Classy Guy, That Stephen Harper

Posted on 2013/03/06 by danneau

Sometimes it’s better to say nothing.

From the Vancouver Sun:

“At this key juncture, I hope the people of Venezuela can now build for themselves a better, brighter future based on the principles of freedom, democracy, the rule of law and respect for human rights,” Harper said in a statement Tuesday evening.

Of course, the Venezuelan government sent a note of protest. They, too, shouldn’t have said anything. Is it any surprise that a leader held in complete thrall to the fossil fuel industry would be happy to see the passing of someone who has used wealth to fund education, housing, healthcare and the general welfare of the general populace?

Once again, Mr. Harper has shown a lack of diplomacy and a streak of unpleasantness unbecoming any leader, but especially a leader of a country that once considered itself to be polite and restrained, even with those with whom we disagreed.

Mr. Harper makes reference to a better future, but I suspect that his vision of the Venezuelan future is predicated on control of the economy and political apparatus by the likes of Carmona, and a return to the enrichment of the few who play nicely with Exxon, Shell and BP at the expense of the broader community of the citizens of Venezuela. His only love for democracy is for that version exported by the Washington Consensus, a rule of, by, and for corporations.

Lot’s Wife Syndrome

Posted on 2013/03/06 by danneau

Don’t Look Back?

We are witnesses to, as well as participants in an extraordinary set of circumstances as the much-touted end times fantasy becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy under the mandate of the greedy and ignorant (or wilfully malicious) managers of the world’s resources. This mythomania, based on what might likely have been men of ancient times with an agenda (more likely a set of agendas) so powerful that it persists to this day and continues to cloud minds all over the planet. Hence, we’re seeing a degradation of our living space that has already become fatal to thousands of species, and which threatens the existence of the rest of life on Earth. Certainly, there is much evidence of bad behaviour in many iterations of our current societies around the world, but nowhere is there more rampant corruption, greed and destructiveness than in the managerial levels, amongst those who would pass themselves off as the governors, including the puppet masters we rarely glimpse. It is a temptation to contemplate at great length the breadth and depth of the destruction being wrought on both our physical and social living spaces and, like Lot’s wife, to be come transfixed to the point of paralysis. There is a balance between being aware and being self-preserving, and a big part of bringing that balance into something constructive is to find what looks like a path forward, a manner of addressing crisis in a way that might produce results that help to redress some of the wrong being done.

Myths can be wondrous if we remember that they are metaphoric and can see current parallels. For instance, the Tower of Babel has some interesting current applications in the different levels of jargon that haunt the professional and political spheres, as well as the consistent failure of groups in conflict to analyze the roots of their conflict with an eye to stepping back from the brink of destruction. Of course, the destruction serves the interests of some, so the likelihood of finding clarity is considerably reduced and the probability of mayhem is greatly enhanced.

The story of Pandora’s Box is another tale that has serious implications for humanity in an age where we continue to unleash all manner of technology on ourselves without proper consideration of possible downstream toxicity. GMO tech is one of my favourite targets as everything that could go wrong with them appears to be doing so in a Murphian dystopian unravelling. We are also suffering from addiction to the same fossil fuels that seemed to make us so comfortable for the last dozen decades. Much of this is a result of doing what we can do instead of what we ought to do because it’s easier and more profitable (we can make it so) than working on the pressing problems of over-population, starvation, disease, degradation of the environment and whole societies based on inequity.

Bringing Us All Together

Posted on 2013/03/01 by danneau

I spent the better part of last week helping out the local high school band leaders chaperone a group of students involved in the competition at the Lionel Hampton Jazz Festival at Moscow, Idaho, a modified repeat of a 2008 session for me. The festival is loaded with talent, both performers and students, and there were a number of wonderful musical experiences involved. Bruce Foreman and Aaron Weinstein did a fabulous clinic on chord melody in which the personal and musical chemistry was blatant, and the contrast in sense of humour between New York and L.A. made for a lot of amusement while these two gentlemen covered a fabulous amount of ground relating to both solo and comping. Weinstein is primarily a violinist, but brought a mandolin to this session and showed versatility and flash, as well as solid technique. Foreman had been part of the ensemble backing Dee Daniels the previous evening, and epitomized all that is good with jazz guitar playing, taste, restraint, fluidity with just a touch of grit, and tremendous musical sense.

There were a multitude of gratifying performances by students from near and far. There are a number of schools in the Northwest US who have killer programs and who graduate legions of accomplished musicians. Our own little backwater punches well above its weight, and has for years due, in large part, to a history of superior teaching by the likes of Barry Miller and, for the last while, Greg and Sarah Falls. Sarah is the current director and has done the Moscow Rag for the last dozen years or so. We only had a dozen or so students this time, most of whom achieved some form of recognition, and worthy candidates they were. My favourite performance by a student was a piano recital, just two songs, by Evan Mayne from Bloomington, Indiana, playing pieces by Wayne Shorter and Charlie Parker. Superior chord voicings, great time, able solo and ensemble playing, evocative of early Herbie Hancock.

As the adjudicators spoke to students following the performances, I often heard the questions of who the influences were and whether the student would be thinking of continuing in music. I was struck by a couple of consistent answers:

1) the knowledge of jazz antecedents was spotty at best in most cases. Students would either deny knowing of a particular musician’s work, or would assent in a non-committal fashion that made it clear that the student had little or no knowledge of those who blazed the trail.

2) there were not too many who were willing to commit to a career as a jazz musician, or as a musician of any sort. Even so, when the numbers were added up, we might very well arrive at a figure that would promise disappointment for the majority of even this talented group. The more musicians, the merrier, but that presupposes that most of us won’t be looking to make a living playing music, but rather that we will enjoy playing recreationally as a way to enrich our social, spiritual and intellectual lives in the context of a career in another field.

At the wrap-up concert on Saturday evening, festival director John Clayton trotted out the notion of music as a unifying force. Lovely. However, there seemed to be a persistent current through the competition of weeding out the the losers from the winners and preparing those winners for the notion of a dog-eat-dog world of musical competition. This is partly valid in terms of the reality of the music business, but I find that some of it is misplaced in the overall context of a musical education, particularly where the playing and enjoyment of music is such a personal and subjective phenomenon, and where people mature musically at very different stages of life. Perhaps some of this is inherent in a quiet way to the philosophy of the Festival, but it would be nice to see it made apparent. There is also the trait of much of the music falling within certain parameters, both in the Festival and in the music business in general, where taste is, to a certain extent, dictated by those who sell the charts, those who select what gets airplay, and who is judged to be stageworthy. It could be my lack of inquisitiveness, but I didn’t see a lot of mention of writing or presentation of original work, and most of the performances were of rehearsed pieces, often with rehearsed solos. This works for classical music, but it seems to me that one of the major tenets of jazz is a measure of spontaneity and improvisation: I would like to see more opportunity for this kind of activity in a relaxed and non-judgemental ambience. It would be easy, though, to feature some serious difficulties fitting this into the already dense schedule of the Festival.

My last gripe is a broader sense that commericalism has inserted itself even deeper into the festival, with constant, almost hectoring, reminders of the sponsors, and some of the repeated self-congratulatory rhetoric from the stage. The festival is a blast in itself and doesn’t need to blow its own laudatory horn.

Kerryman Jokes

Posted on 2013/02/10 by danneau

My mother’s family were all Keenans and O’Connells, Irish as Irish could be and generally proud enough of it to make it known to whoever would listen. We made a couple of trips to Ireland, in 1985 and 1993, including a visit to Daniel O’Connell’s grave. This was particularly interesting for a couple of reasons.

The first is that, like many venerated figures from history (we’re discussing the Irish Liberator here), the story behind the man is terribly interesting and not as unambiguous as what was presented to me in my youth. Mr. O’Connell really did oppose the union of Great Britain and Ireland and worked for the rights of Catholics to sit in Parliament, but it seems he was also a bit of a high lifer and not uninterested in forwarding the cause of Daniel O’Connell along with that of the downtrodden Irish. The Wikipedia article on him is enough to whet my appetite (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_O%27Connell).

The second part of this, the part that leads to an observation or two about John Kerry, and possibly about his Canadian counterpart, John Baird, is that our friends in County Sligo, including Bert, who hailed from Galway, were given to telling us myriad Kerryman jokes. The Irish are constantly the butt of jokes in England relating to mental feebleness, laziness, maladresse and a panoply of sins. Of course the Irish have to have someone as the butt of their jokes: rather than going abroad, they chose the men of Kerry in the far southwest corner of the Isle to stand as the object of their humour. So it turns out that the Liberator/Emancipator was from Carhirsiveen, a burg on the way out to the tip of the Ring of Kerry at Derry Nane. He was, therefore, a Kerryman through and through.

So…I caught a bit of a presser featuring Kerry and Baird and was horrified to hear Kerry mispronounce Kazakhstan and refer to the Prime Minister of Mexico in doing something of an imitation of the man to whom he lost the 2004 election (not lost if you follow the writings of the ever-incendiary Greg Palast). It isn’t that I miss Hilary (I winced at her platitudes and lies), but to come out of the gate so weakly hardly inspires confidence that the world is heading into calmer waters with Kerry at the helm. The fact that he chose to meet with Baird before getting to some of the other bagatelles that confront American “diplomacy” speaks more to the fossil fuel lobby than to any sentiment that Canada is really such a good pal. I have to say, too, that I tend to see in Mr. Baird an air of someone just arrived from a frat party. He has a ready tongue and an aggressive and overbearing demeanour that admits no debate. Should we be surprised when an appointee of this nature, one Patrick Brazeau, steps over the line? Was his role to be the First Nations representation in a party that militates to erase any distinction for First Nations and to remove all political and environmental barriers to unbridled exploitation of Canada’s resources? Whatever it was, and whatever Baird, Van Loan, Toews, Flaherty, Ambrose, MacKay, Kent and the like may say, the joke is mostly on us, the citizens of Canada from all ethnic backgrounds. Is what the current bunch in Ottawa doing to First Nations so different from what the English did in Ireland? Always worth a thought in passing.

All the News

Posted on 2013/02/05 by danneau

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.

-Ben Hecht

A quickie update: seems there are many who are having similar thoughts.

http://saltspringnews.com/index.php?name=News&catid=&topic=8

While it may have been staid and a little stodgy, the old CBC had a ton of good content and listening to The World At Six used to leave me with more a feeling of being informed.

I made a mistake: I watched some television news. I must have been bored, or I would have left the room. Wait, I never get bored. It must be some twisted sense of nostalgia and longing for a time when I felt as though I at least had an inkling of what was going on in the world, and that through the lens of newspapers, radio and television. I think most people don’t like being in the room with me when i watch news, or listen to it on the radio, given that there’s this almost constant stream of what I would call counter comment and frequent interjections of judgment of value stemming from variations on bovine excrement. Yesterday, there was an unbelievable tsunami of hand-wringing and chatter over the eventual disappearance of the penny: no one mentioned a thing about devaluation and debasement. There was much gushing about Beyoncé and her performance, including an extended piece on Newsworld about a new biopic about the performer, something we could expect from the entertainment shows, but hardly worthy of a mention on a serious news network. There were reports of missing people who are still missing, missing pets who’ve been found and a ton of human interest stories that paper over the very real shabbiness in the fabric of society. There was, lo and behold, a story about an IPP on the north end of Vancouver Island, but a failure to mention the terms of the contract which, typically, includes provision for the buying of the resulting electricity by BC Hydro at multiples of the market rates at which the utility will be able to sell the power, and, to cap it off, much time for Minister to spout about possible changing conditions that mean that these IPPs will be a bargain in the future. But the absolute killer was when the ominous music came through the set, that Daah duh-duh-duh daah dhu-duh-duh daah that tells me that we’re into the next Olympic cycle/blitz, and that all media will be devoting precious resources to the least related Olympic factoids. At least this time around, the proceedings will be held in a venue far enough not to affect events in this lovely neck of the woods.

A Poor Substitute

Posted on 2013/02/03 by danneau

Food banks made their first appearances hereabouts circa 1980 with the idea that they would be a short term stop gap measure to deal with a sharp downturn in the economy resulting in a decline in employment and in many families having to rely on help while they looked for new work and adjusted to more straitened circumstances. This support was supposed to just fade to a memory as the economy picked up, as people found the next wave of well-paid work and life returned to normal.

We are now thirty years into this process, and food banks have more patrons than ever, and not likely because people want to be leaning on the institutions to feed themselves: the jobs never came back in their previous relative numbers, and few of them as well-paid, while the price of food, energy, housing and clothing has continued to rise at a pace that outstrips what were already pretty meagre social supports.

I also remember pretty clearly the end of the Terry Fox run and the subsequent agony of keeping a public vigil as Terry wound down to the inevitable death in the summer of 1981, just as I remember being astounded at the outpouring of sympathy that accompanied millions of dollars in donations to support Terry’s cause of research into a cure for cancer. I have been party to Fox runs for three decades and have watched the total funds raised in his name balloon toward the half-billion dollar mark. Despite his efforts and those of so many since, cancer seems more prevalent than ever with each passing year, where it is easy for organizer of events benefitting the cancer research establishment to speculate that it’s a rare person who hasn’t been touched by the disease, either personally, or through close friends and family members who have had to deal with the disease.

When the National Film Board of Canada released the film Pink Ribbons, Inc. in the fall of 2011, it helped to crystallize a series of observations that had come unbidden about charity and the role it plays in our society. As I move into advanced years, I have developed the perspective that allows me to look back and assess the effectiveness of the generosity of some and the efforts expended on behalf of all of us in a wide variety of domains. Do we find it frustrating that huge sums of money can disappear into the maw of the charitable machine in all its incarnations and be assured that we still have abject poverty all over the world, including in some of the most prosperous nations, that cancer hasn’t been beaten, that AIDS is still a threat, that clean drinking water and decent housing cannot be counted as a bottom-line facet of life, sometimes even in wealthy jurisdictions.

There is a chilling little sequence in Pink Ribbons, Inc., a short shot of Ronald Reagan in the early years of his presidency, outlining the expanded role of private industry and the charitable sector in the business of providing for the less fortunate in society, essentially affirming without stating so that the American Federal government was on the cusp of abdicating much of the responsibility for the health and welfare of a good part of its population to the tender mercies of those who might have either the business acumen to wring a profit out of the endeavour or the generosity of those well enough endowed to give back at their discretion. This declaration essentially meant that people couldn’t choose to act in concert through the government to ameliorate health or social conditions, that citizens would have to work through for-profit organizations, meaning that shareholders and executives got paid before clients received benefits, or through charitable organizations who would have to cast around for funding through appeals to the generous or through grant applications. In this, we see the rise of the grant writer and the charitable executive as well as the advent of a new type of organization that raises funds for any organization in return for a piece of the action. This situation implies that concerned citizens are blocked from seeing a health or social emergency and acting together to resolve the crisis, hopefully with minimum fuss and interference from bureaucracy and the delays caused by wrangling necessary funding and other resources.

Charity has also typically dealt with symptoms rather than with root causes, something made abundantly clear in the Pink Ribbons, Inc. film which makes mention of the millions dedicated to the structures searching for a cure, and highlights the lack of funding to study the causes and the suspected links to the 80 000 to 100 000 unregulated chemicals that permeate our living space, our food, our cosmetics, our building materials and the air we breathe. As well, when we participate in charitable events, or even just write a cheque, we generate that warm and fuzzy feeling that we are, at heart, good people who are concerned about the welfare of our fellow human beings. This allows us to block out the general mess in which we are all forced participants, to address crises in a piecemeal fashion and to suppress the sense of outrage that we ought perhaps to feel over letting a significant portion of humanity suffer hunger, cold, poor housing, lack of education and a sense of being able to participate fully in the affairs of society. When we peel away the rescue aspect of charity, we’re left with a power imbalance that is degrading and alienating to the recipient and falsely exculpatory to the donor. We are made to feel good as we roll out the best of our intentions, but fail to engage in the kind of long-term thinking that might produce real progress toward eliminating the circumstances that produce poverty, hunger, inequity, disease and a toxic, degraded environment.

Charity should be abolished; and be replaced by justice.

— Norman Bethune

Worth a look, though the complete film will provide a more in-depth look and answer some of the questions raised in the trailer:

Pink Ribbons, Inc. Trailer

A succinct visual representation of the charity versus justice dichotomy:

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (Animation)

(There is a ton of other good stuff on the RSA site! I also really like Annie Leonard’s work, definitely worth a gander for those who haven’t dug in already.)

Hey! I just found this (silly me) bit that is very much on point:

http://www.storyofstuff.org/movies-all/story-of-cosmetics/

Doyle Cut Off

Posted on 2013/01/29 by danneau

Yet another roadblock in the BC Rail affair: Justice Bauman of the BC Supreme Court has ruled that the Auditor General does not have a right to view all the documents relating to the $6 M settlement of Basi and Virk’s legal fees because it would breach solicitor/client provisions. These clowns have taken a plea, done light duty and escaped with their assets pretty much intact, it seems, while the citizens of BC look to have been bamboozled and robbed by the people who were supposed to look out for their interests. Everything about the whole process, the resulting raids and the ensuing judicial dance carries a whiff of barnyard mixed with brimstone, and at some point, having excused the accused from further prosecution, it seems like time to shine an array of lights under this rock. If there is nothing slimy there, we can put the rock back in place and leave it there, but there can be no accountability (a word so dear to Campbell and company) and no trust in the government or the political process as long as affairs are conducted behind multiple screens of secrecy by people who seem on the face of things to be as untrustworthy as a group could be. It will be interesting to see if a change of government in May produces a couple of results:

1) a complete reversal of the narrative of openness and transparency. Don’t say it, do it.

2) a complete reckoning with all and sundry involved in the privatization of common resources needed to keep the citizens of BC engaged in reasonable participation in their economy. Note that Liberals can’t even whimper about anything that any other government does, given their record of stonewalling.

Failure to follow up on these items will ensure that people will dissociate themselves from being part of the governance of their province, a short-term boon to those looking to profit from indifference and corruption, but a powder keg of discontent in the longer term.

A New Woman Premier

Posted on 2013/01/29 by danneau

Congratulations to Kathleen Wynne on her election as the new leader of the provincial Liberal party in Ontario, meaning that she automatically becomes Premier of Ontario, the sixth woman in the current cohort of sitting Premiers. If we only counted Premiers, that would mean that we’re approaching fifty percent of the thirteen provinces and territories that are, putatively, governed by women. She is also the first openly homosexual person to be elected to such a high office, though we have had cabinet posts in Ottawa held by LGBTs.

Before proceeding, can we please stop and take a look at the difference between the rhetoric of Campaign Obama 2008 and the ensuing action? As we move into Obama’s second term in office, and as we reflect on another rousing speech at the Inauguration, do we seriously think that there will be the shift from the state surveillance, war, de facto austerity, Wall Street influence? It’s a big disappointment that the first Black POTUS raised our hopes (perhaps he could have been an inspiration to Harper-wait!- he has been) and then hired Tim Geithner, Eric Holder, Hilary Clinton, Arne Duncan and a bunch of other Wall Street/Inside-the-Beltway retreads to carry on the same old same old.

I wonder how people thought of Margaret Thatcher when she came to power? A woman in the PM’s chair? Hmmm… she outmanned the men, took an estrogen scalpel to the social safety net, marched off to war and helped set up an expanded role for the City in all things British, at home and abroad.

Kim Campbell here in Canada hardly counts. She was refreshing after the bluster and bullshit of Brian Mulroney, but never, even in her short caretaker tenure, made any moves to bring some integrity and humanity back to the office. Likewise for Rita Johnson, Socred stand-in to take the fall for Bill Van Der Zalm in BC in 1991.

And now Ms. Wynne joins an élite group of women around the Premiers’ table in Canada. Her companions include Allison Redford, who can’t seem to make the budget work in Alberta despite being awash in a sea of petrodollars (I guess the oily money is so slippery that it wants to head home to Houston) and Christie Clark whose BC Liberals are actually looking for campaign funding in Alberta because there isn’t enough in the CC4BC coffers or the government publicity budget to paper over the many and profound sins of her administration and that of her predecessor (currently languishing is golden exile in London as he represents the interests of the same folks on whose behalf he sacked the wealth of his home province). I can’t speak too much to what Kathy Dunderdale has done/is doing in Newfoundland and Labrador, nor exactly what might be the vision that Pauline Marois might have for Québec, other than an independent nation (no telling whether it would be a more nurturing nation for her efforts), and Eva Ariak of Nunavut hasn’t raised too many blips on the radar.

On the whole, the prognosis for women in power is not entirely positive, mostly because they seem, in large proportion, to govern from exactly the same stance as men, a phenomenon that shouldn’t surprise too much, given that the power that most often guides a government resides in the corporate boardrooms (Gwynn Morgan, how are things at Enbridge and SNC-Lavalin?) and that these boardrooms are dominated by ultra-competitive, testosterone-fired, single-minded greed. It seems to me that Margaret Thatcher, who so completely embodies the image of the woman in power, coined, if memory serves, the phrase: “There is no alternative!”

There are so many counterweights to this stereotype (binders full?) that we could cite them for days on end, but people like Rachel Carson somehow don’t make it into the halls of power. It’ll be interesting to see how Hilary fares in her bid to become the next POTUS: we once got things like “It takes a village to raise a child”, but Clinton’s actions and speech as Secretary of State might lead us to believe that she will be, much like Barry Obama, pretty much the figurehead that all have been in recent history, feeding the Wall Street maw and cavorting with the Pentagon’s pets, Lockheed, Boeing, General Dynamics and the like as they sell the weaponry needed to protect the vital interests of BP, Exxon and Shell.

I wish Ms. Wynne well in promoting a different agenda than her predecessor and in making a clear distinction between her government and the pretender to the throne, Harper clone Tim Hudak. She’ll need lots of help, given that Dalton has already alienated what should be Wynne’s constituency.

Moody’s To The Rescue

Posted on 2013/01/29 by danneau

The headlines read that Moody’s, one of the three major ratings agencies along with Standard & Poors and Fitch’s, have downgraded the ratings of six Canadian financial institutions, the Bank of Montreal, National Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, CIBC, TD Bank, and Caisse Desjardins. The action is due to the concerns that the agency has about exposure to household and consumer debt and the possibility that Canadians might nor be able to repay all of the money that they’ve borrowed for mortgages or the vast sums that consumers have posted on their credit cards and through home equity loans. This is particularly interesting in the wake of finishing Michael Lewis’ tome The Big Short, in the latter stages of which the role of ratings agencies in the the meltdown of the last five or six years becomes very clear. In effect, all the big Wall Street investment houses were able to convince the ratings agencies that many of the CDS and CDO instruments that they were floating around were worthy of a triple-A rating, even though they were essentially bundles of sliced and diced sub prime loans made to people known not to qualify for traditional financing. Without spoiling the story, it seems clear enough, if you believe Lewis, that the ratings agencies failed to research the instruments, or, because of the fees they collected, were willing to overlook the essentially inherent risk built into the underlying loans that was bound to affect the worthiness of the derivatives. I just fins it mildly ironic that anyone still believes any of what these people say.

However, this does not mean that we should have limitless faith in the above institutions, or any other such group, as likely, Moody’s is covering it’s posterior and the risk factors may be far greater than the ratings agency is willing to admit. Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, has touched none too delicately on this point on several occasions over the last couple of years, which is rather a no-brainer as real estate prices have continued to climb until recently while incomes have remained fairly static, and while the push has continued for the consumer to carry the weight for growth in the economy, particularly during the months leading up to the annual Christmas spending binge. Canadians are supposed to continue consuming, to buy increasingly pricey housing, and to contribute to RRSP, TFSA, and RESP accounts in a zero-sum income situation. Something doesn’t compute, but, then, most of what comes out of our current political régimes makes little sense.

Of course, as in the sub prime maelstrom, the current round of consumer and student debt might produce a round of defaults which, in turn might jeopardize the liquidity of the banking institutions to the point where we could have massive bankruptcy. But the banks seem not to worry: the Bank of Canada will step in, the taxpayers will pick up the tab and we can go back to rebuilding a bubble. Notice that no one, in the wake of the investment fraud that brought on the crisis of 2007-08 (and ongoing), went to prison, that the TARP funds and subsequent tranches of quantitive easing have largely served to prop up the same institutions that caused the mess in the first place, meaning that Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley have largely managed to substitute the real money derived from what people produce for the thin-air funds they created out of sub-prime loans. You have to marvel at the ingeniousness of the scheme and at the dullard taxpayers who put up with this sort of result. Letting the banks fail may not be an option when the real economy is still tied up in the ability of the banking world to extend credit and where governments and pension funds are dependent on the financial community to fulfill their obligations, but surely there needs to be some personal and corporate liability for the incompetence and malfeasance that produces such disastrous outcomes, and where the public who pay to bail out the bankers get control over the assets that should have been forfeit once to extent of the bungling and fraud was clear.

More Reflections on Film/Television Crews in B.C.

Posted on 2013/01/27 by danneau

We just finished watching Season Two of Treme, the HBO drama highlighting the struggles of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, and, like David Simon’s previous series Homicide, Life on the Street, and The Wire, there are multiple and interlocking story lines to follow, as well as many questions posed in the course of the eleven episodes. We both felt, after watching the first season’s DVD, that this was less intense and focused than The Wire, and we still fell that way after the second season, but also that the diminished intensity and focus doesn’t really detract from the interest and entertainment value of this series, and that intensity and focus are sufficient to highlight the conflicts and questions of values raised by the show. As in previous works. Simon depicts the breadth and depth of corruption that accompanies the personal struggles of the various characters. Jon Seda’s portrayal of Nelson Hidalgo is a perfect fit for all of the shenanigans put in play to significantly alter the essential character of New Orleans following the flooding of poor neighbourhoods and the subsequent dispersal of a large segment of the city’s black population to other parts of the country. It seems clear that a certain group wanted to turn the city into something of a sanitized white-bread, Disneyworld-like haven for tourists and a gold mine of redevelopment schemes for sponging up recovery and rebuilding funds, as well as for selling a different city to a different clientèle. There are great scenes in clubs and on the street celebrating Orleanian culture, in particular the music, but without any rose-coloured glasses: there is ample portrayal of the tawdriness of much of life in the city, including the ever-present threat of violence visited on relatively innocent citizens. Included as part of the tension of living in NOLA is the oft-conflicted relationship between the NOPD and the citizens it purports to serve, making an interesting backdrop for several of the story lines. In addition, we’re offered spoiled and conflicted teen angst, hyper-testoterone fired lives, all the flakiness that comes with creative types, well-intentioned poseurism and lots of the confusion and lack of clarity that constitutes much of life for all of us. Simon doesn’t pretend to have any answers to any of this, being quite content to hold up mirrors to let viewers see what they will and decide whether or not any of these situations relate directly to the viewer. He does, however, offer a view of a world full of flaws venial and mortal and helps to formulated a series of questions that we can choose to address at or discretion. It could just be entertainment…

OK, the real reason I bring this up is that my concern for our local BC film and television industry is that they are pawns in a Hollywood game, a game where the Hollywood production people get to pretend and in which the crews on the ground get to be part of the stakes, along with considerable taxpayer funds. Hollywood has done a splendid job of finding the lowest common denominator, exploiting it to the point where they’ve lowered an already low standard, and they want us to forego even more tax revenue so they can continue to shovel out more of this drivel, the same tawdry content recostumed, updated, prettified and sleazified for injection into the already toxic content stream. David Simon’s work isn’t perfect, but it has some sensitivity and incites the viewer to reflect on more than the inadequacy of fortune or looks in relation to the latest crop of celebrities. Is there room for a huge increase in the volume of meaningful content? Probably not to the extent that trash is being created in whatever version of Hollywood exists either in SoCal, or Vancouver, or Toronto or whatever might be the latest incarnation of cheap remote location that turns Gastown or Hogtown into downtown Cleveland. I would love to see the Hollywood moguls go off in a little corner and visit their silliness on each other, but I fear that we live in a world that cannot physically stand that kind of a waste of resources. I certainly resent being forced to participate through government subsidy in the creation of this LCD slime. I’m willing to pay for decent content, and that’s how a market is supposed to work, but here we have yet another example of how the “free” market is rigged through the sale of the political will. At some point, there should perhaps be some sort of dialogue about the skills we possess and how best to deploy those skills in a way that ensures that people such as the film and television crews of BC (and all jurisdictions) can make a decent and stable living doing work that produces content with some lasting value beyond the kind of “sugar high” to which we could liken the majority of what comes out of studios.

Rub Eyes, Shake Head

More Useless Comment

Classy Guy, That Stephen Harper

Lot’s Wife Syndrome

Bringing Us All Together

Kerryman Jokes

All the News

A Poor Substitute

Doyle Cut Off

A New Woman Premier

Moody’s To The Rescue

More Reflections on Film/Television Crews in B.C.