Author: Dan Dickinson

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

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A few notes before I slip back into MBA mode (last assignment woooot!):

.:.

I’ve acquired a metric shitload of reading material: I just bought And Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris and The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. I also have the latest issues of The Economist, Toronto Life and Adbusters to get through. That issue of Adbusters is weird reading, since it goes from right to left, but it’ll be worth the effort when I get to the article entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Civilization”. Just a few pages in and I’m captivated by the story on China’s approach to global politics.

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.

Right now, in between magazines and MBA cases, I’m reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Mark Kingwell said that “[p]reaching to the choir…is corrosive of courage and reason: it makes you soft-bellied and soft-headed” but sitting in the atheist choir is fun when it’s Hitchens at the pulpit.

.:.

Somehow Anya Yurchyshyn ties her hatred of marketing to a book about 20th-century totalitarianism in an article called “Adolf Hitler Was A Marketing Genius“.

Although I think advertising/marketing/branding are evil industries (that help to supply my paycheck), I’m not about to compare the people who work there to Nazis or fascists or even Satan’s gleeful minions. Some of my best friends work in advertising! But it is scary that there’s a superstructure that is trying to control us, and most people have stopped questioning it. Advertising is a part of the landscape; it’s weird when it’s not there.

Somehow I agree with her.

.:.

Toronto made Forbes’ list of the world’s ten most economically powerful cities.

Growth and quality are as important as size in our rankings, so smaller but briskly growing economies like Seoul, South Korea, and Hong Kong also make the list. North America, with relatively lower growth areas, still boasts a number of cities in the current power list, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto, the latter of which squeezes past Madrid, Spain; Philadelphia and Mexico City, Mexico.

[via Creative Class, Accordion Guy and a slew of others]

[tags]joshua ferris, lawrence wright, adbusters, christopher hitchens, mark kingwell, anya yurchyshyn, forbes, economically powerful cities[/tags]

Smarter, relieved, sleepier

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While we’ve kind of had an Olympic theme running (ha ha) throughout our MBA program — we started in 2004, the year of the Athens games and we’re finishing just in time for Beijing — I didn’t realize the timing worked out so well. We actually write our last exam on one of the last days of the games, and the closing ceremonies will take place on the 24th…just as we close out our final MBA week and return home. I don’t think they planned it like this either; the class schedule’s been set since 2004 and I don’t think the Olympics schedule has been out that long.

On that subject, I guess I’ll miss the last week of the Olympics. But I guess I won’t mind that so much.

[tags]mba, olympics[/tags]

Oh sleepy day

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Been a busy couple of days…lots more family goings-on: visiting, singing, eating, celebrating, playing, and so on. Now it’s raining and gray, so we’re all hiding inside and lying about. I just had my ass handed to me at crib (skunked, narrowly avoiding being double-skunked) so I’ve scampered into the office to blog and lick my wounds. There may be a drive to find fried clams later. There may not. That is the extent of our planning and forethought this day.

[tags]family reunion[/tags]

Old Germany

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Last night some of us drove to Amherst, a nearby town, for some dinner. My brother had eaten at a new German restaurant in town the last time he was here, and he quite liked it, so we opted for that. It wasn’t a hard choice; there’s just never been a good restaurant in this town for as long as I can remember.

What a pleasant surprise the Old Germany restaurant was. We all left stuffed full of delicious food (enormous hunks of meat & fish, spaetzle, mashed potatoes, etc.) and proper (Lowenbrau! Erdinger!) German beer. The couple who owns the restaurant, one cook and one server, were very pleasant and friendly. It was extremely reasonably priced too: I had fresh bread, tasty garden salad, delicious Talapia in a mustard sauce, lots of mashed potatoes and two large beers for $22, tax in.

The ambiance is a little weird, since it’s built in an old Dairy Queen (and even still has some of the cheap plastic seating) but the food more than makes up for it. Anyway, when you have nine family members, three of whom are under the age of 10, you just make your own ambiance.

[tags]old germany restaurant, amherst[/tags]

Apres lunch, le deluge

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I’ve been back at the ancestral manse since about 1AM, following a pretty painless flight and drive with my brother, who picked me up. It’s been a nice quiet day, full of chores and playing with kids, until just now when copious amounts of relatives starting showing up. We shall soon leave them to their family dinner (just my mom, her nine brothers and sisters and their spouses).

It’s been nice so far. I get the sense, however, that four days of insanity are just about to begin.

[tags]family reunion[/tags]

"Sort of like plagiarizing a comic strip"

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Ken Jennings freaked me out today. It’s kind of a long story, so stay with me.

Last night I was reading a chapter on business ethics in my textbook (no, really!) and it briefly touched on a bunch of the biggies…Rawls, Kant, Mill, and so on. I guess it must’ve lingered in my head, because this morning in the shower I started thinking about Kant. That immediately got me singing the Bruce’s Philosopher Song from Monty Python, and then I started thinking about the excellent movie Quiz Show (imdb). If you haven’t seen it, it’s about how Charles Van Doren went along with the cheating on the quiz show 21, deceiving the public. There was one particularly funny scene:

Van Doren, contemplating the moral implications of being given the answers: “I just wonder what Kant would think of this.”

Freedman, trying to get him to do it, and not having a clue who Kant is: “Uh…I think he’d be ok with it.”

So I laughed about that in the shower this morning, and then today I saw this post on Ken Jennings’ blog about Charles Van Doren. Now, Charles Van Doren isn’t a topic that comes up in my regular everyday routine, so to think about him so clearly twice in a few hours…weird. I got a little freaked out…started checking over my shoulder. Kind of a Truman Show moment.

[tags]ken jennings, rawls, kant, mill, monty python, charles van doren, quiz show[/tags]

The Life and Death of a Great Toronto Neighbourhood

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In an article (bearing the same title as this blog post) on the Dooney’s website today, Max Fawcett describes the slow decline of The Annex, my old neighbourhood.

It might be time for Toronto’s urban geographers and city planners to add the term un-gentrification to their lexicon, because that’s precisely what’s happening in the Annex, one of their city’s oldest and most famous neighbourhoods. Unlike other neighbourhoods in the city that are being bought out and up by neo-yuppies, who spark the transformation of old carpet stores and empty storefronts being into painfully hip clothing stores, espresso bars, and of-the-moment restaurants, the Annex is sliding in the other direction. Where the neighbourhood was once a bohemian haven defined by a decidedly middle-class ethic it now is rapidly becoming nothing more than an upscale student ghetto defined by fast-food restaurants, ten dollar martinis, a dwindling clutch of futon stores, and a startling increase in the number of vacant storefronts and the homeless people that populate them.

Fawcett seems to be speaking specifically about the commercial strip of Bloor between Spadina and Bathurst. I agree that it’s always seemed a confounding stretch — never as annoyingly cool as Little Italy but never as annoyingly boho as Queen West either. It always just seemed rather bland and utilitarian. If anything, since we moved away and the changes seem more stark on each occasional visit, it’s gotten more bland, and I think that’s Fawcett’s point. When the night life of the neighbourhood (provided there’s no one good playing at Lee’s Palace) is the awful Brunswick House, that’s not a good sign. And he’s right: for every bakery or BMV that goes in, there’s another place selling schwarma or wings or cheap Korean barbecue.

Really, what’s happened to that piece of Bloor is studentification (admittedly, that’s not a word, but it’s as valid as “un-gentrification”) which had been fairly constrained to the Madison in years past. Like it or not, U of T is getting a retail ghetto, and Bloor Street from the JCC to Honest Ed’s is it. I don’t have a particular problem with this — neighbourhoods change all the time, and every time the people lived there before turn up their noses at the interlopers — except that blandness should never be something for a neighbourhood to aspire to.

[tags]dooney’s, max fawcett, bloor street, annex neighbourhood, university of toronto[/tags]

Hey look, pictures that move!

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I haven’t had time to watch many movies lately; this weekend’s combination of lighter work load and sickness has provoked a furious spree of not one, not two, but three films.

I’d already seen the documentary, so the film version of Shake Hands With The Devil (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was a bit disappointing. It was a decent companion piece to the documentary, to help give more detail on the timeline of what actually happened, but ultimately — and surprisingly — didn’t help you understand the complexity of the situation nor of Romeo Dallaire himself.

The Quiet (imdb | rotten tomatoes) had a lot of promise — lots of ambiance and tension — but ended up wasting it on a weird conclusion and, though I can scarcely believe I’m complaining about this, too much focus on Elisha Cuthbert’s hotness. Big waste of Edie Falco too.

The War Within (imdb | rotten tomatoes) may have saved the weekend. Certainly one of the best films I’ve seen about terrorism, the so-called war on terror, Muslim life in America…all these interconnected complexities, but none of them were dealt with in a pat or easy way. Too bad it was never picked up for major distribution, though not surprising. You shouldn’t let that stop you, though. Go rent it.

I also half-watched two others over the past few weeks only because they were on TMN and I was procrastinating: Turistas and Resident Evil: Extinction (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Both were shite; Turistas at least had a semi-cool chase scene in a cave. Ignore them. Trust me.

[tags]shake hands with the devil, the quiet, the war within, turistas, resident evil extinction[/tags]