July’s Top Five Videos
The theme this month: YOU CRAZY TO WATCH THIS!
5. For god sake, don’t watch this. Don’t. It’s disgusting. What the hell’s wrong with you? Why would you want to have any part of an Italian gore flick like this? Yes, yes, we all sneak a peek when we drive by a car accident, but ‘peek’ is the operative word here. We don’t pull up lawn chairs and start cooking up popcorn. You’re sick, I tell you, sick!
4. Mother of God…Glenn Beck has written a political thriller. Yes, that’s right, Glenn Beck. And Fox has brought Donald Lafountaine and his gravelly voice back from the dead to do the trailer. I promise that watching it will be like swallowing Morpheus’ red pill: you will never trust anyone EVER again. Avert your eyes! (One line from the trailer: “The Dog returns to his vomit”) No! Don’t do it!
3. There is no need to watch this public service announcement about sex, because we all know that for young women in school, there is nothing sexier than a male virgin.
2. There is something wrong with Dennis Hopper reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” to a country and western audience. I have no problem with Hopper, Kipling or the country crowd. It’s just something about the mix that is not right. It’s like seeing Santa in July; or a drag queen singing The Star Spangled Banner at the Indianapolis 500, in Spanish, and the crowd actually loves it!
It’s wrong, just plain wrong.
1. Ok. I was joking about the first four videos. Go ahead and watch them, they’re mildly entertaining. But I’m absolutely serious about the next one. It’s from the video blog series staring a young and cute Florida couple. The videos, which I beg you to boycott, for the most part are about them as they go about their day to day lives: shopping, swimming, and taking the dogs for a walk. They talk, they laugh, they watch TV.
My problem is not with this couple. My problem is with the viewers and subscribers.
I cannot, for the life of me, understand how each 20-minute segment can get anywhere around 750,000 views. This means that close to a million people will watch a sitcom-length ‘episode’ of these two – I never learned their names, I suppose it doesn’t matter – window shopping at Mall of America and going to lunch at Fuddruckers.
What are we becoming? There was a time where we would rack our brains to get out of watching a filmstrip of the neighbour’s trip to Egypt. We had better things to do. We had standards! Now, we have no problem with watching Jack and Jane check their dog for grey hairs. Could they – and vloggers like them – be the new generation’s quiet reprieve from the mainstream media’s sensory bombardment? Are they the new Saved by the Bell? Something to be watched with a Saturday morning hangover?
I don’t know the answer, but I think we can use some standards. Comedian Louis CK once opined about his childhood in Boston, where people would “beat the shit” out of each other for no reason at all. Harsh, yes. But as Louis CK put, “it kept quality control”. I like this couple, and I am not advocating that people go and pummelled boring bloggers….just the people who have nothing better to do than watch them. So, watch this one at your own risk…
Yelling
by guest poet, David Starkey
Oh, when I think of all the places
my ex-wife yelled at me!
Throughout
the house: in the kitchen and
in the bathroom, in the living room
and on the stairs, in the basement
by the washing machine,
and standing by the bookcase, throwing
books and yelling.
She yelled
at the supermarket check-out counter
when I thumbed through a copy
of Watch Your Weight, and on the corner
of Randolph and Michigan
during the biggest blizzard
in fifteen years.
In the backyard,
her voice growing hoarse
and raw with the madness
her mother and grandmother
and great-great grandmother
bequeathed to her, she yelled
until the neighbors looked over
our rickety back fence
(then she yelled at the them
for listening).
In the car,
especially in the comfort of the car:
on a five-minute trip to Burger King
or a ten hour drive to another
state. She yelled about the traffic
and her grievances at work
and what I had or hadn’t done
that day.
She bitched and belly-
ached, she fretted, carped and groaned.
She delivered tongue-lashings
and gave everyone every last
piece of her mind. She bewailed
and bemoaned her treatment
at the hands of strangers. She bellowed,
griped, groused and grumbled.
She even kvetched
occasionally, but primarily
she yelled.
She yelled at midnight
and at midday and
in the twilight—nothing about her voice
the slightest bit crepuscular.
She yelled at noon and
in the afternoon and early
in the dawn, before the stars
had faded, before I’d fully
come awake.
From what I hear,
she’s doing fine without me
there to listen, alone in the house
I gladly signed away, alone
with the wide world that made her
so desperately unhappy,
alone, alone but yelling still…
David Starkey is the poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California, and director of the creative writing program at Santa Barbara City College. Among his poetry collections are Starkey’s Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press’s Spring 2000 chapbook contest.
So You Think You’re a Dissident?
I’ll be honest with you. When the protest began Saturday, just after 2:00 at Queen’s Park, I was hoping to see a little violence. Part of me was energetically charged by learning news of my rights being stripped, and I was aching to flex my civic powers a little. At the Second Cup at Bay and Bloor, it was agreed, among my group of friends, that we would try to get as far as we comfortably could to “The Wall” without getting arrested. My backpack, thanks to an article on protest-preparedness in Now Magazine, contained water, peanuts, an apple-cider soaked dishtowel (for tear gas) and a pair of earplugs (for the sound cannons). I was jittery. I was excited.
As soon as I saw the Black Bloc marchers, I was captivated. I forgot about the student and labour union demonstrators, the climate activists and the anti-war protesters. If there was a group that would push the boundaries that day, it looked to be this black-masked cabal of men and women who spent the first leg of the march blocking camera lenses, hunching over each other, trying to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. I trailed them South to University and Queen, where I saw my first line-up of riot police.
These officers, mountain bikes thrust out in front of them, were impassive. They spoke only to ward off people who got too close to them with cameras. Beyond them, stretching across King Street, was a line of heavy-geared riot police, and beyond them were the horses. I must have waited at the intersection for about ten minutes, the small, excited part of me hoping for a violent encounter. Nothing happened. The march was directed along Queen Street. I had the sad feeling I would never get to The Wall.
At intersections along the south part of Queen, lines of the heavy-geared policemen stood. At first, their presence was menacing, but the menace soon subsided to novelty. They were immovable objects, but their faces were visible behind the plastic visors. People took photos of themselves in front of them, with thumbs, placards, and sometimes middle-fingers raised. Everyone, myself included, was hoping to get their photo published Eye Weekly, it seemed. It was a childhood game of dare.
The Black Bloc hijacked the march at Queen and Spadina. There was a moment, when their instructions to the crowd conflicted with those of the regular volunteers, that I became very scared. “If something happens here,” I thought to myself, “the police would be reluctant to get involved.” Whistles blew, shrill voices bellowed orders and the crowd of black-clad activists ran past me in the opposite direction, crowds of spectators in tow, cell phone cameras at the ready. I realized that although we were surrounded by men in riot gear, this strip of road was a no-man’s land. No laws or rules applied. Only today do I understand that if someone wanted to cause severe property damage, this would be the perfect situation to do so.
(This period of lawlessness was interesting. The majority of the people on Queen were spectators, dressed as if they were going to Sunday brunch. During serious moments, when things were being thrown or when voices reached fever pitch, they would stand back and watch the dissident/authority-figure struggle unfold. When things relaxed, they would chat with each other, walk about and take pictures of odd things taking place in front of the riot police: two girls doing yoga stretches, another holding a placard with the words EVERYTHING IS OK, a girl with a caped chihuahua in her bicycle basket. The best way I can describe it, is that it was very tense, surreal and a little euphoric)
During the ensuing carnage, the part of me hoping for a little violence vanished. Windows were broken and mailboxes were tipped over; a masked protester threw rock at a glass door in front of me. I regretfully said or did nothing.
I felt sympathy for the policemen. Through the afternoon they remained mostly impassive, standing there while the emboldened and unmasked protesters shouted shrilly in their faces: “We are peaceful, how about you?” When the officers did move, like when they tried to rescue what they could of the cruiser on Queen, it must have been like walking on eggshells: bumping a protester would elicit shrieks of outrage from the irate crowd.
As for the unmasked protesters, there were the kind of people I avoid at parties, the kind whose conversations tend to turn to sermons. They sat and cheered from the top of the ‘captured’ police car, tribal and ecstatic, their thought patterns regressed to their brainstems. And how tired and cliché the tactics were, for both masked and unmasked dissidents! Sitting atop of police cars, shattering the windows of banks and coffee shops, to me, is akin to Avril Lavine busting a guitar 40 years after Pete Townsend. It was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
The funny thing is, I made it to The Wall that day.
It was by accident. A friend and I turned a corner and there it was, a chain-link fences mounted on cement medians. Behind, stood rows of silent, helmeted police. As we walked the side of its parameter, I was amazed by the quiet, and by the fact that I wasn’t being tackled and handcuffed. Groups of others stood around as well. We had made it to The Wall, and none of us new exactly what to do. Riot police on one side, looky-loos on the other, and silence. It was odd and intimate. For the most part, we all talked and took photos. After hours of mindless braying, it was a relief to finally have a conversation. An older gentlemen talked with us about the Black Bloc.
“They want this civilization to collapse,” he told us, “and then a new one will rise from its ashes.”
“Who runs the new civilization?” I asked.
“I don’t think they’ve thought that far ahead.” he responded.
Afterward we walked up Yonge Street, following the route that the Black Bloc was said to have taken earlier that day. Store front windows had been broken at regular intervals up to College street. Unlike what some newspapers have claimed, it wasn’t just the franchises that got hit. Local places were hit as well. Zanzibars marquee was damaged (apparently, the new civilization won’t have strip clubs), and the jewellery store at Gerrard and Yonge looked to have been looted (political dissidents have gotta eat too, you know).
In the wake of the hijacked protests, Facebook and Twitter are awash with comments about the event. Some say that the police cars were ‘decoys’ to tantalize the crowd into violence. Others are claiming that the police had infiltrated the Black Bloc’s ranks to instigate violence. Some editorials express outrage at police inaction (especially during the Bloc’s run up Yonge), some are railing about police brutality (especially on the day after). Among the plethora of perspectives, I hope that can agree on two things.
Firstly, these kinds of violent protests no longer work (Actually, I’m beginning to believe that the effectiveness of public demonstrations has run its course). They do not gain the public’s sympathy or support, which should be their primary goal. I’ll be clear: NO CAN HEAR WHAT YOU WANT. Protests like these have become a spectacle by the extreme, for the extreme, their very own “So You Think You’re a Dissident?” There must be a new paradigm. I don’t know what it is. But I think we can start by changing the approach. Instead of thinking “I have a right to do this, and that’s all that matters,” rational people should be asking themselves, “Is what I’m doing effective in bringing about the change I want?”
The second point is that genuine demonstrators are being used by the parasitic Black Bloc. This group could not operate without the cover of decent protesters, who are right now being involuntarily arrested on behalf of these vandals, wrapped in their brochure-length manifestos.
During the protest I was asked by a member of this group to stop taking pictures and to show some solidarity, as if I were there to support him. It’s time to break the illusion of support. At future demonstrations they should be called out. If demonstrators want to chant, then they should start by chanting something like, “Black Bloc Blows!”
Funny, for years I’ve admired the participants of these kinds of protests. I listened to stories about Seattle and Quebec City with awe. What changed my perspective turned out to be quite simple: it finally happened in my city. Breaking things to make a point loses its impact when it’s your shit being broke.
Addendum:
Innocent and mistreated by police?
Want justice? The first step is to start telling your G20 stories:
http://ccla.org/2010/06/29/resources-for-g20-related-complaints/
And here: