Usually it seems that when there is a crazy snarl of traffic it has something to do with a TTC vehicle crashing into something. While walking back home I came upon this scene at Beverley north of Dundas: bus parked in middle of road with mystery object wedged under tire, surrounded by police tape and many police looking concerned. Last time I saw such a scene it was a streetcar that had killed a cyclist… one hopes that this was something less gruesome.
Sometimes, every road between my apartment and where I park the car just becomes a parking lot. Once, it inspired rage, but now I can just play with my phone. I say that you can totally text (or blog) while driving, at least when your speed never exceeds single digits.
Just re-watching last night’s episode of Fringe, since my cable went on the fritz halfway through. Good episode, at least on par with last season’s stuff, and it seems like the ‘mythology’ or broader story arc of the show is shaping up in a very interesting way. Noticed something really interesting though: when Lance Reddick is trying to justify the Fringe division to his superiors later in the show, they (the superiors) mention the “old X designation,” and it seems that the actor who reads this line was also a ’shadowy committee’ member in the X-files! Also a TV earlier on in the episode shows the X-files… so the show seems to have gone beyond just borrowing the X-files schtick, suggesting that the story has some continuity with the earlier series! But at the same time, it’s a TV show in the Fringe universe? Wacky.
I’ve just spent about half an hour in line for roti at Island Foods in the food court underneath my apartment. They’re always struck by these enormous lineups around lunchtime, and yet still they are closing at the end of the month. Certainly worth the wait though.
I set up an app on my android phone called PostBot so that I can post from out-and-about. It lets me upload images on the go as well, so I thought I’d give it a whirl. Here’s some aerogel at the Air and Space museum in DC.
Noticing that the site had been down for a while, and having finished my thesis, I decided to devote a bit of time to getting it back up. In the process I chose a nice new theme, and perhaps I’ll even write some new stuff!
In the process of doing my research for a presentation I gave a couple weeks ago, I came to a (very old) review of Sokal and Bricmont’s Fashionable Nonsense, written by the erstwhile Richard Dawkins, whose Selfish Gene was actually an important source in this presentation. Shockingly enough, Dawkins quotes Deleuze and Guattari: not something you will probably ever see elsewhere. (Although I did also find an article on JSTOR about this little trio, written in a style Dawkins would almost certainly deem abhorrent.) He more or less discards them out of hand as obscurantists, on the basis of one citation from Guattari and one from Deleuze, which he certainly just picked out of Sokal and Bricmont, taking them at their word. All the better for these scientific ideologues; all the worse for Dawkins’ grasp of philosophy. What follows is a brief ‘meta-review’ of Dawkins’ review, which seeks to ask some pose some basic philosophical questions about the unstated premises of scientist-demagogues like Dawkins, and the prejudices to which they give rise.
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here’s a revision of the piece I wrote a while back on Foucault and the wire, worked up for publication in UBC’s film journal Cinephile.
if you liked the old one, you’ll dig this. if you didn’t, i may have addressed your objections to it – or you might have come up with some new ones. it’s worth taking a look anyway. pre-publication release! complete with some hilarious comments from me, trying to figure out how to fix some especially unwieldy passages. (i hope this is OK. dewaard, if you read this and it isn’t, you should prolly let me know. haha) oh, and if you notice any glaring mistakes or omissions, please do let me know. (or if you can answer any of the questions in my comments!!!)
here it is: ‘dramatizing individuation: insitutions, assemblages, and the Wire.’
Prof. Steven Shaviro posted on his blog a few days ago a brief meditation on Daniel Day-Lewis’ (now Oscar-winning) performance in There Will be Blood, responding to Salon’s rather scathing review of said performance. Quite a fascinating post really, and one which linked to and generated a number of very interesting comments. Definitely worth taking a look, particularly for those of us who aren’t satisfied with just enjoying a wonderful movie like this, and insist upon analysing it theoretically (with reference, of course, to M. Deleuze).
While reading his post and the resultant comments, I was left hesitating between the implicit claims being made by Shaviro and by commenter LB: isn’t there a much more productive and Deleuzean way of thinking about Daniel Plainview’s character? One which doesn’t neatly fit into the category of ‘nonpsychological subject’ or Homo Economicus, or that of ‘disillusioned but still-sentimental misanthrope?’ And so, instead of getting started on this stack of semiology papers I’ve got to mark, I decided to write up a little dilettantish critique of Day-Lewis’ performance in response to these interesting theses.
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Ah, the humble cigarette. It’s Nature’s little way of exacting revenge on Europe for the whole smallpox-blanket thing in times of yore, a wondrous little abstract machine for killing off people with little interest in living. (And don’t get your hackles up already. I’ve had a family member die of lung cancer just like the rest of us, and I know what it’s like to watch them fade. It’s sad, but it doesn’t make them any smarter: I stand by my statement, and all the increasingly ‘offensive’ ones which are to come.) Given that our economy is still founded more or less on the productivity of living individuals, it’s become understandably fashionable in liberal countries to hate on these little tobacco-sticks. Don’t think that I buy your trumped-up moral arguments for even one second, you anti-smokers. You’re just buying into the ‘healthful’ dogma that you’ve been fed by the powers that be, who for the time being want us living and breathing (at least well enough to show up at work). And so the health nuts haven’t stopped at banning smoking from restaurants (understandable), but have moved on to bars (less so) and are beginning to set their sights on cars, open spaces, and perhaps even prohibition in general. The British have even proposed this absurdity called a ‘smoking licence,‘ while at my university a number of overzealous health nuts are trying to ban cigarette sales in the campus variety store. Maybe smokers will soon have to hide out in a secret room in their basements smoking hydroponically-grown tobacco: it won’t be all bad though, maybe it’ll give tobacco smokers the same appreciation for their hobby that pot smokers have today.