Friday 27 July 2012

Coupland's McLuhan

'Marshall McLuhan' by Douglas Coupland. With an introduction by John Ralston Saul. Extraordinary Canadians Series. Penguin Canada. Toronto 2009.249pp.


    In l967 the face of Marshall McLuhan the University of Toronto English professor seemed to be everywhere. The Manotoban-born McLuhan, now father of five children and 57 ytears old, had his face platered on the cover of 'Newsweek', was a guest on one t.v. show after another, sat in on numerous seminars, and flew off to faraway conferences on the future, pocketting sometimes $5,000 a pop. [To-day that would be about $35,000].
     His books 'The Gutenberg Galaxy' and 'Understanding Media' were darn hard to read. But many people bought them and scoured their pages to find out why groups like gays, hippies, anti-war protestors, black power advocates and Quebec separatists had suddenly appeared on the scene.
     And McLuhan's phrases like 'The medium is the message; and 'Global village' turned up in many conversations.
    Ten years later, say 1978, McLuhan seemed to have vanished. He died in l980, after a stroke had rendered this great if overbearing conversationalist nearly speechless.
    Douglas Coupland is on of Canada's fine novelists whose novels have definittely been influenced by television. In this biography of McLuhan, he sets out the main points of McLuhan's life and theories.
   Non-literate societies or tribal societies lived in what McLuhan called 'acoustic space'. Phonetic spech or words wiped out or chipped away at  acoustic space. Then according to McLuhan, along came the printing press which helped produce the Industrial Revolution, the middle class, nationlism and capitalism In short the 19th centiry was the heyday of mechanical man.
     But with the rise of the telegraph came electronic media, which McLuhan saw as extensions of the human nervous system.
     "The punchline - and what made Marshall a star," writes Coupland, "was that TV, as well as future technologies would possesss the ability to retribalize man back to his oral and tribal roots."
    So McLuhan or 'Marshall' as Coupland and others call him, was a grand theorist some of whose predictions came true. Other of his insights didn't. But Coupland is fair tio McLuhan.
     Coupland stresses the great influence that McLuhan's motherr Elsie had on him. This obviously led Marshall to stress how what he thought was the emasculating influence of women in modern North America. McLuhan was politically incorrect on many issues.
   Coupland also points out how conservative McLuhan was. Marshall hung out with writer and attist Wyndham Lewis whose l930's book 'Hitler' praised the Nazi dictator. Another pal of Marshall's was Ezra Pound, the great American poet. Pound issued pro-fascist and anti-American rants right in the middle of world war two, while based in fascist Italy.
   Coupland is also funny and creative. He brings back the eraly 1960's in a way that no one elese could.
     Last, he shows that mcLuhan was not an easy m,an to get on with. "He was tangenital and self-contradictory," Coupland says of McLuhan, "and could really piss people off." Many of his fellow Uof T English professors hated McLuhan.
      The McLuhan era ended in any case in l967 or 1968. mcLuhan underwent brain surgery in late l967 for a massive brain tumour. He recovered but never completely. Also the high hopes of the 1960's, which McLuhan had never really shared, fell victim to assasinations, violence, and the endless Vietnam War.
      By l973 or so, McLuhan was a non-person in the media. Yet the rise of the personal computer and the world-wide Web has again raised his profile from the dead. Coupland has written a witty , interesting book on one of Canada's oustandind Canadians. And John Ralston saul, should be thanked for overseeing  the series of books on extraordinary Canadians. McLuhan was dedfinitely  an extraordinary person.

Saturday 21 July 2012

'Your Sister's Sister' a film review

'Your Sister's Sister' a film starring Emily Blunt, Rosemarie DeWitt and Mark Duplass. Directed by Lynn Shelton.



   "You just need some head space," Iris, played by Emily Blunt, tells Jack, played by Mark Duplass. Iris used to go out with Tom who's now dead. Tom was Jack's brother.
    After a wake for Tom, off goes Jack to Iris's family cabin. It's not far from Seattle in Puget Sound in the dead od finter. Now as allo f us westcoasters know, winter means rain not snow, and grey skies not cold blue ones.
    But Jack never gets to fell at home in this wintry house. For he finds out that Hannah, played by Rosemarie DeWitt, has crashed here too. Hannah is Iris's sister who's a vegan lesbia. Her seven year relationship has just ended.
    Soon Hannah and Jack make love which I find a bit strange. I've known quite a few lebians and they've made love to men, but not after coming out as gay. In any case   this lovemaking sets off a whole chain of events especially after Iris shows up. Lynn Shelton directs this film using actors's improvisations and lots and lots of dialogue. Some of it's well done. Some of it just sucks, as in the following.
    "You fucked my sister," Iris yells at Jack. "Oh my God!"
     All of this dialogue led me into a state of boredom. But the film does pick up steam in its last 20 minutes or so. Still, there is one plus to this flick. Shelton's films usually take place in a world which many of us know, namely the Pacific Northwest.
      Grey skies, massive grey waters and towering evergreens backstop this film about thirty somethings. How nice to see a movie that takes place in your backyard instead of New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Tokyo, or for that matter Toronto.
    But that was the major plus of this film. The interactions between Iris, Mark and Hannah weren't dynamic enough for me.

Friday 13 July 2012

'close your eyes' a fine arts show

'Close Your Eyes' an exhibition of works by Sophie Jodoin. Showing at the Richmond Art Gallery until August 26, 2012.


   A bird lies dead on the ground.
   Three possibly amputated arms stand side by side.
    A young girl with no head or arms swirls a hoola hoop, while two heads whirl around  her.
    These are three of the many images in Sophie Jordan's lateset show at the Richmond Art Gallery on Minoru Gate. "She's a connoiseur of pain," says art critic James D. Campbell of Jodoin, "and we are unwilling voyeurs."
     Jodoin was born in Montreal in 1965. She studied at Concordia University  in Montreal. And her works are  found in many private and public art collections.
     At the Richmond Art Gallery her display falls into five parts. First off, over 70 small drawings are hung vertically in rows of three.The second part shows five burned houses. Then comes five big pictures of people from the back. These life-sized drawings show us only the top half of the people. Then four black tables form a rectangle and on each table, behing glass tops are four or five small images picked up from the street.
     Last, a video in a small side room gives us Jodoin, a thin green eyed forty seven year old, talking about her work.
    The small drawings of over 70 pictures stand at the heart of this display so I'll focus on them.
      "My images are taken from the Internet, magazines" and other places, says Jodoin. But Jodoin cuts up these images up and transforms them into something else. Then she draws these new figues in mostly charcoal on mylar.
    The drawings are tiny. Jodoin draws in black and white with no backgrounds to distract the viewer and no color either which can also distract spectators.
    Many of these tiny images are masked or wrapped in cloth. But the figures are also wrapped in pain. A dog with a head in bandages stands in a tiny frame. A masked child sits on something, but he or she has lost part of  his or her right leg. A kitten dangles from a hand held rope, with a hook in its neck.
    "You can't cloe your eyes to the pain," Jodoin says in the video. In Jodoin's show, you certainly can't close your eyes to it. But in the world outside, thankfully you can.
     I stumbled out of the gallery into blazing warm sunshine. Children at a nearby summer camp scampered around, played tricks on their instructors and chattered away, oblivious to old men and young female counsellors.This scene was a long way from the world of Jodoin.
    Sophie Jodoin is a powerful artist. But like Goya's 'Diasters of War' or Don McCullin's great war photos, her show only gives us one part of the world's truths. Yet you cab't deny her talent . Her tiny drawings do show her talent.

Saturday 7 July 2012

a bland end of the world.

 'Seeking a Friend for the End of the World' Starring Steve Carell and Keira Knightly. Directed by Lorene Scafaria


   What would you do if you knew that the end of the world was just a few days away? If you're Dodge Peterson, played by Steve Carrell, you go on being the same bland insurance agent that you are right now. Your wife has left, leaving you alone. But you remain the low-keyed chatacter you always were.
     But if you're Penny, played by Keira Knightly, you zoom around, smoking joints, and making love to one man after another. Oh yes, and you're a real deep sleeper.
    "I could sleep through the apocalypse," Penny says while smoking a joint. Which is a useful skill to have - the  sound sleeping habit that is - because in a few days an asteroid will crash into earth and kill everyone.
     When English-born Penny meets finally her longtime neighbour Dodge, you'd expect all hell to break loose. But disappointingly, it doesn't. 'Seeking A Friend At the End of the World' is really just another road movie.
   To juice things up, director Lorene Scafaria has Penny and Dodge flee a riot and drop in on a few people in what maybe the U.S. northeast. "Hi Dad, I miss you like crazy," a tearful Penny says on the phone to her dad in Britain.
    This sort of dialogue runs throughout the film. I wanted to see more sparks fly betweeen the two main characters. But that doesn't happen too often and the film rarely shows us the stresses and strains of people living near the world's end.
     The flick is just too level-headed and too bland. Let's hope that director Lorene Scafaria has more spice to add to her next movie.