On the Agenda

Last week I was on TVO's The Agenda, one of the best current-affairs programmes anywhere. It began with me being interviewed by Steve Paikin, and then we had a panel discussion that used my book as a springboard to talk about some of the broader questions of modernity.

I have to say it was an absolute honour. Not just to be on the show itself, but also that four other people gave up a good chunk of their day to come and debate the ideas in the book. Not everyone was sympathetic to my arguments, and I'm annoyed (as I usually am) that I didn't do a better job of responding to some of the questions and criticisms. I hope to do so here, at some point in the near future (there are a bunch of questions that have come up in reviews and as I've been promoting the book that need a proper response; I wish I had more time than I do to address them).

But for now, give the show a look if you feel like it. I'd like to give a very public thanks to Jordan, Doug, Robert and, espcially, Virginia, for their time and comments, and to Wodek and Allison at TVO for their interest.  It was a pleasure.

Al Gore on biofuels: "My bad"

This story should be called "Everything you need to know about how the world works".

You remember that biofuel craze that everyone bought into, on the grounds that it was all eco-friendly ("it comes from plants!") and would help mitigate global warming and make the flowers bloom and the streams run clean and the birds sing and all that jazz?

Oops, says the architect of the plan. Al Gore has now conceded what has been abundantly clear for years now, viz., that the whole biofuel subsidy programme was a complete mistake. Let's count the ways:

- tax breaks for ethanol make it profitable for refiners to use the fuel even when it is more expensive than gasoline.

-  "The energy conversion ratios are at best very small"

- "The competition with food prices is real"

So, it is no good for the environent, is bad business, and distorts food markets. So why did he do it? Turns out he's as bad as everyone else -- he has a fetish for farmers:

"One of the reasons I made that mistake is that I paid particular attention to the farmers in my home state of Tennessee, and I had a certain fondness for the farmers in the state of Iowa because I was about to run for president."

So why didn't they get rid of it?

"It's hard once such a programme is put in place to deal with the lobbies that keep it going."

And that, kids, is how the environment is lost. Al Gore is probably the most influential environmentalist on the planet, and even he succumbed to farmer-nostalgia, even he succumbed to political pressure, even he succumbed to junk science.

This is all you need to know about why we're doomed.

La Musique est morte

This is priceless. Three quarters of the way down an interesting (but totally unsurprising) piece about the exodus of talented academics out of France and to the US, we get this nugget:  

The brain drain in French academia has been observed in other arenas, as well. The field of musical composition, for example has been hurt by the trend, and composers are few, training offers scarce and jobs rare. “We are in the process of killing contemporary music in France,” said an unidentified composer cited in the report.

C'est pas vrais.

Hitchens: More than just an atheist

I have little piece today in the Ottawa Citizen on Christopher Hitchens. It took me a while to think of something vaguely novel to say about him, this is what I came up with:

But what is most remarkable about Christopher Hitchens is that, for all his faith in the power of the pen, he fundamentally gets that logic alone has its limits, that sometimes debate can be futile. Hitchens grasps that the body itself can be an argument, and that sometimes the most effective way of challenging authority is the charmingly adolescent gambit of simply getting in its way.

How to *really* save the world

The short answer, of course, is have more kids. Why don't more socially-concerned youth have a lot of kids? Robin Hanson gets it right:

Elites have long been leaders in lowering fertility, making more-fertility folks seem lower status. The fertility problem doesn’t offer many excuses for new gadgets or networking events, and the joys of parenthood have long been explored in the arts. Furthermore, if you pick mates before having kids, having kids works poorly as an excuse to meet potential mates. Finally, your having more kids can only make a tiny dent in the overall problem, and the sacrifices you’d make to have kids would not be exceptional relative to your ancestors’ sacrifices. It is hard to tell grand hero stories here.

Authenticity Smokes

Authenticity is like charisma -- if you have to say that you have it, then odds are you don't. And so I can't imagine that Brooklyn's hipster vanguard is going to fall for a target-marketing campaign from Camel cigarettes:

The marketing campaign promises its customers will earn “serious street cred” for trying the Williamsburg brand, and noted that Camel met with some “modern-day pioneers” with “lighthearted angst and rebellion” in the neighborhood to try the brand out. Company spokesman David Howard said the marketing campaign was movitated by one thing: Helping hipsters to understand that Camel fits their way of life.

Except there's one old-timer in the nabe who hopes Camel succeeds:

"I hope all these kids buy them, smoke them, and get cancer," Joe Valle, 52, tells the Post of Camel's new Williamsburg-hipster-branded cigarettes. "They ruined this neighborhood, so I hope the cigarettes ruin them." 

(via the handcaper)

Who *really* cost Obama the election? I blame the kids

If the recent mid-terms were a referendum on Obama, why did he do so badly? He's too left-wing, say some. No, he's too right-wing, say others. He's too cool. He's too muslim. He spent too much. He didn't spend enough. And on it went, for every pundit an opinion.

Me? I blame the kids. It's a bit late to the party (one of the hazards of weekly magazine journalism), but my latest column for Maclean's magazine has been posted. The argument is that no one bailed as pathetically on the president as youth voters. Here's the key graph:

Retail politics everywhere is messy, slow, dirty, and dull. But it is all the more so in the United States, where parties are weak and the entire system is designed to make sure that even a president who controls both houses of Congress is forced into endless horse-trading to get anything done. Progressives in America have a choice: they can either do as Obama suggests, and fundamentally change how things actually work, or they can accept the need for a great deal of patience. The first is never going to happen. And neither, if the kids have any say in the matter, will the second. As one college student put it in a piece about the absent youth vote published in the New York Times, “It’s not the fad anymore to be politically knowledgeable and active.” Or as another student put it in the same Times article, “He made young people feel important, and then he got into office and there was no one talking to us.”

30 Rock versus Brooklyn

On last night's 30 Rock, Liz Lemon buys a pair of jeans from a store called "Brooklyn Without Limits", a hipster outlet in a former mental hospital that also has stores in "Gaytown, White Harlem, and the van Beardswick section of Brooklyn". The good news: they make her look like "a Mexican sports reporter". The bad news? The corporate owner gives her more authenticity than she bargained for.

The first three minutes of this video are great. Via Gawker tv.

Seneca on the Authenticity Hoax

Ryan Holiday sent me this wonderful passage from Seneca, which Ryan describes as "a nice classical indictment of the authenticity hoax, and I guess in a way, also of cool chasing." The last few sentences are particularly lovely.

Then from this dislike of others' success and despair of their own, their minds become enraged against fortune, complain about the times, retreat into obscurity and brood over their own sufferings until they become sick and tired of themselves. For the human mind is naturally mobile and enjoys activity.

Every chance of stimulation and distraction is welcome to it--even more welcome to all those inferior characters who actually enjoy being worn out by busy activity...For some things delight our bodies even when they cause some pain like turning over to change a side that is not yet tired and repeatedly shifting to keep it cool...like an invalid could endure nothing for long but used his restlessness as a cure.

Hence men travel far and wide, wandering along foreign shores and making trial by land and sea of their restlessness, which always hates what is around it. 'Let's now go to Campania.' Then when they get bored with luxury--'Let's visit uncultivated areas; let's explore the woodlands of Bruttium and Lucania.' And yet amid the wilds some delight is missing by which their pampered eyes can find relif from the tedious squalor of these unsightly regions. 'Let's go to Tarentum with its celebrated harbor and mild winters, an area prosperous enough for a large population even in antiquity.' 'Lets now make our way to the city'--too long have their ears missed the din of applause: now they long to enjoy even the sight of human blood. They make one journey after another and change spectacle for spectacle.

As Lucretius says 'Thus each man flees himself.' But to what end if he does not escape himself? He pursues and dogs himself as his own most tedious companion And so we must realize that our difficulty is not the fault of the places but of ourselves.

Checkpoint Nike

While the city of Sao Paulo sought a cure for its urban ills by banning commercial advertising (to the cheers of thousands of people who don't live there), the Islamabad police department has turned to public advertising as a way of beautifying the series of eyesores that punctuate the city's avenues -- the security checkpoints. 

"Zefra Restaurante - Bar-B-Que with a twist," announces the wrap-around, red-and-orange wallpaper encircling one guard booth. "Stop. Security Check. Tasty," reads the lettering on a metal gate sponsored by Tasty snack foods, producer of "supari sweets," which are made of betel nuts and saccharine menthol. Pepsi, Wateen telecommunications, Ufone mobile and Murree Brewery are among the other companies shelling out cash for the prime marketing real estate.

The ads service a number of purposes. First, they provide much-needed funds to help pay for the checkpoints. But they also provide visual clues to motorists who were plowing into the unadorned concrete jersey barriers. But perhaps most interesting is that the advertisements symbolize something important to the population -- that despite the violence and political upheavals in Pakistan, the city is open to business and investment:

"The private sector has always been scared to invest in Pakistan," Hassan said. "We have to provoke the investors, the private sector, the businessmen who can build the nation in this manner, and also save the country."

That's something the anti-advertising constituency in the developed world has the luxury of decrying.

Art that goes below the surface

Over at the Maclean's blog, my colleague John Geddes reviews a new show at the National Art Gallery in Ottawa. Called It Is What It Is, the exhibition is a selection of 82 works by 57 Canadian artists bought by the  gallery over the past two years. John contrasts the show with last summer's Pop Life show at the gallery that featured the work of Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, and he's struck by how little influenced this new Canadian art is by the superficialities of those big stars:

Some of the artists represented in It Is What It Is evidently assume that anyone likely to be looking at their work is probably more interested in political questions or environmental issues, say, than in movie stars or fashion. Others are tapping into the imagery of fantasy, but deep, surreal, dreamy, quirky fantasy, not the sort of fantasy that sells products. Does this make these disparate artists sound earnest or naïve? If it does, doesn’t that beat being shrewd or glib?

I haven't seen either show. But I did catch the Julian Schnabel exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario a couple of weeks ago, a show that, like Pop Life, plays off our fascination with celebrity and commercialism. Schnabel doesn't have much insightful to say about that, and he's really not much of a painter. The most interesting aspects of the AGO show are the way Schnabel uses his painting to explore the one medium where his real talent lies, which is film.

Gatherings

Picture from California (of course), sent by Chris.

1. A few weeks ago, I interviewed Dan Gardner at the Ottawa Writer's Fest about his new book, Future Babble. If you want to see Dan being interviewed by a washed potato, here is part one; the rest you can click on to the right of the video window. 

2. Sylvie St-Jacques of La Presse wrote a neat piece about the rise of the guru -- I spoke with her about it and got some good quotes into her article.

3. Here's Henry Rollins dissing hipsters, and looking like an ass in the process.

4. The latest in trend in lifestyle slumming: Not washing. (Thanks to Jeff Bailey)

5. The primtive-authentic: Seashells as cutlery (Thanks to R Jay Magill, who gave my book a long but quite critical review in the American Interest)

6. The Underbelly Project has been bombed. 

The Culture That is Quebec: The most disgusting sandwich ever made

Via @johnlustig:

Stuff White People Like: Nature

The National Parks Service is having trouble attracting non-whites to America's great outdoors:

Studies and surveys show that visitors to the nation’s 393 national parks — there were 285.5 million of them in 2009 — are overwhelmingly non-Hispanic whites, with blacks the least likely group to visit. That reality has not changed since the 1960s, when it was first identified as an issue. The Park Service now says the problem is linked to the parks’ very survival.

One park ranger at Yosemite took it upon himself to do something about it. Shelton Johnson sent a letter to Oprah pleading for help; she has now devoted to entire shows to the issue. But as Johnson admits, he wasn't surprised to find that Oprah herself had never visited a national park, and never gone camping.

The NPS isn't sure what the problem is, though some suspect that rules about the number of tents permitted at a single site might "clash with the vacation style of extended Latino families." But it is blacks who overwhelmingly avoid the wilderness, with many citing the parks as "uncomfortable places".

Which might be the whole source of the problem. Camping is a ritualized return to pre-modern forms of civilization (which is why there is such contempt amongst serious campers for "car-camping") that involves deliberately abandoning the comforts of the modern world. But the only people who are interested in this form of authenticity-seeking are those who have the luxury of being tired of comfort. Camping, in short, is just another aspect of the recreational slumming that is the dominant form of leisure amongst urbanized whites.

The real question, then, is why the reluctance of other groups to engage in this is seen as a problem.

Art so extreme it can never be seen

Even as Banksy is busy working for The Simpsons, the authentic street-art scene has gone, literally, underground. Today's NYT has a piece by Jasper Rees about a new exhibition of street art that is so hip that the gallery's existence is a secret, almost no one has seen the art, and the whole show actually closed the very night it opened.

It sounds like a parody -- something that Mr. Brainwash might get up to -- but it seems to be the genuine article. The gist of it is that some street artists found their way into one of Manhattan's handful of abandoned subway platforms, and decided to decorate the place with street art executed by some of the hottest upandcomers in the business.

Called "The Underbelly Project", the exhibition hits all the usual authenticity-hoax plot points: Popularity is for sell-outs, capitalism is bad, art that no one sees is sacred, and the extreme authenticity of the exercise is underwritten by the fact that it is illegal:

Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station.

The whole thing strikes me as a more extreme version of the ephemeral Sufjan Stevens song, that you can only hear by trecking to the owner's apartment in Brooklyn. What becomes of art in the age of digital reproduction? It becomes a commodity—cheap, ubiquitous, and disrespected. One surefire way of restoring the lost, sacred halo of meaning around the unique work is to make it inaccessible and transitory -- accessible only to the lucky few, for a limited time.

That's precisely the agenda of the Underbelly project.  The Times has a slideshow of the artworks online, many of of which match the dark, underground, and illegal nature of the show. There are some giant rats, some images of women in veils, some strange cartoonish totem poles, and a weirdly zigzaggy interpretation of the American flag. In short, the show sounds totally, undeniably, awesome. The fact that I'll never see it makes me jealous of those who have -- which, unfortunately, is kinda the point.