felis_ultharus

Marched in the Pride parade again. Haven't missed marching in about a decade, I think, though it terrifies me being at the centre of such a large crowd. I hold on tightly to my banner and don't let go, and it's okay.

But it's still important. And it's still something deeply important to me.

Yesterday, I tabled for the New Democratic Party at community day. We were visited by Jack Layton (leader of the party) and Olivia Chow (our immigration critic). I'd met them before, but they actually hung out awhile. I helped Olivia put up banners.

It was tiring - I've had next to no sleep this week. But it was nice to be part of it again, and tired as I am, I am sad to see it gone so fast.

Also, the rain held off until the parade was over, so it was a rainless parade again. Clearly Mother Nature is on our side :)

So, yeah. Among the books I have on my pile to review is the strangest thing I've ever read - and I speak as a fan of manga, and someone who's read Beautiful Losers, Nightwood, and parts of Finnegan's Wake.

I'm talking about The Malleus Mallificarum, of course - the greatest witch-hunter's manual of the Middle Ages.

( Maybe again the Burning Times? Plus, there's no good answer to the question, 'What does a witch do with stolen body parts?' )

So, yeah. A useful historical text, and good for any writers trying to build a realistic Middle Ages. I wouldn't exactly recommend it as pleasure-reading, though.

In infinitely more pleasurable entertainment, I saw the Scott Pilgrim movie last night with good friends. I'll talk more about the series when I get to reviewing the graphic novel, but I will say this - I'm startled by how well they adapted such a potentially hard-to-film work.

I wasn't thrilled with the choice of actors - I was sceptical more for their appearance and voices than their acting talents - but they all interpreted their parts excellently. Kieran Culkin made a (surprisingly) perfect Wallace Wills.

The ending hadn't been written yet when the film was made. The graphic novel ending is much better. But that's a very high bar and the movie was still really, really good. I highly recommend.

Just thought I'd stop in to wish a happy Lughnassadh/Lammas to those who celebrate it - and a happy August to those who don't.

em_fish and I had a lovely afternoon chez jenjoou today. Other than that, it's been a quiet day of writing (twice my daily quota), and cleaning the apartment (mostly) top to bottom.

I'm not looking forward to another week of lots of overtime this week, though :/

So in my continuing series of reviews, I thought I'd tackle Bioshock, the anti-Ayn-Rand video game.

The short review: brilliant. I mean, I would've played anything that allows me throw lightning bolts and bees at well-dressed Objectivists. But it also had a brilliant story, and (dare I say it for a game?) cinematography. It has a very Orson Welles feel to it. An anti-Atlas Shrugged meets Citizen Kane, 20,000 leagues under the sea.

( Review continues, with mild spoilers only. )

So, yeah - nearly perfect. I'm looking forward to the sequel. I hope the anti-Objectivist stuff continues, though I've barred friends from spoiling it for me. So who knows? Maybe the archvillain will be Alan Greenspan? He did his part in crashing the world economy with Ayn Rand as his co-pilot, so if anyone deserves to be covered in psychically-generated bees, 'twould be him.

On a completely note, here's the best use of stop-animation ever - the last 14 billion years, summarized. Ray Harryhausen, eat your heart out. This must've taken a decade to produce:

'Tis been an extraordinarily busy few weeks. Today was finally a day off, so I've squandered it thus far luxuriously in writing. My vacations tend to involve a lot of running around, and when I returned we'd just moved into the new office space. That meant somebody had to move and unpack most of the sixty-somewhat book-and-paper-crammed black plastic crates.

Everybody else suddenly became very busy. And as I'm lowest on the ladder in administration at my company, all passed bucks stop here. I did get a lot more hours than usual (almost twice as many), which will result in a much better form of passed bucks come payday.

I'm reading so much lately that my to-review pile is taking over my desk. So I'll take on a novel I read early in the year - Fruit by Brian Francis, the hilarious story of a too-pubescent 12-year-old boy who's the only person in Sarnia, Ontario, not to have figured out he's gay.

( Review continues, with a rant! No real spoilers but cut for length )

And if it's ever made into a movie, the theme song will have to be "Chronicles of Sarnia" by Owen Pallett. Actually, this is just an excuse to link to Owen Pallett:

There's more to say than could be said about what happened in Toronto this week. It was revolting what happened to Canadian citizens on Canadian soil. I've seen police brutality close up, of course there was Quebec 2001. But never anything on this scale, never anything so blatant. And never has so much been captured on camera before for us to see.

There's so much I could link, and did on Facebook - which itself was a small fraction of the evil perpetrated there. And let's not mince words or hide behind euphemisms. This was evil. You know it by the awful feeling in your gut when you watch it.

Two things were more haunting for me than anything else - for others too, clearly, as they've gone viral. The first is Tommy Taylor's powerful account on Facebook of his arrest. The other is this moment of peaceful protesters being attacked while they sing "O Canada." This is now my favourite rendition of our national anthem, and the only one that stirs my patriotism:



Yet 73% of the country think the police did a good job. And that's way too high for the right-wing nutjobs in this nation - after all, only 39% voted for Harper.

I wondered how could anyone think that? How could that be thought after the bloodied journalists and the trapped activists singing hippie protest songs bloodied by batons? While other pictures show police standing by and looking bored while anarchists - in suspiciously new brand-name black clothing - break windows and set fire to police cars?

How could they read the descriptions of the 40-person cages full of peaceful protesters and random passersby (tourists who are never coming back here again) as they stood up for 16, 18, 24 hours with nothing more than a dixie cup or two of water and a toxic sandwich, and not be sickened?

How do they rationalize the targeting of gays, and anyone who spoke French? The lies the police told? The officer who threatened a journalist with rape? The tasering of a man with a pacemaker, the abuse of a man with cerebral palsy? How do they justify the scale - the camera panoramas that show it wasn't just "a few bad apples"?

Then I realized they didn't need to, because they didn't see it and they didn't read it. It's not in their world.

"Two solitudes" is our favourite cliché. It applies here. Not English or French, or central Canada and the rest. Not even the suited men (and one two women) in the conference and the people outside, though there it applies better. In this country, those who got the story mostly through old media and those who got it mostly through new media are the two solitudes. They got two different narratives.

Old media wasn't always awful. The Toronto Star got it right from the first days. CBC and the Globe & Mail - our two great bastions of old media - got better after day one. Even the National Post worked up some outrage.

Most failed absolutely, though. Just a guy breaking a window and a couple of burning police cars. That was the story. While we new media types saw the unedited footage of bloodied innocents and unprovoked assaults, for most old media it was just a story of hooligans captured.

We say that we "consume" old media and "use" new media. But that's simplistic. Both get used, both get consumed. But who does the using, and who the consuming?

The old media moguls make a big show of using new media. They can tweet, they can post to YouTube, they can set up a Facebook account. But they still imagine themselves as the talkers, with others as listeners. They still aren't listeners themselves, which was painfully obvious on the CBC's and Globe's first day of coverage - until journalists they knew were hit. They still don't believe that non-journalists have something worth saying.

I think the violence and horror will probably be one of the defining moments of our generation. That may sound bombastic, but ask someone who was a teen or twentysomething in the Sixties how many hippies they knew - the answer is probably zero, though they now define the era.

But I also think this will be one of the moments where we look back and say, "That was a nail in the coffin of old media." It was one of those moments we called "watershed" when we can easily visualize a gradual change.

No, I won't be cutting this one. I don't want this one to be optional.

Happy (belated) Litha/Solstice to those who celebrate it!

Things are much better this week than last. Another day I might post more about it. But I've got lots of overtime this week, so time is short and I'm not up to my quota of writing.

I did want to say that I have very good friends, though.

Also, how many of you have heard of the Cult of Antinous? Knowing my friends' list, probably quite a few.

For anyone who hasn't, though, Antinous was the beautiful boyfriend of the Emperor Hadrian, one of the best-respected of the Roman emperors. He died in AD 130 - drowned in the Nile, and whether accident or murder is still debated. Hadrian was distraught. He built a city in Egypt (Antinopolis) on the spot where Antinous died. He had statues and monuments to Antinous built. He put his face on coins.

Most of all, he declared him a god. People could and did worship Antinous.

Well, some gay Neo-Pagans have resurrected the worship of Antinous. One of them will be making a guest-post on The Wild Hunt Blog tomorrow.

So congratulations to Iceland and Portugal. Nine countries, a handful of American and one Mexican district, and that's it, so far. About 5% of the world's nations, but everyone that comes over makes it easier for the others - and embarrassing for those that resist.

I need to update my icon. I can't right now, though.

Of course, there are still countries that kill us, still. There are lots of countries that still jail us. Will they move on, or dig in deeper, when they watch the rest of the world move in fits and starts toward sanity?

So I finished watching jPod this week, the Douglas Coupland's TV adaptation of his own book about a team of freakish genius video-game programmers assigned to the same team by computer error because their last names all started with "J." The show also focuses much more than the book on Ethan Jarlewski's freakish family, who are essentially the Brady Bunch as written by Quentin Tarantino.

Nine-tenths of the series is perfect dark comedy. The acting is excellent and breathes a lot of life into characters that were already excellent (though a little icy). And CBC censors nothing except brand names, so it's pretty astonishing what they can get away with.

There were flaws, though.

( Yes, I'm complaining about homophobia again. And I'll keep complaining about it until it goes away. )

Also, I've finally updated my historical blog - only five months late! This one is about Roswell George Mills, the first openly gay man we know of in Canada (in the 1910s).

The party was lovely yesterday. I got to see a lot of friends I've seen too little of. I was showered with lovely gifts as well - though not literally, as two were fragile and some of the books were heavy.

Today, I relaxed. A little bit of writing and a few dishes, but otherwise I vegged. After three weeks of doing almost nothing but cleaning, working, and writing I figure I deserve it. And it's always easier to relax in a clean apartment.