wIll cAmPBEll

Google Street View’ing your e-mail

Canada’s privacy commissioner says Google broke a national privacy law when its fl eet of Street View cars captured per-sonal e-mails, phone numbers and other information from wireless access points across the country.

Jennifer Stoddart said Tues-day an investigation by her of-fi ce has found the California-based search giant didn’t know its cars were picking up per-sonal Internet communications from unsecured Wi-Fi networks as they rolled along Canada’s streets taking photographs.

“Nobody had an idea that it involved collecting unprotected information as well,” she told the House of Commons privacy committee.

A report by her offi ce found the “inappropriate” snooping was in violation of a Canadian law restricting how private companies collect and use per-sonal information.

It said a “careless error” by Google allowed the cars’ soft-ware to capture wireless In-ternet transmissions, which included e-mail account pass-words, and even a list of people’s names and medical history.

The Street View cars, recog-

MAKING GOOD ON MUSIC COUPLAND ON THE FUTURE

cArA SABATINI

By virtue of necessity“I don’t think modern people can believe in virtue,” said Dr. Jordan Peterson at last week’s lecture, “On the Necessity of Virtue.” The event was part of Hart House’s annual Hancock Lecture and parallel program-ming, ongoing until the end of next month.

Organizer and lead staff advi-sor Day Milman describes the Hancock Lecture as a platform to encourage dialogue. Exem-plifying Hart House’s new la-bel as a “living laboratory,” the event creates “an open environ-ment for new and old ideas to be discussed,” says Milman. Controversy is welcomed and expected: “we are not afraid of having controversial subjects because we try to engender a civil way of addressing these topics.”

On the topic of virtue, Dr. Pe-terson’s key tenet was, “A virtu-ous life justifi es being itself.” In slight evangelical intonation, Peterson claimed that life is inevitable suffering, for “pain transcends rational argument.” So did his speech. When I asked if he successfully addressed the “necessity” of being virtuous, Milman answered that Peterson was not the kind of lecturer who supplied a “linear argument,” but rather presented “a part in a series of ideas.”

Clinician and revered U of T psychology professor, Peterson referenced such experiments as Stanley Milgram’s, but most of his arguments came from more

divine sources. Admittedly shocked at the fact himself, his words echoed those of various religious texts, offering, “If you re-ally don’t know what the hell you’re doing, follow a moral code.”

Though his argument seemed to call for some kind of intro-spection in navigating a virtuous path, Peterson warns against self-consciousness. It pulls us away from engaging, or “being,” in the world, into self-absorp-tion. This resonates with the U of T student in chronic contem-plation of what she should do with her life – burdened with how to change the world for the better with such a quality edu-cation. Peterson responded to

Dr. Jordan Peterson presents his argument for “The Necessity of Virtue”

a question from the audience with, “A lot of people will try to fi x the planet, but they can’t fi x their car.”

So we should be rather than think about what to be. Yes, life is suffering, but what in our lives makes the suffering worth it? To this Milman said, “if you don’t know yourself, you don’t know your own suffering.”

In an effort to help students in this endeavor, the Hancock program is hosting a workshop on autobiographical songwrit-ing. These workshops are tar-geted towards students - an aim that the program didn’t quite fulfi ll in last week’s lecture, at-tracting a large audience of gen-

eration x. “Sing Your Life” takes place Thursday at 6pm in Hart House’s South Dining Room. Students will have a chance to perform their work in next week’s Open Mic Night (so everyone can share in the suffering?).

Peterson warns against intro-spection, but urges to his audi-ence, “know yourself.” In what seemed a preemptive reply to this contradiction, Peterson stated a necessity to “be cau-tious about being the judge of ‘being;’ there may be a lot of things you don’t know.”

What I do know is that I en-tered the theatre expecting to add more insufferable lecture hours to my day. But I was so en-gaged I completely forgot about what to do with my impractical pursuit in the humanities. Now who can I see about a lesson in auto-mechanics?

INSIDE

HORSES ON BUNS

nized by the orb-like camera rig mounted on the roof of the vehicles, roam the country’s streets taking panoramic snap-shots of neighbourhoods, which are then used in Google’s online mapping service.

Google also outfi tted the cars to capture information about wireless Internet networks. The data is supposed to help smart-phone users navigate the map-ping service.

“In doing that, they also got personal information that was unencrypted and not password-protected,” Stoddart said.

Her offi ce dispatched a team of investigators to Google’s headquarters earlier this year after international reports of company vehicles recording wireless Internet communica-tions.

They found that a Google programmer added a feature to the Street View fl eet’s captur-ing software in 2006 which let the cars “sample” some of the information transmitted on the publicly-accessible wireless net-works they passed.

The addition was made by an engineer who failed to notify a Google lawyer about the pro-gram – a violation of company policy.

The software is used by all of Google’s camera-equipped vehicles, which map streets on seven continents.

Stoddart said that Google screened all of the Street View software before it was installed, but failed to catch the illegal code, which was outside the scope of the company’s review process.

“This is not something that was done intentionally. This is something that was done with-out Google being aware of the fact that they were scooping up the personal information.”

Stoddart, whose offi ce is cur-rently investigating Google for another possible privacy breach, added that Canadians should ensure their wireless networks are secure, and not open to passers-by.

She recommended the com-pany delete all the wireless in-formation it collected in Cana-da.

She also called on Google to do a better job informing its employees of privacy laws, and make sure its products are more thoroughly reviewed before re-lease.

Germany’s data protection

October 21, 2010University of Toronto’s Independent Weekly Vol. XXXIII N0.

the newspaper

Arts EditorCara Sabatini

2 October 21, 2010

the newspaperEditor-in-Chief

Helene Goderis

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ContributorsSuzie Balabuch, Dave Bell, Will Campbell,

Dan Christensen, Andrew Gyorkos, Anna Marszalek, Aaron Zack

the newspaper1 Spadina Crescent, Suite 245

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The Life Raft

Mark KingwellPhilosophy bakes no bread

Picture this: civilization as we know it has crumbled. The few survivors are boarding a vessel that will carry them to the new world - where they will re-build - and only one seat remains. All of academia must vie for it using their most deadly weapon: reasoned dis-course.

We have chosen Mark Kingwell as the fi rst apocalyptic refugee to plead his case in defense of philosophy. Kingwall is an established author, academic, journalist and teacher. He

has published 15 books (in the diverse fi elds of political philosophy, cultural theory, aesthetics and some more ir-reverent works), written for every me-dia rag worth its salt (New York Times, Globe and Mail, This Magazine, The *ahem* Varsity), and garnered some impressive accolades (The Spitz Prize, an Honorary Doctorate from NSCAD). He is best known around campus for his years as the dynamic professor of PHL100 - Intro to Philosophy.

-Diana Wilson

My fellow travellers:I’m going to leave aside the

obvious point that, if push came to shove, you could combust my body for energy or consume it

2. The argument from con-ceptual clarifi cation. You think you know what ‘real’ means. I can assure you that you don’t. It may take a while.

3. The argument from dis-ciplinary investigation. The English philosopher R. G. Col-lingwood liked to imagine a scenario in which he confronts a physicist or medico and asks, with deepening emphasis, why they carry on the way they do. At some point, he notes, they will get frustrated and angry and just shout the equivalent of “It’s just what we do.” They as-sume, in other words, some ‘ab-solute presuppositions’ which are the conditions of possibil-ity, typically tacit, of physics or medicine. Philosophers think it’s their job to make those tacit assumptions explicit. We’re

pretty good at it, and yes, it does tend to make people angry. As a former student of mine said, “At parties people are always shouting at me, ‘Stop telling me what I’m trying to say’.”

4. The argument from lit-erary diversion. Dialogues, fragments, poems, koans, med-itations, confessions, treatises, critiques, essays, discourses, investigations, prolegomenas, tractatuses, notebooks, re-fl ections, prefaces, polemics, manifestos, Philosophy is not literature in the sense of being fi ctional, but it is literary in the sense of always having a form. We’ve got all that covered.

5. The argument from crowd control. Noble lies, useful fi ctions, advice about cruelty and deception for princes and kings. We’ve got all that covered too. This could get messy, but you are in safe hands.

6. The argument from the meaning of life. Well, yes, there’s that. Philosophers aren’t necessarily wiser or better than other people. Many of them are quite nasty, to be honest. But at least they’re honest.

Of course, everything present-ed in arguments (1) through (6) is in the nature of distraction. Worse, such arguments surren-der the fi eld in advance to bad assumptions about utility—as if philosophy needs to be rescued from its uselessness. This can-not be done. Philosophy bakes no bread.

But it’s also the case that man does not live by bread alone. The paradox of philosophy is that you can only see that it’s worth doing when you’re al-ready doing it. And so you can-not convince who hasn’t started that it is worth starting. It fol-lows that you can never do phi-losophy for the fi rst time. And so, fi nally:

7. The argument from be-cause. I have questions for you, not answers; I offer prob-lems rather than solutions. From your point of view, there is no good reason for me to get this seat. And that’s exactly why you should give it to me.

as food. The same can be said of almost anyone, and there are probably better fuel sources, certainly more delectable gusta-tory opportunities, among my

colleagues.So let me tell you a few of

the things that philosophers do which they think they can do better than other people. This is the sort of thing we say when accused of infi rm purpose or when accosted by some kid at career day who wants to go to law school. Here are the argu-ments we use:

1. The argument from criti-cal thinking. Yes, philosophy is good for the brain. Argument is the derivation of conclusions from premises. Can’t tell what counts as a premise? Can’t say whether a derivation is valid or not? Come to us. Even the most apparently rational people are bad at argument. They just are. It’s not their fault. But refusing to do something about it is. Yes, this is why philosophy majors do so well on the LSAT.

The Opinion

3October 21, 2010 the news

You may have noticed some-thing peculiar about the world’s most charming and iconic search engine recently. You may have noticed that particu-lar tool, once so humble and pa-tient, has turned into an over-bearing tyrant, telling you what

you want before you’re even able to know such a thing for yourself. In short, you may have noticed Google Instant.

Trumpeted by those Silicon Valley boffi ns as the most ef-fi cient thing since slave labour, Google Instant aims to revo-lutionise the way information is obtained online not only by

providing auto-complete sug-gestions, but also by perform-ing the searches as you type. So, for example, Google will spit out pages about Canadian Tire, Costco, and Cougar, and make seven more failed attempts to predict my query, before it re-alizes that I’m actually looking for “Countdown to Ecstasy,” the classic Steely Dan album. I ap-plaud the effort, Google, but I liked you better when you were a patient retriever and not an incessant yappy bastard.

Google has always been de-signed for speedy simplicity, but now it’s being aimed at the sluggish simpleminded, as if it doesn’t even trust its users to

know what they want from it. In the offi cial unveiling video, there’s a particular quip, spoken by an elderly man who’s aghast at how he “didn’t have to press enter” while using Google In-stant, which strikes a bit off. Ap-parently, if you eliminate that pesky little

keystroke, the population of geriatric web-surfers skyrock-ets. And what does that do for general productivity, you ask? Well did you know that Google Instant reduces average search time by anywhere from two to fi ve seconds? Why, with all that new found time, I can fi nally fi n-ish that masterpiece I’ve been writing.

Above all else, Google In-stant is one of those grandiose innovations that exist mainly to gratify itself. Any claims to increased effi ciently are nulli-fi ed when such time will be in-evitably squandered refreshing manic Twitter feeds or wander-ing through Facebook. Not to mention that the weaponiza-tion of online queries can hard-ly be seen as an improvement. Is assaulting users with spastic stabs of haphazardly guessed information really something to be proud of? Somehow, I doubt that this is what web searches have been desperately lacking for all these years.

Google Instant Headache

ANDrEw GYOrKOS

Because the Internet wasn’t distracting enough already

The Debate

TO EAT, OR NOT TO EAT HORSE MEAT

DAV

E BE

LL

DIANA wIlSON

The con

Hold on to your horses! It is likely that my opponent has argued that there is no difference between eating cows and eating horses. But I suggest that there are discernible advantages to eating cows, chickens, tur-keys, and pigs. All of these farm animals (everyday dinner meats) are low input consumers that produce large quantities of meat. Cows and chickens are multi-use: they produce milk and eggs and are also edible. We don’t eat dairy cows typically but that doesn’t mean that humans never have, or that we shouldn’t. These delicious animals are tame, relatively gentle, and fl ightless, making them easy to farm.

Why do we eat farm animals? Once humans con-cluded which animals can be domesticated, each an-imal was put to its best use. Horses are much more valuable to us as transportation, despite their hulking size. In this sense, the question of this debate could be: why do we not ride cows?

Of course, these arguments relate to the productiv-ity of horses and farm animals, not the ethics of con-sumption. If my opponent argues for universalizing meat consumption (why not humans then?), I am left with two options: if I must disagree that all meat should be eaten, then I could argue that 1) no meat should be eaten at all, or 2) only some meats are ethi-cally edible.

Assuming that you have already heard all the argu-ments for the vegetarian lifestyle (no meat), I will argue that there is an ethically relevant difference between horses and cows (some meats). Is there ethical pur-chase in the disparity in taste? Horses are apparently less fl avourful then farm meats. But it may not be un-ethical to eat bad tasting food (case in point, Wendy’s hamburgers, Peeps, certain fl avours of Doritos, corn dogs, Mountain Dew, gyros, sheep’s eyeball, sliders, anything under hot lamps at 7-11, fl esh of the undead, overripe bananas, fi sh that is slightly too salty).

But it may be wrong to consume animals that could be better put to use alive. If we consider maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people as the

morally right position, then we could argue that horses are more benefi cial as trans-portation than as dinner. But to argue that horses produce more energy by quicken-ing transportation then cows do by being eaten, would need factual evidence that I don’t have. Besides, in modern society, we have cars to replace the use of horses. Horses are for leisure, not practical purpose.

What can I conclude? Either that the pleasure of riding horses outweighs the pleasure of eating them and is thereby the most benefi cial (a complex argument if even possible), or that we should not eat horses because eating any meat is wrong. So...go veg, I guess.

Unfair Game: Be it resolved that the consumption of horse meat in circumstances outside of dire neces-sity is wrong.

AArON zAcK

I’m sorry, but horse is just plain delicious. Actu-ally, I take that back. I’m not sorry. Horse is a great alternative to the monotony of cow, so why shouldn’t I eat it?

I could bore you with the science of it (that horse has 40% less calories, 50% more protein and 30% more iron than lean beef), that it has less sodium and even less cholesterol – but that seems superfl uous to the argument at hand. No, this is a debate about the very nature of what we deem acceptable and what we deem taboo in the slaughter of animals for food.

Opponents of the commercial slaughter and sale of horsemeat claim the animals are abused, given drugs not intended to enter the food sup-ply, or are in general mistreated. Be it true or not, these claims only serve to strengthen the ar-gument at hand. Only with a change in the public perception of horses – that they are a source of meat like any other commercially raised animal – can we hope to impose industry regulations that would, in turn, stamp out any alleged mis-treatment of these animals.

Food ethics aside, there is no practical argu-ment for the banning of horsemeat. The taboo association is itself based on outdated standards, when horses were required for fi eldwork and transport, and their role as a food source was auxiliary at best. We now live in a mechanized world where the vast majority of work is carried out by machines, and in which horses, like many other animals whose consumption is considered taboo, often serve no practical purpose beyond recreation.

It is in these recreational roles that these ta-boos continue to survive. We do not eat horses for the same reasons we do not eat dogs – we, as North Americans, associate them with some outdated model of necessity, or place them un-der the protective title ‘pet.’

So again I ask, why not eat horses? Some would argue intelligence as a factor in the continuation of these taboos. But really, is a horse smarter than a cow? Than a pig? Many studies fi nd this not to be the case. In fact, pigs are generally regarded to have intelligences equal to or greater than that of dogs, yet you don’t see anyone lining up to eat Lassie.

Until taboos are overturned and revealed for what they are – outdated models of practicality, no more relevant to our modern lives than superstition is to science – can we consider ourselves progressive and open-minded people, from a culinary perspective at least.

They eat horses, don’t they?

The pro

DAN EPSTEIN

4 October 21, 2010the inside

Sheila Heti’s new novel, How Should a Person Be?, published this month by Anansi Press, is a chronicle of identity. She used five years of her life as source material, and emerged with a portrait of herself. Or, that is, a certain fragment of herself, along with certain fragments of her close friend Margaux, and smaller fragments of other friends and lovers.

It’s the kind of book that en-velopes you in the author’s mind, although it’s never quite clear what the author is confess-ing and what she’s fabricating. But does it matter whether or not something is confession or fabrication? I don’t know. And I’m not quite sure Sheila does either.

There are a few things that are certain – How Should a Person Be? is very fun to read, Sheila’s head is a fun house to hang out in, and Sheila is quite happy be-ing done with figuring out how to be. I sat down with her to talk about some of these things.

You wrote this book based on interviews that you con-ducted with your friends. I got the impression some-where that you went into interviews with friends knowing what you wanted to find out. Is that true?No, that’s not the truth. When I was taping Margaux, it was just a lot of taping. We’d go somewhere and I’d be taping and we’d go somewhere else and I’d be taping, and taping other people too. But there’s not

Sheila Heti on how a person should besomething specific I was trying to get out of it apart from try-ing to understand how people talk – I was interested in seeing what dialogue really sounded like. So taping and transcribing – I was more interested in that than anything else.

And was that - as the nar-rative goes in the book - geared towards possible dialogue for a play?I don’t know why I really start-ed. I was working on a play at the time, but I’m not sure. I bought this tape recorder and it seemed like the right thing to do at the time. It was just one of those instincts – you don’t know why but it feels right.

Something that constantly tripped me up as a reader and especially preparing for this interview is the line between the persona that you’ve created in the book and the author that you are. This is something that you’ve commented on, saying that this book is entirely fiction, but with a non-fiction truth beneath it – that it shouldn’t be read as a memoir. Could you elaborate on that differ-ence? What’s the dynamic that you’re trying to create between truth and fiction?Well I wouldn’t say that it’s en-tirely fiction – a lot of the stuff that happened in the book hap-pened to me but the reason that I keep saying that it’s not mem-oir is that I think the motiva-tion of memoir is so different from what my motivation was. To me a memoir is someone

trying to write about their life with the hope of putting some kind of story together based on their life. When I was writing this book what I was trying to do was understand this ques-tion, “how should a person be?” - which was a real question for me at the time - and use my life, look at my life the way that I would look at a character’s life. So that’s my way of understand-ing the world, through fiction. I used my life as material for fic-tion in the hopes of being able to live beyond this question. So the actual book itself has fiction and it has non-fiction and it has thinking and dialogues, but it’s really a mix of everything be-cause I wasn’t concerned about creating fidelity or infidelity to my life.

There’s a passage in the book where Sheila is hav-ing a conversation with a man named Solomon and the two of you get to the topic of the Israeli consti-tution, or rather the lack of an Israeli constitution, and there’s a great quote, where Solomon says, “If you don’t write a book by which to rule yourself, you are opening the door to all kinds of things that only God knows.” Is that what this book is supposed to be for you? Is it what it ended up being for you?Yeah, a little bit. To me, it’s not really clear what are the laws by which you should rule yourself. We don’t have much fidelity to any religion in the kind of circles I run in. You just kind of make it up. I think that it’s worth

thinking about it and writing it down, and writing it down for me is narrative, because narra-tive is a really moral form. And so if I can write down a moral narrative that involves me - as I, in some way, understand my-self - then maybe I can live in a more orderly way, according to my deepest convictions. And for me, I learn what my deep-est convictions are by writing fiction. I learn what I think is moral by writing fiction. I can’t really just sit down and think “well what’s the most important thing I should have fidelity to in my life?” It has to take five years of work.

How did you learn that? Was it when you were writ-ing stories or writing Tic-knor?It was after Ticknor – a few years after I wrote Ticknor, it was realizing that if I looked at Ticknor or thought about it, I could remind myself of certain ways not to be. At the time that I was writing Ticknor I didn’t un-derstand that, but now I think that if you’re going to be para-noid about people, you’re gonna end up as this miserable, alone man in a room who can’t even go to a party. So then I realized that I can use my own fiction in this way.

When you were writing Tic-knor, did you start to relate to that character?I became that character.

Yeah, I read that you were sort of playing him in your day-to-day life.We can’t help it because if

you’re writing that kind of thing every day, it just becomes part of the way you think. So it’s like an actor who plays a role in a movie – they’re really happy to have that movie done so they can sluff that off. For me it’s the same with writing.

So was creating a character or persona for yourself a way of purging yourself of the character that was not you that was taking over?That’s interesting – I mean, it was partly me. It’s like when you write a book there’s a part of yourself that you’re empha-sizing and you’re thinking about and the other parts become very small, so the “How Should a Person Be?” part of myself be-came very big. I was very look-ing forward to the book being done because I know from my experience writing Ticknor, that once the book was done I would be able to move on and change. Cause the thing is when you’re writing a book you can’t change. You’ve got to be the same person five years later who’s the person who started the book or else you can’t finish a book. So somehow if you’re not writing a book, you change at a regular pace – like maybe gradually over five years. But if you’re a book, all those changes kinda get stop-gapped and then once you finish the book then all the changes that would have happened over five years hap-pen quickly.

This interview has been con-densed and edited for clarity. To read the full interview, visit thenewspaper.ca.

DA

N E

PSTE

IN

5October 21, 2010 the inside

Douglas Coupland presents the futuremArTIN wAlDmAN

Setting his name alongside notable past contributors like Noam Chom-sky, John Raulston Saul and Mar-garet Atwood, Douglas Coupland is currently in the midst of present-ing the 2010 Massey Lecture. Since the release of his first novel, Gen-eration X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture in 1991, Coupland has been considered one of Canada’s preem-inent writers, with a particular gift for well-timed and astute cultural observation.

In addition to his success as a writer, Coupland has also special-ized in visual arts, especially typog-raphy, photography, and sculpture. His work includes key contribu-tions in design and sculpture to the CityPlace park taking shape along the Gardiner Expressway between Spadina and Bathurst.

Considering his diverse back-ground, it perhaps shouldn’t have come as a surprise when it was re-vealed that Coupland would break with convention and, for the first time ever, present a piece of fiction at the Massey Lectures.

Player One – What Is to Become of Us?: A Novel in Five Hours will be presented in five parts, in five different cities across Canada. De-spite a hectic touring schedule that includes criss-crossing the country a few times, Douglas Coupland took the time to answer some questions about his newest composition, the future, and, of course, Canadian identity.

Hello Douglas.Hi Martín Waldman and U of T

We’re very interested to hear more about your ex-perience as a Massey Lec-turer.Thanks for your interest.

What were you doing when you found out about the offer to present a Massey Lecture?Life as usual. But I remember almost exactly two years ago the pressure was on to say yes or no the day of Margaret At-wood’s lecture at Vancouver’s Chan Centre. She did such an amazing job and I wanted to try and live up to the level of expec-tation she set. She did lectures on debt that came out the week of the Crash.

Player One is the first piece of fiction to be presented at the Massey Lectures. What led you to decide to write a piece of fiction instead of the usual essay lecture for-mat?Many. At first I thought I might do a pure dictionary, but I couldn’t figure out a way of making that work across five

live hours. And as I’ve never really attended lectures be-fore (art school boy) I thought I’d best find my own way. Fic-tion is actually very subversive that way. You can pull people through huge swaths of ideas and they won’t even know it’s a lecture in disguise.

How does the Massey for-mat fit into your own body of work?It was certainly a way of crys-tallizing two decades worth of thought. Certain themes that were embryonic back in the ear-ly 1990s now seem fully born in 2010: the way time no longer feels like time, the way money no longer acts like money, the way being an individual no lon-ger feels like being individual, and the way feeling like you’re a part of a community now feels so different, too. You’re a uni-versity paper, so I can’t imagine you remember any of that era. The seeds of our current mo-

ment were well planted then, I just had to look harder.

How do you expect this al-ternate genre will connect to the different audiences each night?We just did the third lecture last night in Charlottetown (I’m in the plane flying back to Van-couver right now; won’t *that* seem like an impossible luxury fifty years from now.) They’ve been received wonderfully, but I think that’s because I lucked out with three good audiences as well as superb sound tech-nicians. It’s an intimate expe-rience to hear Player One read aloud. It’s not like school at all (says he who only ever went to art school.) It’s a performance, too.

Did you run into any diffi-culties with writing a “nov-el in five hours?”Only large bouts of self-reflec-tion that are good for anybody.

It forced me to unplug and con-sciously and subconsciously fuse everything together. It’s very, very, very, very hard to discon-nect once you’ve experienced a certain level of connectedness in your life.

Did you aim to capture a particular slice of Canadian identity in Player One, or is it a more general look at humanity moving towards the future/the end of the world?I think it’s Canadian because it does have a hopeful ending (some would disagree, but **no spoilers**). Most countries on earth don’t have much futurity at the moment. We missed the bullet in Canada, so we need to use the calm that stems from this safety to figure out smart, unpanicky next steps for every-body.

In some of your most re-cent pieces (for example,

your article in the Globe and Mail on October 8th), you seem to look towards the future with a sense of inevitability.It was as sort of parody of pes-simism. The editors called it ‘Radical Pessimism’ which I thought was funny. (The only people who don’t think I’m a pessimist are the real pessi-mists.)

Why are we powerless to slow down our “prog-ress?”This conversation could go in many sorts of ways. But I do believe in technological deter-minism, which is to say, sooner or later someone would have invented TV, sooner or later someone would have invented chip architecture, and sooner or later someone would have in-vented the Internet. It was all a matter of when, not if. So like it or not, the next technologically predetermined invention is go-ing to happen to us. We don’t know what it is, but it’s going to happen, and probably annoy-ingly soon, before we’ve even had a chance to digest Google. Probably some jerk in a garage in California, the way it always seems to happen. Ontario, get your bright young kids some garages.

Kids that are now ap-proaching their teenage years have only known a world with the Internet. Are you worried for them?

No. I’m fascinated to see how lives of pure, saturated con-nectedness are going to make modern young people have new ideas and make new art. It’s re-ally really exciting. I think that’s what people aren’t getting right now – the way rules are being rewritten for everything in our lives. It keeps me up at night with anticipation.

On the future of Canadian identity: what new images will replace the stubbies, toques, maple syrup and Mounties that serve as rep-resentations of our culture currently?Stem cell research. Athletic ex-cellence. Profound art. Waking up in the morning and being glad it’s a new day.

Thanks Doug.Thanks, U of T.

Douglas Coupland will be pre-senting Player One as the 2010 Massey Lecture in Toronto on October 29th at Convocation Hall. b

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6 October 21, 2010the arts

SuzIE BAlABuch

Classical music is an intimi-dating, albeit beautiful, genre of music. In this day and age, practically every musical prod-uct on the market comes with some form of super approach-able visual stimulation to keep the listener interested. So, how does an antiquated type of mu-sic with no sexy video content to speak of draw in the young lis-teners of today?

The potential answer lies in a new effort put forth by U of T Doctorate of Musical Arts Student Alex McLeod of Ton Beau Quartet. Starting Decem-

Musical Enlightenment for Students, Strings Attached

ber 1st at the U of T Art Centre, this group of young music grad students will present a concert series on portraiture in music, with pieces by composers rang-ing from Beethoven to Stravin-sky. “The art offers a sort of sec-ond stream of connection with the music, and it means that there’s a discussion going on, so people can feel empowered to have opinions about what they’re listening to,” says Alex McLeod.

There have been many con-certs hosted in the Art Centre in the past, but the perennial prob-lem is attracting student listen-ers. Ton Beau Quartet hopes to combat this problem by using a

format that’s much more “au-dience friendly” and much less intimidating, or worse, boring. McLeod reflects, “A lot of peo-ple feel uncomfortable with the idea of classical music, or they feel that they should be arriv-ing, ready to listen, so it’s kind of a way of getting past that.”

Following the December con-cert, there will be three more Art Centre concerts in February, March and April to finish up the four-part series, each one focus-ing on audience interaction and visual as well as musical stimu-lation.

As captivating as this concert series sounds, McLeod laments the fact that musicians often

take for granted their extensive musical knowledge, even when dealing with people who have no knowledge of music at all. Secondly, the problem of our “decentralized campus” arises. In a campus as mammoth-sized as St. George, it is difficult to find the prime location to host a future concert series specifi-cally targeted to students who have never listened to classical music before. The idea of at-tracting a new generation of classical music lovers is the goal of Ton Beau Quartet’s next mu-sical endeavour, a campus-wide musical outreach concert series, spanning the various periods of classical music.

Young musicians like McLeod are very aware of the possible demise of classical music with-out innovative ways of getting young listeners involved: “If you can’t make classical mu-sic interesting to university students, you can’t make it in-teresting to anybody, and it’s dead, it’s finished.” Who would want to live in a world with no Mozart to balance out the Lady Gaga?

For more information about Ton Beau Quartet’s concerts or for ideas for where to host the next series, contact Alex McLeod at tonbeauquartet@gmail.com

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U of T DMA student supplies steppingstone for soon-to-be classical fans on campus

The film reviews

7October 21, 2010 the arts

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From the moment the lights dim, we feel we must be in for a comic book movie. We’re in-formed that this is a DC Com-ics production, but unlike those fi lm adaptations that wear their source material format on their sleeves (Sin City, another Bruce Willis-lead feature, or perhaps Watchmen come to mind), there’s no indication anywhere that Red has been based on a comic book.

Oh, wait – does a conspicu-ous, overwhelming lack of real-ism count?

Frank Moses (Bruce Willis) introduces us to his post-CIA

You’ll wish you’d ‘Red’ the comic book insteadlife of lonely monotony (what a shame – all those rugged good looks and no one to share them with), a life only perked up by phone conversations with Sarah Roses (Mary-Louise Parker), a romantically challenged call centre cutie with a harlequin-airport novel addiction.

Just his luck when his house is ambushed and he’s forced to kidnap his new would-be girl-friend (for her safety, of course), and track down all of his old (did I say old? I meant geriatric) CIA buddies (and biddy) to fi g-ure out who’s trying to kill him, including the likes of Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Hel-en Mirren, and Brian Cox.

Wait, haven’t we seen this premise – the oldies coming back to kick some ass – recent-ly? Like really recently in The Expendables? Oh well, I sup-pose we can forgive the some-what cliché premise, only this isn’t the fi lm’s biggest downfall.

It suffers from sloppy sto-rytelling, such as multiple in-stances of unimaginative ex-position, as well as frigidity towards its characters. Early on, upon being reunited with Willis after years, Freeman’s charac-ter gives an awkward, unsolic-ited announcement that he’s 84 and has stage four liver cancer - hardly naturalized chit-chat.

Then later, after he is (obvi-

ously) the fi rst character who is killed, his “friends” act as if they barely knew him, showing no sign of regret, gratitude, or remorse, save for an unceremonious shared drink on the back porch. I guess these ex-CIA geezers have no time for sentimentalism.

As is to be expected from the star-studded cast, the per-formances are the fi lm’s most successful aspect. Malkovich delivers an impressively comic performance as the paranoid wacko.

Cox, a true chameleon, pulls off his Russian ex-commie mas-terfully while sharing a delight-ful and tender romance with the ever elegant and graceful

(and bad ass) Mirren. Alterna-tively, Willis’ attempts to squint his way into our and Louise-Parker’s hearts are foiled, as the pair’s passion remains uncon-vincing.

In the end, Red simply deliv-ers a passable, run-of-the-mill action comedy blockbuster. It’s only a “comic book movie” to the extent that it’s actually based on a comic book. Maybe this is obvious, but my hopes for the fi lmmakers to take advan-tage and provide us with a little more comic book style and fl air were disappointed.

JAmAIAS DAcOSTA

The imagineNative Film and Media Arts Festival kicks off this week, celebrat-ing its 11th year as what is known as the most prominent Indigenous arts festival worldwide.

The four-day festival includes several shorts programs, feature fi lms, docu-mentaries, performance arts pieces, me-dia installations, workshops and panels as well as parties.

A Who’s Who of the Indigenous Arts community, imagineNative features con-tributions from around the world. The themes do not always focus on culture or indigeneity, but showcase many artists who are often under or misrepresented in the fi lm and arts world.

I had an opportunity to review several fi lms featured at the festival. Had I not been familiar with the usual stellar cali-ber of imagineNative fi lms, I would have been slightly alarmed after viewing Ariel Smith’s short, “Dear Diary” (Moonshine Shorts Program 1, Thursday October 21st). “Dear Diary” screens like a fi rst year fi lm school project: pseudo surreal-ism on a low budget with a highly ambig-uous visual narrative. Meh.

Fortunately the other two shorts showed much more promise. Torontonian Shane Belcourt’s “Keeping Quiet” (Thunder-ing Whispers Shorts Program II, Friday October 22nd) features the melancholic story of a lonely parking garage atten-dant seeking companionship through the classifi eds. Samoan Misa Tupou’s “One Night” (also Moonshine Shorts Program) offers a harrowing glimpse into the iso-lating world of a masked homeless man on the desolate nighttime streets of Ho-nolulu’s china town.

The closing night feature fi lm “A Win-digo Tale” includes the screen debut of University of Toronto’s Aboriginal Stud-ies instructor Lee Maracle, who is also a renowned writer within the community. “A Windigo Tale” utilizes the Anishin-abe tradition of the Windigo to tell of the

imagineNative hits the city!devastating effects of residential schools. A meshing of suspense thriller and dra-ma, “A Windigo Tale” leaves a haunting impression and makes for an excellent primer for those unfamiliar with the gen-erational impact of residential schools.

I managed to have a quick Q & A with imagineNative’s MediaMashup perfor-mance artist Tara Beagan, who’s piece “Foundlings” takes place Thursday Oc-tober 21st at the Edward Day Gallery. “Foundlings” is described as the story of a Cree man who becomes the fi rst client of the high-end familial match making service, The Gallery Agency.

This performance piece is described as a “Media Mash Up”. What are some of the mediums that will be used during the presentation of Foundlings?Live performance, video, and the prin-ciple thing that qualifi es it as perfor-mance art is the participation of the au-dience. [Audience members are] treated as though they are shopping for a familial candidate.

The main character, Harmon Re-vienes is described as a “self-actu-alized Cree” What does that mean exactly?He’s a man who’s claimed his place in the world...fi rm in his identity, and has pride in his roots.

The Gallery Agency, described as a “High End Familial Matchmak-ing company” is an intriguing idea. What was the inspiration for this piece?There is an ongoing imbalance as far as parental fi gures go in a lot of northern communities, in particular First Nations, a lot of women raising our children, a lot of absent fathers. There are no direct answers as to why this is. “Foundlings” offers a round about way of having that discussion without laying any blame on anyone’s head.

OurMA & PhDPrograms

focus onthe cultural

history ofthe material

world.Open HouseDatesNovember 14, 11amDecember 5, 11am

RSVPBGC Academic Programs38 West 86th StreetNew York, NY 10024T 212 501 3019F 212 501 3065E admissions@bgc.bard.eduW bgc.bard.edu/admissions

ApplicationDeadlinesFor full-time andpart-time studentsthe deadline isJanuary 3, 2011.

Fellowships andscholarships areavailable forqualified students.

BGC Galleries18 West 86th Street

T 212 501 3074W bgc.bard.edu/gallery

UpcomingExhibitions

New York, NY 10024

Check out imagineNative.org for a full listing of programs and events.

8 October 21, 2010the backpage

the newspaper asks itself:What’s your least favourite part of election season?

Taylor Ramsay, 4.5th year somethingWhat’s the question again?

Cara Sabatini, Ethics, Society, & LawThe fact that Smitherman’s campaign sign obstructs bike locking locations.

Earthworm Jim, Soil SciencesSlimy dirt bags. And birds.

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Josee Matte, Geography & Visual StudiesBad YouTube spoofs.

“ the campus comment ”

Martín Waldman, Poli SciStrategic voting. Oliver Cromwell is dead.

Joe Howell, EnglishHaving to see Rob Ford’s hideous, porcine visage every-where.

Across3. Flimsy shard8. Essay9. Blame10. Copper or iron12. Monument13. Between yellow and red14. Religious table16. Yearning for water18. Mythical medieval creature21. Trend23. Fiction24. Moment25. Rage27. Looked for30. Traffi c cones32. Sporting venue33. Between good and best35. Careless37. Joke40. Liberated41. Go in42. Puff up

Down1. Final2. Character4. Bruce or Spike5. Korean car company6. Yellow fruit7. Industrial run off10. Chicken or beef11. Master15. ___-la-la16. Clusters17. Cache19. Coarse, as a voice20. Lecture scribbles21. Just so you know22. Be killed26. Fish eggs28. Eaves trough29. Water resistant sheet30. Green space31. Duds34. Hearing bits36. Plant to be38. Uncooked39. Nothing

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