Archive for culture
Nan Goldin
I watched Laura Poitras’ documentary “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” about photographer Nan Goldin, yesterday evening – and though it runs about two hours, it took me more than three to finish it, having to pause, sobbing, and also in gratitude. God bless Nan Goldin for her art, her activism, her genius, her revelatory photography, and for her love of others.
Here she talks with Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.” How wonderful I am alive to hear these two in conversation. I will try to write more about these things soon.
This did my heart good
My partner sent me the link to “The Junky’s Christmas” today. Somehow I had missed this! God bless William Burroughs.
Thy neighbours
“Effective Altruism,” so called, takes a utilitarian approach to philanthropy. Proponents argue that rich people can save more people than poor people can, so get rich; AND, their wealth can save more people in the future than it can people in the present, SO invest in caring for generations not to be born for millennia. Looking after people who are suffering now is inefficient and indeed sentimental.
“Look, there are a lot of things that I think have really a massive impact on the world,” Sam Bankman-Fried said. “And ultimately that’s what I care about the most. And, I mean, I think frankly that the blockchain industry could have a substantial positive impact. I was thinking a lot about, you know, bed nets and malaria, about, you know, saving people from diseases no one should die from.” …
To hear Bankman-Fried tell it, the idea was to make billions through his crypto-trading firm, Alameda Research, and FTX, the exchange he created for it — funneling the proceeds into the humble cause of “bed nets and malaria,” thereby saving poor people’s lives.
But last summer Bankman-Fried was telling The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus something quite different. “He told me that he never had a bed-nets phase, and considered neartermist causes — global health and poverty — to be more emotionally driven,” Lewis-Kraus wrote in August. Effective altruists talk about both “neartermism” and “longtermism.” Bankman-Fried said he wanted his money to address longtermist threats like the dangers posed by artificial intelligence spiraling out of control. As he put it, funding for the eradication of tropical diseases should come from other people who actually cared about tropical diseases: “Like, not me or something.” [NYTimes]
I despise these people as much as I do people who want to colonize space.
Earth is our home. Our neighbours are now.
People who want to deracinate us from our home or look past the struggling people down the block to focus on greater things believe that evil things *are* the greater things. We’ll foil the dangers of artificial intelligence and get our way, to colonize space with generations of slaves who depend on us for air.
God bless Nan Goldin
I revere no artist who has worked in my lifetime more than Nan Goldin, a woman whose photographs of her friends and herself opened up the world, it seemed. I am keenly awaiting to see the recent film “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed,” a documentary that weaves together the emergence of her art with the story of her fervent, perfectly pitched attacks on Purdue Pharma – manufacturer and distributer of Oxycontin – and the Sackler family that ran the company for decades. Variety has an enticing description:
Half a million people in the U.S. have died of opioids addiction, but it wasn’t until Goldin herself became addicted to OxyContin, in 2017, that she grasped the danger and learned about the multi-layered, calculating ways that Purdue Pharma had orchestrated the crisis for the sake of profit.
This outraged Goldin. But what she also learned is that the Sacklers were among the last half century’s most venerated art-world donors, giving millions and millions of dollars to the world’s most famous museums, in no small part to distract from their business practices by cultivating and polishing their image as philanthropists.
Many of these institutions, like New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, had a Sackler Wing. And since the art world was Goldin’s world, she was filled with disgust, in a searing personal way, at the hypocrisy of the Sacklers’ image-laundering. As she says in the film, “They have washed their blood money through the halls of museums and universities around the world.” …
… Goldin, who is now 68, [has become] something unlikely and inspiring: an *artist* of activism. We see the events she orchestrated to spotlight the Sacklers’ pedestal in the art world, and some of them are ingenious, like dropping hundreds of opioid prescriptions as confetti from the top of the Guggenheim Museum during an opening there. Early on, the museums ignore her; they don’t want to risk the loss of funding.
But she keeps up the drumbeat, and when the National Portrait Gallery in London agrees, after a protest, to turn down a million-dollar donation from the Sacklers, the dominos began to fall, as other fabled institutions — the Tate, the Louvre — follow suit. Goldin’s goal was to have the Sacklers’ name removed from museum galleries. And by the end of the documentary, the Met, setting a seismic precedent, does just that.
It’s a moment of triumph, even as the true subject of “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” — and, in a way, of Goldin’s art — remains the lacerating cost of trauma.
‘Heroines Revisited’ review
Mala Rai’s review of Lincoln Clarkes‘ “Heroines Revisited” gets the important things exactly right.
For the people that loved her, whether she is missing, deceased, or transformed, these pages are a sensitive keepsake. As half the women photographed may be closely connected to [or even have been among] are murdered and missing indigenous women, these pictures may be the sole glimpse into a family member or friend’s troubled time. How can the surroundings be so dire, yet every woman in that instance is utterly stunning? They are in terribly vulnerable places, yet invoke the persona of tough-as-nails heroine: Your sister riding a 10 speed, smoking a cigarette, clad in page boy at and a crop top. Your former high school friend at St. Paul’s hospital, perched in a confident, yogi pose upon her bed. The woman who’d become your mother, about to inject, focused on her syringe, but 13 pages later, impeccably put together, she is confidently staring right back at you. A tender Mother’s Day sisterhood collective. Perhaps their arrival at that destination in life was a shock. Maybe it was expected. It isn’t profound sadness or pain that I see in each frame, but the significance of these women in our society. They likely had no idea that their images in the finished product would comprise a collection of artful history. The pictures make us hunger for more details of each person’s personal history, but there are no crumbs to spare.
Lincoln Clarkes
Anvil Press just published Heroines Revisited, by Lincoln Clarkes. Looking at this series of photographs will always be an overwhelming experience for me.
The photograph below was part of the original photographic exhibition in 1998 at Vancouver’s Helen Pitt Gallery.
Here’s an interview I did with Lincoln for my old ezine Ellavon, in which many of the Heroines photographs first appeared.
Larry King
Back in 1988 I appeared on CNN’s Larry King Live! to debate the topic of Near Death Experiences (NDE’s). I was given the role of the skeptic. To me that meant I was there to offer explanations for this very real-feeling sensation that were neither paranormal nor religious. My goal was to “save” the experience rather than “debunk” it, offering a more scientifically sound way of describing the NDE.
The woman sharing the split-screen with me here is Barbara Harris-Whitfield. Considering how pointed my remarks were on that show, she was very forbearing and generous with me. Indeed, after our appearance on Larry King she asked producers of other shows to ask me on to be her debating foil. (We even travelled to Cincinnati to be on an early version of The Jerry Springer Show, which was not the gong-show it would become but which nonetheless sure did encourage ill manners.) Barbara showed me how to be somewhat kinder to others when I argued with them, and she taught me that lesson without embarrassing me. I think of her often, with gratitude.
A word about Larry King. Back in the eighties, the discussion on Larry King’s show could be a good deal more elevated than what people saw in his later years at CNN; there were fewer commercial interruptions as well. To me, though, King’s finest years as an interviewer came when he was on the radio at night in the seventies. He knew everything and everyone and the conversations could really spread out. His curiosity was unquenchable, and he alleviated the isolations of insomnia among his listeners. It seemed he never failed at that. RIP, Mr. King.
David Cooper
Congratulations to David Cooper for being named a member of the Order of Canada, for “his innovative contributions to Canadian performance photography and for his dedicated mentorship of emerging artists.”
David is an astonishing talent and spirit. I love that the announcement focused on David’s mentorship of others. I cannot think of a better thing to have said about you.
The above photograph, of dancer Alex Kolarcik, is from Cooper’s work on The Performance Research Project. What a great photograph! The portrait below is by Emily Cooper.
To the south
After I moved back to Canada in 1996, I spent many years trying to determine what made Canadians and Americans different. I came to two conclusions: (1) Americans are ruled by zeal, (2) Canadians by a sense of the commonweal.
About a month ago I decided to go with a third conclusion as well: Americans hate one another.
Considerable simplifications, I know, but with high explanatory value.
The Greeks and Us
Lately I’ve been beginning my mornings reading the Greek Tragedies. It has been a joy! Perhaps the biggest theme in the Aeschylus and Sophocles I’ve read so far: the pressure of justice upon children. I’ve been reminded of something I wrote on that topic awhile ago about more modern times:
Compared to how often parents denounce and disown their children, it is remarkably rare to see them do so in print. Why? Perhaps because, to anyone outside the writer’s particular family orbit, slagging one’s offspring utterly undermines one’s standing as a parent, and hence one’s authorial credibility, too. (The father of cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer, Lionel Dahmer, saves his harsh judgments for himself.)
I can think of only one example in the genre: Famous atheist Madalyn Murray O’Hair’s rejection of her first son, William Murray, after he became a born-again Christian. (This son was the “Murray” in the Supreme Court Case Murray v. Curlett in which the court banned prayer in United States schools.) O’Hair wrote: “One could call this a postnatal abortion on the part of a mother, I guess; I repudiate him entirely and completely for now and all times. He is beyond human forgiveness.”
Books by adult children attacking their parents, on the other hand, are everywhere. Parents, even if they are not dead, can’t fight back without bringing upon themselves righteous fury and dishonour. This genre, then, allows justice for those children among us who could never defend themselves before, but for the rest it provides a template for cowardice and disgrace that is tempting for a time. [4 June ’04]
KDocs
Kwantlen Polytechnic University‘s Social Justice Film festival gets better every year. I’m very lucky the films will be shown just down the street from my home.
Business Couple
New West, BC.
Various online directories list the bail-services company as a “talent agency” as well. Lots happening!
Cyclops
I subscribe to very few newsletters (preferring my news feeds and news alerts), but I am really enjoying one recently recommended by my friend Clarissa. It is called Prufrock: Books, Arts & Ideas. Prepared by Micah Mattix, the daily newsletter has an erudite, literary-philosophical bent, with a paleoconservative disposition. It’s well-written. From this morning:
I’ve finished the final lectures on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. The final two treat friendship and action. Friendship according to Aristotle is the “most necessary” virtue. I won’t go into Aristotle’s types of friendship (those founded on utility, pleasure, and virtue), but I appreciated his view that friendship is one of the foundations of civilization. It is what binds a city together. We see this idea in classical and modern literature, too. Friendship and hospitality (which is welcoming a stranger as a friend) are quintessentially human attributes in The Odyssey, for example, which are not shared by the gods or the sub-human cyclops. These two ideas—that friendship is the basis of civilization and a touchstone of humanity—are also found in Francis Bacon’s short essay “Of Friendship,” which is obviously drawn from classical sources. Whatever “delights in solitude,” Bacon writes, “is either a wild beast or a god. For it is most true, that a natural and secret hatred, and aversation towards society, in any man, hath somewhat of the savage beast.” It’s not that solitude is bad or unnecessary. It is that to live only in solitude is to live a sub-human life. Without friends, Bacon continues, the “world is but a wilderness.”
It seems to me that we’ve lost this high view of friendship as an aspect of human identity, which we now regularly confuse with personality or view as a discrete construction of the autonomous will rather than as something that is composed of universal attributes. So, it is no surprise that our lives increasingly look like those of the cyclops. We live in caves, in fenced-in back yards, and “consume” each other—on television, in movies, on Facebook and Twitter. And because our lives (I’m speaking generally here about American culture) are ordered around maximizing physical pleasure, not virtue, they must end in suicide when the body’s capacity for physical pleasure wanes. The opioid crisis starts with this low view of human nature and won’t end until a grander view is recaptured, which I don’t see happening any time soon.
–
I have worked hard at friendship all of my life, and have found that honest attentiveness can overcome awkwardness and the various stupidities, if not one’s friends’ arresting memories of these. My friends and I usually can see one another.
Responsibility Project/ Father’s Day
This is an updated link to one of the greatest short videos I have ever seen. Love and pain and memory and family. Beautiful.
The video won the Silver Lion at Cannes. Ernie Schenk writes, “I did the story and co-wrote the screenplay with director Laurence Dunmore. Shot this in 2 days in Devore, California. Does anyone have any idea how cold it can get in the San Bernadino Mountains. My toes are still numb.” Here is more of Schenk’s fine work.
To serve and house the homeless …
Seattle’s “technology community” is here to help.
Tech companies such as Amazon opposed Seattle’s short-lived head tax on large businesses to pay for homeless services and housing, but Mayor Jenny Durkan now says they can assist the city in other ways.
Rather than tap the companies’ bank accounts, she wants Seattle to tap their know-how. For example, they could help the city design apps for social services, Durkan says.
Sweet!
The mayor has convened an Innovation Advisory Council to seek advice on challenges such as homelessness and transportation. … She described the panel as a “new collaboration with Seattle’s technology community that will better highlight technology solutions.”
Besides Amazon, participants at this point include Microsoft, along with Zillow, Expedia and Tableau, whose leaders spoke out this year against the idea of a head tax. …
A Durkan executive order creating the council includes no concrete pledges of time or money by the companies.
“What we’ve heard from company to company as I’m talking to them is, ‘Tap us for our know-how … We have some of the most talented people on the globe right here in Seattle,’ ” the mayor said.
Her order says the group will identify issues, make policy recommendations and implement projects related to “data analytics, dashboards, applications and software for the city.”
Dashboards!
(This is so fucked up.)
h/t @atrios
Review
The New York Review of Books has always been very generous in providing current and past articles online. In celebration of the publication’s 50th anniversary its editors are “digging into the magazine’s archives and featuring one article from each year of publication.” They start with 1972 – 1974:
- Robert Wall’s “Special Agent for the FBI” will remind us that the current United States President’s complaints against that agency are righteous as well as self-serving. (Hard sentence to write.)
- Peter Singer’s essay on “Animal Liberation” helped launched a movement that truly enlightened “Western Culture.” (Hard to swallow how mundane it was for us to gratuitously, lazily cause pain to animals.)
- And Gore Vidal reviews Robert Caro’s annihilation of Robert Moses, who wanted to run a highway through Manhattan’s Washington Square Park (“The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York“). (A titan acclaiming a colossus gutting a Goliath.)
I happily spend days reading the NY Review, which lost its fabled editor and co-founder, Robert Silvers, last year but which has remained “irreplaceable” (a cliché, I realize, but it is completely the case).
katsvox
photo of kat kosiancic by English Bay in Vancouver, 2013
With some of kat kosiancic’s friends and her dad, I’ve been curating a website devoted to kat’s art, music, and writing. It is called katsvox.com.
This site is an ongoing project. We have excerpted some of kat’s unpublished books and other writings and selected some songs for you to listen to and some paintings to see.
Down the road we hope to publish selections from her prolific and utterly delightful correspondence as well as portions of her journals, particularly her amazing travel writing. We will be showing more photos of kat from many eras of her life’s journey as well.
We would be grateful for any feedback you have. Our friend kat wrote every day, and she was always making art. Let us know what you would like to see more of. There is a contact / feedback page on the website. You can also get ahold me directly.
A rich man dies
He hated Jews, he hated Catholics, he hated homosexuals, he favoured tyrants, and he tried to persuade Nixon to nuke North Vietnam. I believe his faith was real, though, unlike many of those who emulated him. #billygraham
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