markethouse, the S&R Department is a landmark in Kingston, being something of a Margolians of Truro but at the same time selling a broader range of stuff than just clothes and shoes including some groceries, drugs and, up on the top floor, hardware, toys and linens. I don’t know what the “S” and the “R” stands for but in local accent it is pretty much pronounced “snar”. – and just to prove these are the end times, even they have a web site where we find the answer to my question:

The 175 year old limestone building that houses S&R was an integral part of the downtown long before the store came into being more than 40 years ago. It was designed by the same architect as Kingston’s City Hall (George Browne) and constructed in 1817. Among other things, it has been a merchandise mart (1860’s), piano factory (1890’s) and a barracks during W.W.II. S&R was opened in 1959 by Maurice Smith and Percy Robinson after extensive heritage renovations.

Five Hundred

Five hundred posts in around nine months. I received my congratulatory prizes from Portland the other day: a T-shirt from a deep sea fishing outfit from California and a wind-up radio that includes a warning not to wind up until the batteries have had 5 hours charge from a 12 volt adapter (not included). So in honour of the passage of time a side-by-side shot to the southwest from the dome.

Two images of the same view mid-19th century and early 21st

 

I noticed the older photo down a hallway at work, a view from the dome of City Hall which I have twinned with one of my own from a couple of weeks ago. According to the St. George’s Cathedral history, the older photo must be from between 1838 and 1862 as you can see the second larger dome built in the latter year is not present. So it is around 150 years older than my shot from the other day. The church’s predecessor, more on the actual market square the row of houses to the bottom of each photo face, is the location of the declaration of government in Ontario in 1792:

John Stuart, “Father of the Anglican Church in Upper Canada”, was the Rector. On July 8th, Lieutenant Governor John Simcoe, standing on the steps of St. George’s Church, took “the required oaths” of office and read the Royal Commissions, thus connecting St. George’s with the beginnings of provincial government in Ontario.

The actual date of the first European settlement in Kingston was 1673 by the French at Fort Frontenac. La Salle, the great explorer [after whom a car was named and referenced in the All in the Family theme sung by Archie and Edith Bunker] was the first seigneur and used the fort as a base for his explorations into the interior..which did not turn out all rosy. In 1758 Fort Frontenac was taken by the English. Ransacked and abandoned, it remained unoccupied for the next 25 years. [An interactive map of the entire St. Lawrence area starting with Fort Frontenac in the west from 1776 is here.] In 1783, Major Samuel Holland was sent to survey the condition of the fort, and in the same year temporary barrack facilities were constucted. Sammy is well known in PEI as its first surveyor (though it was only a part of his larger works) and the briefly celebrated namesake of Samuel Holland Institute of Technology (a joke since at least 1993 – scroll down page) which was soon renamed Holland Collage.