paved :: marc weisblott

“As I get older, I find it
more and more difficult to disguise my utter comptempt for what
representative democracy has become. Long gone are the days of an
Abraham Lincoln or a Harry Truman, leaders so unconcerned with what was
popular that they risked everything to do what was right. …
Representative John Hostettler (R-IN) proudly flies the banner of
almost indignant ignorance every opportunity he gets. In his 12 years
in Congress, Hostettler has made such incredibly stupid assertions that
a lesser man would die from embarrassment immediately after having
uttered them.” [Enjoy Every Sandwich] … “I hope the next time Mr. Hostettler decides to visit Canada, they give him a full body-cavity search at Customs. I have a fishing pole they can borrow.” [Bark Bark Woof Woof] … “The only enclave of Islamic activity I see on a regular basis is running up to the second floor flat because my crazy Somalian neighbours have yet to grasp that when the toilet overflows – one’s first course of action should be to turn off the water valve underneath the toilet tank, as opposed to their usual course of action, which is opening up the back door and sweeping the excess water out all the while praying for deliverance.” [The Last Amazon] … “I thought the only thing we lake side dwellers of ‘South Toronto’ had to worry about was getting run over by a street car, freezing our balls off, drowning while intoxicated, terminal boredom, and of course getting shat on by a duck. There are a lot of those here. More ducks than Muslims anyway.” [Montreal Simon] … “But other than the chairman’s reference to ‘South Toronto,’ no one seemed to think it necessary to identify just what the committee had got so egregiously wrong. Is Canada not home to a good many terrorist cells? Should we not have been more careful about screening applicants for admission to this country, and if we had, would we not have rather fewer of these characters in our midst?” [Andrew Coyne] … “The residential population in this region is comparatively small and consists primarily of professionals living in upper middle class condominiums and heritage homes. It is not known for significant concentrations of Islamists, mosques, Muslims or people of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent.” ["South Toronto" earns a definition at Wikipedia]

What good is a conference dedicated to Web 2.0 if the details aren’t obsessively documented online? Well, based on the scattered recaps, the two-day mesh conference at the MaRS Discovery District reflected the fact that Bay Street is sniffing around the internet again, alongside developers eager to find the secret formula that allows a social networking concept to build an audience via alleged altruism. The best collection of quotes from the event were apparently kept by ProPr blogger Joseph Thornley, with inevitable gloating from successful entrepreneur panelists accompanied by bouts of cynicism. Venture capitalist academic Paul Kedrosky pondered how this current era feels like yet another bubble that’s waiting to burst: “It takes a lot of dead bodies to fill a swamp.” Micropersuasion blogger Steve Rubel evidently stirred things up just by railing against companies who jumped on the personal website trend by creating sites written in the voice of their mascot, like Captain Morgan: “If Mickey Mouse were really blogging, he’d be telling us how much he’s sweating in the costume and how long it has been since he went to the bathroom.” A panel dedicated to the influence of blogs on politics had Maclean’s pontificator Paul Wells summing up his user experience: “We are being flooded by commentary by people who don’t know jack, can’t write the English language, and give it away for free.” Questions about whether these topics are relevant to the technological side of the 2.0 trend were addressed in advance criticism of the mesh conference, and a big-tent mentality suggesting that fickle investors, PR hucksters and media personalities are going to factor in the successful advancement of web-based ideas may have been a bit too ridiculous, given how none of them were of much help the first time around. Jon Arnold, a market researcher, emerged from the mesh event with blurry vision after too many hours staring at the logo: “I didn’t really feel that all the strands connected … At the end of the day, much like Earth at Creation, I’d like to see this humming mass of energy and chaos sort itself out and unravel nicely like a ball of yarn.”

The hacker responsible for the words “Stephen Harper Eats Babies” scrolling on the LED display inside a westbound Lakeshore GO Transit train has earned the ultimate reward – a rebuke from Rush Limbaugh, whose radio commentary on May 10 was dedicated to the incident: The softwood lumber agreement, increased border security and more military spending are just the Soviet Canuckistan innovations that Limbaugh’s audience wants to hear about, developments that no name-calling can stop. “On both sides of the border, liberals are strong – but only when attacking their own leaders,” offered Rush. “When it comes to understanding how to defend their country – or even why they should defend it – they’re pretty much useless.” This whole story broke on the blog of National Citizens Coalition president Gerry Nicholls, who wondered “if somebody paid to put up this message or whether it was just the official viewpoint of GO Transit”, which led Exclusive Advertising Inc. to issue a press release emphatically stating the message was “not condoned”. Their claims of tighter protection measures on the antiquated displays proved laughable to those familiar with the finer points of the process of pixel hacking with a cheap infrared keyboard, as explained by Collision Detection blogger Clive Thompson: “Virtually none of the gormless businesspeople who use the signs ever bother to change the password from its factory-installed default – which is usually something like ‘password’ or ‘admin’ or ‘1234′ or whatever.” Moreover, the San Francisco-based computer security group Midnight Research Labs scoffed at claims that a more complex password will prevent this from happening again “since anyone with $4 and a Radio Shack IR kit could intercept and replay the password and any new message that they want”. But while coverage of the baby-eating message generated a few chuckles, before being forgotten, Angry in the Great White North blogger Steve Janke has persisted in his effort to sleuth the hacker down. Janke found a 24-year-old Sheridan College student named “Joshua”, who was linking to online coverage about the incident, stopping just short of confessing to the prank – reader reaction included “I hope Exclusive Advertising sues the ass off that little prick of a commie”. But the accused quickly deleted any implication that he might’ve been responsible, and posted a denial. “You aren’t clever enough to have pulled this off,” concluded Janke, who then took the higher road of delineating how the same technology can help you empty your hotel room minibar for free: “These vulnerabilities will continue to be exploited, and one day, people are going to get seriously hurt.” And clearly, none of these threats would be of much concern if the mainstream media in this city wasn’t so damn liberal.

Compulsive viewing at Hot Docs has inspired a few bloggers to keep track of the flicks they’ve seen, providing some insights beyond the fact that Natalie Portman – along with co-star Dustin Hoffman and ex-boyfriend Gael Garcia Bernal – was in the audience at the Isabel Bader Theatre for the Canadian premiere of Wordplay. That chronicle of crossword puzzle geekery earned high praise amidst Wholesome Goodness blogger Sameer Vasta’s batch of reviews (”I am somewhat at a loss for words in describing the sheer amazingness of this movie.”). Consolation Champs blogger James McNally offers a comprehensive post on each doc he’s seen, ranked on a scale that seems to be limited to the numbers 8, 9 and 10. A Funkaoshi Production blogger Ramanan Sivaranjan has also typed screening notes that are mostly enthusiastic. Bombippy blogger Jay Kerr hasn’t been as consistently enthused by the festival, left unimpressed by the gushing of the programmers who act as emcee for each film (”What can you say when the director and the producer are standing beside you?”) and further annoyed by what appears to be some poorly calibrated HD projection, resulting in blurry film and ghosted titles. Dan Dickinson also kept score of screenings on his site, noting the advert for the Cadillac Escalade that precedes each festival flick was even screened before OilCrash, which is all about the coming petroleum apocalypse. What’s the Story? blogger Siobhan McLaughlin has been volunteering at Hot Docs, allowing her to catch three programs per day, and reports that a compulsive local film festival volunteer “Harvey” will find himself the subject of his own documentary, which starts shooting soon. Meanwhile, the festival offering that stirred up the most adverse advance reaction, American Fugitive: The Truth About Hassan, directed by the Governor-General’s husband Jean-Daniel Lafond, is subject to analysis by Tart Cider blogger Chris Selley, who concluded that it’s hardly the conspirazoid sympathy trip suggested by those who’d rather demolish Rideau Hall than listen to the theory that Ronald Reagan helped prolong the captivity of hostages in Iran until he moved into the White House: “It’s not Lafond’s fault if university students watch his film and conclude that the real villain is Bush despite him not having a damn thing to do with it,” writes Selley. “University students can come to that conclusion from staring long enough at a ham sandwich.”

[YOUR REVIEWS are welcome below along with any further links.]

The internet conference industry continued its comeback at iSummit 2006, held at the MaRS Discovery District, attracting those who’d be drawn to a 48-hour discussion regarding “Content That Pays”. Whether or not any delegates end up profiting from ideas discussed at the $375 event, the McGuinty government used the stage to boast of the digital media windfall woven into the recent provincial budget – a $7.5 million Entertainment and Creative Cluster Partnerships Fund, and a one-time infusion of $23 million for the Ontario Media Development Corporation, along with further tax credits. This sounds great on paper, but would access to such funding extend beyond those usual suspects who’ve figured out how to play the government grant game? And with most Web 2.0 success stories built with sweat equity above the ruins of the first gold rush, often with no initial expectations of profit, who’d even bother paying attention to a deluge of tired ideas being shoveled into the digital realm? Based on the official iSummit weblog chronicle, chatter surrounded interactive advertising, wireless content, branded entertainment, the potential return of convergence, and how to capture the kiddie crowd before they are old enough to know they’re being marketed to. The wrap-up from Remarkk! blogger and strategy consultant Mark Kuznicki is more philosophical, contemplating the idea that two different waves are concurrently surging forward, creating a situation where “the boomers own the content, their children live in the social media world”. Robert Ouellette also jotted a few notes on his new Gagglescape site, including panels on the Copyright Conundrum and We/Me Media, plus a session dedicated to Consumer Market Trends where the challenge of establishing a Canadian identity amidst this global marketplace was broached. Well, the iSummit earned a shout-out on shoestring video blog success story Rocketboom – the only thing that will prevent comparable phenomena in this town is the renewed illusion that conferences motivate those creative iconoclasts who rarely seem to attend them.

The next big whatever is being contemplated this week at the South by Southwest conferences, which have expanded over the past 20 years from a festival of primarily independent roots music to gatherings dedicated to film and interactive media. The rock ‘n’ roll delegation is listed on CBC Radio 3’s Canadian Blast site, which links to the 78 homegrown acts who’ve made a largely subsidized trek in the quest for glory beyond CanCon regulations – The Meligrove Band, Jason Collett and Sam Roberts have been granted prime slots in a showcase assembled by SXSW’s Toronto counterpart, NXNE. The cinematic segment of the event included the premiere of Ron Mann’s latest beatnik documentary, Tales of the Rat Fink, where talking custom cars with celebrity voices narrate the story of hot rod cartoonist Ed Roth. And while Toronto Star entertainment wags Geoff Pevere and Ben Rayner are posting items from their respective beats on a SXSW blog, the interactive event is presumably not deserving of such mainstream treatment. Don’t the personalities behind websites pack a comparable celebrity cachet? Dispatches from a keynote conversation between bloggers Jason Kottke and Heather “Dooce” Armstrong suggest maybe they’re not ready for such prime-time coverage: Kottke was one of the earliest bloggers, and gained a following for glib link roundups and cultural observations – last year, he got around 1,450 micropatrons to float him an average of 30 bucks each to become a professional blogger with grand ambitions, and then proceeded to put even less effort into the site. Dooce was famously fired for blogging in 2002, and has since played up all her personal life drama interspersed with toddler pics – asserting her decision to stay home with her kid while living off blog ad revenue generated 1,544 comments*. A more intriguing generation of online narcissists hopefully awaits to take their places. Writing is Fighting blogger Laina Dawes is apparently the only local who appeared as an interactive speaker at SXSW, including a panel called “We Got Naked, Now What?” But, unlike for those in the music or film sectors, a pilgrimage to Austin is a pricey proposition for anyone lacking a benefactor. (Joe Clark stayed home this year, and explains why.)

The Star at SXSW [blog]

Much ado about the anagram TTC subway map whipped together by “Robot Johnny” Martz, inspired by a similar treatment of the London tube highlighted on Boing Boing. While similar copycats keep sprouting elsewhere, those initial parodies were quashed by cease and desist orders, with the Toronto Transit Commission following their UK counterpart with a claim of intellectual property violation. TTC mouthpiece – and former CFNY newscaster – Danny Nicholson bluntly explained to the Star: “From our perspective, some of the content is offensive.” Would Martz’s original effort have remained online were it not for the Beavis and Butt-head-esque jumbles attached to certain station names? Not every stop could be an “Arborescent Grouch”, “Oboe Wind” or “‘Twas Sudden”, after all. While the anagram map was hastily recast with a generic layout, it provides yet another chance to portray the TTC as a bunch of bureaucratic killjoys who frown at any fondness expressed by artistically inclined riders, although it’s not too late to follow their NYC counterparts by holding a beauty pageant to find a spokesmodel. Robot Johnny’s brush with copyright law did give his efforts more weblog mileage than Leah McLaren’s confused Globe and Mail column, Logging out of the blogosphere, which appeared some 47 months after the first time this kind of shambling attempt to stir up gratuitous reaction was published by The Boston Globe: In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap, by Alex Beam, which managed to inject legitimacy into an emergent medium. Leah proclaiming that she’s jaded by political science sites, while feigning fascination at her writer pal David Eddie’s dedication to updating his site with personal ramblings once every three or four months, was really just a prelude to encouraging readers to investigate who might’ve been bashing her via the faulty Technorati search engine. The tactic seemed to work – “Leah McLaren” spent the weekend a notch behind fervent searches for a video starring a cheerleader from Singapore named “Tammy”.

With no newsworthy accomplishments to dwell on, the weblog medium is taking a round of beatings this week – most extravagantly in the Financial Times Magazine, where the caustically titled feature, Time for the last post, is accompanied by a feedback blog all its own. Trevor Butterworth had little problem getting former editors of Gawker and Wonkette to unload about the relative futility of their intense link-seeking endeavors after serving time in those trenches. That feature contributed to a weekend-long pile-on that included a Slate financial story speculating on the Twilight of the Blogs as a prospectively lucrative endeavour, wacky neocon rag The Weekly Standard positing Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent of Marx (pictured), and The New York Times Magazine language columnist William Safire’s condescending salute to Blargon. It was exactly one year ago that blog triumphalism was operating at full steam, as the term “MSM” entered the parlance of the MSM, when amateur online apostles of both left and right American political rhetoric crowed about defrocking their respective threats against The Truth – the names of both Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon are bound to appear in the blog edition of Trivial Pursuit. What’s gotten lost in the shuffle, unfortunately, is the hybrid of personal diary and sociocultural punditry that fueled much of the initial enthusiasm for the format. A piece in the Life section of the Saturday Star addressed The rarity of the black blogger, where Laina Dawes lamented the absence of those collective voices online in Canada – although any calculated attempt to change that dynamic usually undermines the creative potential of anyone who might be inspired to have their own unique experiences chronicled online in a generally scatterbrained fashion. Fortunately, Laina runs such a site herself, Writing is Fighting, a refreshing throwback to before blogs began the process of drowning in their own hype. (Warning: May contain a four-star review of the latest Judas Priest reunion album.)

Frank Gehry came back to the town where he was born to tell us what we already know – Toronto missed its chance at architectural glory due to the fortress of condos on the waterfront. But at least his transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario, to be completed in 2008, is sure to enhance a neighbourhood that never looked like it was given much thought ever since Gehry grew up there in the ’30s and ’40s, only to escape to California right after high school. The starchitect was widely quoted for his supportive words on Wayne Gretzky amidst gambling allegations, while sporting a Roots hockey bomber jacket, one day before No. 99’s new endorsement deal with the clothier was announced. Yet, the reason for this scrum was a three-month exhibit dedicated to Gehry’s greatest hits, to which the AGO lured local bloggers to post their own perspectives – arguably the first time such invitations were extended for a local media launch that had nothing to do with computers per se. The results are rounded up on the gallery’s own Art Matters site: Sam Javanrouh’s [daily dose of imagery] was among those pouring photos into the flickr pool. While the notes taken about the launch reflect a sedate affair, Spacing Wire’s Shawn Micallef was one of those who discovered, after roaming around the collection of working models, that grumpy anti-Gehry prejudices expressed by public space advocates may not be entirely fair. By contrast, 77-year-old Frank Gehry won’t likely have his curmudgeonly views about Toronto changed: “It doesn’t feel right, but I think I am just fuddy duddy because of my age.” Frank Gehry: Art + Architecture gets shown off at the AGO (317 Dundas St. W.) starting on Saturday (Feb. 18).

It’s hardly conflict on the scale of editorial cartoons in the Muslim world, but the next time any old-school media type shrugs off online conversation as trivial, they can hold up outraged reactions to a gaudy rendering of the long-delayed Metropolis complex at Yonge and Dundas, recently posted on several Toronto-centric sites – a decade after planning started on the project. Commentary like “Words almost fail me” [Spacing Wire], “I don’t even have words to express my thoughts” [BlogTO], and “aaaaaaaaaaaargh!” [Torontoist] oughta reassure developers that the outlandish extravagance originally intended for the location hasn’t diminished one bit. This blogburst does prove why it’s important for a prominent municipally-sanctioned building to provide transparent information on what’s behind the hoarding, rather than having its image buried on a design firm website – then arbitrarily circulated in a pointless effort to stir up protest, as if this were just another underhanded product placement scheme. After a few rounds of response to those postings, though, it’d appear just as many locals are eager to see Metropolis sprout, proving that any firm seeking to test market an idea shouldn’t fear the initial storm of negative attention – because good publicity can prevail. The complex looks perfectly consistent with Downtown Yonge’s overhaul ambitions – a vast improvement over the porn emporium, dollar stores and flea market previously inhabiting the block – and the folks most likely to interact with the location will find it thrilling. The movement to keep most public space from being plastered with a sales pitch has already proven valid, like when pointing out insidious ad creep concepts such as the MegaBin, but knee-jerk NIMBYism directed at every last instance of commercialism risks becoming absurd. Demand for sponsorship space where it never before existed is increasing as the cultural clout of prime-time television, print newspapers and terrestrial radio shrinks each day, all casualties of shifting markets. Toronto should embrace the sort of wretched excess represented by Metropolis – the defining monument for these transformative times.