What Naheed Nenshi's Victory Means

The tyranny of the baby boomers is over. But is generation X done as a political force too?

It was great to be part of a winning election campaign for the first time in my electoral life, but I can’t help wondering if it might just be the last time my demographic is considered part of the swing vote.

While Naheed Nenshi’s victory means different things to different people, as his ability to reach out to diverse communities was no doubt one of the reasons he was able to garner support across the city, the thing I will be watching closely is to see which political generation is now in the ascent.

It would be easy to suggest that the baby boomers are passing the torch to generation X, but that is not necessarily true. One of constant points of frustration for my generation has been the fact that we are outnumbered by both the boomers and the millennials. Thus, while it was clear throughout the campaign was that Naheed Nenshi dominated support among 18-35 year olds and a few reports even implied that anyone under 40 was part of the generic “youth” movement. The fact of the matter though is that there are two distinct generations throwing their weight behind Nenshi - the so-called generation X and millennials.

Over at The Daily Wenzel I’ve speculated that real political change could only occur once the millennials came of age, simply because of their numeric superiority. As with all generations, there may be lot of division over beliefs, but many of these beliefs are not being addressed in any meaningful fashion by the major parties, leading to their perceived disengagement in the political process. Nenshi has proven that they are ready and waiting. If I were a provincial or federal politician, I would be watching these results with a view to see where the support for Nenshi was coming from and comparing that with other elections happening today.

If the day really does belong to the millennials, then Stelmach and Harper have a lot to answer for.

Double Espresso Glory

This is the view of the cream swirling in my double espresso this morning.

(Ok, it's really from the Hubble.)

The Process, Pt.II

Growing up, I always thought that writing was a glamorous activity, something free of structures and the rhythms of nine-to-five work. Maybe that explains why my writing process is not the best. In writing this novel, I carried with me one my A9 Bluelines, jotting down a few paragraphs at a time whenever I had the chance or a good idea. Most of these early pieces are fragments, non-linear snippets, that I worked on over the summer trying to put them in order. I think I had forty to fifty pages worth of these pieces in my notebook. I spent much of the last year just transcribing these words and editing them on the fly.

Once the summer started I settled into an early morning groove, waking up at six o'clock every morning in an attempt to write a minimum of five hundred words before the other people in my house woke up. Within a few weeks I was doing a thousand or more words and appeared well on my way to achieving my goal of finishing the novel before September 1. However, as August approached the mid-way point, I began to suspect that I wasn't going to make it. My initial guess was that 65 - 70,000 words would suffice, and I believe I crossed the 65,000 word threshold going into the Labour Day weekend. The only problem was that my novel was going to be much longer than this. It took me another two weeks before finally completing the first draft at 83,000 words.

After taking a short break, I began the process of revising, which is almost complete. In the past, I used to hate revising, preferring to move on to my next project. This time has been different, though I can't imagine that I will continue to feel this way. What made it enjoyable has been watching the core of the narrative take shape, pruning and amalgamating minor characters and subplots, streamlining and strengthening the whole.

Pattern Recognition

In honour of completing the first full draft of my novel, Games of Chance, I celebrated by going and buying a paperback novel for the first time in years. Usually I get most of my books via Fast Forward or handed to me from my wife. When I do buy new books, it tends to be mostly non-fiction works, like the phenomenal Third Teacher. Buying a new paperback was a special treat.

So what did I buy?

I went up and do the aisles quite a bit, but ultimately chose William Gibson's 2005 Pattern Recognition. I quite enjoyed it's sequel, Spook Country, and especially the chance to interview Gibson about the book. There was a way that Spook Country conceptualized information-as-commodity that I found really intriguing. In Pattern Recognition it appears that part of the focus is on the relationship we share in the construction of meaning.

BTW, Gibson has a new book out, continuing to explore the ground laid out in these earlier two. It's called Zero History and Fast Forward has an interview (by someone else) here. At my current pace, I'll be reading it in 2015.

Fits and starts

I'm happy to announce that I've finished the first draft of my novel and am working my way through going over some initial revisions before turning it over to a couple of trusted proofreaders. In the meantime, as I work on cover letters, synopses, and other things associated with trying to figure out how to approach a publisher, I hope to be returning to some more regularly scheduled updates around these parts.

Works in Progress

I admit that things have been relatively quiet over here in the What Sister Ray Says corner of the Internet - what with the World Cup wrapping up, a sojourn out to the coast, and some long overdue home improvements, I think I can be forgiven for missing a few updates.

The real news though, as many of you know from past postings, is that I'm working on a novel. I've been haphazardly plodding my way through a couple of ideas over the last few years, but back in June I gave myself the challenge of committing to finishing one before September 1st.

This afternoon I broke through 50,000 words (or roughly 200 pages) my main work in progress. It's about success and alienation, family and identity, Vancouver and Calgary, while using the 2008 financial meltdown as a backdrop. It's got love, death, laughter, tears, and even a little violence. I think the only thing that's missing is a bit with a dog...

I've managed to double my total word count in the last month, figuring that I'm over the two-thirds hump. Unfortunately, I estimate that I've still got 15-20,000 words to go with just a little over two weeks left, making me a little nervous about meeting my self-imposed deadline.

Venom and Eternity

I am not a film historian, although I do have an acute interest in history and the history or subcultures in general. Lately, I've been working my way through various film vignettes in the Kino Avant Garde series of Experimental Cinema (1928-1954). Aside from a hyper-stylized adaptation of The Fall of the House of Usher, and some experiments in stop-motion and sound effects, little has made an impression on me, most likely because I lack the understanding and appreciation of film history.

However, I was quite please to discover that the last film in the series was Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity. Like a lot of fans of punk, I stumbled across Isou, a Parisian film maker from the early 1950s, in Griel Marcus' fanciful history on the origins of punk, Lipstick Traces. I say fanciful, because there is a lot of speculation involved in Marcus' linking of punk to past avant garde movements like dadaism, situationism, and Isou's own lettrism, something he described as a celebration of pure noise, freeing letters and sound from the tyranny of thousands of years of words.

Venom and Eternity was Isou's attempts to explore this idea in film, and just as he wanted a disconnect between sounds and words (meant, I think, more in the sense of narrative meaning) in poetry, Isou argued that the next phase in the evolution of film (following World War II), was the severing of the relationship between sound and images. He felt that both of these artistic avenues could be used to explore different, but complementary, themes simultaneously. The visual literacy of the audience was such that they didn't need a dialogue or film score to reinforce the images being presented, their audio faculties could be engaged along other lines.

What we see in Venom and Eternity then is a set of filmed sequences following the main character "Daniel" as he wanders around Paris. There is a narrative voice-over, but the two are not related in any direct way, other than perhaps to say that Daniel features in both. Isou has also scratched and drawn on the film stock, making the overall effect very similar to a lot of the films I've seen shown at punk rock and electronic shows as a visual backdrop to the music. In fact, it struck me that perhaps the punk shows represent an idealized manifestation of Isou's lettrism in film, and strengthening some of Marcus' claims.

Judge for yourself (here is a random selection from Venom and Eternity since Isou wasn't all that keen on narrative):