‘How I learned to stop worrying about global capitalism via perpetual intoxication.’

The idea that there is something innately pure or dignified about holding down a job in our postmodern, ‘post-history’ society is about as defunct as North American manufacturing. It’s a bygone notion from a bygone past.

“What’s changed?” You may be asking yourself, because you like most people are under the impression that the Protestant work ethic can somehow survive being repeatedly shanked by global capitalism. To put it simply: it’s the structure of the Canadian economy that has shifted. Our economy is no longer about tilling soil, building stuff, or latching on to the civil service and holding on for dear life (ok, there’s still that). Instead, it’s characterized by serving coffee, answering the phone with the proper amount of enthusiasm, and praying to God for a minimum wage hike. In other words, working life has become an intravenous drip of advanced capitalism, apathy, and alcohol. We’ve transitioned from our parents’ ‘get an education and get a job’ to our present ‘get an education, get another education, and then go work at Indigo.’
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Edited: April 26th, 2011

Taidot reflections of fantastic depth

In a dainty café, studying Mandarin, repeating the word as I write out the characters time and time again. It being Chinese, I tend to get a bit loud as I try to enunciate the tones clearly enough for my shoddy brain to remember. I get lost in the process, moving from word to word, until one point when I happen to look up and see a dainty café full of customers staring back at me. A few of them are grinning, others look dumbfounded, and one old lady even looks genuinely offended. It’s then that I realize that not only have I been declaring “AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!” for the last few minutes, but I’ve also gone so far as to unconsciously make a little song out of it; the Mandarin equivalent of “A to the I to the D to the S.”

Edited: January 21st, 2011

Film Review: Lars Von Trier’s ANTICHRIST!

This movie throws the rule book out the window, though not before subjecting it to all kinds of debasement. It’s like Antichrist shatters all of your preconceptions- normally a good thing- but this time in a way that leaves you cold, disoriented, and wanting nothing more than to return to your original state of conceptual naivety. Think your soul is already withered and you’ve seen it all? Think again! Think you’re clever and sophisticratic enough to attribute a meaningful design to even the most cryptic and slow-moving of Art House films? Maybe not! Think you’re man enough to see what the green goblin’s dick looks like when it ejaculates blood? No!

From a narrative point of view, Antichrist is divided into two distinct parts: a painfully slow, often awkward string of dialogues between a couple that have lost their child and a reign of chaos. The themes that inhabit the first part are quite conspicuous: dead babies, lust, pride, and the state of nature (or, how human sexuality can lead to dead babies). Really, it’s quite boring, and anyone who finds their way to this movie based on anecdotes of how fucked up it is will start to wonder if they picked up the wrong Antichrist. Just hang in there until William Defoe first hears the acorns cry and discovers a talking fox, because then part two is on like Donkey Kong.

And seriously, what a part it is. The last half of the movie feels like Lars watched the first half, realized that there’s nary a person who’s been raped yet, so he subsequently poured the whole spectrum of human folly in to insulate his ‘gasp!’ street cred. Once the fox sounds off, it’s a nonstop romp of sex, blood, and psychotherapy. At one point, it even gets all cute and self-referential when Charlotte Gainsbourg asks if Freud is dead. Well, if Freud really is dead, Lars Von Trier never got the memo!

If you find yourself wondering how a parent’s grief can transform into an exploration of gynocide before slipping into an orgy, then a phase of orgy-violence, and then finally settle on violence-violence; don’t worry because you’re not alone. Times like this you just gotta accept that either the director is simply smarter than you or they’re on a regime of narcotics that effectively place them on a higher plane of existence. After all, everyone leaves a theatre with their own take on a movie. For me, Antichrist is unmistakably a film about redemption, as evidenced by the knowing look that the crow gives William Defoe at the end, absolving him of his prior crow-killing transgressions while trapped in the vagina hole/womb. Others might take home a life-long impression of the graphic scenes of genital mutilation. In these subjectivities we discover the true power of film.

Edited: January 15th, 2011

Women of the world, fear not! Broadview Security is here!

Edited: January 15th, 2010

Harper, pundits, & democracy – oh my!

Every once and a while something happens in Canadian politics that’s just so goddamn crazy that one can’t but replace their comfortable numbness with burning shame. This shame, of course, stems from Prime Minister Harper’s recent prorogation of Parliament- a move so brazenly cynical that even Harper’s former chief of staff calls it ‘childish.’ When I first heard about it on the news, I mistakenly thought the newscaster said, ‘the Prime Minister has scuttled parliament so that the government can focus on watching the Olympics,’ which, though absurd, is far better than the final rationale of needing to ‘get important work done.’
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Edited: January 12th, 2010