Category: Writing

I was approached by This Magazine to write something for their current “Big Ideas” issue, and since I’d been chatting to Misha about taking part in Copycamp I used the opportunity to write about how excited I am that art seems to be harder and harder to commodify these days.

Paying for art should be like paying for sex -– possible, but not encouraged. I’m not against creative people getting rewarded for their work or thinking about their craft as seriously as a job -– it’s what I’ve been doing for the last decade or so -– but treating artwork as a commodity has never really felt right. And after thinking about it for a while, I realize why.
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I’d been assuming that Bit Torrent would either go the way of other great file-sharing methods: be shut down like Napster, or become clogged to uselessness with viruses and fake files like Kazaa. The longer it goes on — three years at this point — the more I feel like it’s ushered in a golden age of media accessibility, in particular for episodic television. Most of the shows I watch regularly, in fact, started with being able to steal them easily.

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A few years back, a bunch of us were playing Trivial Pursuit. Mark Slutsky (of Automatic Vaudeville fame) was reading out the answers at random, and one of the green science answers was “Slackwater.”

Our eyes locked.

“What a perfect name…”

“…for a youth subculture.”

We holed up for a week in Mark’s Montreal apartment and wrote this feature length script imagining what these aristocratic anarchists would be like — destitute but dignified, penniless but proper — and we had a lot of fun doing it. We’ve decided to release it under a Creative Commons licence, which allows anyone to make it into a movie. We’d be happy to see people run with it.

For download instructions and a taste of the script’s characters, keep reading!

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Tonight I went to see Dr. Cheryl van Daalen give a talk called “Living as a Chameleon: A Feminist Analysis of Young Women’s Lived Experience of Anger.” My wife Susan told me about it and I said I’d go–but it wasn’t to be supportive. Usually when people find out about my interest in feminism they often think that I’m a guilty white liberal, or give me undue credit for being down with the cause. The truth is that I’m self-interested–as someone who feels like there’s systematic injustices going on, their anger validates my own. Their reasoning and different routes to the same destinations strengthens my arguments and my resolve.
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My favourite new mag is Spacing, the print arm of the Toronto Public Space Committee that is anything but newsletter-ish. By drawing attention to the amazing and oft-ignored public spaces, it’s an antidote to our culture’s fixation on private ownership. From their beautiful subway buttons to their sticker slogans (“Everyone is a Pedestrian”), they’re doing it up right. I’m working on a new article for their past/future issue, but in the meanwhile here’s the article I did for their second issue on Parkouring, the art of street gymastics.
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I wrote an opinion piece for eye last week on arts grants. Feel free to add your comments at the end.

That’s what arts grants are, right? Free money. You know this guy who used his grant as a down payment on an SUV. Heard of this other woman who used hers to make grapefruits talk to each other and someone else who made lesbian porn with public money. Taxpayer money! Your money and my money!
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On the weekend me and my wife Susan went to the launch of Geeks, Misfits, and Outlaws, an anthology of short fiction edited by Zoe Whittall. We stuck around after the readings and such and they played Le Tigre and my current pop obsession, “Hey Ya” by OutKast. Nothing like that spine-crawl of bliss brought on by dancing…

My contribution to the anthology was one of the sincere science fiction stories that laid the groundwork for Everyone In Silico and originally appeared in Adbusters. Click below to read it.
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This short story just appeared in Number One Fan, Kris Rothstein & Sam Macklin’s collection of smart essays and fictional forays on the theme of fandom. The book not only walks the tricky line between analysis and enthusiasm, but it’s also a beautiful object: each one is a hand-made, one-of-a-kind hardcover that the pictures don’t do justice to. (Scanners don’t pick up iridescent fabric very well.)
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This article has been on my site in a different form for a while, but it recently was published in Mix Magazine accompanied by Marc Ngui’s hilarious and brilliant microbial analysis of the sellout dynamic. Especially now that I’m writing a videogame column for the Torstar media conglomerate-owned eye weekly, it addresses issues I deal with on a daily basis. I invite you to read and comment on the piece.
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I’m leaving you. The book we had… well, it was special. I was willing to give it a try even though we were very different people — me, an anarchist zinester and you, a right-wing media magnate — but it’s just not working out.

At first, I was amazed by all the things you owned: Fox, News Corp., New York Post, HarperCollins… my friends were impressed that my new sugardaddy owned their favorite shows, The Simpsons and the X-Files. Like me, they slipped under your spell.

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