Can You See Me?

Posted on February 7, 2017 by McPhedran

The house was long and bright, a small tour being conducted as I came home.

“What longitudinal line does the house bisect?” The guide smiled briefly, waiting only a moment before conducting the group through the sculpture gallery. “Originals, everything is an original.” My clothes were missing from some shelves, moved to a downstairs room still under construction. That’s where she was, my wife, unpacking my things. I thought of just staying there, waiting for all of this to come around to a sensible point, but gathered my wits and caught up to her before her next meeting. “I need just ten minutes.”

A loose-suited man stood beside her. “I need the same.”

Her look was reserved as she glanced between us and then back at him. “Would you like to look at the garden? Why don’t I take you out to look at that?”

“We won’t have time then?” I stuttered.

She was already leaving. “We can schedule something for next week.”

I followed them down to the train, past a half naked man engaged in a complicated ritual, artistic or personal I didn’t understand. “Henry, we’ve talked about bringing your friends.” She turned to the loose-suited man. “It’s too much, isn’t it?”

I thought that it was but had been left at the top of the stairs.

DuVernay’s Documentary “13th” Needs To Be Seen

Posted on February 5, 2017 by McPhedran

Ava DuVernay’s Academy-nominated documentary 13th exposes the intrinsic flaw of America’s 13th Amendment. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

While abolishing slavery is well and good – how did it ever happen in the first place?! – the amendment allows for the practice to continue through the penal system, a system that systematically incarcerates black males in America, a population that, only 4% of the overall population, accounts for 40% of prisoners. DuVernay outlines America’s dismal history of discrimination and servitude, citing Jim Crow laws as well as the systematic targeting of black leaders such as Angela Davis and Black Panther Fred Hampton.Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Clinton are all indicted for the role in the morass as well as So-Called President Trump. Most insidious of all is the monetization of the mass incarcerations – corporations such as WalMart and Time Warner directly profiting from these policies – as well as the understanding that another iteration of the racist laws awaits us all. DuVernay’s film needs to be seen. Okay, so what are you doing? Watch it now!

Ice Friday: Ian McGuire’s “The North Water”

Posted on February 3, 2017 by McPhedran

Through a stuttering veil of snow he sees at the floe edge a bluish iceberg, immense, chimneyed, wind-gouged, sliding eastwards like an albinistic butte unmoored from the desert floor. The berg moves at a brisk walking pace, and as it moves its nearest edge grinds against the floe and spits up house size rafts of ice like swarf from the jaws of a lathe. Sumner feel, as he watches, that he is seeing something he shouldn’t rightly see, that he is being made an unwilling party to a horrifying but elemental truth telling. As quickly as the chaos began, however, it ceases. The berg loses contact with the edge of the ice, and the shuddering cacophony of impact gives way to the remnant howling of the wind.

Post-Pop Idol, Vulvana, reflects on “Manitou Island”

Posted on February 2, 2017 by McPhedran

Shortly after the burial ceremonies, Vulvana interviewed with Entertain Me Magazine: Our technological society offers nothing but self-denial and self-annihilation. Under the leadership of Gerbi Norberg, his mother Norma Butler-Norberg, the medicine man Asawasanay and the village elder Pamequonaishcung, these people have decided to forge their own course. They are returning to the essence of life, the earth itself. They are redefining human progress. They’re throwing away technology, building a society where the family and community are not just political promises.This is a land to which the forgotten people can go, you know, what Victor Hugo called the miserable of the earth, the dispossessed. This is their land. This is where they belong.

Corinne Reveals Business: Trump Voodoo Dolls

Posted on January 31, 2017 by McPhedran

President Trump’s Appointee for Secretary of Education, Corinne, tries to stay on point: “You are rude. You don’t say hi to anyone.You have a skank look on your face. You’re just not nice. It’s just weird and uncomfortable. I know how to get to people like (you). What does that say about your emotional intelligence, bitch?”“I’m nice until you cross me,” she admits. And for anyone who does that? “How do you make a voodoo doll for one person?”

Funnily enough, they are conveniently available here: Donald Trump Voodoo Doll

Battery Park Rally Against Trump’s Muslim Ban

Posted on January 29, 2017 by McPhedran

This was my first political rally, complete with chants – No Hate, No Fear! Refugees are welcome here! – signs and speakers. New York politicians showed up in force: Senators Charles Schumer, Kirsten Gillibrand and Cory Booker, Mayor Bill De Blasio, Congressmen Jerry Nadler and Adriano Espaillat, along with a host of city council members. The only thing that Trump’s despotic methods have managed to achieve so far is galvanize the opposition against him; the past indifference – liking, tweeting and such – has evolved into activism, protests appearing everywhere in the country and around the world. What wicked thing has he in store next? Week two has only just begun.

Ice Friday: Camus Spins Trump

Posted on January 27, 2017 by McPhedran

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. The schoolteacher is well aware of this. And the question is not one of knowing what punishment or reward attends the making of this calculation. The question is that of knowing whether two and two do make four. The essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. And to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.*

(Excerpt from Albert Camus’ The Plague)

Embarrassed by Trump & Bannon & CNN too

Posted on January 26, 2017 by McPhedran

Surprisingly, Stephen Bannon – apparently the Goebbels-to-be in the Trump Administration – got one thing right in his recent anti-media rant: “The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and listen for awhile.”

The only thing is that Bannon’s context is wrong. The media should have shut up and listened when Trump made his first speech and then stopped their obsessive coverage on the campaign trail. As reported in The New York Times, “Media commentators have accused CNN of giving preferential treatment to Mr. Trump to lift ratings. The network is on track this year to collect $1 billion in profit.” Yes, that ship has now sailed.

As terrible as Trump is – uber-racist-liar-son-of-satan and all – the bigger problem is this money problem of capitalism. There’s nothing else to it, no empathy and understanding, nothing but making money and then more of it, which is why Trump is in the White House and why we’re all going to die. Prematurely, I mean, from a fucked-up planet. Trump isn’t the thing. And Bannon most certainly isn’t the thing. We’re the thing. It’s my problem and yours, this wanting, this pretending to care with likes and shares, this superficial bullshit that is dragging us down, back to the ooze. So, yeah, Bannon is right, they should shut up and listen. And so should he. And I guess me too.

Naked, Talking About Trade Winds

Posted on January 25, 2017 by McPhedran

She was unnerved, trying to laugh. “I mean…”

“I’m talking about trade winds.” He stayed there, naked, legs spread, absently playing with his penis. “The trade winds, okay? They’re gone. Done.”

She looked past him at the long-lying clouds, grey over the harbor.

“Trade winds are the foundation of all weather. No trade winds, no weather. Everything will just stay the same, whatever that is.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It’s like this. Think about street signs, all right?” He strode across the room, his bare feet slapping the wooden floor. “Say the street signs just started changing, right? The signs at the corners, the names just changing, Park Avenue to something else.”

“You mean, getting replaced by workers?”

“No, just changing, the signs themselves, the letters and numbers changing, 42nd Street suddenly something else.”

The day had been sucked into a drifting fog, the black glass of the building across lost in the thick shroud.

“And the only way to track it would be to launch a sticker campaign, tagging the signs that change and sharing that information through a central hub.”

“I don’t understand anything you are saying.”

“It’s a metaphor. I’m trying to get you to understand.”

“I don’t.”

He had her back to her now, at the edge of the hallway.”You would have probably been better off without me. I think about that, how you would be if none of this had ever happened. You would have been better off.”

She closed her eyes and imagined it.

“Everyone would have been. Even me.”

“Manitou Island”: Individual Response Tests

Posted on January 24, 2017 by McPhedran

My parents enrolled me in a private grade school, The Venture, where the regular curriculum of maths, sciences and languages was mixed with Individual Response Test Situations (IRTS). A typical IRTS involved being left alone in a room full of toys, while the psychologists watched from a one-way window. I don’t remember doing anything much except staring off dumbly.I was accident prone. By the time I was 12 years old, I already had stitches in my knee (bicycle), chin (pool), shin (bicycle), lip (hockey stick), elbow (bicycle), thumb (car door) and knee again (bicycle again). A week before summer vacation in Grade 12, I broke my leg in a car accident. So instead of starting a summer job at the bank, I went to Cedar Lake and stayed with my grandparents. The highlight had to be catching a six-pound bass. I was so excited that I pulled the motor’s cord with the motor in gear and was thrown out the back. I tread water, my cast dissolving in the water, and watched the boat circle around me. I ruined my shoulder trying to grab it once. Finally the boat worked its way to shore and ran up on the rocks. And so I lost the fish, wrecked the boat and had my leg in the cast for another two months.

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