The Private Life of Fame

The storm of media attention surrounding the same-day deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett has probably already hit saturation point. Some will read more than coincidence into this, others will conclude that it was another spectacular publicity stunt by Michael Jackson to go out in style with the former vixen queen of the 70’s. Whatever the case, the inundation of media gossip and tabloid-style overkill has already started raging forth and one can only duck to avoid the sheer breadth and speed of the coverage. Death’s ever-present shadow poses a merciful boon to ratings in the dumbed-down, hyped-up pop-culture “Neverland" we are living in. A place where we can find permission in Michael Jackson's Peter Pan syndrome, to linger in our own juvenile fantasies. Yet "Death" still comes knocking at the gilded gates of stars' estates and pushes through the undigestible clutter of mass media with its bleak finality.
Michael Jackson was arguably a “captive persona” of stardom. A product of this continuous production line of celebrity idols yet never able to fade away quite as forgettably as most and determined to let his freakish persona rival and then eclipse his talent as an entertainer. Is it possible Michael Jackson was a casualty of his own forever-morphing and cartoonish image? He was undivisible from his own celebrity, and in a sad sense, it was all he had, and it devoured him. In these waning moments of the Hollywood-American empire the obsessive effort to mass-merchandise youth and beauty has doubled in recent years - as if to show to the world that America is still the young land of hope, prosperity and remade has-beens. And as the ouverture of the final movement swells in its cacophonous soundbite babble and desperation presses itself up against the glass outside, the grimace of used-up fame and shattered myths are locked up securely in steely celebrity vaults. We are taken by the pitiless storm, the synthetic replaces the organic, and the juvenile and the profane are held onto as safe illusions masking a vitiated and self-indulgent culture in rapid decline. There is a compelling resonance here between the stretched-over grin of greedy success and Michael Jackson’s disappearing nose. A scalpel wielded by a quack plastic surgeon is no different than a pen wielded by a fraudulent real estate broker. It’s the illusion that sells.

All of this dead celebrity spectacle of course is compelling because it tugs at our elbow and catches the corner of our eye with a stark sense of unease. It serves as a wider ontological frame of reference for our own fleeting time. These public display of mass mourning for dead celebrities are completely mired in some atavistic need to congregate and observe ritual. Indeed, occasions like this that are inflated to such magnitude (Princess Di’s death is a fitting example,) approximates the ersatz sacred or ceremonial in a cultural landscape of pre-fab subdivisions and Twitter. It is a phenomenon that can’t be easily dismissed or avoided for that matter. This type of public hysteria and outpouring of grief over the deaths of strangers save for their pop-icon status, reveals a confused and childlike public craving for Godhead wherever it can be found. More importantly, there is a proprietary aspect to all of this. Michael Jackson, Princess Di, Elvis, Marilyn were not merely symbols -- they were trademarks – the property of millions and destroyed by the pressure of the spotlight. Could it not be argued that the adoring public holding these mass "orgies" of grief, are registering their sense of betrayal? Of having their beloved icon torn from their grip only to reaffirm the shocking truth that mortality is the great equalizer? More on this in the next blog.

Is that a Feeling or a Sensation?

I just came across a quote from Oswald Spengler, in "The Decline of the West," in which he writes that one of the key features of the end of a culture is when one can't tell "sensation from feeling." It's hard to dispute this claim as one looks around at our hyper-stupefied age where the general level of discourse is of a teen gossip magazine variety. It seems as if we distrust deeper and more "authentic" human emotions and prefer to hide behind the safe dishonesty of the "cool" surface. The culture of "cool" permeates our conscious environment. Cool means noncommittal and disaffected. The whole cool "facade" is about "trying too hard" to detach and steer clear of vulnerability. Our collective consciousness is blunted by the flood unfiltered trivia that permits undue influence to the insipid or the tasteless or even the the likes of bloggers without lives (personal references aside.) How have we arrived at this juncture in our evolution where a shrugging detachment has become a necessary survival method? We've even come to misunderstand "feeling" as opposed to "feelings." To have or discover "feelings" has an Oprah connotation - usually associated with something touchy-feely, sentimental and easily sold to a self-absorbed and gullible public looking for the next quick fix from the latest self-help guru. Then there's "feeling" - that "all-too human" condition in which one responds to stimuli by genuine engagement. Any of us who are products of this cynical branding culture are jaded in the knowledge that sensation sells. It keeps the presses warm and the heads of our media and entertainment industries well-remunerated. I don't want to accept that humanity is now reducible to sets of predictable shopping behaviour and that all the rest is history, but it's obvious that our failure to access a sense of the profound, of the transcendent is diminishing amid our unrelenting need to satisfy our shrinking attention spans. There are rare moments when I am transported by a piece of music, for example, and am touched with either a "feeling" of joy or gravity depending on what it conveys and I will be surprised by the genuine emotions that are stirred up from within. Music is particularly effective at doing this but so is art and literature -- albeit with more effort. A great work of art is able to connect the viewer to the universal -- to immortality. It has the power to access the higher senses and is not quickly digested and forgotten upon the viewer's exit. A great work of art doesn't merely take you by surprise and shake you out of your routine, it infiltrates your consciousness and quietly alters your perception and experience. Indeed, it ought to subvert and leave you a bit confused. We have not merely lost our ability to "feel" -- we have more importantly lost our ability to understand why we're feeling it. If you listen to the "Marriage of Figaro" by Mozart for example, there are arias that are soft and healing -- that literally take the weight of the world and liberate the listener with a "feeling" of heavenly levitation. This is not a mere sensation -- it's a humanizing experience that has a purgative effect on us. A great piece of jazz or even a well-crafted, melodic and intelligent pop song also have the same effects but we're now living in the age of the deejay and it seems that the technological advances that allow for deafening crystalline volume with earth-shaking bass are commensurate with a decline in quality or substance of the music being played. The twin trends of idiocy and mediocrity seem inescapable and the brash noise of a world impoverished by excess overwhelms higher and more reflective states of being.

Viciou$ Cycle

It was only a matter of time but it now looks like the recession has finally caught up with my life. I've been facing a tight market in the line of work that I've been attempting to establish myself in which is E.S.L. teaching to be precise. I live in an overrated city that is paradise for those who can afford it and just another landlord-enriching, hand-to-mouth exercise in futility for most. Lately the embers of anger have been rekindled inside me. I'm 43 years old and fall far short of the "upwardly mobile" criteria. I have no real assets to speak of, no career, no investments, forget RRSPS. I have a long-distance relationship going on two years with a woman who I want to marry and yet the paralyzing weight of financial reality threatens this possibility. To add insult to injury, a former friend of mine is pursuing a small claims case against me. His aims are dubious and based on an informal understanding that we had about my living there for a time. The circumstances I was in when I was living at his house were as such that I wasn't able to pay him rent but now he remembers it differently and adamantly insists that we had a verbal contract from the very beginning. It's a convoluted story in which he is seeking maximum damages because he is under financial pressure from his mortgage creditors. He decided that rather than wait for me to set my life up and return the favour when I was in a position to, he opted to push ahead with a claim. He did this by editing his memory and trumping up his version of events on legal documents. This is the abyss that I'm staring into right now. Conniving former friends who will stop at nothing and are willing to believe their own lies and spin facts, to get what they want. This former "friend" won't rest until I suffer as much as he claims he has. This is what the world is becoming now. A snakepit where at any moment someone who you thought you could trust might turn on you. Where the enormous economic pressures just to survive are quickly eroding our humanity and where moral lapse, deceit and where many interpersonal relationships are based on some form of transactional pragmatism. I can't help but want to point my finger at the greedmeisters - the untouchable corporate elite who foster these mechanisms and then stand back and unleash them on an unwitting public. Yet I am not so naive as to actually submit to some Marxist or Anarchist solution as I've come to believe that ideology itself is far too limiting. In fact, ideology itself doesn't seem sufficient anymore as the problems we face on a global and planetary scale don't demand one set of solutions. I may not have a sophisticated or detailed knowledge of the international monetary system, but I do believe that if there is a culprit, it's the persistent notion that is propagandized to us by media and governments that market-based capitalism is the indisputable measurement of our success as a civilization. My own life is a microscopic statistic with its own unique history of personal mistakes and poor choices but thrown against the backdrop of a much larger composite I see how the reality of my "statistic" reflects a demographic trend. Should I take comfort in this? Or should I recognize the cold isolation of my circumstances - that my own incompetence and neglect from an earlier age should dictate the present crisis of my life? Is my life a microcosm of the world that has been created in the last 30 years? Booms and busts, sudden bumps and turns and an increasingly rootless and humiliating life of poverty and debt? Perhaps this is why I have chosen to write this in my blog, it's the closest way that I can scream back at the world from my rooftop without being arrested or institutionalized. How can one continue to deny that these pressures arrayed around us are not largely and fundamentally systemic? This blogging exercise might help me to get some things off my chest and I can only hope that it will be a modest contribution to a greater dialogue but I think we're all compassion-weary in the developed world and have become almost de-sensitized to the pain of others, we have adapted this Darwinian reflex that shuns the weak and the dispossessed for fear of becoming so ourselves. Hence this denial is reflected in exaggerated displays of wealth and power in our culture. The usual status-conferring objects like expensive cars or accessories take on even more value in these times. The individual who displays his toys is effectively declaring his "fitness" - that he's risen above the muck of hard economic times and has passed the evolutionary test. And as the times come to reward the crassest modes of behaviour like ruthless opportunism rather than the community ethos of mutual support without a contractual due-date, it seems the collapse of everything we've known and bothered to fight for becomes more and more imminent.
Money has always pervaded our conscious waking-lives and will continue to do so, but now it seems that as we become more fragmented and left to fend for ourselves in this economy, many of us who have simply slipped through the cracks will find ourselves getting too familiar and even comfortable in their surrounding.

Help Wanted

Below is a piece I came across that I wrote in 2002, recently I've experienced similarly frustrating setbacks in my life and I'm trying to examine how much personal choice overlaps larger economic forces beyond our control. I argued from more of a political framework of analysis then, but now I would see the political as symptomatic of a broader social and cultural underpinning. Here goes:

At the time I write this I am unemployed.
In the age of public confessions, this is a mild one, but it still invites negative stereotypes.
I can already hear that dismissive refrain of - “get a job” .
It infuriates me everytime I hear it, and I am forced to defend my integrity by having to reassure the smug, sadistic fool who utters this line that I am leaving no stone unturned looking for work.
At my age, 36 to be exact, I know that I am not the prime candidate for most labouring jobs, though I continue to apply, and equally, I lack the skills for specialized work. I’m caught in the crevasse of the new economy. I am aware that I made earlier decisions that landed me here. I am aware that I need more training and I intend to go back to school. I refuse to be helpless in this situation.
Being a student of larger events, I have come to the conclusion, however,that we are shaped by global forces as much as we are by personal choices and circumstances.
The developed world has undergone a“ paradigm shift” in recent years. This catchphrase means that the traditional structure of our economy has become outmoded and we’re in a whole new game with a whole new set of rules - somebody else’s rules, I might add.
Governments have responded by shrinking, deregulating and privatizing at a frantic pace in order to seem relevant in a technology based economy. For the shortsighted this is a welcome development, but for others who believe that government plays a balancing role in society, this threatens human and planetary progress.
I grew up in the eighties with the belief that all you needed to do was graduate from post-secondary school and you could simply take your place in the world. Faced with the new reality, this notion seems quite romantic now. Still the old belief system that fosters this kind of hyper-individualism is still very potent in out society.
The Calvinist tradition in our country presumes an individual’s worth is defined by productive labour. This doesn’t have the same resonance nowadays. However, as a member of the jobless “statistic” it s not easy to overcome the sense of shame that to be unemployed reflects moral failure. I have experienced feelings of self-loathing, to resignation ,to disgust at my situation. I sense that I am not alone, that I am among a permanent, growing underclass .
To view it in context, Gordon Campbell like George W. Bush is an employee of big business more so than a servant of the public trust. The Campbell Liberals argue that their attacks are aimed at financing the debt, they convince us with distorted math, but it is a front to cater to the business elite.
In the current economy, getting a decent job feels like winning a lottery draw and holding onto it means working with the ever present fear that you are replaceable.
In the shadow of NAFTA, September 11, and the recent softwood lumber tariff, we are confronted with the fact that we are at the mercy, more than ever, of international forces in B.C.
Campbell’s stubborn,cost-cutting might create a business friendly environment in B.C. but it will mean very little if the services that allow for a decent quality of life aren’t there anymore and therefore as
Unemployed persons, we must resist these feelings of shame and burden. To fall into this mindset absolves the powers-that-be so they can continue their assault on the most needy.
I think it’s important to become aware of the larger context in which we’re all living even though when you’re out of work it’s hard to get beyond the momentary and immediate. For the next few years the unemployed in this province will have to get used to being out in the cold unless we become informed and organized and defend our rights to live and work in a civil society.

Listen to the Rhythm of the Gangs

There's been a high-incidence of gang-warfare here in pleasant, liveable Vancouver. I decided to put together a rhyme about it, it goes as follows:

GANGSTAR

Listen to the rhythm of the night
A multicultural gang fight
flying bullets they unite
Black, yellow, red and brown and white

Celebrate diversity
At gangstar university
Beats without the melody
And justice waiving felonies

Check out Rajiv's pimpin’ ride
He wears the colours of his tribe
Gino’s got a hit out on Wang tung
Who’s got the Latinos on his turf
The Bikers are after everyone
Watching from their sideview mirrors

How’d ya get those big and shiny toys?
I didn’t think you were employed
Must be chummy with those boys
Who live at home and on steroids
Hey why’dyou look so pale?
Slumped and bloodied at the wheel
On the wrong end of a deal,
Now where’s all your tough gangster appeal?
Seen too many simulated crimes
On HBO and on Showtime
Heard too many half-wit, urban thugs
Boastin’ of the homies that they’ve plugged
Flashin’ the gold in their teeth
Countin’ all the coeds in their sheets
It’s the Horatio Alger myth
On testosterone and speed
A few they might just end up stiff,
You gotta meet your market’s needs
If it’s a white powdery whiff
Or another potent-grade of weed


Celebrate diversity
Here at gangster university
Beats without the melody
And justice waiving felonies

C’mon give the kid a break
He’s all about family and good grades
He wants to do his MBA
He’ll have done his practicum in spades
Don’t let the bling and track suit
make you think he’s one of them
He’s statistical fluke
just hangin’ with the wrong friends
He’s just really misunderstood
Except when he’s in your neighbourhood
Then your social theories can’t compete
With the sounds of gun blasts in your street

If the Shoe Fits...

Like many, I witnessed the footage of U.S. President Bush narrowly ducking a pair of shoes hurled towards him by a protesting Iraqi at a press conference. This desperate, futile gesture of shoe-throwing reveals not just one individual's statement of visceral loathing but in a sense, symbolizes how many others both in Iraq and around the world feel towards Bush even in the dying days of his presidency. It is quite telling and remarkable that a U.S. president could have so singularly, in eight short years, successfully alienated world opinion to the degree that a reporter, in the normally safe bubble zone of a press conference, is willing to part with his shoes to demonstrate this.
I won't miss the Bush presidency and believe it was a disastrous spell not just for the U.S. but for the globe, yet, despite the administration's use of outright fabrications and perversions of justice as a rationale for its invasion of Iraq, Bush might have had a point when he brushed off the incident by remarking how this kind of protest was normal in an open and democratic society -- inferring that Iraq had achieved some measurable form of democratic progress. Of course, it's very tempting to be cynical about anything that comes out of the mouth of this president and his platitudes about democracy are outweighed by the reality on the ground there. Yet, it has become far too easy to dismiss everything about the Bush presidency as a caricature of arrogance and villainy combined with gross ineptitude. Such was the divisive and controversial nature of the Bush administration that it polarized the U.S. and the world to such and extent that any of its remotely positive accomplishments were eclipsed by its obvious failures.
There was much discussion and speculation in the news media after the "shoe-ing" episode about how to throw one's shoe is a mark of ultimate contempt in Arab culture and this was followed-up by a recounting of how hundreds of Iraqis gathered around a lowering Saddam statue to hit it with their shoes. What's curious here is that had it not been for the ill-considered U.S. invasion, Saddam might have still been around today gassing minorities, jailing opposition and torturing anyone who got in his way -- and people would have most definitely kept their shoes on. If there was one thing that came out of this that could be construed as redeeming, it was the removal of a vicious tyrant who, although some argued was a contained threat, ran his government like a mafia and repeatedly and mercilessly suppressed and murdered his own people. I describe myself as anti-Bush for a host of considered reasons -- although unlike some, I don't lay awake at night seething with his visage in mind and I don't subscribe to some of the more hysterical strains of Bush-hating out there -- I wouldn't even go so far as to assign him the equivalency of a Hitler or a Saddam - much to the surprise of some in my own circles . I've heard people time and again associate Bush to this stellar cast of infamy and I find it inaccurate, historically-ignorant and giving Bush too much credit. Bush was no evil genius but an "employee" or a "front" for a clique of paranoid, power-hungry neo-cons. As much as neo-cons have shown their capacity for inhuman enterprises, they are a few degrees of a lesser evil than Hitler or Pol Pot.
While Bush's neo-con led foreign policy has resulted in high numbers of casualties both direct and indirect during these last eight years, it now appears that it is now - hopefully - on its way to becoming another discredited, morally-bankrupt ideology like Fascism or Communism. I don't think I can recall a president who was so ridiculed and reviled since Nixon. Opposition to Bush was persistent, vocal, furious and creative in both the U.S. and internationally. True enough that the administration smugly ignored world opinion to satisfy the interests of its oil lobby supporters, yet now reality has finally come home to the U.S. in the undesired dividends of body bags and soup lines and a disillusioned and angry public has spoken by electing Obama. It would have been vindication for many had an impeachment process guaranteed an earlier exit but such is the way things are when the weight of the system and its legal obfuscation are against you.
The shoes were a size ten which almost matches the percentage of the outgoing president's approval rating. All things considered, this president led a charmed presidency considering he could have been ducking a lot more than a pair of shoes.

Goodbye, Dad

Exactly a week ago my father passed away. Knowing my father and his generally sound judgement, if the timing of his death was of his own volition, late-November was perhaps an appropriate time to go. The inconsolable drear and darkness of this month can discourage the will to get out of bed let alone live.
Although this had been long expected - with his confinement to a care home for three years succumbing to
the ravages of Parkinson's, two-strokes and dementia - the actual reality of
his passing still hit us like an emotional tsunami.
After the initial week of intense grief and sorrow and the busying around of making official arrangements and finally the funeral service, the sense of
the loss itself is only now starting to penetrate. One could say that the first week
was the early shock phase that involved denial and disbelief combined with confusion and episodic tears but now, after the ceremony and the family and public mourners have gone home, I am alone in the still moments to reflect and quietly mourn his loss and what he meant to me. He was a powerful influence in my life, as most strong fathers tend to be, and although he was absent through much of my childhood and youth, when he was present - he was unmistakeably so. He had a deep, full-timbred baritone voice that could naturally project, and a compact physique that he carried with swift confidence, but more importantly he was so energetic and driven. I think the life he lived was equivalent to several lives all concentrated into one. He was so determined and had so much fire within that he was comparable to a steamroller and it was often easy to feel flattened in his path. He was an impatient man from a very old school Catholic-Depression-era-upbringing who rose to prominence in public life here in Canada by the sheer might of his determination to succeed and his extraordinary self-confidence and focus. I always found him to be hard to live up to and spent years trying to live down to him instead. He felt that I had been given opportunities that he never had and I think he envied me for that. He and I had typical father and son conflicts,and I inherited his stubbornness, which meant that I was unwilling to admit it when he was right.
Even now, as I reflect about my relationship with him, I recognize how strained it was and how I wish that we had both respected each other more. He was a very accomplished man from humble roots who had charisma to burn and a larger-than-life presence. He was a "happy warrior" who maintained his values throughout his career and never compromised where it mattered most. It feels as if a void has opened up. That this world is less one more man of his generation -- a generation which did not eschew self-sacrifice and loyalty.
As we become more time-managed, distracted and coarsened by our lives that are circumscribed by the consumerist ethos of "more still" to placate the shallow needs of our own vanity and when we have slid into this festering hole of non-committal relativism underscored by a mistrust of social institutions, we are left softened at our edges and hollow at our core. To witness the lives of those who reflect a time in which standards existed and when values mattered is almost to be marveling at a museum display.
My father was a product of a simpler time, a time when the world was framed in dualities and not multiplicities. Obviously, significant and progressive changes have happened since then that he wasn't resistant to, and even helped to bring into being, yet for all of this, he was a man of his era and he did not swim easily with the currents that were to follow.
He did not go gently into that good night. He will be missed.