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Garth Ennis and Gender

Posted in Bruce Byfield, comics, feminism, Garth Ennis, gender, gender roles, graphic novels, Personal, Preacher, Pride and Joy, The Boys, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on February 17, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Gender issues don’t play well in comics. The most notorious example is Dave Sims’ Cerebus series, which, as soon the topic was raised, degenerated from a hilarious and inventive series into self-indulgent, misogynistic rants that quickly became unreadable. By contrast, though, Garth Ennis has not only been discussing gender issues repeatedly in his series, but doing so in with an artistry that makes what he has to say intelligent even if – as I do – you have reservations about his opinions.

This suggestion, I realize, requires some defense. Garth Ennis? The hard-swearing, raunchy, ultra-violent, hilarious Garth Ennis, who had to start his own publishing company to write the sort of things he wanted? And there is no denying that Ennis is fascinated by machismo and war, so much so that his treatment of super heroes almost always involves men trained in violence overcoming those with super powers.

Remember, though, that this is the same writer whose best-known work, Preacher, ends with the hero literally riding into the sunset with the love of his life – the same writer who gave loner John Constantine a major love interest in Kit Ryan, a tough, cynical woman from Belfast, and even managed to make their breakup poetic and sentimental.

If you focus on the scripts and ignore the often gratuitously sexist artwork, he is also the writer who manages believable portraits of strong women like Deborah Tiegel and Bloody Mary. Yes, there is a large degree of male wish-fulfillment in female characters like Tulip O’Hare or Annie January, but there is also an effort to give them their own inner lives and concerns in a way that few male writers of graphic novels have even attempted.

I have read much of Ennis’ work, but far from all of it. To say the least, he is prolific, and some of his work, such as his war stories, would only interest me because they were done by him. However, three of works stand out as places where gender roles play a major role.

Pride and Joy

The first is Pride and Joy, a relatively little-known series that fits into a single trade paperback. Pride and Joy tells the story of Jimmy Kavanagh, a petty criminal who goes straight because of his love for his wife. His wife dies, to Kavanagh’s frustration as much as his despair – cancer being something he cannot fight – leaving him to raise their daughter and son on stories of his own father’s exploits as a tailgunner in World War Two. These stories cause endless conflicts with his son, a quiet, more intellectual type than Kavanagh.

One of the most interesting scenes in the series shows him with his wife in the hospital. She asks if he remembers her reply when he assumed that he would be making the decisions in the marriage. With a wistful grin, he quotes from memory, “Like hell.” She replies:

That amazed look on your face . . . It was priceless. You were such a little boy. I gave you such a hard time about that stuff, that Being a man thing. I used to really hate it. My Mom and her Mom, they both lost their men to wars. Men off being men, chasing some ideal they’re meant to live up to. My Mom used to say, ‘All men can do is die and leave the women and children to suffer.’

Now, she is doing the same to him. Yet even in the stress of the moment, Kavanagh needs her reassurance that this is a case where he can cry.

Another key scene is his discussion with his son. While his son asserts that “we’ve got nothing in common,” Kavanagh expresses concern that his son needs to toughen up in order to survive. He remembers his father’s war stories, which Kavanagh’s wife condemned as “macho bullshit,” and for a moment father and son bond. “I guess that’s why she made sure you . . . . You saw a different side to things, maybe. But I still think your Grandad had a point.”

However, as they flee a killer from Kavanagh’s past, any fragile understanding is broken by Kavanagh’s admission that his accidental killing of a child has poisoned his life. His son considers the admission proof of the underlying hypocrisy of Kavanagh’s machismo.

The story ends with the issues unresolved. The son stands up to the killer long enough for Kavanagh to kill him, but as Kavanagh lies dying, it is him, not the son, who cries. As the authorities close in and ask whom he is kneeling over, his son fights to keep from crying – apparently remembering his father’s advice about how not to cry — and replies simply, “He’s my Dad.” Belatedly, the son has found some truth in his father’s philosophy, although there is no reason to believe he accepts it whole-heartedly.

The Boys

The Boys is a twelve volume series about an off-the-books CIA team whose job is to keep super heroes in line. The series cynically assumes that super powers lead to corruption, and is full of thinly-veiled parodies of mainstream comics – for instance, the creator of the G-Men, and most of his original team, turn out to be child molesters. However, beyond the obvious critique of the traditional morality of comics, in many ways the story centers on Billy Butcher, the leader of The Boys, and Hugh “Wee Hughie” Campbell, the newest recruit.

Butcher and Wee Hughie each see the woman they love murdered by self-indulgent super heroes. However, as the son of an abusive father and as an ex-Marine who saw action in the Falklands War, Butcher’s response is to launch a decades-long campaign for revenge that ultimately leads to the attempted genocide of everyone with super powers in the world.

By contrast, Wee Hughie is “an ordinary bloke.” In that respect, he resembles Butcher’s deceased young brother. He learns to fight and kill, but, unlike Butcher, not to enjoy it. Hughie also resembles Butcher’s maternal grandfather, who lost an arm in World War Two, but refuses to dwell on those aspects of his life. Butcher is constantly trying to get Wee Hughie to accept the need for violence, but he also views him as someone who, like his younger brother, can potentially keep him from becoming a complete sociopath.

Wee Hughie’s back story is given in the eighth trade paperback of the series. Despite being an orphan, he turns out to have had an idyllic childhood, complete with adventures straight out of popular children’s literature – in fact, as the cover art makes clear, he has a childhood straight out of the British children’s annuals. However, a return to his childhood home ends in the death of one of his childhood friends. Innocence, clearly, is no option for him; violence can still affect him.

Butcher’s back story is given in the tenth trade paperback in the series. Like Kavanagh in Pride and Joy, Butcher was raised by a tough father. But where Kavanagh’s was simply macho and ultimately fell short of his own ideals, Butcher’s was outright abusive.

Uncomfortable in his growing resemblance to his father, Butcher is saved from becoming his clone by the love of his wife Becky. Trying to be worthy of her, he quits drinking, and learns to control his temper. Thanks to Becky, he also manages to get his mother to leave his father and free herself from abuse, a move that he considers the best thing he has ever done in his life.

Becky sets the limits in the relationship the first time they are in bed. She notices a scar, and as he launches into what is obviously an often-told tale, silences him with, “I don’t wanna hear war stories.” Later, as she runs a finger down his body, she muses, “All this strength. All this power. It has to be tempered. Men without women, Billy. It ain’t a good idea.”

As he lies dying at the end of the series, Butcher expands on her viewpoint: “All that macho shit, that gunfighter, Dirty Harry bollocks – it looks tasty, but in the end it’s fuckin’ self-defeatin’. It just leaves you with bodies in ditches an’ blokes with headfuls of broken glass. Men are only so much use, Hughie. Men are boys.”

Ennis does not spell out the message, but, considering the behavior of the super heroes in The Boys, it seems that men’s physical strength and social positions are just other forms of power that lead to corruption. The dying Butcher’s last advice to Wee Hughie is to return to his estranged lover. “Grab hold of her, Hughie,” Butcher advises. “Feel her strength inside yer own. An never, ever, ever let her go.”

In the closing pages, Wee Hughie takes this advice, and the series ends with a classic romantic happy ending at the end of all the destruction and political upheavals.

Preacher

Preacher is generally considered Ennis’ major work to date. The main plot concerns Jesse Custer, a young Southern minister who becomes possessed by Genesis, a creature whose power causes God to flee from heaven. Angered by this literal abdication of responsibility, Jesse sets off with his girlfriend Tulip and a hard-living vampire named Cassidy to hold God to account.

However, the story is as much about Jesse’s self-discovery, in which gender roles play a major part. The dialog even includes references to feminist theory that are used as humor for those in the know – for instance, Jesse mentions that he much prefers reading Germaine Greer to “the Dworkin woman.”

Jesse is the ideal of a Southern Gentleman: Good-looking, polite, and slow to fight but more than able to hold his own once he does. In fact, he is so much the epitome of traditional male roles that he channels the spirit of John Wayne. Early in the series, he witnesses Tulip being killed. When she is resurrected by God in an effort to placate Jesse, he remains haunted by the fear of her dying again.

After a firefight in which Tulip’s shooting skills help them to survive, this discussion takes place:

TULIP: If I was another guy, you wouldn’t have given it a second’s thought. You’d just think, “He can handle himself. Cool.” but you can’t accept the fact that I can deal with this stuff, can you?

JESSE: Honey … What I been trynna tell you is, it ain’t what’s happened at one time or other that worries me. It’s the thought of what could happen to you. It scares the livin’ shit clean out of me.

TULIP: So no matter what you see me do, you’ll never believe I can take care of myself? Jesse, that just doesn’t make any sense.”

What makes this discussion work is the fact that both views have some validity. Tulip is proud of her competence, so her anger at the thought that it might be ignored is understandable. At the same time, while Jesse’s attitude is part machismo, it is also the natural concern for someone he loves.

Unable to overcome his fears, Jesse abandons her to rescue Cassidy. When he rejoins Tulip, she leaves him handcuffed to a bed for several hours in revenge. Later, they discuss what happens:

TULIP: You know what the worst thing about it was . . .? It reminded me of when I was eight and the boys wouldn’t let me play soldiers . . . . And when you dumped me in that motel and ran off on your big guy’s adventure, I felt just as dumb and useless and stupid as they made me feel all those years ago.

JESSE: Well . . . um . . . I ain’t trynna get off the subject her or anything like that, but I really got to ask . . . How come you wanted to play soldiers, instead like with dolls an’ stuffed toys an’ shit like that?

TULIP: Remind me why I have sex with you again?

. . . .

JESSE: I know, I know. I’m constantly reexaminin’ my approach to gender issues. But sometimes I slip up . . .

Despite the humor and Jesse’s best efforts to act differently, the problem remains. In the sixth trade paperback, they discuss it again:

TULIP: Nothing but demeaning, patronizing, sexist, macho crap

JESSE: Or badly phrased love.

TULIP: Can you think of a single reason why I shouldn’t kill you for trying a line like that?

Yet, as they start to make love, and, she murmurs, “Don’t ever change,” suggesting that, at some level, she responds to the machismo that she verbally condemns. While the limits of Jesse’s ethics anger her, his code of behavior is part of what makes him deeply attractive to her.

In the end, Jesse is unable to overcome his fears, and abandons her again as he goes into action. Waking after being drugged by Jesse, Tulip arms herself while muttering, “I’m going to kill him. I’m going to save his stupid fucking life for him – and then I’m going to kill him.”

For Tulip, this is the last betrayal. At the end of the series, when Jesse catches up with her at the bus depot, she asks him, “Do you think breaking your word doesn’t matter when it’s to a woman? Do you think honor is something that only counts between men?” Jesse starts to give his usual rationales, but even he is aware that he has gone too far. He breaks off with, “I ain’t got no defense.”

Chasing after her, he finally admits that their love is what matters most to him, and that “I do know that I have to change a little, if this macho bullshit you talked about is gonna keep getting’ in the way.” Unable to shed a tear ever since he watched his father’s murder, faced with losing Tulip, he finally manages to cry. “I guess I must be learnin’,” he says, and this sign of humanity gives Tulip and Jesse their last minute happy ending.

Yet as though to show that Ennis is not willing to completely abandon machismo, the last pages of the series show Cassidy waking, newly human again. He starts to put on his sunglasses, the symbol of his irresponsible lifestyle, then throws them away. “I think I’ll try actin’ like a man,” he tells himself. The macho code may be flawed, but it is still better than the amorality with which Cassidy lived as a vampire – if for no other reason than because it prohibits abusing women.

The Power of Ambiguity

I am not claiming that gender issues are all that Ennis’ work is about. But I do suggest that their importance have been overshadowed by more obvious aspects of his work, such as the critique of the comics tradition. No one who is not deeply interested in a subject would return to it as often as Ennis does gender issues.

Nor am I agreeing with Ennis’ positions. If nothing else, I can imagine few women who want to think that their role is as the redeemers and moral compasses for their lovers and spouses. Yet, despite everything, Ennis’ discussion of gender roles works in a way that Dave Sims’ does not, and is far less offensive.

The reason, I think, is that Ennis seems genuinely divided on the subject. On the one hand, he is obsessed with machismo, and of how manly men interact with each other. On the other hand, he also views machismo as ultimately childish, and needing to give way to a less violent maturity that can only be won through the love of wife and family. The places where machismo operates may be the places where he finds stories, but he also considers those who remain there too long as immature.

This unresolved dichotomy, I suspect, is what keeps Ennis from descending into polemic. Genuinely fascinated by all perspectives on gender – including women’s – he weaves his interest into the sub-plots rather than interrupting the action to lecture. You don’t have to agree with his perspectives to see that the result is the complexity of true art.

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Men’s rights and how not to create a self-identity

Posted in Bruce Byfield, feminism, gender, men's rights, Personal, self-identity, social roles, tagged , , , , , , , on February 13, 2013| 11 Comments »

So-called men’s rights advocates make me impatient. Yes, men’s roles are changing, and modern men need to think more about the changes. But men’s rights advocates are so vicious, so full of a sense of entitlement that I find sympathizing with them impossible. Instead, I am simply astonished that anybody could be so wrong in so many different ways at the same time.

I may not be an expert on identity, but I have been around long enough that I’m no stranger to the issues, either. From my own ups and down and self-questioning, I can say with some assurance that no one can build a healthy sense of identity based upon:

  • A negative identity based upon what you are not. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with a negative identity in the short-run; for instance, most boys and girls go through a period in which they claim to dislike everything to do with each other. But in the long run, a negative identity requires constant reinforcement. In the case of men’s right advocates, that means a constant and tiresome denunciation of women and supposedly feminine traits.
  • Bullying or abuse. Not only are both socially unacceptable, but neither creates a stable personality.
  • An assumption that you have the right to every woman’s time and space. Believe it or not, most women have their own priorities, which do not include listening to a man’s passing attraction to them, dealing with a man sitting too close to them, or putting their own concerns on hold for a man. Even a man in a permanent relationship can’t assume that; if he does, the relationship is unlikely to last long.
  • A sense of privilege. While many people unconsciously think of themselves as the stars of their own movies, most people learn that other people are not extras in that movie. The learning process is called growing up, and it involves a reining-in of the ego.
  • Considering yourself a victim of women (or anyone else). You can’t assert your own rights to self-realization by complaining when other people do the same. Ironically, the traditional gender roles whose loss men’s rights advocates frequently bemoan would find this attitude shameful.
  • Equating the difficulties faced by modern women and men. With the changes in modern society, men feel uncertain. But women are also likely to face abuse and discrimination. The two are not even remotely comparable, no matter how much anyone quibbles and rationalizes.
  • Trying to continue old narratives. Personally, I suspect that the old gender roles were never as simple as the nostalgia of men’s rights advocates would make them. At the most, people – mostly women – simply suffered in isolation. But, whether that’s true or not is irrelevant. Whatever value the old roles might or might not have had, they’re gone, and for strong social and economic reasons. They’re not coming back.
  • Creating an imaginary opposition. In the case of men’s right’s advocates, this opposition is generally “all women” or “all feminists.” Either way, everyone lumped into the category is assumed to act or think the same way. This is a map so different from the territory as to be useless for anything.
  • Not listening. Much of the rhetoric of the men’s right movement seems dedicated to denying the truths of women’s lives – claims that women really don’t face discrimination, that gender differences in pay are reasonable, that rape doesn’t happen as often as the statistics suggest, and isn’t so bad as women claim. The trouble is, these things are not only too well-documented, but – more importantly – too well-witnessed that anyone can do more than nitpick about the details. Not only is that a waste of time, but believing such things mean that you are acting on faulty intel. Act on faulty intel, and you end up doing things like invading Iraq.
  • Anything so fragile as gender. Gender may be all-important to adolescents or to transsexuals trying to figure where they fit. However, for the rest of us, it’s not the only source of self-identity, or necessarily the most important. You need much more to build any sense of identity.

I could go on and on, but my point is clear enough: The men’s rights movement is based on half-truths and psychologically unhealthy. Its complaints are a form of mourning for a social order that never existed the way its members imagine, and the only reason not to dismiss it completely is that even an out-of-touch group can still be dangerous.

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The end of inadequacy

Posted in Bruce Byfield, Impostor Syndrome, inadequacy, Personal, Uncategorized, university, tagged , , , , , on February 8, 2013| 1 Comment »

I had barely been at university for twenty minutes before I realized how inadequate it could make people feel. I had just sat down near the top right of the cavernous lecture theater for Introduction to Fiction when a young woman dressed in pink and white arrived.

She looked so upset that I immediately asked, “Is everything okay?”

She burst into tears. “Can I do anything for you?”

She shook her head, and sat for maybe a minute, sniffling. Abruptly, she fled up the stairs of the lecture theater and disappeared into the hall.

Possibly, she broke down because she was embarrassed that a stranger had noticed her. But I imagined that, like me, she was new to the campus and overwhelmed by the experience. During my first year, I remembered her many times, as well as my own inability to help her, although I never saw her again.

Not that I ever broke down and cried, but I could understand how someone might want to. My first year of university was a time when most of the assumptions by which I lived my life changed. I was abruptly free to do almost anything I wanted, but with that freedom came a vast indifference. It was all the same to the university whether I attended classes or not. Nobody care if I handed in assignments. Whatever I did, the university would continue to grind on the same as ever, processing whatever data it had about me exactly the same way as it would any other data. I had deliberately gone to a university where few of my high school friends had gone, and now I was feeling lonely with the intensity that only teenagers have.

The second semester, if anything, was worse than the first. Noticing that the subject matter got much more specific in second year, I had deliberately arranged my first semester so I could take second year classes in my second semester.

Consequently, I felt massively inadequate. The teaching assistant, let alone the professor, seemed so much more knowledgeable than me that I despaired of ever equaling them. How, I kept asking myself had I ever imagined that reading through my high school library could possibly prepare me for university courses? My grades were high, but I felt like I was surviving by luck alone. I was an impostor, elbowing myself in to a place I had no business being, and it was only a matter of time before I was denounced as the phony I obviously was.

I started talking every chance I could during the tutorial, hoping that, as unlikely as it seemed, I might make up in participation what I lacked in knowledge. The ploy seemed desperate, since I had already figured out that, unlike high school, university reacted to results rather than effort. I was steering a narrow line along the edge of panic, sure that I was about to fall off at any second.

One day, a woman in my tutorial with whom I had had coffee once or twice remarked about how much I seemed to know.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I just know how to fake it.” If the words were flippant, my tone was anything but.
She looked dubious, so I added, “Seriously, I just know how to make the most of what I do know.”

Later that day, on the bus home, I realized that, in trying to sound modest I had said something important and true. Over the next few weeks, I started thinking of the possible implications.

One of my courses was Romantic and Victorian Literature, and we had spend an inordinate amount of time on Wordsworth, who was the professor’s and teaching assistant’s special interest. But, when we turned to Shelley, I was able to correct something the professor said in lecture, and one tutorial, it was obvious that I knew considerably more about Shelley than the teaching assistant did.

These instances cheered me immensely. Even more importantly, in thinking about them, I realized an obvious but important fact: I was never going to absorb all the possible knowledge in the world, as I had vaguely assumed possible in high school. In fact, I was never going to do as much as win a general overview of all possible knowledge. The best I could was find a niche or two of expertise.

On other subjects, the best I could do was sound attentive and learn a few basic facts – faking it, if I was feeling cynical, or accepting my limits, if I was being realistic. No matter how much I tried, there would always be people who knew more than I did on some subjects. But that didn’t matter because, that was reciprocal – in my chosen specialties, they would be as out of their depths as I would be in theirs.

In some ways, I never have outgrown my childhood wish to know everything. Decades later, I still prefer to be a generalist, knowing a little about as many subjects as possible rather than a lot about a single thing. For better or worse, I have what my partner used to call “a magpie mind,” that’s always being distracted by shiny new tidbits of information.

But more to the point, that was the end of most of my feelings of inadequacy. I was – or could be – on an equal footing with almost anyone, if only I chose to make the effort. True, there might sometimes be geniuses whose expertise I could never match. But I could choose to win a rough competence, and even geniuses would have areas where they were less than brilliant.

With these conclusions, I learned to live with myself, as well as freeing myself to admire experts without jealousy. I still had flashes of inadequacy, but, in general, I never thought of myself as an impostor ever again. At worst, I am only ever a person at the start of a particular learning curve that I might or might not choose to ascend some day.

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Gary Minaker Russ, “Thunderbird Capturing Killer Whale”

Posted in aboriginal art, art appreciation, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, First Nations art, Gary Minaker Russ, Haida, Haida art, indian art, killer whale, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, thunderbird, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 2, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The more I see of Gary Minaker Russ’ work, the more I consider him the leading argillite carver working today. His attention to detail, his variety of designs, and his restrained use of inlay all combine to put him in a category all by himself. So, naturally, when he was in town a few weeks ago with two mid-sized carvings, I jumped at the chance to buy. Not being able to afford both, I narrowly turned down “Raven and Frog Inside Of a Halibut,” a formal piece squared into an upright rectangle, in favor of “Thunderbird Capturing Killer Whale.”

haida-thunderbird-capturing-killer-whale

I’m pleased with my purchase, although part of me still wonders if I should have bought the other piece – or, better yet, found a way to buy both. But, having narrowly missed buying a cedar sculpture of the same subject a few weeks previously, I still half-feel that karma was urging me to the one I chose.

The thunderbird, of course, is perhaps the best-known figure from First Nations mythology – although I would be hesitant to equate the figure found in the Pacific Northwest with similar ones in the Eastern, Plains, or Southwest cultures to any degree.

In popular modern culture, the thunderbird is simply very large, and somehow creates thunder and lightning. However, among the first nations of the Pacific Northwest, the feature that makes it stand out is simply this: The thunderbird is a creature so large that it hunts whales. Considering that the killer whale is by far the largest animal seen from shore or near it – true whales being usually found further out – that makes the thunderbird a truly monstrous size.

In “Thunderbird Capturing Killer Whale,” Russ has reduced the thunderbird’s size somewhat, making it closer to that of the killer whale, and the capture less one-sided than if the thunderbird was significantly larger. The thunderbird. It fills the left side of the piece, its head upraised in what looks like a grimace, identified by its curved beak (and, yes, those are teeth, and never mind that natural birds don’t have any). It grips the killer whale by its dorsal fin and head, almost hugging it with a wing that sweeps across the center of the piece.

Otherwise, the killer whale lies passive in its grip, bent almost double by the thunderbird’s strength, so that its tail at the top right is almost at right angles to the head at the bottom center. The thunderbird may be straining, and appears buffeted by the loose tail, but the killer whale is caught and probably moments from death.

What at first glance seems an abstract clutter of body parts becomes, on closer examination, a moment of tension, with greater violence due in a matter of seconds.

The fact that the thunderbird appears almost whole– although in profile – while the killer whale takes a moment to recognize suggests the inevitable winner of the fight. So, too, does the difference in the eyes, the killer whale’s round one suggesting passiveness, compared the thunderbird’s elongated one.

Yet this is not a formline design that keeps the eye moving around the entire composition until you have understood the various shapes. Only the wing operates in that way, the eye’s movement seemingly transferred to the wing itself, creating an impression that it is beating, another of the thunderbird’s weapon and, perhaps, helping it to hang on. On the rest of the thunderbird and all of the whale, the formline is more stiff, leading nowhere and slowing the recognition of the scene – an effect that reinforces the sense that the carving is capturing a brief moment of chaotic violence.

Although you might not be able to see clearly from the photo, Russ’ carving of the scene reinforces the struggle by the depth of carving. Most of the sculpture is in low relief, the figures looking slightly squished. But the whale’s head is carved more shallowly than any other part, barely emerging from the background surface. By contrast, its still free tail is raised almost twice as high, and the thunderbird’s head and tail three or four times.

However, for me, the master touch is that the piece is entirely in low-relief – all except for the thunderbird’s claws, which are in high-relief, and rendered realistically rather than with the usual shapes of the northern form-line. This difference literally makes the claws stand out from the rest of the design, making them identifiable when the rest of the carving is still a jumble of forms to your eye. In a very real sense, the claws are what matter most in the scene: they control the killer whale and will shortly rend it.

In the end, this reinforcement of the subject with technique that swayed me to buy “Thunderbird Capturing Killer Whale.” As I often do with sculpture, I am keeping it beside my computer desk, where I can appreciate it while I begin the leisurely process of deciding its more permanent position in my townhouse.

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Escape to the Cirque

Posted in Amaluna, Bruce Byfield, Cirque du Soleil, Personal, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 20, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Last week when I went to the Cirque du Soleil for the first time, I expected to be entertained. But I also expected the entertainment would come with reservations. The show would be too full of Las Vegas glitter for my taste, and any success would be despite a residual corniness that I would have to condescend to ignore.

Or so I half-expected. In practice, I couldn’t have been more wrong.

There are always experiences that are flawed yet defy criticism: King Lear, a soapstone sculpture I own, done in the Haida style, Alec Guinness’ performance in Smiley’s People, Dylan Thomas reading his poems, and Loreena McKennitt singing among them.

To these, I have to add Cirque du Soleil, whose organization and headlong pace overwhelmed me so completely that for two and a half hours, criticism was not only impossible, but irrelevant. For that time, I was a child, caught up in a sense of wonder that I never wanted to end.

The bare facts are that the show was Amaluna, a story loosely-based on The Tempest, , but with a female twist. At the time, I was vaguely aware that the story was about a young princess’ coming of age, as she moved from childish things and found a lover, but the story was the least of what held my attention – frankly, the story was as thin as filo pastry, and about as reliable for connecting the scenes together. Things happened so fast and so continuously in the show that each scene was self-contained, and the unfolding story only one more minor detail.

From the moment I passed into the general tent, I was aware of just how much a smooth-running machine Cirque du Soleil actually is. Everything from the placement of the concession stands and the souvenir shops to their selection of merchandise – popcorn to Toblerone and wine, T-shirts to Carnival masks – was designed to play on the sense of a circus, but, in keeping with the price of the tickets, a circus that was both expensive and in good taste.

The layout also boasted an unpressured efficiency, with entrances all around the perimeter of the theater, complete with ramps for wheelchairs and scooters. Inside, the theater was well-insulated against the January cold, and full of every theatrical device imaginable, including towers for acrobats, and a revolving stage with trap doors at its edges. Fifty feet up, almost hidden in darkness, was a catwalk that performers could descend from or ascend to. An oversized fish bowl dominated the stage, and ramps ran from each side that always seemed full of dancers or musicians.

The show began slowly, with performers wandering through the aisles. A lizard man, the princess’ childhood companion, appeared on stage and jumped into the crowd, stealing popcorn and showering the crowd with kernels, then leaping up to a platform to deluge them with a smirk on his face before running off into the crowd with the princess (no doubt on another adventure) A female clown waddled out and gave the obligatory warnings against smoking and taking pictures.

Then, suddenly, the show was under way, and so much was happening on stage that it was next to impossible to catch all the details in a single number, let alone in the whole show. All I can really say is that, if you can imagine a theatrical device that doesn’t involve animals, it was probably in the show. There were dancers, musicians, gymnasts, acrobats, unicyclists, clowns, and jugglers. Props included magnified glass, teeter-totters, trapezes, high-wires, flaming torches and water, all used at such a neck-breaking pace that it was hard to remember them all.

An intermission came and went, at the start of the second act, things grew quiet for a while, with a balancing act accompanied by only the barest hint of music. But the pace soon intensified, rising to a climax that – impossibly – was even wilder and more high-energy than the opening act, and at the end of it, those of us in the audience were slumped back in our seats, overwhelmed and breathless.

But only for a moment. The performers took their bows, which was a performance in itself, and everybody was clapping. Some time later, the audience staggered out into the sub-zero night, and somewhere halfway to their cars or the Skytrain station, realized that it was over, and they were as exhausted as though they had been part of the cast instead of the audience.

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Why suicide has never really tempted me

Posted in Bruce Byfield, death, Personal, suicide, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , on January 18, 2013| Leave a Comment »

“And you to whom adversity has dealt the final blow,
With smiling bastards lying to you, everywhere you go,
Turn to, and put forth all your strength of hand and heart and brain,
And like the Mary Ellen Carter rise again.”
– Stan Rogers, “The Mary Ellen Carter”

Ever since Aaron Swartz killed himself last week, people in computing seem unable to talk about anything else. Some talk about Swartz’s life or how he was harassed by the American legal system. Even more talk about when they felt suicidal, or give advice about how to deal with the possibly suicidal – all of which leaves me feeling rather left out, having long abandoned my own flirtations with suicide.

My deficiency is not due to any lack of existential angst. I mean, I repeatedly read the collected works of Byron, Keats, and Shelley in my teen years, so I know all about the romance of dying young. And it’s not that I’m a stranger to depression, or never known weeks when ending it all seemed the smartest career move. In fact, at the risk of sounding egocentric, I’ve probably known these things better than most people, and with better reason, although you’ll have to excuse me if I leave the details private.

Yet the fact remains that I never attempted suicide. Even at my lowest point, I never worked past a bleak and overwhelming despair to considering ways and means – even though I’ve been in situations where many others did kill themselves. Partly, I was lucky, but, looking back, I suspect that my habits and mental attitudes played the largest roles in keeping me going.

To start with, after the inevitable experimentation, I was never been a heavy drinker. Missing half the next day to feeling attenuated and cramped all over lost its appeal to me before I hit twenty. I enjoy a few drinks when I’m out, but months have sometimes gone by without me having any alcohol. With these habits, I was never likely to drink myself to a point of rashness where suicide seemed sensible or I took careless chances because of my depression.

Even more importantly, I’ve always been a regular and heavy exerciser. With daily doses of adrenalin and endorphins rushing through my veins, even the most intense depression ultimately didn’t have a chance – especially since one of my reactions to depression has always been to take long walks. In my worst state, those long walks were not enough to leave me with a jaunty walk and a smile, but they did dilute the depression to some degree. Moreover, if I walked long enough, I would collapse into long, dreamless sleeps, which are probably one of the best states I can hope for when depressed.

However, an even more important reason that I survived serious depression is my personal mythology. That mythology, born of the lessons that Robert the Bruce supposedly learned from a spider and hours of training to improve my running was that I was a person who endured and kept on.

Moreover, I had read large chunks of Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell. I knew all about the stages of the hero’s journey, including the descent into the underworld. Consequently, as bad as things have been on occasion, a part of me was always utterly convinced that eventually change would come if I waited.

Meanwhile, I told myself, I would endure. I might sing “The Mary Ellen Carter” over and over to myself, sometimes until I was too distracted to do anything else, but I would endure. I was, as I kept telling myself, simply that kind of person. After a few hundred thousand repetitions of such statements, I started to believe them with some small corner of mind, even while the rest was being overwhelmed.

But the strongest reason I survived was even simpler: sheer curiosity. Like any intellectual, a part of is always standing a step or two back, watching what I am doing and saying. This part of me is as addicted to the show around me as couch potatoes are to their favorite TV series – I don’t want to miss an episode.

While the main part of me has been busy shoring up my life and despairing at ever managing to do so, this watching part was noting how depression and helplessness felt, how my time sense and eating habits changed, and a thousand other things I had never before had the opportunity to experience first hand.

Had I ever attempted suicide, this watching part would have been furious. Committing suicide would have forced it to miss too many episodes. So, I didn’t, and kept struggling on because that was what my image of myself forced me to do, and I was convinced that – unlikely as it might seem at the time – my current state was only one episode and others were coming along. This reaction never leaves me, and when I actually get around to dying, I suspect that my final words will be some variation of, “Not yet!”

Perhaps I am a biological optimist, and I survived for no better reason than an accident of chemistry. However, that’s not what it felt like at the time. Rather, I think that, partly by accident and partly by choice, I evolved a useful set of coping mechanisms against the effects of depression. Those coping mechanisms didn’t always operate smoothly – in fact, they often felt like they were dragging me naked across a field of snakes and broken bottles – but they turned out to be stronger than any inclination to depression or suicide.

Almost certainly, they wouldn’t function for everybody. All of them were the result of a lifetime of habit before they were needed, and probably they couldn’t simply be assumed at will. The most that I can say is that they worked in my case, and are enough for me, at least, to be going on with.

“I am not looking for loose diamonds,
Nor pretty girls with crosses around their necks,
I don’t want for roses or water,
I’m not looking for God — and I just want to see what’s next.”
-Ray Wylie Hubbard, “The Messenger”

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The anomaly of argillite

Posted in aboriginal art, argillite, art, art appreciation, Bill Reid, British Columbia, Bruce Byfield, Christian White, Ernest Swanson, First Nations art, Gwaai Edenshaw, Haida, Haida art, indian art, Jay Simeon, Marcel Russ, Northwest Coast Art, Personal, Robert Davidson, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on January 16, 2013| 10 Comments »

I love argillite. Of all the media used by the First Nations artists of the Pacific Northwest, argillite has by far the most mystique and romance, as well as the greatest visual appeal.

Argillite is a black slate found only on Slatechuck Mountain on Haida Gwaii. Similar slates have been in a few other places around the world, but have slightly different chemical compositions that make them less suitable for carving (or so I’ve been told). Only members of the Haida nation are supposed to be allowed on the mountain, and families have unofficial quarries whose exact locations they try to keep secret.

Rumors persist of a logging road that makes access to the quarries easier, but, generally, artists either have to carry out the argillite they quarry on their backs down a narrow trail, or else buy what others chose to sell – usually at about five dollars a pound on Haida Gwaii, and as much as twenty dollars a pound in Vancouver. The tradition has been to keep argillite out of the hands of non-Haida, although a black market makes small amounts generally available to other artists, who generally turn it into pendants.

The history of argillite carving is equally romantic in its obscurity. The standard account is that argillite carving did not begin until 1820, and that the pipes that were among the first carvings known were never actually used. However, while European tools and interest in curios made the 19th century a Golden Age of argillite carving, it seems unlikely that such a sophisticated art form could emerge suddenly without at least a few centuries of tradition. Studies of early pipes show a residue that prove that some early pipes were definitely used, but, since heat can crack argillite, most likely it was a medium reserved for shamans and other ceremonial use before the nineteenth century.

But whatever the truth of the matter, argillite carvings became a major trade good in the 1800s. Unlike other traditional art, these carvings consisted of far more than family crests and the stories that families and title holders held the right to tell. Instead, the carvers of the time also depicted the animals, peoples, and plants of everyday life. Sometimes, they imitated the patterns of the china plates carried by American traders. Other times, they made miniatures of houses and canoes. At times, they depicted the Haida viewpoint of the European traders and immigrants, offering some of the few contemporary depictions of colonization from the perspective of the colonized.

Nineteenth century argillite was not completely naturalistic. For instance, a head is generally one-third the length of the body. However, much of it is painstakingly detailed, with muscles on arms and legs or the individual strands of a rope all clearly delineated in a way that the more traditional wood carving almost never is. During its development, argillite carving also developed its own stock poses, such as a shaman holding a rattle in his upraised right hand and a knife in his left.

Like other art forms, argillite carving suffered because of epidemics and Christianization. However, because it was a trade good, argillite carving never declined quite as much as more traditional forms. Probably, it helped, too, that Charles Edenshaw, one of the first great Haida carvers whose name and career we know, was a skilled argillite carver – although this aspect of his art was omitted altogether from the recent exhibit of the works of Charles and Isobel Edenshaw at the Museum of Anthropology.

Today, argillite is a niche market. Bill Reid was influenced by argillite design, but only experimented with the actual medium. Similarly, while Robert Davidson as a teenager sold model totem poles in argillite for the tourist trade, it has never been his favorite medium. The same is true of artists such as Jay Simeon, Ernest Swanson, Gwaai Edenshaw or Marcel Russ, although all of these artists can produce outstanding argillite pieces when they take the time.

The trouble seems to be that argillite is more temperamental than wood, silver, or gold. It is dirty to work with, resistant to tools, and prone to flaws that can destroy hours of work with one misplaced stroke. Because of its water content, it can shatter in the cold. Artists like Christian White or Gary Minaker Russ who have done most of their work in argillite are essentially specialists, appealing to a relatively small and expensive market. Excluding pendants and miniatures, galleries rarely have more than two or three pieces of argillite at any one time, and prices usually begin at about $8000.

Nor has the reputation of argillite been helped by the growing practice in the last decade of inlaying pieces with gold, silver, and semi-precious stones. Often, such inlays are added before carving begins, seriously interfering with the artist’s ability to add detail, and, almost always, they are added in lieu of detailed carving. Moreover, because such inlays are expensive, they add substantially to prices, which means that buyers are being asked to pay more for inferior work that increases very little in value.

Quality argillite pieces are still being carved, but to find them buyers either have to visit Haida Gwaii or at least deal with artists directly. However, the effort to find quality can be well worth the effort.

Even when left with its natural finish, argillite has a reflective finish that makes a carving rich in shadows and highlights. These shadows and highlights change with the available light, but always adds a unique impression of depth and motion. They make argillite a medium that demands to be touched, and its carving traced over and over with the fingers – in fact, many believe that frequent handling prolongs the life of a carving, because the oils from human hands replenish the moisture that was originally in the slate.

Elegant and mysterious, quality argillite carvings are an under-appreciated glory of Northwest Coast art that never fail to capture and intrigue the eye.

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The loyal opposition

Posted in Bruce Byfield, journalism, Personal, Uncategorized, writing, tagged , , , , on January 15, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Parliamentary democracy is far from a perfect system of government. Its party system and first past the post elections are both serious flaws that seem increasingly unsuited to the modern world. However, it does include one concept that I find invaluable: that of the loyal opposition.

To anyone used to another system of government, the words “loyal opposition” may seem like an oxymoron. If someone was loyal, how could they oppose the government? If someone opposed the government, in what sense could they be loyal? Americans, with their system of confrontational politics, have a particularly hard time with the concept.

As a concept, the loyal opposition is reminiscent of the devil’s advocate. The assumption behind both is that questioning decisions and suggesting ways of modifying them makes for better decisions. It is also assumed that, in raising questions and making suggestions, the opposition is ultimately committed to making the government’s decisions better, and has a genuine allegiance to the country.

To someone trying to comprehend the idea, the loyal opposition sounds absurd at first. Since the opposition wants to form the government someday, surely its main motivation must be to discredit the government at every opportunity, rather than helping it to pass better laws or to take more useful actions. And today, to a large extent, people who think this way would be right.

All the same, the concept of the loyal opposition continues to exist. Especially in times of crisis, it allows a government and its opposition to act together. Yet, even in untroubled moments, it is not unusual to learn that the same people who exchange carefully restrained abuse in the House of Commons are in the habit of having a drink together in the evening.

I mention the concept because the loyal opposition is often the position I find myself in as a writer about free and open source software (FOSS). Despite the speed at which FOSS is growing, those involved in the community tend to be a small group. They know each other and, although feuds exist, they often support each other uncritically. They exchange praise easily, and rarely criticize each other – a situation that doesn’t always make for the best possible decisions.

Sometimes, users can correct this tendency by protesting clearly and repeatedly. However, users are not easily stirred up, and too much happens that would be better for a review.

That’s where people like me come in. I am all in favor of FOSS (if I wasn’t, I would be off doing something more lucrative), but there are frequently times when more feedback is useful, when a suggestion of alternatives is needed, or someone simply to say in public what everyone is saying in private emails and tweets. Nobody else is doing these things, so people like me write commentaries that do.

My criticism is rarely as harsh as it could be. In fact, you could probably get an accurate sense of my opinions by how diplomatically I phrase them. But, like the loyal opposition, I believe – perhaps arrogantly – that the community makes better decisions because someone says them at all.

Contrary to the knee-jerk cynicism of the Internet, it’s not because I am a paid troll, or set out to increase page hits by deliberately creating controversy. It’s because, like the loyal opposition, I am convinced that, frequently, voicing dissent is a greater sign of loyalty than unquestioning support.

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A celebration as much as a protest

Posted in Bruce Byfield, dancing at the revolution, demonstration, flash mob, Idle No More, Personal, protest, Uncategorized, tagged , , , , , , , , on January 12, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Yesterday evening, as I stood shivering at the corner of Robson and Burrard in Vancouver in the middle of a flash mob, the insight struck me: The people who refer to the Idle No More events as protests have the wrong idea. The events are not just protests – they’re at least as much celebrations.

Not that politics don’t enter into what the Canadian First Nations are doing. Most of the people at last night’s event could cite at least Bills C-45 and C-27 among the half dozen bills that the movement is protesting. A political pamphlet, obviously hastily made, was being handed out, and the organizers speaking to the media could talk knowledgeably about the issues.

However, politics were no more than half the story. Political signs were scattered throughout the crowd (My favorite: “We want to speak to the Crown, not the court jester,” a reference to requests for the Governor General to intervene, and a dismissal of Prime Minister Stephen Harper), but there were also Canadian and British Columbian flags, as well as variations on the flag that the Iroquois Warrior Society flew during the Oka Crisis. One man carried a flag with a Northwest Coast copper in the center. Others had tied flags around their shoulders that proclaimed, “Idle No More” in large letters.

Even the organizers didn’t spend much time on the issues. Two or three made some obviously unprepared remarks for the cameras before moving on to the drumming and dancing as soon as possible. In fact, of the entire ninety minutes of protest, no more than fifteen were concerned with talking politics.

That’s not surprising. The flash mob was the third Idle No More event that day, and many in the crowd had gone to all three events. They must have had every opportunity they could wish to hear about the politics, and almost everyone in the crowd must have made up their minds long ago.

Anyway, you could tell it wasn’t a political crowd by its composition. A crowd bent on political action is usually young, and predominantly male. It doesn’t consist of grannies and elders on scooters, or mothers carrying toddlers and families with strollers.

Unless I am very much mistaken, the people I saw had come to celebrate being First Nations, to feel good about being survivors and the descendants of survivors of disease, neglect, and abuse. Some were wearing traditional button blankets. Others were wearing T-shirts that talked about Haida Gwaii, or simply declared an cultural identity like Haisla.

But, more than to support any cause, they had come to show their pride in being aboriginals in a modern world, and most of them couldn’t get enough of the idea that their identity was something to proud of. For some, especially the senior citizens in the crowd, that might have been a new idea they were still exploring.

But you could tell what they were there for: the drumming and the dancing. They couldn’t get enough of either. At first lone singers with drums played at scattered points through the crowd, the drumbeats echoing stirringly among the tall buildings above them. Then many of the drummers formed up in two facing lines, each line trying to outdo each other in volume and enthusiasm until it seemed only a matter of time until a few drums were broken from the pounding they were taking. Around me, people swayed and shuffled to the music, clapping hands and whooping as each song finished.

Later, as the crowd moved to block the intersection, many didn’t walk so much as dance. As the drumming and singing continued, several chains of circle dancers formed, continuing for at least twenty minutes.

I remember sitting on a fire hydrant through part of the intersection blockade, watching the police diverting traffic to make sure they were continuing friendly, and my eyes kept continually drifting back to the dancing. It seemed a little tentative, as though some of the people couldn’t quite believe what they were doing, but they were enjoying it anyway.

I remembered the early twentieth century anarchist Emma Goldman saying that if there was no dancing at the revolution she wouldn’t be attending, and found myself thinking that, with that attitude, she would have loved what I was seeing.

Even when the crowd moved back on to the sidewalk and started breaking up into twos and threes and drifting away, there were some who couldn’t stop dancing. I had seen one teenage girl with “Idle No More” painted on her face who was already dancing half an hour before the start of the event; I saw her at the end, and she was still dancing, seemingly tireless.

Then the last echo of the last drum beat faded. The dancers continued for a few seconds before stopping to clap and cheer, and the noise of the traffic suddenly seemed unusually loud.

To all appearances, nothing happened or didn’t happen because the intersection of Robson and Burrard was blocked early in a winter evening. But it would be a mistake to imagine that the event served no purpose. The event ended with the participants feeling good about themselves and their cultures – and I suspect that it would be an even greater mistake to dismiss that result as having no consequences.

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Entering the Age of Steam

Posted in Bruce Byfield, cooking, Personal, steam cooker, Uncategorized, vegetables, tagged , , , , , on January 8, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I was raised in a very English family – a fact that means parts of my education in cooking was backwards. Contrary to the stereotypes, traditional English cooking does have high points, including cheeses, desserts, and Yorkshire pudding, but those points do not include vegetables. For the most part, vegetables are an after-thought, cheap items designed to make the expensive meat go further. Growing up with this attitude, I have had to learn about cooking vegetables piecemeal and on my own.

As times changed and I left home, I did learn a few things. I learned that salads can consist of more than lettuce, and need not contain it all. I learned that vegetables in general taste better if you don’t boil them until the color is drained from them, and that boiling corn on the cob in particular is an Abomination. I learned that casseroles and stir fry were often more interesting possibilities.

Yet throughout this re-education, until a few months ago, boiling remained the default option for vegetables, unless I was following a specific recipe. Oh, I’d add spices and sauces, but that didn’t change the fact that when I was rushed or tired, I’d leave little of the original taste of whatever vegetables were unfortunate to fall beneath my paring knife.

This default was particularly unfortunate for rice, condemning me either to a soggy mound on my plate or else a burned pot unless I watched and stirred it nervously and turned off the heat at exactly the correct second.

A few months ago, desperation drove me to pour rice into a strainer balanced over a pot of water and covered with a pot. The cooking was so even and the taste so much greater than when I boiled the rice that I tried the same method with various vegetables. I was equally pleased with the results.

I had heard distantly of steam cooking, but vaguely assumed it involved expensive appliances and was impractical for anyone cooking for one. However, an Internet search soon showed that steam cookers were available for well under a hundred dollars. In fact, many models were fifty dollars or less. When no one took up my pointed suggestions for a present, I returned home on Christmas Day and promptly ordered the model of my choice.

Yesterday, it arrived, and I broke off writing long enough to unpack it and check that it worked. As a sometime student of usability, I was intrigued by its egg-shaped base and its tiered shelves, each with a perforated lid complete with indentations for holding eggs and a rice tray. Like a growing number of kitchen appliances these days, the cooker was a thing of elegance, form and function matching perfectly. The only design flaw is that the reservoir for adding water is too small, which prolongs what should be a straightforward task.

Naturally, I had to try my new toy as soon as possible. For dinner that night, I began with a wad of chicken breast. I half-expected that steaming would leave the meat pink, but instead it browned lightly and evenly in twenty minutes, shredding easily in my fingers.

Another twenty minutes did for the vegetables and arborio rice needed for risotto. Mixed with the shredded chicken and covered with tomato sauce and a few spoonfuls of pesto sauce, the result was the most delicious risotto I had managed in seven years of preparing the dish, full of flavor and textures that boiling would have done its best to remove.

Had I cooked both meat and rice together using two shelves, I could have assembled a complete meal in twenty minutes, all without turning on the oven or any burners. Just as importantly, washing the pieces was no more than a matter of running a soapy dish towel over all the surfaces.

That was enough for me. I still have plenty of experiments to try, including cooking fish and adding spices to the water. I can see, too, that coordinating the various parts of dinner and positioning them on the shelves will take some practices. But so far as I’m concerned, steaming is now my preferred cooking method for most vegetables. I’ve entered the Age of Steam, and there’s no going back.

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