Canada Day

Today is a national holiday, so I’m taking the day off.  I get to do that most days, honestly, but I’m doing it with real vigour today.

Don’t party too hard, my fellow Canadians; don’t be like the people down the hall from me, who have already, at 5PM, passed through the stages of conviviality and drunkenness to the point where they’re all just abusive and angry with each other.  Don’t storm around bellowing in a hodge-podge of English and French, the only clearly discernable words in either language being expletives.  Do other things.

An early start

It’s just after 9PM on June 30th here in Ottawa.  The great national orgy doesn’t begin formally for another three hours or so.  It’s rainy and sort of cool, though pleasant enough for me, personally, as that’s how I like it.  Nevertheless, in this great capital of ours one can already hear the frequent explosions of incompetently-administered fireworks and the slurred, drunken singing of someone who’s been at it for the last hour.  Every so often one can even hear the distant sound of that tuneless Spanish soccer chant that is my generation’s poor excuse for joyful noise.  It comes like an infant’s murmur, soft and ominous.

To bitterly mutter that I hope they all die would be uncharitable and wrong, and not a little bit unnecessary anyway because of course they all will.  It’s just awfully hard to work through William Law’s 1728 masterwork exhorting me to a devout and holy life with all these distractions.

I’ll simply keep at it, I guess, and wistfully look forward to my new apartment – to be moved into in August – in which my bedroom is in fact a subterranean cave with no windows.  That should be quiet.  Oh yes it should.

An anniversary and a new year

The indispensable Brian Vissagio of Saint Superman has now been posting his content for a full year, his blog having been started (partially) in response to the Holy Father’s declaration of the Pauline Year, which is just now wrapping up.  Congratulations, Brian, but don’t get too comfortable with that several-thousand-hit lead over yours truly; I’m back on the wagon and determined to catch up.

Incidentally, and as many of you will already be aware, Benedict has proclaimed the upcoming year to be the “Year for Priests,” in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests.  It would be a good idea even apart from this anniversary – what better way to follow up a focus on evangelism and public ministry than with a focus on pastoral work?  I hope that the results of the upcoming year will prove helpful both to priests at large and to those discerning their vocations; while I do not (and never shall) count myself among them, the appalling heroism with which they must so often face the circumstances of their work is inspiring indeed.

St. John V, as quoted by Benedict, really…  well, he really seems to like priesthood:

“Without the Sacrament of Holy Orders, we would not have the Lord. Who put him there in that tabernacle? The priest. Who welcomed your soul at the beginning of your life? The priest. Who feeds your soul and gives it strength for its journey? The priest. Who will prepare it to appear before God, bathing it one last time in the blood of Jesus Christ? The priest, always the priest. And if this soul should happen to die [as a result of sin], who will raise it up, who will restore its calm and peace? Again, the priest… After God, the priest is everything! … Only in heaven will he fully realize what he is”.

Benedict’s response at first seems like something of an understatement (”These words, welling up from the priestly heart of the holy pastor, might sound excessive”), for there’s much in there that frankly horrifies on a superficial reading.  The key is to understand that St. John V is describing something relational rather than causal, or at least not causal in the direction that it seems.  He says, for example, “without the Sacrament of Holy Orders, we would not have the Lord.”  Obviously he does not mean that if it weren’t for Holy Orders there would be no God; priests do not create God.  What he’s saying is that where you find the one, you will necessarily find the other; God and the Sacraments go hand in hand.  Each of his statements has a relational implication that must be acknowledged: the priest welcomes and feeds your soul, but he does not create or give you your soul; the priest prepares your soul for God and bathes it in the blood of Christ, but he is not God and he is not Christ.  For the priest to do the things he does there must be God, first and foremost, as the Subordinating Other (if I may express something so beautiful in such lame terms).

Whatever the case may be, times are hard for priests – for reasons alternately legitimate and dubious – and we would do well to remember them, both as a body and as specific individuals, in prayer and thanksgiving.  I’m sure the coming year will offer many opportunities for both.

An encounter with the past

A thirteen-year-old boy in England gave up his iPod for a week to use a thirty-year-old Sony Walkman instead.  The results are strangely delightful:

From a practical point of view, the Walkman is rather cumbersome, and it is certainly not pocket-sized, unless you have large pockets. It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.

When I wore it walking down the street or going into shops, I got strange looks, a mixture of surprise and curiosity, that made me a little embarrassed.

[. . .]

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.

Do read the whole thing; it’s short and surprisingly well-written.

I’m old enough to remember – and to have had – Walkmans, though of a somewhat sleeker variety than the ominous silver doorstop with which young Scott Campbell was saddled.  It’s easy to forget that there’s a whole generation of kids out there now who were born in such scandalously recent years as 1996 and for whom the trappings of my particular childhood are as foreign and appalling as were those of the generation that preceded mine.  I came too late for 8-Track and Beta, but the children’s shows I watched still made jokes about them.

Perhaps decades from now urchins will look back with disdain upon the clumsy necessity of using one’s fingers to operate electronics.  They’ll pause between infusions from their subcutaneous nutrient packs to express their scorn to their real-time data feed’s subscriber base.  Somewhere, a man will sigh.

Meanwhile, the third of the world’s population that has no access to computers or high-level electronics will continue to live a real and notably human life.

Tomorrow Series update

Having finished the second book in John Marsden’s Tomorrow Series (I wrote about the first one here, a few days ago), I can now definitively state that the series is by no means suitable for any children ever.  Things that were only hinted at in the first book, in terms of both violence (which is somewhat defensible in context) and sex (less so), become almost unbearably graphic in the second.  It will probably be like that for the rest of the series, too, so we’ll see about that, but in the meantime I’ll just reiterate my call for extreme caution on the part of anyone intrigued enough by the concept to pass the recommendation on.

More festing

The line-up for the free portion of the Ottawa Bluesfest – to take place in the ByWard Market downtown – has been announced, and it’s sort of exciting.  A swell bunch of performers are set to perform in the no-doubt choked-to-a-standstill market, but there are two who have caught my eye and will surely give me cause to brave the crowds.

July 9th will see a free performance by George Clinton and the P-Funk All-Stars.  Not typically my sort of music, but, well, I enjoyed it back in high school and I don’t hate it now by any means and it’s George Clinton giving a free show.  I’d be foolish not to go.

July 13th will present a horse of a distinctly different colour in the form of Serena Ryder, whose music I’ve never really heard before but about whom my enthusiastic mother (among others) has been unable to say enough.  I suppose a free show will be as good a way to get acquainted with her as any.

All in all, this whole thing is shaping up to be very interesting.  I’ll start saving now for next year’s Festival, in fact, so that I can attend as much of it as I want to.

On my way

I had always hoped that this would transpire one day, but I never suspected it would happen this soon or this easily.

The sprawlingly enormous Ottawa Blues Festival will be starting soon (July 8th, to be precise), and there’s a heck of a lot of talent lined up. There’s some I don’t quite understand as inclusions at a blues festival, like KISS and Ice Cube, but most of the dozens of performers are tangentially related to the field.

There’ll be a lot of folks there that I want to see. Jeff Beck. Joe Cocker. The gypsy rock band DeVotchKa (most famous for their work on the score for Little Miss Sunshine). Loreena McKennitt. The Brian Setzer Orchestra. Lots more besides. Unfortunately, however, they’re spread out over a number of days, and I am only a poor impecunious student. It’s about $40 just to attend one day, but there are discounts the more days you buy. A full pass is around $225, which is pretty good considering the thing runs from the 8th to the 19th, but I don’t want to see all of it, don’t want to spend over a week at the same concert, and certainly don’t intend to still be in town by the 18th anyway.

So I bought a ticket for one day – Sunday, July 12th. Joe Cocker plays that day – nice! So does noted English hip-hop singer Estelle – fair enough. But really it’s just a lot of stuff I’ve never heard of.

Except for at 7:30PM, when – the point of this post – Neko Case takes the stage.

Regular readers will know how pleased I am that this should be so.

The death of an icon

So, Michael Jackson.  I’m about the least competent commentator on this subject in the entire world, his general ouevre having passed me by more or less completely, but there have been some elements to all of this that have intrigued me.

I’ve heard some of his songs.  They were pretty good.  I get that they were excellent and groundbreaking in terms of pop music, but, shit son, it’s just pop music.  Amazing pop music is only pretty good music, and it has to struggle even to be that, a lot of the time.  Jackson’s music seemed to me to always be fighting against its own artificiality.  There were times when a certain authenticity came through – “Ben” is a good example – but it would be hard to describe something like “Billy Jean” or “Black or White” as being in any sense innovative or accomplished in terms of music.  The chief draw of the man for me was always his dancing and his wider sense of the theatric.  It’s hard to watch something like the video for “Thriller”, or again, “Black or White,” and not be impressed in spite of one’s self.  There was a real talent there, and a deft hand in how he presented himself and his associates, and he used both for all they were worth.  One might be scandalised that so much time and money were spent in the production of mere music videos, but at least it can be said that you can easily see how both time and money were spent.

But man, he was pretty weird.  Most of it is basically proverbial by now so I don’t intend to spend any time ennumerating his list of sins and misdeeds, whether actual or only suspected.  It remains the case that he was a man who suffered much and who led an awful and in some ways monstrous life, and whatever his desserts may be at this, its relatively early end, it would likely be safe to say that “well done thou good and faithful servant” will not be the Lord’s immediate and heartfelt response.

All of which underscores something that bothers me quite a bit.  I understand that using the occasion of a man’s death as a platform for ideological grandstanding is unseemly, but I get so few opportunities to do it, after all.

The messages of support and remembrance that I’ve been seeing on message boards and comment sections about Jackson’s passing have all been pretty positive.  “Your music was great and we’ll miss you.”  Fair enough.  A goodly number of them, though, have taken the basically necessary form of “you were weird and you did some bad stuff with kids, but your music was great so it’s all good.”

Well, great; how charitable of you all.  “You were apparently a pederast, but you were also the King of Pop so we’re fine with it in the final analysis.”  Mighty fine of you, one and all.

A man molests some children (purportedly) and gives us pop music in exchange and it’s basically fine.

But, say, a centuries-spanning Church runs an entire network of universities and hospitals, and gives hundreds of millions of dollars to charity every single year, and performs a thousand other acts of kindness for the impoverished and the sick and the threatened and the sad throughout the world, and man, when trouble comes along, people can’t call it quits on the whole thing fast enough.  We’re the most corrupt and dangerous and destructive force in the history of mankind.  We’re the source of all human suffering.  Our immediate dissolution is necessary for the safety and succour of the world.

Maybe we should have moonwalked.

“Marx was too busy being clever to be correct”

The incomparable Vernunft of The New Skeptic (just try to compare him to something; it’s impossible) has a delightful post about the unfortunate tendency found among capitalism’s greatest critics to telescope capitalism into a Theory Of Everything rather than just accepting it as a smaller component of a larger worldview:

Capitalism is a tool; the purpose has to exist beforehand, and the tool has to be fit for that purpose. Capitalism cannot make a people adopt an ethical viewpoint; if, however, a people’s ethics values prosperity and material goods, then capitalism will allocate human and other resources in an efficient way for that people. Because capitalism substitutes market forces for central planning, a people with individualist politics will find it conducive to an enjoyable life free from undue interference. That’s why capitalism seems to be such a dominant ideology – it gives some people what they wanted with minimal effort. It works. It can’t fulfill every need, but it is designed to fulfill the material needs efficiently so that there is little waste; whatever else a person is disposed to seek, he can devote more resources to seek it under capitalism than under a more wasteful system. If he is a mere consumer, then capitalism will dominate his life – not because of capitalism, but because of his constitution. Marx essentially blamed a theory for the failings of individuals.

You can see the foolish thing being done here, albeit in a manner Vernunft didn’t specifically have in mind when he wrote the above.  Stuart Jeffries’ insistance that French president Nicolas Sarkozy needs to read more Hegel is bizarre on a number of fronts, not least of which is the fact that “read more Hegel” is only ever the proper course of action when the deficiency being remedied is something like clear thought or simply being alive.

Jeffries makes a number of absurd errors quite apart from that, though.  Let’s take a look at the most relevant:

Such is the freedom of late capitalism, which seems to systematically strive to deprive us of an identity that we might construct ourselves.

Here is the error in its fullest manifestation; “capitalism” does not strive to do anything, or deprive anyone of anything.  It is an abstract concept, and a subordinate one at that.  It does nothing, and strives for even less.  What people do with it, however, is another thing altogether, and Mr. Jeffries would have done well to have limited his commentary to that particular issue.

It’s also the case that describing it as “late capitalism” is indefensible; Mr. Jeffries, whatever he may or may not think of himself, is not a seer of the future and thus does not know what that future holds for capitalism.  For all he knows this could still be very early days for it, even by his own problematic understanding of the idea.  More importantly, however,  “capitalism” is not some mere fashion to which people voluntarily subscribe and that just waxes and wanes in popularity.  It makes no more sense to speak of “late capitalism” than it does to speak of the latter days of the second law of thermodynamics or the infancy of inertia.  Capitalism describes very well what happens when people freely exchange goods and services, just as the laws of motion (for example) describe very well what happens when bodies move and collide.  Neither set of ideas describes much beyond that, though: Newton’s first law is not a literary theory; capitalism is not a government.

The Holy Father’s new, much-delayed and exahaustively-researched encyclical on finance and social justice is scheduled to be released on June 29th – the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul – and I look forward to it with great interest and not a little anxiety.  Interest because it will no doubt be excellent, and anxiety because the world’s media is gearing up even as we speak to condemn it as either right- or left-wing propaganda, depending on which sections of the document they choose to emphasize in their editorials.  It won’t actually be as easy as that, of course, but never let it be said that the media can’t find a way to reduce something beautifully complex into something stupefyingly simple.

I don’t understand it

With the exception of the truly enormous and gratifyingly popular post about the Eucharistic desecration fiasco last year, this post, about nothing important whatsoever, is the most popular and widely-distributed one I’ve ever made.  On any given day it still gets the most hits out of every single post ever.  How bizarre.

A post about the Belgian comic book character Tintin is the third most popular.  I guess these things just happen.