My review of the 2010 Olympic opening ceremonies

I thought it was a bit overly political, honestly. Glorious from a design point of view, but weirdly politicized in terms of content.

I mean, everything made total sense from a Canadian perspective… but that’s also a problem. Instead of making a good show for the world, the Vancouver people made a so-so show that carefully appeased each of Canada’s quirky idiosyncratic hang-ups — a goal much less interesting than we tend to assume.

All the native stuff, for example. Native anything in modern Canada seems to have transformed into the favorite plaything of the elite class, excessively paraded as a symbol of post-modern tolerance at every available opportunity. In reality, as every Canadian knows, traditional native art, dance, costumes, etc comprise a tiny, tiny subset of contemporary Canadian culture, something most of us will rarely encounter unless we bother to attend some government-run spectacle, like the inauguration of the commissioner of Nunavut. Yet at the ceremony native stuff comprised, what, 50% of the show?

Here’s another thing: I don’t know if you heard about this, but the four native chiefs of the bands whose “traditional lands” encompass the territories of the games (whatever that means) were given “head of state status,” and thus got to sit in the special gallery containing the prime minister and the governor general. That’s pandering on the highest level. What exactly are we implying to the world? That Canada is co-governed by its 2% aboriginal population? It may be good image politics for the government of British Columbia, which is currently overcommitted in treaty negotiations of ambiguous scope and schedule, but it warps the reality of Canada for everyone else.

Everyone, even poor John Furlong , was speaking a lot of French. This served no legitimate communicative purpose, but is a bit of Kabuki theater all Canadian big-wigs are expected to perform when speaking to a “national audience.” It perpetuates the mythology that Canada is some sort of seamlessly bilingual country, where people can drift in and out of either language and everyone will just follow along. It’s a very popular trademark of made-in-Ottawa productions, but why subject the rest of the world to this fantasy? People will, after all, eventually leave their seats, walk outside, and be exposed to the cold, cruel reality of unilingual English Vancouver.

The wheat field thing was very cool, but it was also hard not to interpret it as a heavy-handed sop to regionalism. “Look, something from Saskatchewan!” Now we can tick that box! I’ve already heard people bitching that Ontario and Quebec were unrepresented. This is the can of worms that Canada cannot resist opening.

Then there was that fat guy from the Northwest Territories, giving his whole rant about how the future belongs to Canada and how we pronounce it “zed” and blah blah blah. An obligatory foray into the realm of what one of my poli sci professors once dubbed “high school nationalism,” the sort of Molson’s beer commercial stuff that drives insecure anti-American types nuts with delight. The hooting that greeted the reference to “zed” alone (to say nothing of the grotesquely paradoxical yelps of delight when he mentioned how polite Canadians are) was Canada at its most chauvinistic and unattractive.

Put together, all this sort of stuff highlighted the degree to which Canada is a perennially naval-gazing nation, a country so thoroughly trapped in the political concerns of the present that it has a very hard time transcending into something greater, something timeless. We can’t just produce cool stuff that happens to be made in Canada. No, everything that comes out of Canada has to be aggressively about Canada in the most ostentatious way imaginable. Our long national drama of self-examination and identity construction is an odyssey the whole planet must enjoy along with us — we’ll make damn sure of that.

The amazingly weak American political parties

More than the parliamentary system, more than the office of the prime minister, what truly differentiates the Canadian political system from the US model is our country’s vastly different method of structuring political parties.

The biggest news to come out of Canada this week was Jack Layton’s emotional revelation that he has been diagnosed with prostate Cancer. Aside from being a personal tragedy, this was an announcement with potentially serious political consequences. Layton is, after all, the leader of Canada’s fourth-largest political party, a position he has held uncontested for the last seven years. Any successes or failures the New Democratic Party has achieved during that period — and there have been plenty of both — are largely the result of Layton’s leadership, and his health-related resignation, if it were to occur, would undoubtedly instigate an intense period of concerned speculation regarding the future of his party.

These sorts of dramatic leadership resignations and subsequent partisan soul-searchings are an event of fairly routine occurrence in Canadian political theater, yet they’re also an act of drama almost entirely lacking a comparable American equivalent. The first great principle of Canadian political parties ­— that they be incredibly structured, formal, hierarchical organizations — simply does not exist in the United States, and is in fact actively resisted whenever proposed. It’s a divergence Canadians often have a hard time fully comprehending. Our natural, parochial tendency is to assume all political parties the world over are more or less structured like ours, which is to say they have fee-paying members, a single leader, and a firmly enforced partisan philosophy. But reality tells a different story, and we do ourselves a tremendous disservice in believing otherwise.

To be a “Republican” or a “Democrat” in the United States entails little more than declaring yourself to be one. A citizen simply self-identifies as one or the other (or none of the above) when he fills in his voter registration card. It’s an incredibly unglamorous gesture on par with stating your date of birth, yet it qualifies you to vote in primaries, attend conventions, exploit party resources, and all the other perks and benefits associated with your label of choice — and all largely free of charge. Indeed, it’s this ease of “joining” a party in US that directly justifies the free-wheeling American primary process, a public system of choosing party candidates that often leaves Canadians scratching their heads, so vastly different is it from our nation’s boring, closed-door “nomination meetings” of party insiders. When Paul Martin was appointed Prime Minister of Canada in 2003, the National Post cynically observed that the some 133,000 card-carrying Liberals who made the decision contrasted rather unfavorably with the over 3 million who had picked the winner to the previous night’s Canadian Idol. Likewise, while I can almost guarantee that you do not know a single person who helped install Martin as leader, you’d be hard-pressed to find an American Democrat who did not cast a vote in the Hillary-Obama matchup (or at least possess several friends who did).

Even then, the analogy is still not perfect. Barack Obama is not to Paul Martin as Jack Layton is to Stephen Harper. Despite being president, Obama holds no titular office in the organized wing of the federal Democratic Party (as much as such a wing even exists). It’s Tim Kaine, a former one-term governor of Virginia, who holds the purposely convoluted title of “Chairman of the Democratic National Committee,” a position previously held by such household name heavyweights as Roy Romer and Joe Andrew. What exactly these people do, aside from write the occasional mass email or host the odd fundraising dinner, is hardly clear to even the most civic-minded American, but suspending disobedient caucus members, whipping votes in the legislature, decreeing platform positions, and all the other mundanely authoritarian responsibilities one associates with a Canadian party leader are certainly not among them. Indeed, when compared to the cavalcade of vainglorious ambition that characterizes the typical Canadian leadership race, it’s remarkable to consider that George H.W. Bush’s brief 1973-1974 tenure as chairman of the Republican National Committee is widely considered to be one of the lowest points of his political career.

Lacking a hierarchical structure, a strong distaste for bureaucratically-imposed discipline within the American political parties has become one of their most defining traits. The purpose of American party committees, both federally and locally, is largely the unremarkable business of redistributing funds. Money is raised through various channels, then, when the voters decide the two nominees, be it for president, governor, or school board trustee, the committees open their spigots. Even though there has been much controversy within some Republican circles as of late regarding whether this or that politician is “conservative enough” to deserve the GOP label, the leadership of the Republican National Committee voted unanimously last week to strike down a proposed “purity test” that would have given themselves the ability to deny funding to candidates who held “incorrect” views on abortion, or whatever.

All together, the weak partisan structures of the United States ensue that one can be virtually any sort of Republican or Democrat one chooses, and skill eke out a reasonably successful political career. The style of Republicanism practiced by a Senator from Mississippi will be vastly different than one from Maine, yet neither will face any consequences for heresy. The challenges President Obama has recently faced in wrangling his own party to support his controversial healthcare bill is similar evidence of the limited powers that even the Leader of the Free World can exert over his own caucus.

Canadians sometimes speak pityingly of the United States and the fact that it “only has two parties,” provincially assuming, based on years of suffering under their own party bosses, what an oppressive tragedy this must be. But in practice, the American system proves largely the opposite of the standard Canadian conventional wisdom— that it’s not the number of parties that matter, but the amount of freedom afforded to those within them.

Wrong about Vancouver

My city, Vancouver, will be hosting the Olympics in a couple weeks. The cool thing about big splashy events of this sort is that they generate all sorts of international media attention, and thus briefly turn the host city into the Most Fascinating Place on Earth for a couple of weeks. I’m now constantly confronted with articles about my hometown in all sorts of respectable media outlets that would never previously give a fairly unaccomplished, mid-sized Canadian city like Vancouver much of a second thought.

It’s also interesting to see how much complete nonsense is written about my city by ignorant blowhards who are trying so desperately to find some “edge” to the Olympics story.

From a journalist’s perspective, the Olympics are very boring to cover because the story is always the same. “Countries win medals amid glamorous spectacle.” Many journalists feel they are too good for this sort of stuff, so they have to turn the Olympics into some sort of “bigger picture” thing, usually by highlighting how the host city houses some particularly good or bad manefestation of some currently fashioble  cultural/political/social trend.

Here’s an idiotic editorial in the UK Guardian about Vancouver. The basic thesis is that the Olympics have transformed the city into a crazed fascistic hellhole of oppression and exploitation, proving that the games are little more than

a corrupt relic of the 20th century that does little more than gut city coffers and line the pockets of developers and investors. If things go pear-shaped and Vancouverites resort to their riotious ways, at least the city will get its money’s worth out of that bloated security force and the ensuing spectacle will boost NBC’s slumping ratings.

I cannot overemphasize how uttery, uttery terrible this piece is. Almost every single sentence in it is wrong. One of my friends posted it on Facebook and everyone — right or left, pro or anti-the games — tore it to pieces.

It’s interesting, though, because the story will doubtlessly influence the minds of lots of foreigners who have never been to Vancouver, don’t read Canadian media, and like believing sensationalistic things.

We all understand that “you shouldn’t believe everything you read” and you should be skeptical of the media, and so on, but when something as intimate as your own hometown is being discussed by the mainstream media in such brazenly untrue terms it really brings that reality home in a powerful way. It makes you realize how much reporting and editorializing is just little more than ignorant speculation, hasty generalizations, pre-determined conclusions, and other useless blather about topics no one actually knows anything about.

As a pundit myself, it makes me second-guess the legitimacy of much of my own work.

Kindles are great

The art of reviewing Pathologic

Continuing on the theme of my Flower post, and the video games-as-art question, I recently had a chat with one of my more game savvy friends about the state of gaming journalism. In my mind, I said to him, a truly artistic medium should inspire equally artistic criticism, and there doesn’t appear to be much evidence that the “gamer” subculture is producing any of that.

While there are untold millions of people who view the crafting of an eloquent work of literary, music, film, or other conventional media criticism as an artistic end in itself, gaming criticism seems to be mainly written by people who just want to rant to the world about the latest thing they played. Has anyone, anywhere, ever produced a truly infamous game review? One so well-crafted, opinionated, and insightful that it becomes irreversibly conjoined with the larger cultural zeitgeist of the game itself, in the way that, say, you can’t read about Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band without also reading about Richard Goldstein’s cynical reproof of it in the 1969 Arts section of the New York Times.

My friend countered by telling me to read this lengthy, three-part review, on a site called Rock, Paper, Shotgun about an obscure Russian video game called Pathologic. He described it as one of the finest pieces of gaming journalism he had ever read.

I do recommend you read it. It’s a very powerful and thoughtful analysis of a very dark and intriguing-sounding game.

Pathologic is essentially a Half Life-esque PC title where you control one of several human characters as they spend seven days navigating the terrors plaguing a small, disease-infested rural village. The plot and atmosphere are incredibly morose, and the gameplay very undirected and frustrating. Yet the game remains perversely engaging precisely because of these factors, which capture the imagination of the author in a way that is fascinating to follow.

The piece is not a great literary work by any stretch — the author, Quintin Smith, writes in the same sort of unpolished, juvenile, overly-conversational, swear-filled, stream of consciousness style most gamer journalists employ  — but he still manages to engage with his subject in a deeper way than we’ve grown to expect from the IGNs of the world.

What I particularly liked was some of his analysis near the end, where he reflects on what an awful, depressing game Pathologic is, thematically speaking, and segues into a broader discussion of games as a uniquely manipulative medium of human emotion:

… games have incredible untapped potential in the field of negative emotions. Just as the lowest common denominator of any art form appeals to ‘positive’ emotions, whether it’s humour, arousal or excitement, so it is that our young games industry is obsessed with the idea of ‘fun’.

I think this is one of the core reasons that the games industry hasn’t had its Casablanca or Citizen Kane- we’re still in the era of musicals and slapstick comedy. No games developer’s going to try and make its audience feel sad, or lonely, or pathetic, at least not for long stretches. You might get games that dip their toes into that water from time to time, but by and large developers are keen to keep you smiling.

Smith describes Pathologic as art, and though it certainly sounds like a better contender than the vapid Flower, I’m still not convinced. I stand by the premise that the more artistic a game gets the more it will be required to sacrifice its core game-ness. And just as Flower did not sacrifice nearly enough, Pathologic, with its very cinematic, linear presentation sounds like it sacrifices too much.

But I am much more convinced that game criticism, at least, can aspire to a fairly high level of cultural worth. I’d like to see more.

The unsurprising reason student newspapers are thriving

An amazingly ignorant article in the National Post analyzing the state of university newspapers in the wake of a recent national conference of student journalists. They are “unexpectedly… thriving,” says the incredulous author, expressing shock that campus papers would still be attracting contributors in an era of overall newspaper decline.

I was a student journalist for pretty much the entirety of my six-year career in post-secondary academia. I’ve worked as a columnist, reporter, editor, editor-in-chief, and chairman of the board of several different papers at several different colleges. In 2007 I was even nominated for the presidency of the organization that ran the conference the article refers to. So it’s a world I am somewhat grounded in.

Here’s the newsflash: Regardless of the quality of journalism they may or may not be producing, student newspapers will always be able to attract contributors for the simple reason that they are not really newspapers at all, but rather subsidized, cash redistribution rackets whereby smart kids can effectively enrich themselves at the expense of the apathetic campus majority.

Because they are directly funded by the university — year in, year out, completely indifferent to any sort of market forces — campus papers are barely analogous to real-world publications, which of course must actively cater to their readers in order to survive economically. Campus papers can, and do, publish whatever the hell they want, compete with no one, and sleep easy knowing they will enter the new year with the exact same level of guaranteed funding. Only breathtaking levels of self-inflicted fiscal incompetence can usually hurt them in any meaningful way.

Smart students will figure out a way to weasel themselves into jobs at their student paper, and through the ensuing paycheques, snag a chunk of cash that has been involuntarily taxed from their peers. It’s really just a classic example of what the economic people call “rent-seeking,” whereby savvy folks are able to extract gains for themselves by manipulating an existing economic system (in this case, a university’s legally mandated obligation to distribute some share of tuition fees to “student organizations”), rather than produce something of worth in their own right.

Working for student newspapers is fun and satisfying, obviously, or I wouldn’t have done it for so long. And lots of enormously talented people are similarly attracted. But anyone who has spent any amount of time in the subculture knows that the appeal of employment (especially long-term employment) at such places is often very brazenly cynical and exploitive.

If student papers were not thriving then that would be a very sad commentary on the collective intelligence of Canadian university students.

Flower is not art

So there’s this game called Flower. Some sort of downloadable thing for the Playstation 3. I had previously heard many glowing things said about it, for example, on IGN:

If you’re interested in something very unique and very powerful, Flower is a must-play. It will especially resonate with people that possess a deep connection with nature and spirituality, as it’s the type of game that reaches out to us and whispers about the beauty of life — without saying anything at all.

Wow! And how about this guy, on The Sixth Axis:

…never before has a game moved me so strongly, never before has a game made my day better, never before has a game affected my view on life…

Or in the words of Sony themselves:

We like to think of it as a video game version of a poem…

(The Sony people even ran a contest to see who could describe the game in the single most elegant 10-word sentence).

I finally got around to playing this much-beloved… poem the other day, and my overwhelming reaction was: huh? This is it?

Flower is a remarkably simple, uninspired, rigidly task-oriented game where you try to steer some floating flower petals over some earthbound flower buds in order to make them bloom. The action takes place in a big vast field, and the difficulty stems from the hassle of finding all the flower buds scattered across this sprawling grassy void.

The graphics are beautiful, undoubtably, and the music is soothing, and I suppose compared to blasting the faces off skinless rottweilers, or whatever your mainstream Playstation title consists of these days, yes, Flower is a gentle and moving experience.

But it’s still very obviously a game in the most crude sense of the word. In fact, far from disguising the fact, I found the entire nature motif merely highlighted the shallow mundanity of the video game experience. There was no other pretense — I was very obviously controlling abstract objects to achieve a specific, point-oriented goal. There was no story, no characters, no anything to evoke any sense of empathy or allegiance, just the beauty of nature — artificial, computer-generated nature — which only carries any impact because of its contrast to the bloody, gray mess or cartoonish nonsense we’d otherwise be wasting our screen time with.

I know there has been some debate as of late, prompted by Roger Ebert and others, as to whether or not a video game can ever be accurately described as “art,” in the way practically all other popular media can. Until now, I was somewhat indifferent, but having played Flower, which I understand is Exhibit A to the pro-games-as-art people, I can say with some confidence that no, video games cannot be art.

Video games are a wonderfully innovative and enjoyable creation of modern technology. There is definitely an art to both their creation and play, and a multitude of sensory and emotional delights to be experienced by their consumers and spectators. But the raison d’être of a game, of any game, from football to God of War, is inherently inartistic and utilitarian. It’s a thing you play, (and eventually learn how to play properly) and thus lacks the detachment and distance from its audience that good art requires.

A video game that strives to be artistic will inevitably sacrifice the very elements that should be giving it strength as a game in the fist place — namely firm user control and confidence, and obvious objectives and purpose. Flower was not the sort of game I personally enjoy, which is to say, slow-paced, abstract puzzlers, but it’s good enough for what it is, in that specific regard. And it can ultimately be no more than that. The strange need of the “gamer” community to inflate Flower into a cultural artifact of higher worth seems to reflect little more than that subculture’s persistent desire to be shed its lingering adolescent image and be integrated into respectable adult society.

Why do some countries have more gay politicians than others?

Interesting piece in Time online about openly gay politicians in Europe, of which there are a surprising abundance. The mayor of Paris, for example, is evidently gay, as are the mayors of Germany’s two biggest cities (Berlin and Hamburg).

The article is more or less written from the “why there and not here?” perspective, contrasting the success openly gay politicians have had in Europe versus the US, with the predictable conclusions about tolerance, etc.

I think, though, that it’s also important to also realize how countries with less democratic political systems and more elitist media outlets, such as those in Europe, can more easily establish a somewhat “false consensus” on controversial issues like homosexuality in the national culture, than in a country like the US, which has more populist institutions.

Here’s what I mean. Take the lesbian prime minister of Iceland, Ingibjorg Gisladottir, a politician whose success the Time article makes a great celebration of. Ms. Gisladottir became prime minister last year not because she was popularly elected by the citizens, but rather because she staged a parliamentary coup of sorts. As leader of the minority party in a two-party coalition government, Ms. Gisladottir abruptly threatened to withdraw her party’s support from the coalition in February of 2009, unless she was made prime minister. The majority party refused, and the two divorced, forcing a leadership crisis. Then the President of Iceland, who is this sort of mediator figure in their system, appointed Ms. Gisladottir to lead a new, even smaller coalition government composed of her party and the parliament’s third place, far-left party. And that’s how the world got it’s first ever openly gay prime minister.

European politics tend to be heavily controlled by a handful of strong, unelected, hierarchical party “bosses” who determine the country’s leadership amongst themselves, via complex parliamentary games and coalitions which rarely involve consulting the public. In finishing a distant second place, we would say that Ms. Gisladottir and her party clearly lost the last election by North American standards, yet she still wound up as prime minister anyway. In such a political climate, it’s not hard to understand how “controversial” figures can have a much easier time working their way through the system than they can in the US, which with its republican institutions, primaries, and direct elections tends to give the public a lot more veto power.

It’s not a defense of the bigotry that characterizes some sectors of the American electorate, of course, it’s just that the American system gives the public’s biases much more influence on their government, resulting in a political culture that allows unpleasant opinions to have greater power than they do in Europe. Or perhaps instead of “unpleasant opinions” I could use the more broader label of “opinions that go against the preference of the political class.” It’s the same reason why controversial ideas (like, say, government-run healthcare), as well as controversial individuals, can have a harder time making the sort of headway in the US as they seem to so easily achieve in the EU.

Media culture is a related issue. Talking about Ms. Gisladottir, Time says the Icelandic media consciously “ignored” mentioning her sexuality as much as possible, adding this quote:

“The media silence echoed the sentiment of the public. Nobody cared about her sexual orientation,” says Margret Bjornsdottir, the director of the Institute for Public Administration and Politics at the University of Iceland. “Being gay is a nonissue here. It’s considered unremarkable.”

It’s somewhat circular logic, though. We don’t report about things the public doesn’t care about, and what the public doesn’t care about is evidenced by our reporting. I heard the same sort of logic used to justify the Canadian media’s reluctance to admit the fact that popular CBC comedian Rick Mercer was gay. The argument was made that Canadians don’t care about the private lives of popular figures, which is just patently untrue, as anyone who has been to a Canadian supermarket checkout can attest. A more accurate statement would be that the people who run the Canadian media did not consider Mercer’s sexuality to be an issue, and would prefer if the public felt the same way. And if a country’s media options are limited, state-funded, or heavily subsidized, as they are in small countries like Iceland and Canada, it becomes much easier for such media outlets to impose a similar sort of elite-driven “false consensus” on the public than could be done in a society with a more populist, market-driven, public-pandering media culture.

Anyway, the point is that institutions matter, and it’s wrong for institutional factors to go ignored when we discuss why one unusual phenomena (such as gay politicians) are more accepted in one country than another. There can be no doubt that public opinion plays a huge role, but very few democracies allow it to play the biggest role.

R.I.P. David Levine

I learned today that David Levine, the longtime cartoonist of the New York Review of Books died this week.

Levine was one of the greatest caricaturists of all time, and an artist I took a great deal of inspiration from, obvious or not. For over four decades he brilliantly illustrated virtually significant personality of our era, particularly (given his publication) authors, a class of people who sadly don’t get drawn very much these days. His caricatures were not only outlandish, well-crafted, and hilarious, but always displayed additional cunning insights into the personality of the depicted, through his careful incorporation of clever props and poses. In doing so, he set a high standard for the art of caricature, demonstrating that it was not sufficient merely to illustrate the face, but also capture the entirely of the person, both physical and intellectual. Needless to say, given the sheer amount of individuals he depicted, Levine’s trademark required a level of educated brilliance that is almost unfathomable to imagine a mere cartoonist possessing today.

Check out the wonderful archive of his work on the NYRB website and marvel at his craft for yourself. You might want to steer clear of the last decade, however. As is unsettlingly common among legendary cartoonists, Levine ultimately worked too long past his prime, leaving the artwork of his latter years (groan) a mere caricature of his former glories.

Regardless, he was a great artist and hero of mine, and will be missed. R.I.P.

Who has hegemony, the right or left?

My pal Luke and I were recently arguing at the bus stop about which political ideology has a stronger stranglehold on society — that of the right or left.

Now Luke is some sort of socialist hipster grad student, so naturally it was his position that the unquestioned dominance and celebration of the capitalist system in modern Canada — even among nominally left-wing political parties — proves that we are living under a right-wing hegemony. I, in contrast, being an anti-elitist social conservative apologist, argued that social policy was much more powerful than economic policy in shaping modern society, and in this realm, liberals unquestionably held hegemonic control.

It’s a back-and-forth argument that I’m sure you’ve heard a lot, though not often in the mainstream media, which tends to shy away from philosophical chatter of this sort. Luke later emailed me his critique in more elaborate detail, and I sent a reply of my own, which you can read below. Who makes a stronger case? Read the rest of this entry »