Premature

Reading the CBC website's comment page in the wake of the Boxing Day shooting death of Jane Creba and the wounding of seven others in Toronto, you'd have thought the Big Smoke had turned into a warzone, a scene of racial strife that was playing out the last days of a dying city. In some of the letters, the thin veil of racism is almost completely ripped off, one J. Villa even going so far as to imply that black people are "devils". Several readers from New Brunswick and Red Deer, Alberta write in to comment on a city they don't even live in, armchair generals to the last.

As someone who was born in Toronto, and has lived in its suburbs and knows its urban core quite well, it amazes me that anyone could look at an incident like this and assume that Toronto was going to the dogs. As the same J. Villa on that page pointed out, in April 1994, Vivi Lemonis was killed during a robbery at a cafe called Just Desserts-- over 11 years ago (a little off of the 20 years guesstimated by Villa). The fact of the matter is that this kind of incident is a rarity -- that of a black man shooting a young, attractive, white women -- and it betrays the parochialism of a lot of people when they start making noise about immigrants, gun cultures and how a city is fast turning into a cesspit of violence and carnage, when such an incident occurs.

If you've ever lived in Toronto, or even in many American cities with per-capita murder rates an order or two larger than any Canadian city, you'd know that you can generally walk around feeling pretty safe and secure. These are not warzones, but like any large and dense population, there will be people with bad motives and loose ethics -- restricting immigration assumes that only foreign cultures can spread violence, when Columbine, the Michigan militias and Timothy McVeigh, as well as the thug-jock ethos of modern white culture manifestly demonstrate this is untrue.

The reality is, there are bad parts of cities, places where the poor and underprivileged live, where due to circumstance and lifestyle, bad things are more prone to happen. "Good people" don't go there. That's what we usually see on television and on the news, when there's a shooting in the black community, or in the Indian community, or in the South-East Asian community. In fact, not long ago in the suburbs of Toronto, a young, attractive, Indian woman was shot through a door by some men, also Indian. This added to people's belief that Toronto had gone gun-crazy, but beyond local mention, didn't even play across Canada. The only reason that this particular tragedy has garnered continuous national attention is because "good people" are getting hurt now -- good people being a euphemism for middle-class and white. As long as the violence stayed in bad areas, in Scarborough and the seedier parts of downtown, or the low-rent areas of South Etobicoke, it could be shrugged off as another news item, another bullet on the list of reasons why Toronto was no longer as good as it used to be. But Jane Creba, with her pretty, pleasingly blonde face, so white and innocent -- well, that's something to get worked up about.

The supposed insularity that breeds tension and dissension caused by multiculturalism isn't the problem -- even in the supposed melting pot of America, the black community is as separate from the Jewish community as it is separate from the white community and violence is more a component of the superstructure than any individual section of the country; at least in Canada, we recognize people's natural need to group and great effort is made in introducing each other to our respective cultures. As more rational minds have pointed out, time and again -- the effort has to be put in at the level of class: social programs, good schools, good urban planning and architecture, inclusion rather than isolation, if things are to really work. To blame the gun violence on cultural issues when the problem is completely social? That is inherently racist.

The Temple of Leisure

I was on the slopes the other day, the first time in nearly two decades that I had clipped on a pair of skis. I went to Whistler-Blackcomb, the vaunted ski resort and Vancouver's trump card in a 2010 Winter Olympics bid that has the city feeling its oats. Since I'm writing this now, I survived, and I might likely ski again, but one of the things I noted was how costly it all was, even with discounts and my thrifty nature. A lift ticket in the area of seventy-five dollars, a set of rental equipment for thirty, transportation up to the mountain and food and drink while there (nine dollars for a bowl of chili!), and it all added up to a fine dent in the wallet. No wonder people have always thought of skiing as one of the provinces of the rich and well-to-do.

Recently, too, I cancelled my membership at the local aquatic centre. I hadn't been swimming as much, and though it was relatively inexpensive, I still felt strange paying for leisure and exercise I would never use. It made me think of all those private gyms that people go to, determined and humourless in their pursuit of weight loss and fitness, and all the money spent to make use of them (or not, depending on their diligence). The way these annual memberships and season passes are structured, it forces a person into a mentality that requires them to maximize their usage of the services they've pre-paid for, to the point where it becomes akin to chore.

The Economist, earlier this year, began publishing a lifestyle magazine called Intelligent Life in whose inaugural issue they profiled the sport of leisure boxing -- people of white-collar background who felt that they weren't getting enough out of their pansy, low-impact workout, and so chose to pay for the benefit of the highest impact workout around. The magazine's sections, ranging from the explicitly consumerist "Wealth" and "Luxury" categories to the implicated-by-association "Leisure" and "Travel" headings, are all about what people do when they have money and few native ideas on how to spend it.

It's hard to tell whether or not this is a good thing -- is the slow creep of the "wealth instinct" to the middle-class a sign of rising, global prosperity? I have my doubts. People have been rich since time immemorial, and conspicuous consumption has been practiced just as long, but why has this consumption become something aspirational? The home improvement and gourmet cooking shows, the profiles of music stars' houses on MTV Cribs, the proliferation of gadget and other "next wave, cutting edge" consumerist tracking blogs; all seem to add up to a culture that is quite different from the consumption of the past, because the consumption is no longer specific to a particular class of people. Marketers cast their net wide, now, and hope to capture as much market-share as possible, creditworthiness be damned.

It's quite possible that this strive-for-more, cooler, faster, is a product of how the current crop of twenty, thirty and even forty-somethings grew up: in the age of television and electronics. We've moved so quickly from a time when toys were simple, well-crafted things on which to focus a child's power of imagination and play, to a time when product placement and cross-over marketing ensure that everything already comes with a detailed backstory and history. For instance, video games, as enjoyable as they can be, are the outlet of the creator's imagination -- if there are spaces in which a child can insert his or her own fantasies, those spaces are becoming narrower and fewer. What once allowed a free-form imagination that -- in my mind -- gave rise to the great age of invention that preceded the past twenty years is being slowly choked off. (That's not to say it would disappear; the human capacity for creativity is boundless even within the confines we've put it.)

The beauty and trap of this kind of culture is that it pacifies. Like Noam Chomsky's somewhat dour attitude toward spectator sports, with their emphasis on our-team jingoism and meaningless statistics, and the lethargy it inspires towards more meaningful pursuits like political and cultural awareness, caring about "nice things" and "new things" is really the ultimate form that soma has taken, that narcotizing drug that keeps the peace, at a cost, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Sure, we have Prozac and Viagra, but these are drugs people use to cope with the demands of our culture, not the sources of its problems. The real opiate of the people these days is not religion, but shopping. Well, that's too glib. What's taken the place of religion for those who aren't particularly religious is whatever occupies their time to exhaustion, to the point where trivial things become central to their consciousness. Whether that's the 9/11 conspiracy theorist's decidedly narrow view of the world, or the shopaholic's energetic efforts to collect a particular line of shoes, I think it's all of a piece. In Google-world, where massive amounts of information on any particular subject can be pushed to our screens instantly, it's no wonder that minutiae is what drives most of our waking moments.

It struck me, on the mountain, as hundreds of other eager leisure seekers shusshed past me on their technologically advanced skis, outfitted in expensive Gore-Tex and neoprene, that we had lost some of the pleasure of what inspired the first skiiers in Scandinavia -- being alone among the vistas, in the expansive realm of nature, ignorant of particular techniques and taxonomy and joyful in the way of children in discovery. (It was also pretty useful in those snow-bound countries.) Instead, we've taken the Olympian motto of performance culture ("faster, higher, stronger") to a level where it has become the motto of our times, in much of our endeavours. Unlike those pundits of the past who praised the dwindling of the work-week from seven days to six and then to five, doing nothing -- really doing nothing -- is the biggest crime you can commit. So do something. And if you are going to do something, if you're going to spend your time on leisure, you had better not do it leisurely -- get the best equipment, spend the bucks, work at it! It's not worth doing if you don't!

Destiny manifest

Even as ecological issues have migrated to the forefront of the consciousness of the average Western-world citizen (which ranges from high-minded activism to gas-is-so-expensive water cooler talk), and their lifestyles shift from rural and land-rich to the urban and high-density, the world's population still continues to increase dramatically. How do we, with dwindling resources, maintain a quality of life that we will find acceptable? Garrett Hardin's "Tragedy of the Commons" posited that we would not be able to do so via technology or science, but only by a change in our collective values, a change that lately has become more plausible as talk of our oil dependence takes centre stage. We still seek technical solutions; even the gloomiest energy pundit believes that a diversion of our current oil and gas-based resources to develop alternative energy would help resolve that quagmire, if it weren't for our collective disinterest in this solution.

The reality, though, is this: even if the entire population of the world became model conservationists and ecological stewards of the highest order, unless, collectively, people stop increasing that same population, energy conservation and recycling will likely do relatively little. It's a dramatic onus placed on the natural instinct, to reproduce, an instinct that even colours the majority's impressions of intentional childlessness. Today, every individual still acts in his or her own best interests, and people seek to reproduce for a variety of reasons -- for love, for posterity, for other less savoury reasons. In some ways, it's viewed as our natural right as animals to continue our species. We buy hybrid cars and replace our incandescent lightbulbs with energy-efficient fluorescents, and downsize into smaller and smaller apartments, but are we just delaying the inevitable? As rational and practical a policy of one or two children per family might be, will we be able to adopt this policy on time?

There are countries whose population growth rate is minimal: Japan, estimated at 0.05% for 2005, takes this honour. Although many look upon this as an indication of the decline of Japan and its society, we might have to look again at this measure. Japan is heavily urbanized, committed to energy prudence, with a population comfortable with smaller private spaces and small families: perhaps this is the type of society and culture that, in future, will ensure our continued existence. But that points up the real issue, the area where we should really be focusing our efforts. Even as the culture of conservation takes slow root in the soil of North America, the world is filled with overpopulated and underdeveloped countries, countries where the possibility of a natural population decline is as foreign as easily available contraception. These countries form the bulk of the world's population growth in the coming years and this is where any effects of conservation done in more developed countries will be effectively nullified. So, even as we applaud ourselves in the West, with our sudden focus on energy conservation and conservatism, our fuel cell technologies and solar arrays, we are far from real solutions. Even the vastest resources of land, energy and food are finite.

One of the more popular catchphrases, well-worn by its use in environmental movements, is "think globally, act locally" -- that is, we can do our small part at home and effect change throughout the world. What I suggest is that this is a nice slogan, but meaningless in the long run. We most likely will not see the effects for quite some time, not in our lifetimes and not in our children's lifetimes, but if we really want to contribute to the continuing health of the human world, we will have to think globally and act globally.

The New World

As habitable land inexorably gets devoured by the minute, either through sheer population growth, like in the cities of Asia, or by the growth of the sprawl-hungry North American suburbs and exurbs, what seemed inconceivable with the current state-of-the-art of architecture a few hundred years ago is now commonplace in many cities: the sight of hundreds, if not thousands of concrete, glass and metal spires rising from the ground to heights that dominate vision. In cities like Hong Kong, years of vertical building have created a sea of stalagmitic apartment blocks that scale Victoria Peak in an organic version of highrise living: an amalgam of sleek futurism and Asian pragmatism. The bustling core around Central District and Causeway Bay, all flyover street signage and glittering neon, packed with people, is a keen indication of the vitality in this city of cities.

Vancouver, where I live, is an example of a North American city learning to build vertically, shaped less by population growth and more by accident of geography and hence, land values -- the city is constrained by mountains, the ocean and a border shared with the United States. Land is scarce, and, like many cities on this continent, Vancouver's developers have opted to raise an army of characterless condominiums flanking the downtown core. There's a certain sculptural elegance to these towers that only makes itself known from a great distance, but up close, the condos of False Creek and Yaletown seem copycat utilitarian; the jury is still out on whether a city the likes of the great modern metropolises will manifest itself in such a condo-heavy environment.

What does Vancouver lack? I suspect it's the drive of commerce; the mercantile instinct. Think of the cities around the world that are the vanguard of skyscraper living: New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong and lately, Shanghai. These are the commercial centres of the world, to where both the rich and poor flock, to make their fortunes. It's this collision of class, race, religion and creed, brought together by ambition, that seems to me the best recipe for a vital city. When everyone's a potential customer, how can you wall yourself off from the next person? That is both the strength and source of tension in our great cities. With all their flaws, these cities are the models for future living, as space dwindles.

There's still something abhorrent about life in an alveole-like chamber in a non-descript tower. We all want room to move, a place to stretch out, variety in our environment -- not that much different from old Fido. As much as I might believe that vertical living is inevitable for most of us, I appreciate the benefits of space. What is it that appeals about it? Some remnant of life on the plains, under an open sky... a reminder of freedom? Too-small spaces feel like prison cells, with limited vistas and just enough room to pace. Space is to shelter as spice is to food -- it may not be needed, but without it, something is lost. In every cramped little condo, even the grandest fixtures and building materials cannot quite overcome a feeling of claustrophobia.

To some extent, we can find the space we need in the communal areas granted to the public: the great parks, like Olmsted's famed Central Park, and their smaller cousins, and in the various planned spaces found in any urban environment, whose quality is often commensurate to the effort and money expended on them, meaning in many cases that they're pretty awful. Many new high-rise developments, harkening back to L'Enfant's master-planned expanse of Washington, D.C., often devote substantial space to public parks and recreation areas, conscious of their importance. In the future, it's quite possible that these public spaces will become drastically vital, as our private realms shrink.

It's by no means assured, however. As the web continues to grow in importance, our business and social lives conducted online, our information gleaned from predominantly virtual sources -- all the things that common spaces once abetted so well -- we ensure that our real, public spaces will never be as popular as they once were. Though we all seek space and freedom, it seems that many of us have found it in the virtually limitless regions that are available to us online. Even as we are brought closer together, physically, by the expansion of our cities and the dwindling resource of land, the web has ensured that, in its mediated way, we can remain as far apart as we like. (Even as it, too, paradoxically, strives to bring us together.)

A culture of "taste"

Knowing the difference between a confit and a consommé; being aware of the vagaries of font design; having an intimate knowledge of the Queen Anne period of architecture and the Bauhaus school. What once seemed to be knowledge kept in the realms of various specialities -- essentially all forms of craft that, over time, had accrued deep expertise and methodologies -- are now proliferating to the average person, the untrained generalist who probably finds it appealing to dabble in these areas in their spare time. Books and literature on gastronomy, graphic and furniture design, architecture, all fly off the shelves in a time when being cultured in this most materialistic of senses is immensely popular.

Can we look to people like Martha Stewart and the cast of the various television networks dedicated to cooking, home renovation and general aspirations to a perfect, sleek vision of domesticity for some of this appreciation? And simultaneously, the proliferation of consumer products as objects of design (like the iPod or the Karim Rashid designed Umbra wastebasket) available to the masses -- the dream of many designers, design populism! What to make of a culture where the average person might happen to care about letter spacing or authenticity in ottoman reupholstering?

I suppose it'd all be pretty harmless if it felt like this was just a pastime, a side story to people's lives, but in so many ways it seems as if people's existences are predicated on making things pretty, caring about looks, essentially being superficial in the guise of being cultured. I'm not one to say what "true culture" is, but I suspect that those denizens of past ages would look upon our current fixations and wonder where our brains were? Or am I wrong? Have we always, collectively, allowed taste and discernnment to be such a defining factor in our lives?

I think that strikes at the crux of the issue. Taste and discernment are things that are associated with people who are wealthy, who as members of Thorstein Veblen's "leisure class" sought to exhibit that wealth in so many ways. This is the lifestyle that has filtered down to Joe and Jane Average: everyone wants to be rich, so if we can't be rich, let's be tasteful. Let's care about beautiful things and have opinions on the aesthetics of things, opinions that define us. Perhaps, in some kind of subconscious reversal, we as consumers seek to become aesthetes first, without the concomitant requirement of money. It's a bad and craven thing to aspire to riches, goes the common wisdom, but to have taste? Well, terrific!

To me, this is where we're at -- we're immersed in lifestyles defined by what we consume, what we like, the things we find pretty and full of character. We surround ourselves with aesthetic values and claim it as culture, when in fact intellectual vibrancy among most of my peers these days is at an all time low. We see it in the innumerable blogs and websites devoted to food reviewing, gadget reviewing, home renovation and collecting. The sheer success of eBay. We're living some weird cross between mercantilism and aestheticism and there's very little going on in the gaps between. Even the reading culture, maybe one of the bastions of non- or anti-materialism has been infected by this taste-making virus, where Oprah's book club becomes one tremendous cog in a giant marketing machine of books, an arena that once depended on individual and mostly independent interest to determine their fates. Will "taste" stand the test of time? Or will all this "taste" ultimately render a culture with little trace?

Whither popularity?

Why is popularity such a fundamental part of the success in life? Even after we leave the knockabout halls of high school, with its intricate social pecking orders, popularity in various forms is still fundamental to our interactions.

As one of countless aspiring writers, I'm part of a mob of people, arms up and frantic, hoping to be picked or recognized for their talent, their incisiveness, their art. There are so many of us that the only mechanism we seem to have is popularity to determine who should gain attention and fame. Google, one of the most ubiquitous names in the online world today, based its famous search engine algorithm on the concept of popularity. Its PageRank system, at heart, is based on the idea that popular is good. For the most part, popular sites are ranked higher in its search engine results, and sites are deemed popular when other popular sites link to it.

As effective and revolutionary as this was at the time, when search engines like the once-famous Altavista would often return pages of irrelevant results, it does result in another problem: popular sites become popular and unpopular sites, no matter their merit, languish in obscurity. This is the blog culture we're now growing up in, one which ensures that only sites deemed "linkworthy" by other popular sites will gain attention. Think of the vaunted Slashdot effect, where a linked site from Slashdot.org will fall to its knees under the load of the thousands of incoming visitors.

Now, perhaps bloggers feel that, hey, they know best. They think, as arbiters of taste and culture, we will be able to ferret out the obscurities and bring them into the light. Where Google, by design, relegates unpopular sites to the no man's land of page 10 results, the bloggers will subvert the order and make them popular. It's the same philosophy behind Google-whacking and search engine optimization, I suppose, although those have less salutary motivations.

The question is, have bloggers been able to finally equate popularity with quality and vice versa? Are we entering an Internet age where the most popular (linked to) sites are also truly all excellent sites? Perhaps blogging, or filtering as some have called it, is essential to combat Google's design flaws. I'd like to hope so, but in fact, the result is not unlike other tastemakers and those who eventually gain a level of popularity and authority that calcifies and makes them unable to see innovation and highlight truly unique things. (Case in point: Coach Leach's profile by Michael Lewis, who seems to be the very definition of an unpopular, innovative and by all rights fameworthy person for his exploits in football coaching, but who is resolutely ignored by the majority of those who should be able to recognize his talent.) If anything, bloggers are quickly approaching that same stage of calcification, absorbing the attention of the bulk of the populace online and leaving the unpopular but truly unique individuals to figure out ways to infiltrate this newly established order.

When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning

After having spent a frustrating day trying to prove my identity and get a response back from various Internet domain registrars and hosting providers I use for several websites I maintain, it struck me that the whole domain registration business is pretty young. It's a bit strange to see how a certain industry develops: does it turn into a huge, respected area of business with giant corporations, like the telecommunication industry, or does it turn into an industry full of two-bit operators and the occasional more recognized brand name, like the domain registration industry?

Much like gym memberships and cell phone resellers, there's something about this kind of industry that attracts sleazy behaviour. At least part of that is the "take your credit card number and sign a cryptic contract" subscriptions that are the de facto standard in these lines of business. And the obstacles that they put in your way when you do decide to cancel, well, it confounds reason how people can operate businesses in this manner. I've had managers actively avoid speaking to me, in hopes that I'd leave and miss a cancellation deadline. I've had people claim they had no office and no direct phone number so that I couldn't reach them without going through a chain of powerless customer support agents and salespeople that acted as a human buffer. And in this latest attempt to cancel some domains I own that I don't use, I'm finding that my registrar has buried the cancellation website in a frequently asked questions sub-site, where you actually have to search for "cancel" before you can find the link to the cancellation site. Further, the site tells me that the cancellation forms should be faxed in to the number on the forms but the forms don't even list a number! And if you do a search for "fax", it results in multiple possible numbers.

That would be bad enough, but because the email address I registered with them a few years ago is one I no longer have access to, and even though I've changed it through their website to one I do have access to, the activation emails are still not being sent to my new address. So I'm forced to get support through their billing and tech support email addresses, because they don't really offer phone support for the package I signed up with (a "too good to be true" 3 year free hosting offer -- I now see where the catch was). It's despicable behaviour, frankly, and it does astound me that businesses can operate like this.

Then again, even big, respectable businesses aren't really: Enron, Worldcom, Tyco. It's amazing, but perhaps not surprising, how people will cast aside ethical behaviour in the quest for money!

Notes on a Movie Trailer

Watching the trailer for Memoirs of a Geisha, two things came to mind.

One, is it not impressive that Ziyi Zhang, who spoke no English in her debut to American audiences (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) all the way up till her appearance in Rush Hour 2, is the star of a movie acted completely in the English language? This same woman appeared as a presenter at the MTV Movie Awards with Jackie Chan, barely able to comprehend what was going on and asking whispered questions in Mandarin to the multilingual Chan. Think of the reverse situation, with a Western actress gifted in accent mimicry -- say, Meryl Streep or, more contemporarily, Gwyneth Paltrow -- attempting to learn the Chinese language in a short enough period of time to make filming them acting in that language feasible. It wouldn't happen.

I think this demonstrates the relative ease of learning English over Chinese; spoken Chinese I'd hazard would take about three to four years to become fluent in, English obviously much faster. Zhang has put the work in, with her claimed "five hours" of study a day, but still, I don't know how convincing Paltrow might be if she had to master the tones and pronunciation of Mandarin, after a year or two of study. Then again, I could be completely wrong.

The second thing I noticed was that all three major female characters are played by Chinese women. At first, this struck me as exceedingly strange, since all the characters are obviously Japanese, being geishas in Japan. It was starting to raise my hackles a little -- "just another example of Hollywood confusing ethnicities!" -- when it occurred to me that Hollywood has never made much of an attempt at authenticity in this sense. Italians played by Jews, Polish characters played by Italians, Rwandans played by African-Americans. It's a rare occasion when a white character is cast solely on ethnic background, so I suppose it shouldn't be any different if they were East Asian?

Still, something seems off and I can't quite put my finger on it. Maybe it says something about North America, where the strong divisons of ethnicity and language are lost, and a character is no longer British or Spanish or Armenian, but simply white. Still, even in the examples I think of, where ethnicity does become a factor, like the Polish dockworker Ziggy in The Wire played by James Ransone, an ethnically Italian actor, there is something unconvincing about their performances. Obviously, if one is able to make distinctions like Italian/Polish or Japanese/Chinese, these performances stand out negatively -- listening to Zhang's Mandarin-inflected English jars when I know very well how English is spoken by native Japanese speakers.

I suppose this does indeed circle back to a certain ignorance of the producers, and maybe their estimation of the audience: "we can't tell the difference, why would they be able to?" It may very well be open-minded and creative to put someone in a role designed for someone with completely different traits, depending on the nature of the production (gender reversal of characters in a modern staging of Macbeth perhaps?) but it's clearly not the case here. The thought process goes that the (relatively) big names are Chinese, we need big names to attract audiences, and Chinese people look pretty much like Japanese people. It's this line of reasoning that ensures that I'm sure is a definite contributor to the lack of progress in Hollywood film-making and its eventual demise, as people get sick of having their intelligence patronized.

Well, let's hope.

Caveat emptor

I was reading excerpts from Jim Kunstler's The Long Emergency, the latest book in a life's work of writing dedicated to sounding a strident alarm about the state of the world, the way people live and, in this latest installment, our overwhelming dependency on oil. The central thesis is that we will not be able to switch quickly enough to alternative energy sources when our supply runs out, and that we are essentially destined to return to a pre-Industrial Age where we live and work locally.

One of the interesting things he noted in a small section late in the book was people's over-emphasis on real estate as the safe haven of value. He pointed up the absurdity of ascribing "intrinsic value" to houses in much the same way it's been pointed out to various gold bugs that gold, in fact, is no different from any other material, even as they spout various theories about why the yellow metal will always retain some kind of value. As people fled from the equities market but sought similar sized gains of 15 to 20% a year, and the Fed chairman Alan Greenspan dropped the cost of borrowing to nearly nil, it was almost inevitable that a bubble would be created.

Kunstler is astute in pointing out this fact -- why have houses taken on the mythic status of safe haven? I suppose it's tied up in notions of land-owning and property. People argue that having a domain, room to move and a place over which you have control. But this notion of property ownership is dependent on a stable government, a peaceful citizenry and its acceptance of the rule of law, none of which may exist in exactly the situations that would give rise to a flight to safe value havens. Gold's value in antiquity likely came from its appearance, its relative rarity scarcity is a primary component of value), its properties when made into jewelry -- remnant values that would be somewhat meaningless if the world went to hell in a handbasket. That's not even to bring in the fact that there are obviously much rarer and more useful metals these days.) In any potential breakdown of society, it's likely that a house would be more liability than asset. Kunstler points this out in energy terms -- heating and maintaining a large home would be next to impossible in an age of stifled energy production -- but also in the environment of lawlessness that would likely ensue, as you'd have to defend your abode from thieves and other invaders.

Of course, that isn't to say that we should stop owning houses -- where would we live? Again, this is something real estate proponents look to as a source of demand, but they always tend to forget that we often live in real estate that is much more than we require. What I am saying is that the concept of value in real estate is a tenuous thing, much like the value perceived in dot-com stocks and tulips in 1600s Holland, most of which value was endlessly justified by naively optimistic investors.

Revisionism

I've always felt that Jason Kottke, one of the more well-known people who have taken up the blogger moniker, kind of tripped into his modest fame. As creator of the old 0sil8 website, he occasionally did interesting work, but ever since he began to accumulate his observations into an online testament to the possibility that anyone can get famous, whatever goodwill he accrued from his design work slowly dissipated in a morass of often lame and ill-informed analysis.

Case in point: his belief that "few would have predicted keeping personal diaries secret as a use of the public internet several years ago." By "few would", I guess he means "he wouldn't"? Earth to Mr. Kottke: people have been keeping personal diaries on the internet, both publicly and privately, since before this supposed blog revolution -- it went hand in hand with writing anything about one's life on the web. Varying levels of privacy has always been a key concern of the web -- there isn't one sole entity called "The Public Internet", but rather different tiers of exposure. Private and focused mailing lists have also been present since the start of this whole thing. I don't write this to be pedantic, but to highlight how every new movement of people seems to have a loud and vocal group that trumpets themselves and their new thing as if it had never been thought of before. It's a rare instance when this is truly the case. Although the web diary movement has been subsumed into the category of blog (often called a "personal blog", now), it's a truism that the use of online sites intended to communicate with a limited audience has been around since day one.

Without doing a hatchet job on one of the web's most visible and simultaneously mediocre voices, I have to say that t's this kind of hand-waving generalization he does that will now pass into fact in many of his readers' minds. People will read his glib remark and a whole page of Internet history will be elided, while those with a modicum of memory and insight watch as he puts his foot in his mouth once again.

Lab Rat Gaming

A friend of mine who is an avid and opinionated gamer made reference to game designer Wyatt Cheng's five second rule, five seconds of perfect pleasure in a game that ensures you'll want to do it for hours and days to come, like the five seconds when you complete a row in Tetris and the blocks disappear and you hear that distinctive sound, or the five seconds in Street Fighter 2 where you deliver a controlled and well-timed dragon punch and inflict proportionally more effective and visually interesting damage. My friend wrote that the immensely popular game Worlds of Warcraft was missing this key factor and that it was one of the reasons he found his interest in the game waning.

Even as someone who's been around the culture of video and computer games since its inception and even at one time attempted to develop games in a professional capacity, I've always felt uncomfortable referring to myself as a gamer, because I'm not. However, I've owned several consoles since I was a kid and my initial computer purchase was driven not because I wanted to do anything particular productive with that box of metal, glass and electricity, but merely because I wanted to play games. I still try out new games regularly, and keep up with various innovative or particularly interesting games -- I made a concerted effort to try out Shadow of the Colossus recently (fantastic) and for some reason am fascinated by the concept of Katamari Damacy even though I've never actually played it. I own an Xbox, got it modded (a process intended to allow an owner to play games and software on the console in a much less restricted fashion), but ended up using it mostly as a media centre to watch videos and, unlike a hardcore gamer, left it in Toronto to gather dust temporarily while I moved to Vancouver for work.

So... I don't know where I fall on the spectrum exactly. I suppose most people would call me a casual gamer, but I suspect I'm not even that. But to get back to this "five second rule" -- to me, this insight initially seemed interesting but the longer I think about it, the less convinced I am of its bell-ringing universal truth, and the more I believe that he's conflated excellent game mechanics with the visual and auditory elements that embellish them.

Katamari springs to mind as something that is essentially a single idea, repeated indefinitely, but rolling a ball of trash around to pick up larger and larger pieces isn't the central reward, it's the basic structure of the game. In a similar fashion, the Tetris example used by Cheng seems particularly wrong-headed. Making rows disappear is the fundamental game mechanic of Tetris; if you don't, you will lose much faster. I don't think anyone but the most addicted of gamers played the game for the particular delights of seeing a row disappear.

It's as if Cheng is saying that the sheer delight of a gong sounding and a fireworks display when your pawn captures a queen is what would keep people playing chess, rather than a well-tested game mechanic with deep implications. His "five second rule" points up a certain philosophy of gaming that I find kind of depressing. It's the devotion to a system of tangible rewards, a weirdly Pavlovian style of gaming that is completely at odds with the way I played games as a kid, and the games which I enjoyed. You see it in the grim, statistic quests of many MMOGs (massively multiplayer online games, games which allow many people to play together and interact -- a kind of socializing for the 21st century nerd) and in the insistent way some gamers feel they need to finish a game, even if they don't like it all that much.

Like the promise of continuous pleasure in the videotape described in David Foster Wallace's magnum opus Infinite Jest, the majority of vocal gamers nowadays seem intent on creating even more efficiently time-absorbing leisure. Playing games has become a lifestyle in itself, a centralized devotion to something that by design, is just entertainment, diversion. It's diverting, all right. (What results from games? Really, only more games.) Is this just the modern way of doing things? Is this some endpoint of copious leisure time? How ironic it is that people have lost their jobs and families to the addictive pleasures of modern games!

Five seconds, multiplied, sure adds up.

Bill Bryson and Grime

I spent last evening re-watching a documentary series produced in 1999 by Granada Television, called Notes from a Small Island. It was hosted by Bill Bryson and based on his book of the same name. Following from the same internal reasoning that has allowed me to avoid ever seeing Titanic, I had assiduously avoided reading any of Bryson's incredibly popular books, mostly dedicated to travel. (I have recently read A Short History of Nearly Everything, his foray into science writing which seems to have garnered him equal acclaim in that arena -- it was folksy, witty and entertaining, which I guess is what most people want in their reading material, no?)

Anyhow, it was pleasant to watch the show with a friend of mine, a woman who has a distinct bent for the idyllic, old-fashioned and prelapsarian, and who loved the depiction of village life and the twee, gentle characterization of the English people as a bunch of lovable hobbits, cabbies and other eccentrics that were -- Bryson channels Goldilocks here -- "just right", And admittedly, for the most part I enjoy that too, being somewhat of an Anglophile.

But the thing that struck me as odd was how strange and narrow the focus of the 6-part documentary series was. In one of the few moments that seemed to admit to the changing nature of Britain, especially of its larger cities, Bryson makes a mild reference to the multiculturalism that's more and more evident, with the briefest flashes of coloured faces. Very quickly, however, it returns back to the very white and very traditional vision of Avalon. Keep in mind that this documentary was made in 1999.

After having my head filled with visions of cheerful cricket players, Welsh bards in the outer Hebrides and posh princess daughters of rich magnates, it's jarring to see the poverty and drug use that gets elided in Bryson's happily naive vision of the Isles. Illiterate kids in East London, making music with cracked computer software and broadcasting on pirate radio. It sounds a little like the early era of hip hop, birthed out of the inner city ghettoes of the Bronx. This new wave is less Peace, Love, Unity and Having Fun, in the words of Afrika Bambaataa, and more about sheer, nerve-jangling bravado. This is one of the heavy influences of modern British youth, a weird America-through-the-looking glass ethos that has also given rise to the chav.

I'd avoided listening to the music that goes by the name "grime" (or "sublow" or "eski" or another half-dozen also-rans), in much the same way that I had managed to never read a Bill Bryson travelogue, but that photo series by Simon Wheatley got me intrigued again, and late to the game, I went and listened to the Run The Road grime compilations and discovered that there was more to it than the nails-on-blackboard voice of Dizzee Rascal. It's got all the sonic bombast of hip hop, borrows liberally from the guttural soundclash patois of dancehall and rides clattery club beats that point to its debt to UK Garage, birthed in a youth culture that seems completely at odds with Bryson's nostalgic vision of England.

Without commenting on the positives and negatives of the social upheaval that is sure to continue for the next few decades and as much as I enjoyed the sun-dappled portrait of Britain in Bryson's work (the book was voted as the top depiction of the English, by the English -- wishful thinking or biased poll?), Notes was a facile vision of a country, a sort of secular restorationism exhibited in other forms, particularly in James Kunstler's constant derision of modern architecture. It's the same thing that gives rise to people's musical conservatism ("everything except rap and country") and a variety of limited worldviews.

What I see here is two competing visions of a country, neither perfect -- one which wants to hold fast to a beautiful world of ritual and history that may no longer exist in half a century's time, and another which voraciously consumes everything in its path, multifarious, narcotized, oblivious to tradition, but capable of stunning innovation and energy. Can they ever hope to live together?