Generation Bubble: Theory of the Leisure Class Pt.3

Ok, so apparently my iPod wanted to weigh in and offer this little ditty by the Smiths as something of a side commentary to my previous posts.

(To make things interesting though, I opted to post this cover version by Cursive off of the How Soon Is Now tribute album)

Generation Bubble: Theory of the Leisure Class Pt.2

One more thing, Hansen's description of the demands on white-collar workers made possible by technology are very one-sided. My decade spent as a parking lot attendant has led me to suggest that maybe the relationship between employer and employee ought to be a two-way relationship.

In any work there are tasks that are time-sensitive and those that are not, just as there are tasks that are location dependent and those that aren't. Directing traffic and selling parking tickets were two tasks that were both time and location dependent. Unfortunately my supervisors could never really predict when the demand for these tasks would occur and so I spent countless hours alone in my parking lot waiting for cars to come so that I could fulfill the tasks associated with my job. What made parking cars appealing was that there were few, if any, tasks that were not time or location dependent (ie. nothing to take home at the end of the day). I often used my time in the parking lot, without traffic, to read, write, or engage in other kinds of contemplative work. My employers wanted my skills to be available on-demand within a given time frame and location, but I felt free to engage in activities that didn't compromise my ability to complete those tasks successfully.

If the contemporary white-collar worker's holiday or family time is being encroached upon by off-hour employer demands, I think that it is suitable for family or holiday demands to encroach on employer time. If you can ask me to answer email while at the beach, why can't I answer email at the beach if I have no other location dependent work to do? Do I need to save my afternoon at the beach for my holiday time if I can still complete those tasks to the same degree of completeness while at the beach? Similarly, if it doesn't matter that a non-time sensitive employer task is completed at 10:00 AM or 2:00 PM, does it really matter if I complete it instead at 8:00PM making it possible for me to complete a time-sensitive family task at 2:00 PM or 10:00 AM?

Turnabout's fair play I say.

Generation Bubble: Theory of the Leisure Class

Just the other day a friend and I were wondering if we might have been less angst-ridden if we had become "one of those guys who just comes home from work and drinks beer in front of the tv after dinner." It's not a particularly flattering picture of anyone, as it tends to reduce someone to a singular stereotypical activity. However, more than that, it also has a tendency to place undue value on our own activities.

In making this comparison, our chief thought was related to angst generated by what we saw as our professional obligations, obligations that tended to follow us around look after the end of the official workday. These obligations are also compounded by a certain amount of ambition, not necessarily a careerist ambition, but (if we're charitable) rather an ambition fueled by passion to do our work well and successfully. The dark side to this passion is a dogged sense of guilt when we fail to live up to our own expectations of where our realm of achievement ought to lay, especially when this professional achievement comes at the cost of a competing value, such as family time.

In our minds, our beer-drinking friend of whom we were envious, engaged in some kind of imaginary blue collar work, the mental calculations of which did not follow him home at the end of his day, allowing him to spend his evenings in some kind of blissful tranquility. Shortly after our conversation, I realized that we were following in the same sort of ill-conceived bourgeois romanticism of the relatively privileged hippies when they idealized the working classes back in the 1960s.

Having grown up in a working class family, surrounded by other working class families, I can tell you it's a pretty smug sense of superiority to consider that a blue collar experience is a less emotionally turbulent one than some kind of professional or "knowledge worker" because it is devoid of intellectual conundrums. In many cases I think it fair to say that basic economic anxiety precludes the luxury of time spent dwelling on existential contemplation.

Which brings me to a recent posting on Generation Bubble, where I fear the author Ylajali Hansen might be making a similar mistake. In her article, Hansen laments her relatively carefree days as a library shelf stocker when compared to the potential demands of the corporate world, referencing the around the clock deluge of emails and Blackberry-enabled action requests from colleagues and supervisors versus the simple pleasure of being able to clock out and go home at the end of the day. For Hansen, in this corporate environment, the possibility of "clocking out" never occurs as "work," like so much else, is now on-demand as well.

For those who have known me since my CJSW days and before, Hansen's argument well-echoes my own descriptions of my halcyon days as a Parking Lot Attendant, a job I have often stated as the best I ever had. Thinking things now, I can honestly say now that the bulk of my economic problems are taken care of, I've had a tendency to gloss over the economic problems I faced as a parking lot attendant, to dwell on the existential pleasures I enjoyed surrounded by acres of asphalt. In reality, I tried one set of privileges and problems for another set, and I think it would be unfair to categorize one or the other as "less angst-ridden."

But true to form, these are the kinds of problems I like to think about and so I love that Generation Bubble brought them up.

February Bookends

February was unusual in that it saw me burn through quite a few books, most notably a couple of long-standing slow readers, The Essential Equation, a handbook on school reform, along with Rich Dad, Poor Dad. My own father recommended to all of us kids that we read it, and I know that their were some pretty particular (and blunt) financial lessons that he was hoping for us to get from it (ie. don't use your money to buy stuff, use your money to buy income generating resources - then use the income generated by these resources to buy your stuff). Personally, it all made me think more about the relationship between working, income, and time (free time, family time, personal time, etc.). Hopefully I'll be able to flesh these ideas out for a post sometime soon.

I also read Ho Che Anderson's graphic novel King, a biography of Martin Luther King. It was pretty intense and film noirish. It's a special edition that includes a brief diary/journal kept by Anderson during the decade+ time it took him to write all three issues. I found the journal as interesting as the book itself.

Andre Agassi's autobiography Open was another good read and full of surprises. Granted, one would expect Agassi to downplay a lot of his enfant terrible behaviour, but it's quite shocking at how mentally fragile he was at times and the iportant roles that key relationships played. It's always tempting to want to draw out parallels or inspiration from an autobiography and I'll admit that I was hoping there was a lesson for me somewhere in Open since I had heard that Agassi spent the first half of his career hating tennis but then found a way to make peace it with it. I still feel that I'm struggling with that in my own profession.

I also read a short book about using rubrics as an assessment tool called Knowing What Counts: Setting and Using Criteria that was about as interesting as you would expect.

I am currently reading I Slept With Joey Ramone by his brother, Mickey Leigh, with help from Legs McNeil.

Currently Reading

J. Lloyd Trump - A School For Everyone (1977)

Mickey Leigh (with Legs McNeil), I Slept With Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir, (2009)

Books Read

Andre Agassi, Open, 2009

Ho Che Anderson, King: A Comics Biography, The Special Edition, (1993-2002,2009)
David Townsend, Pamela Adams - The Essential Question: A Handbook For School Improvement (2009)

Robert T. Kiyosaki, Sharon L. Lechter - Rich Dad, Poor Dad, (1997)

Kathleen Gregory, Caren Cameron, Anne Davies, Knowing What Counts: Setting and Using Criteria, 1997

Books Acquired

Andre Agassi, Open, 2009

Louis de Bernieres, A Partisan's Daughter, 2009

Ben Moor, More Trees To Climb, 2009

Craig Yoe, The Great Anti-War Cartoons, 2009

When the going gets tough, the Mayor calls it quits

"My work here is done?" Seriously? "I've met all of my goals from 2001." Leading Calgary into a recession was one of your goals but leading us out wasn't? Now that it takes real leadership and hard choices you're walking away? Bronco, you suck. Seriously.

See his farewell here.

Music Update

It's been awhile since I've written about music over here, but you can rest assured that my iPod has been getting a work out (even if I could use one from time to time).

First, as I've written about my enjoyment of the History of Rome podcast, let me add a new one: Norman Centuries, looking at the rise and fall of the Vikings, and in particular Normandy. It's by Lars Brownworth, whose 12 Byzantine Rulers I also enjoyed very much.

Also, before getting to all the new music that's come my way since the New Year began, let me state that I'm still finding the time to listen to Mos Def's The Ecstatic on a fairly regular basis.

January was dominated by the complex and enjoyable free-form rambling of A Silver Mt. Zion's latest album, Kollaps Tradixionales.

I also picked up the latest from Basia Bulat, who sort of occupies a similar, but more country-ish space as Sarah Harmer and Orenda Fink, both of whom I really like. Heart of My Own however, was something that I really couldn't get into.

The big story for January of course was Enter The Magical Mystery Chambers, Wu Tang vs. The Beatles. (Can't seem to find an active link for it, so perhaps like the Jay-Z/Beatles Grey Album mash-up, it was just too beautiful for this world)

The latest release by local group turned happy globe-trotters Woodpigeon fell into my hands in February. Die Stadt Muzikanten continues to showcase Mark Hamilton's strong songwriting as the "band's" musical kaleidescopic folk sound evolves beyond what any of us anticipated oh so many years ago.

On a different note, I also managed to pick up last year's Radio Retaliation from Thievery Corporation and spent a couple of solid days with it on repeat, though I must say that I'm tempted to give Black Sands, the new Bonobo album a slight edge.

Finally, the legendary Gil-Scott Heron released the captivating I'm New Here, the gives a raw edge to his spoken word pieces concentrating on growing up and growing old.

Olympic Love

So we've all spent the last week at our house watching the Olympics and cheering for the Canadians. Every morning my daughter gets up and states, "I feel Olympic!" However it was not the Olympics that prompted this afternoon's pleasant surprise, but rather the "Woolympics."

Inspired by a young girl she befriended at the Opening Ceremonies Knit Along we all attended, my daughter was determined to learn needlework. With a little help from my wife, she made me this little item as a belated Valentine Present.

It forms a little pouch, inside of which she had placed one of the Hershey's Kisses I gave her for Valentines. She says it's for my desk at work.

Generation Bubble: The Rag and Bone Shop

I'm a fan of the work coming out of the Generation Bubble website. They're producing the kind of work that we had hoped to achieve with The Daily Wenzel but they're clearly smarter and more hard-working than we were (and that's okay - I suspect their livers might be a tad healthier too).

I found their recent article

The Rag and Bone Shop of the Self: Social Media and Networked Subjectivity

to be rather interesting, as I am always intrigued by the issue of personal identity. I recommend people have a look at it. In particular, the lines:

"At the level of the subject, network culture moves beyond the fragmented postmodern self, which was still haunted by the loss of a unitary identity, and presents an entirely flexible self constituted perpetually and provisionally within the network"

and (I believe quoting Kazys Varnelis):

"Less an autonomous individual and more of a construct of the relations it has with others, the contemporary subject is constituted within the network…. In network theory, a node’s relationship to other networks is more important than its own uniqueness. Similarly, today we situate ourselves less as individuals and more as the product of multiple networks composed of both humans and things"

My first thoughts went to some of the work I've seen related to George Siemens and his ideas of Connectivism, the idea that we are moving into an era where knowledge is distributed across social groups with less emphasis placed on collecting knowledge within the singular individual. It's an interesting idea that people in Education circles are talking about. George is a nice guy, but I'm still thinking about this one.

At a deeper level though, the idea Generation Bubble put forth about the individual identity being (sub?)merged with the group, or network, identity. I'm interested to see where this goes. On the one hand, new technology makes this clearly a new phenomena, but I wonder if we still can't apply some good old-fashioned Hegelian thesis/antithesis/synthesis action/reaction type thinking to this process. It is often argued by supporters of Marshall McLuhan that the introduction of the printing press and the printed book helped liberate the individual from the group, ushering in the Modernist Era. Further, one of the hallmarks of modernism, aside from it's belief in "science" and "progress" was the exploration of the self as a unitary expression of difference from the group. The post-modern era, on the otherhand, dispensed with the notion of the self as unitary expression, insisting that individuals had multiple identities in different contexts and even going so far as to blur the boundaries between what constitutes separate identities and social groups. To describe it imperfectly, post-modernism saw identity as a mask that one was free to put on and take off, and that individuals possessed not one "true" mask as the modernists supposed, but rather a bag of masks to be used as the situation demanded, no one mask more or less true than any other.

The suggestion that I take away from Generation Bubble is that just as post-modernism undermined the idea that individual identities are fixed and concrete, the idea of "network identities" might actually be working backwards towards lessening or blurring the distinction between self and group brought about by the printing press.

I Feel Olympic!

My household has been eagerly anticipating the Olympics for months. In part because we're all sports fans, right down to my six-year old daughter, but also because we have strong family ties to Vancouver and it's like a second home to us. The controversies and struggles in preparing for the Games have been made real to us through cousins and routine trips to the city, so Friday was a big day for us and Olympic coverage started early.

I had actually planned to post something in anticipation of the Olympics but too many things happened on Friday for just one post, especially one that would have been written in the heat of emotion.

Initially, I was planning to write about my criticism of the Harper Government's foreign training time limitations and aggressive push for the podium plans. A lot has been made about how upset this has made other countries, while defenders of the policies point out that the government's actions are not out of line of what other countries, such as the US and China did, it is unusual to see this behaviour coming from Canada. As the host country, the Harper Government says, if we want to win a bundle of medals, this is one of the tools at our disposal. Sure, I would like to see Canada win a whole sackful of medals that do not include the typically Canadian Bronze (ie. fourth place), but do I want this to occur at the expense of our Canadian identity and our notions of fair play? Are we going to encourage our athletes to take performance enhancing drugs because China and the US do that too? For me, these questions raised a much larger issue, do I want Canada to engage in the same kind of realpolitik as other nations, pursuing the same ends and the same means? Should we subsidize corporations at the cost of our social infrastructure, or sell surplus military weapons to developing nations because that's the way it's done? No, I do not. We're Canada and I'd like to hold on to my naive romantic notions that we can do things a different, uniquely Canadian way.

So I was deeply conflicted heading into Friday, as part of me hoped the best for our athletes, but another, much quieter part - a part hidden deep down inside, hoped that our athletes would do poorly. So poorly perhaps that the resulting anger would topple the Harper Government, and in those moments, I found myself ashamed and hating both the Harper Government and myself for thinking such thoughts.

And then I looked up from my notebook and saw Nodar Kumaritashvili, the Georgian luger, fly off the track, into a pole and lie unnaturally still on the ground. In my heart, I knew he wasn't going to be ok and my first thoughts went to how horrified I would have been as a parent if that was my daughter. I turned to her, sitting next to me on the couch, her eyes wide in shock. "I don't think people should do this game," she said. "I'm going to stick to soccer." My wife changed the channel and I felt all my anger rise as this was a training run. In those first moments, it didn't matter to me that he was a young athlete, maybe too inexperienced to be on the track, or maybe that the engineers had built the track too fast. No, in my mind, more training could have saved this boy, and more training was precisely the thing we denied him. It took me a long time to calm down afterwards and I realize that the whole thing is far more complicated and tragic than simple government policy.

For the Opening Ceremonies we went down to Make 1, the local yarn shop. My wife and some of the other ladies at the shop had organized a special "knit along" as part of their online Ravelry Knitting Olympics. They all gathered around the television, waiting for things to start so that they could begin their special Olympic projects. My wife had vowed to knit eleven socks and the others were all equally ambitious. It was a lot of fun to watch the ceremonies surrounded by friends, and checking in with my other friends around the globe via Facebook and Twitter.

The Ceremonies themselves were good, I liked the straight-forward narrative of most of the performances. It was a surprise to see Bryan Adams still performing regardless of the fact that Nelly Furtado was there. Sarah McLaughlin was good, though the best performance to me came from K.D. Lang and her version of Leonard Cohen's "Hallajeuh."

Like many, we were all speculating who the final torch bearer would be. I had heard a rumour earlier in the day suggesting the Gretzky was out of contention, so we guessed all sorts of names, but Marc Gagnon, the most decorated Winter Olympian was considered our likeliest choice. That Gretzky ultimately lit the torch did not surprise us, but the inclusion of Rick Hansen, Catriona Le May Doan, Nancy Greene and Steve Nash did.

The Opening Ceremonies were meant to reflect on Canada, and what it meant to be simultaneously a Canadian and a member of an international community. The moment that I'll cherish as making me feel proud to be Canadian was Romeo Dalliare carry in the flag. Considering Dalliare's efforts to alert the international community to the atrocities in Rwanda, and the way the international community ignored him, I feel like giving Dalliare such a tremendous honour at one of the highest profile international events held in Canada, was a way for us to remind everyone what happened. I know that a few moments ago I was expressing my disgust at the Harper Government for their international relations vis-a-vis training times, but I'd like to give full props to whoever picked Dalliare to carry the flag.

Bowie a Biography and an Inspiration

I saw this at the bookstore today, and it was almost enough cause for me to break my personal ban on buying new books. I still my circumvent this by buying it for my wife, who is a much more "intense" fan of David Bowie than I am, referring to this cover shot as being of "the sexy David Bowie." Oddly, there have been quite a few women in my life, whose first introduction to Bowie came through the movie Labrynth, and share this opinion. In fact, as far back as high school, a former flame of mine referred to Bowie's presence in the film as "sexy, before you even knew what sex was."

How can you deny that piercing gaze?

I read Marc Spitz' previous book, We Got The Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk, and found it alright, so perhaps Spitz will be in his element here, too.

Besides, after my whole Bowie or Bust Experience back in the fall, it's safe to admit that this will eventually find it's way into my hands.

In thinking about what such a book might include, my wife and I initially wondered if it might include the exact moment that Bowie sold his soul. But then we decided that that was unfair. There was no singular moment in which Bowie sold his soul. Instead, there were moments when he sold it, but then equal periods when he appeared to barter his soul back. It gave me the idea for a character in a story, a kind of aging artist languishing alone in his mansion without a soul. It wasn't so much that this character had sold his soul, but rather through some sort of artistic alchemy had fused elements of his soul into a few of the records that he made, as if he had been diminished with every creative act, so that in order for him to feel or to experience any sort of emotional memory required the playing or presence of those albums.

It's an intriguing premise, a kind of reverse Dorian Grey meets Voldemort's horcruxes that might have spot in one of the many, as yet, unrealized projects in my head.

Twilight Kino

While the foggy weather with it's ice bushes has led to bunkering in for the evening with The Lord of the Rings trilogy, last night was all about the brilliant (and apparently underrated) The Face of Another, by master Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara. Stylishly shot in 1960s urban Japan (some of the characters dress as if they inhabit the same Madison Avenue fashion world as Mad Men), it explores the life of identity through a factory worker who is horribly disfigured in an accident. Ashamed of his appearance and believing that his wife no longer desires him, he seeks out the aid of an experimental surgeon who fashions him a mask with which he sets out to seduce his wife.

On the one hand, the movie explores themes of identity and individualism during an age where the pressure to conform was great, but it also deals with responsibility and restraints that comes with the accountability of a public identity.

Books fit to print.

My wife knits. A lot. Lately she's been getting some packages in the mail from a certain Woolgirl. These packages are based on a particular theme and often come with extras. Her most recent kit was based on the Cowardly Lion and it came with this lovely little notebook that my wife gave to me. It's great and I especially like that it has the word "Courage" written on the back. I'm not sure what kind of writing project I'll use it for, but that'll be half the fun.

One of the things that I like about the notebook

is that it reminds me of some of the (very expensive) notebooks that I saw at the Assouline Boutique at the new

Las Vegas City Center. It's particularly reminiscent of this one:

I've written about my love of notebooks before, and I was also highly enamoured of this stationary set design that came in notebook form as well, but thought that maybe it was a little too over the top.