Jodi Dean

To begin, it will be vital to contextualize the Blog and provide its history and emergence. A Blog is a ‘web log,’ an online journal of sorts that allows, at least now in 2011, anyone to go online, log into a blog service provider and write and post just about anything on any subject with a whole myriad of themes, fonts and ways of going about a discussion or debate. Other users or web surfers can log in and add discussion comments, or ‘like’ and ‘re-blog’ other user’s work or images, linking and connecting a gargantuan web of information, opinion, imagery, sound and video bites for all the online world to see. The main sites for blogging in 2011 are WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, each incorporating a unique way of adding posts to a blog template. The history of the Blog is quite short, as the phenomenon has quickly sprung up since the end of the ‘90s. In 1998 there were just a handful of sites of the type that are now identified as blogs. 23 to be exact, each one based mostly in political discourse and opinion, but this small list of blogs was the beginning of a community that would explode in the coming 10 years. The influence for these online ‘logs’ was based mostly in reaction to access of information regarding political discourse and happenings in American society, a combination of journalism and opinion mimicking that of a discussion forum. Folks like Rebecca Blood and Brigitte Eaton found these forums of information to be an excellent way of garnishing solid news and information, all the while strengthening thoughts and opinions through sharing information with the online community.

Blogs are basically derivatives of forum servers and chat rooms, except that they are created usually by one individual, incorporating and adding ‘posts’ that anyone can respond to and access. In the beginning, web logs could only be created by people who already knew how to make a website, web enthusiasts and individuals with skills in web development and commercial advertising backgrounds. Original blogs were link-driven sites, each a mixture of unique proportions of links, commentary, and personal thoughts and essays. A prominent blogger named Peter Merholz is the originator of the name ‘web log,’ announced in early 1999 and inevitably shortened to ‘blog’ with the weblog editor referred to as a ‘blogger’. At this point, the ball started rolling, as blogs were easy to read and were widely read by internet savvy intellectuals with inside opinions on everything from fashion to religion, to pets, to sexual orientation or food and drink. More and more people began publishing their own weblogs, and suddenly it became difficult to keep track of all the new blogs that were appearing week to week. In August of ‘99, a software developer named Pyra released ‘Blogger,’ the free online blog service provider that is still running strong today. With the ease that this web-based tool provided, web log culture exploded.

The advent of free, simple-to-use blogging software, made it possible for anyone, anywhere to be a publisher, reporter, and pundit. By May 2007, WordPress was hosting 15 million blogs. Though only a few bloggers have audiences large enough to place them among the top 100 websites, their contribution to news and commentary online has been revolutionary, instead of information being provided primarily by a few large players in the media, the new fertile blogger ecosystem could now support millions of smaller players each serving a small but targeted audience. The democratization of blog content creation caught on quickly in the blogging community, as well as other online networks. Wikipedia and other “wikis” enabled readers to collaborate in the creation of content; YouTube allowed a full range of users (from creative geniuses, to proud parents, to nut cases in general) to “broadcast” their own videos; and Facebook gained national dominance as an all-purpose platform for self-expression and communication. Remarkably, WordPress, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook offered these publishing tools to users for free and millions of people became not only consumers of information but creators, curators, and distributors. From 1998 to the present day, blogs and online networks have evolved and solidified themselves as forums and harbors for public information; incredible sources of knowledge and opinion for individuals, governments and the public sphere to utilize.

Hugh Hewitt

One of the key influences blogs have had on society is within the realm of journalism and mainstream media, simply because journalistic techniques and blogging are quite similar to begin with. Bloggers often express a sense of liberation from the mainstream media, whose control over the news, have hindered the ability of citizens to participate in public deliberations over politics and policy. Blogging has been seen as a revitalizing deliberative democracy, a move against the one directional flow emerging from the mainstream monopoly of information and news. Blogging can be seen as “individuals engaging in the polis of America and the world in a direct way, one that is almost impossible in the physical world. The modern community will be built by the digital empowerment of the individual and the blog is at the heart of it”. Ideas like these point in the same directions that good journalism does, blogging simply involves more facets for an individual to cultivate and depend on the information provided. Blogger Hugh Hewitt compares his perceived liberation from the hegemony of the mainstream media to the sixteenth century reformation: “Once Luther’s spark set the fire, the availability of editions of the Bible made the collapse of the Church’s authority inevitable, though the struggle was long and often bloody”. Similar to Hewitt’s comparison, the collectivity, and more importantly the anonymity and pseudonymity that blogs provide have allowed them to become a formidable force that contends fiercely with large media organizations in terms of information gathering and sharing in journalism. In recent years, through independent fact checking and investigation, bloggers have run stories that institutional media organizations were unable or unwilling to publish.

Louis Althusser

The public arguably derives benefit from this investigation, through increased media accountability and the spread of previously undisclosed political information, like the kind that WikiLeaks can provide. What occurs with these notions of disrupting the one directional flow of institutionalized information relates to a direct interplay with the ideological state apparatus of communications. The concepts of Louis Althusser derived from Marxist theory work well in conjunction with the way in which blogs and online journalists work against the repressive nature of the State, in this case large scale media corporations that control what the public knows and what they are kept from knowing. One can look at blogging as a form of class struggle, a move to break free from the hegemony monopolized media has created.

A lot of criticism surrounding blogs and its comingling with journalism is the legitimacy and accuracy of blog information in relation. Some critics refer to bloggers as “‘wannabe’ journalists, amateurs lacking credentials”. Where exactly is the information these people are deriving coming from? How can the public trust what is being provided and discussed? This is not to say that accuracy and verifiability are not paramount concerns in the blogosphere, as they are in traditional journalism, rather, the means of attaining those ideals are different in the blogging context. Information that is laid out in a public setting has a self-regulating effect. Unless there is an overhead control mechanism, like a major news corporation, or even the government, there is no reason why facts and truths cannot exist legitimately. A perfect example of this is Wikipedia’s content, and this idea is also related to Gramsci’s public intellectual, but that will be touched on later in this discussion. As newspapers and other media institutions have shifted more and more of their content to the Internet, an increasing number of bloggers, most of whom have no formal ties to traditional media, have actively assumed the role of competitor to those institutions.

Today, few people would argue that a relatively small number of media organizations have the power to speak as “the voice of God” and monopolize news content, yet comparatively there are signs that the idea of bloggers as journalists, or at least as individuals analogous to journalists, is gaining ground. Arguments for blogs as the future of journalism or democracy evoke Michael Warner’s notion of a counter-public: ‘where a dominated group aspires to re-create itself as a public and in doing so finds itself in conflict not only with the dominant social group but with the norms that constitute the dominant culture as a public’. Certainly, blogs are not dominated with the same violence as the groups which Warner has in mind in his work, but there is a clear suggestion of a group which is outside looking in, wanting a place at the media’s table. This is clearly linked to the blog and the blogger’s relations to journalism and its ideals of truth and qualitative content.

Shirky

Blogs have had an influence on the valueof news, art and information as well, by the ways in which media is proliferated and transferred throughout the blogosphere. In comparison to blogs, hard copy, published newspapers and journals have both intrinsic and extrinsic values. Firstly, there is value in the works themselves, in that it takes real work to create, store, ship and sell the published product. Extrinsically, published works have the value that the physical presence of the work has as well, its value rests in the fact that someone saw the potential of spending time and money on actually creating the physical object and its content. Basically, there are entrance barriers and standard formations that publishing created simply by the ways in which information is provided traditionally for the public. Blogs in many ways alter these values, and it is the alteration of these values that makes blogs so important. Blogs rearrange the value of art, news and information by making it heavily abundant and reproducible with virtually no cost. Most individuals want a world where global publishing is effortless, a world where individuals don’t have to ask for help or permission to write out loud and a world that shares art, music, news and information freely; the blogosphere clearly provides this service. Clay Shirky sums up the problem that arises from this type of situation: “When we get that world we face the paradox of oxygen and gold. Oxygen is more vital to human life than gold, but because air is abundant, oxygen is free”. Weblogs make writing as abundant as air, with the same effect on price. Prior to the web, people paid for most of the words they read. Now, for a large and growing number of individuals, most of the words read cost nothing. This abundance of information and the ease of access to images, sounds, thoughts and opinions by virtually anyone, is something that is almost incomprehensible if you look at the future from a lens of say, 25 years ago. What comes with Shirky’s summation of the proliferation of information in the blogosphere is a relation to Adorno’s concepts on mass culture: “However useful it might be from a practical point of view to have as much information as possible at one’s disposal, there still prevails the iron law that the information in question shall never touch the essential, shall never degenerate into thought”. Jodi Dean remarks on these thoughts as well in relation to art, images and literature on blog websites: “The deluge of images and announcements, enjoining us to react, to feel, to forward them to our friends, erodes critical-theoretical capacities”. These thoughts relate directly to the way in which Tumblr works, one of the most popular blog servers on the Internet. Photographs, images, sounds, information and opinion are posted into the blogosphere of Tumblr and are forwarded, ricocheted and essentially ‘tumbled’ around in cyberspace. There is sense that an object or work posted in Tumblr, loses its ‘aura,’ as it is ‘re-blogged’ and reproduced hundreds and thousands of times over for the patrons of the server; something that Walter Benjamin contends with. Thanks to Adorno’s ideas of mass reproduction and the way blog culture works with the information or images present in a post, there is clearly a loss of attention and legitimization of much of the content on servers like Tumblr; the value of the works in question is clearly altered and reshaped by the operation of blogs.

Žižek

A similar concept to those featured above is a concept that Slavoj Žižek develops from Claude Levi-Strauss. It is referred to as the decline of symbolic efficiency, in other words, there is an immobility or failure of transmission of a work in question, be it a photograph, an image of a painting, or an essay when it is posted onto a blog and commented on, or redistributed out of context. Žižek posits his concept in the pinning down of the meaning of a work, something that can be totally lost in the blogosphere. Sometimes it is difficult to tell when a blog or a post is ironic and when it is sincere, when it is funny or when it is serious. Terms and styles of expression that make sense to an ‘in-group’ can shock, insult, or enrage individuals who happen upon a blog. As well, there is potential for unexpected meanings and uncertainty that affect the intensity of the declining symbolic. The concept is most prominently at work in the random search engines that some blog servers provide for patrons perusing a blog server. One clicks a link and is sent to a blog with no initial context. In addition to the effect of random shuffling, blog sites that harbor opinions and debate publically can allow for indirect deconstruction of the original thoughts they provide through comments and discussions by anyone who has an opinion. Some other option, link, nuance, some other experience of some ‘other’ who could be someone damaged or disenfranchised by the content, or may have found a better angle on the subject, or a completely different assessment of the opinion altogether. These are just opinions and comments, yet they have a link in affecting the symbolic efficiency of the work in a post, it can be lost or neutralized by the influence of the other, the breaking down of the message through meaningless arguments and ad hominem attacks on comment boards. Jacque Lacan’s signs and signifiers can be worked into this situation as well, wherein the absence of a signifier destabilizes meaning in a work, the absence of signification through the subjectivity of an author or artist is lost in the complete open and infinite amount of possibilities for interpretation of the work in the blogosphere. There is no choice construction in a blog server like Tumblr, or a comment board accompanying a post on WordPress, the subject loses the incentive for their word to be their bond; the signifier is virtual, it works not as another element in a chain as Lacan suggests, it is something more than itself, something present as potential, the meaning is suspended through the post and reaction posts alike on a blog. Information, opinion and debate can be diluted, and the symbolic efficiency of blog content is reduced.

Hayles

Katherine Hayles relates the compounding of Žižek and Lacan’s signals to new technologies like blogs and the Internet. Information technologies change the mode of text production and dissemination. They fundamentally alter the relation of signified to signifier. Carrying the instabilities implicit in Lacanian floating signifiers one step further Hayles refers to them as ‘flickering signifiers,’ and her definition is an interpolation of something just like symbolic efficiency and the value of how texts, and language in Hayles’ case, work. Wolfgang Iser’s thoughts on reader response theory can parallel Žižek’s concepts as well, in that the way a patron of a blog forum interacts with its content. Because Iser states that the structure of the literary text is what guides the reader and is constantly modified by his or her viewpoint, it can be seen that the nature of reading primarily from web-site based and blog themed settings, affects reader response, and thus the value of the work being viewed. This connects to Žižek’s ideas of how works are contained within the movement and operation of blogs. The ‘hermeneutic circle’ that Iser describes can be disrupted when an image, essay or re-blogged article is situated, related and given no context. The individual viewing the work in question may have difficulty with the filling in of the ‘blanks’ that Iser describes present within the text, and the ways in which the reader must work to fill in those gaps. Blogging and blog culture in the sense of mass reproduction, random posting and the generalization that blogs effects can have on the value of information is quite interesting to note. The operation of clicking, ‘liking,’ ‘re-blogging’ and surfing the blogosphere have tremendous implications on the ways in which individuals interpret and understand information, and how the information can be transformed by blog operations.

Habermas

Along with the important influences on value and legitimacy in the blogosphere, it is interesting to note the strength in the ways blogs host public discourse, despite its ability to dilute opinion. As touched upon earlier in this discussion, the argument over the blogosphere as a forum for public discourse is one of great influence, and it relates directly to Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere. According to Habermas, the liberalization of the market since the High Middle Ages brought about the manifestation of civil society as a private realm within the absolutist regimes of early modern Europe, a process enhanced by the rise of public forums like the coffee house and literary salon, where individuals could discuss issues beyond those sanctioned by economic consumers, church patriarchs, and state leaders. The blogosphere, liberating the individual from one directional media like radio and television, can been seen as a revival of those coffee houses and salons. Individuals within the blogosphere behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted fashion, just as in the way Habermas discusses. Lately, however, the view of the blogosphere as a new public sphere has been challenged. Michael Keren notes the “often celebratory enthusiasm displayed by many authors regarding the participatory potential of the Internet and the blogosphere, in particular,” and warns that “the image of the blogosphere as a deliberative space, as a model for an online (Habermassian) public sphere where every person is free to air his or her views, thus making rational dialogue between equal status-free participants in public debates possible, is somehow problematic to say the least”. One reason for this challenge to the potential of blogging, is the sharp divide between politically identifiable groups in the blogosphere who hardly link to each other and mostly strengthen their biases by in-grouping and shutting out external opinion. The blogosphere, like the Internet more generally, is certainly good for democracy, because it increases the availability of information. But if linking behavior on blogs can be taken as a proxy for information filtering, it is reasonable to think that many readers are obtaining one-sided views of political issues . This raises important questions about the political impact of the blogosphere, and the overall mass of blogs. The fact that millions of men and women of all nations, races, and classes are taking advantage of the blogging medium to articulate their thoughts, feelings, experiences, and particularistic identities online, without having to get the approval of book publishers, newspaper editors, employers, or party bosses, is undoubtedly a new phase in political communication. However, to bolster this relation to Habermas’s concepts on the public sphere and its roles along side state activities, blogs are clearly providing new communication channels that can “temper or reverse the crisis in political communication by challenging the indirectional flow of message traffic that has tended to characterize mass-mediated democracy”, linking the blogosphere directly to the way in which Habermas’s unrestricted public body operates.

Gramsci

As mentioned previously in this discussion, the way in which these public spheres and mass-mediated democratic communities operate is dependent on the legitimacy of the information circulating throughout them. Bloggers that tend towards the ideal of truth and qualitative content in their commentary can be compared to that of the public intellectual that Antonio Gramsci’s work touches upon. Intellectuals give social groups like the blogosphere “homogeneity and an awareness of its own function”. Today, most popular bloggers are often seen as public intellectuals, due to the expansion of what ‘public’ is by incorporating many private concerns discussed in blogs, and the opportunity given to a much larger number of people to comment on public affairs, as discussed above. The growth of online venues has stimulated the quality and diversity of public intellectuals: “The Internet is viewed as a vital aid for the renaissance of public intellectuals. The explosion of online publications, podcasts, dialogs, and especially blogs has enabled public intellectuals to express their ideas beyond the narrow confines of elite op-ed pages and network television”. A real world example of how this is emerging from blog culture is that of public debate taking place in Iran and the Arab world. Clearly, the Arab Spring was heavily influenced by a strong online presence of intellectual bloggers intent on the proliferation of emancipation from dictatorial regimes, and the social production of intellectuals, and more importantly of intellectual debate that has occurred in the Arab Spring required sufficient public space for such debate to emerge. Blogs and the Internet allow for this public space; a “far greater range of voices speaking ‘intellectually’ than ever before”.  The conception of bloggers as public intellectuals allows their classification by the same criteria applied to intellectuals in the past, as in the case of traditional intellectuals, there is clearly a difference between those who are politically engaged and those who are not. These types of intellectual bloggers have a regulating effect on the blogosphere, as well, they have an effect on the symbolic efficiencies that may be affected through the debate and public discourse that occurs within their opinionated forums. Like Wikipedia, the presence of intellectuals acts as a kind of guarantee of legitimization of information and qualitative content; Gramsci notes this concept in his work: “A human mass does not ‘distinguish’ itself, does not become independent in it’s own right without, in the widest sense, organizing itself; and there is no organization without intellectuals, that is without organizers and leaders, in other words, without a group of people ‘specialized’ in conceptual and philosophical elaboration of ideas”.

The political force that the blogosphere can generate is quite significant. When intellectuals, coupled with blogging practices that limit the effects of symbolic decline, reduce disruptions to the hermeneutic circle, and are able to really harness the value of the Habermassian public sphere of democracy present in the blogosphere, incredible things can happen. Blogs have played an important role in places like Iran, China, Myanmar, and other countries who’s oppressive regimes force bloggers to often risk their lives to express independent views and bring data and images on human rights violations to the world’s attention. It has been coined ‘cyberactivism’ and it works closely in conjunction with the power blogs have to getting information ‘out there’ for the world to see. During the aftermath of the Iranian elections of June 2009, blogs and other new media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube served as vehicles to organize activists, mobilize the Iranian diaspora, and inform world public opinion about the crackdown on demonstrators in the streets of Tehran. While the cyberactivism surrounding the Iranian protest was unprecedented, “the war in the streets spread to an online war of words”. And as important as words are, they are insufficient in themselves to bring down a determined political regime supported by a ruthless secret police. It remains to be seen how effective blogs work in conjunction with cyberactivism in the future, and how capable it will be in overcoming regime counterattacks involving blocking Websites, flooding the Internet with disinformation, and intimidating street journalists, the expectation that the blogosphere could change the balance of power in favor of the individual in oppressive regimes, and serve as an arena of deliberative politics in democratic ones, due primarily to its being an endeavor played out in virtual reality.

By looking at the ways in which blogs have emerged from a small online community of internet savvy political and social opinion makers in the late ‘90s, its easy to see how much potential lies within the blogosphere and within online networks like Wikipedia, Facebook and more recently, Twitter. Today, the single page website of an obscure Turk named Mahir can sweep the web in days. But the unassailable truth is that corporate media and commercial and governmental entities own most of the real estate on the web. Bloggers are still outnumbered by Internet conglomerates like Dell and the corporate public relations and advertising departments of Coca Cola, or news organizations like Time Warner. The democratic public sphere that the blogepelago has created is working well to counter the one-directional flow of information coming from such institutions, as well as acting as a harbor for truth and qualitative content that has real meaning in the arenas of pedagogy and epistemological evolution. What comes with the benefits of the blogosphere also come detriments to the value of information, art and culture within it, even though we are able to find and collect a myriad of knowledge on a day to day basis, the Huxlian concept of ‘too much’ can hinder an individual as well.  It will be interesting to see how blogs continue the proliferation of public opinion, political influence, creation and distribution of information and the ease of social interaction.

References:

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Sberny, Annabelle, and Gholam Khiabany. “Becoming Intellectual: The Blogestan and Public Political Space in the Islamic Republic.” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 34.3 (Dec. 2007): 267-86. Print.

Warner, Michael. Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone, 2000. Print.

15. Matt McNea

Have you ever felt confident? Successful? Ever had one of those days where you feel like the cock of the walk and you want everybody’s business to be all about yours? Well, Matt here is there to tear it all away from you, smiling with pleasure as his well placed glib remark rips you from your self assured feeling of security and positivity. With the rapier wit and razor sharp ability to cut anyone down to size in any situation, Matt has raised my eyebrow on so many occasions this year. Never have I been so humbled in moments of glory by this man, and to round out the top 15 of the most intriguing, Mathew Gordon McNea wins out.  Matt excels at doing physical labour as fast as humanly possible. Never have I seen a stroke of the leaf rake sweep through a thick layer of matted leaves so swiftly, nor the sure and steady guidance of a heavily laden wheelbarrow, brimmed with the discards of an unworthy topsoil so speedily dispatched from a client’s backyard. That’s right ladies and gentlemen, Crimson Leaf Landscaping’s Head of Maintenance takes his job fucking seriously. And so, this exemplary behavior trickles downward to Matt’s underlings, like his idiot brother Alex, and that weird kid named Brock who cries at the drop of a hat and shits his pants… We’re all made of excellence, and McNea is one of the reasons why. To you good sir, I wish continued fervor in the arena of insults and self esteem lowering, and a happy new year, dick.

14. Paige Stewart

Paige was the first girl I ever met at University. Together we would romp and frolic the majestic Guelph Campus, skipping and laughing, collecting botanical plant samples, commenting rigorously on the personal appearance of ugly people, and ripping new assholes for those looser hick Aggie fucks that came to class drunk. All whilst getting shit faced every single night of the week. Fuck yeah. A delight in the presence of many, Paige has the uncanny ability to rock the tightest clothing I’ve ever seen, changing in and out of outfits at record speeds, as well as having strikingly perky breasts and lengthy legs… If given a pen or pencil, Paige can recreate just about any image you can conjure on command, even a top notch rendering of one of Georgia O’Keefe’s sexualized flower paintings, or even a Turner landscape… She’s just that talented. If Walt Disney were still alive, I’d have a mind that the father of Mickey Mouse would hire her in a goddamn heartbeat. Paige is one of the best friends a guy could have, and to her I send wishes of love and success for 2012. The #14 spot goes to her. Yay!

13. Dennis Wilson

Dennis Wilson is a man I’ve known for some time. Recently married and the father of two delightful twin boys, Dennis has landed himself on the path to financial security and recession proof employment in the trades sector. But what a lot of you reading this don’t realize is that he’s also training to become the next light heavyweight champion in the UFC. Dennis was born in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, where he was trained from birth in Judo and Jiu Jitsu. His father would beat him with a hardened wooden cane and barbed chains as a child, feeding him only small portions of sticky rice and a varied assortment of insects for protein and vitamins. Dennis’ small electrified enclosure constructed next to the Amazon River by his abusive father would be constantly at risk of attack by jungle dwelling predators like Jaguars and Cobra snakes. In defense, Dennis would simply employ his mixed martial art expertise and break the neck of aggressive big game, or rend and devour the scaly flesh of the attacking serpents, providing him with the missing protein his insignificant rice diet could not afford… A true warrior, bred from the wilds of the Brazilian jungle, Dennis has hardened himself for the Octagon, a product of surviving the harsh underground fighting world of Brazil he escaped from, 6 short years ago. I love you Dennis Wilson, you and your prize-winning arm bar submission move and aggressive grappling technique. Happy New Year, Dennis ‘The Rio Ripper’ Wilson.

12. Annie De Grey

Planet Earth is by far a better place with this beautiful rolling stone, tumbling around its wondrous exterior. Annie is like Alan Ginsberg, Ken Kesey, Janis Joplin and Rosemary Leary all rolled into one fabulous person. Annie has spent the last year hitchhiking and trekking across Canada to places like Nelson and Canmore. Blown by the wind or influenced by the literal constructions of Tom Robbins, Annie is one of those down to earth, wholesome girls that knows what he fuck is happening in the world and wont hesitate to give you the gears when you’ve been a dick, or said some outlandish selfish bullshit. Annie is like a smiling, joyful chunk of exuberance, and I wouldn’t be the somewhat humbled man I am today of it weren’t for her. I’d feel damned lousy if she wasn’t apart of my life, and #12 goes to her.

11. Kelsey Atkinson-Derasp

Kelsey fascinates me. She’s a quadriplegic English undergrad at the University of Guelph, and she garnishes high marks without the ability to type or write consistently (with my help of course). I have never met someone with a larger comic book collection, video game collection or the ability to complete the most difficult Portal puzzle in record time. One time I started talking about how much I loved Superman and Spiderman while we were discussing super heroes. Then she told me how much Clarke Kent and Peter Parker acted like pussy losers, and that they needed to grow a pair of balls before they could measure up to Bruce Wayne’s pimpin’ steez. She has the foulest mouth an innocent person like her might have, not to mention the incredible guts and nerve of plowing through a crowd of student pedestrians trying to get to class in her high powered, off road electric chair, stone cold and determined to win the race against the able bodied fucks in front of her. For 2012, I wish Kelsey a solid graduation, and high hopes for a future in Video Game Development, something that gets her out into the world, and not cooped up in a small apartment in Guelph. Cheers Kelsey, you kick fucking ass.

10. Todd Morrow

Handsome Todd. Never have I met a more bitter English student. A man who hates his program with such passion and zest, that for some reason, he fits paradoxically well within the maddening confines of a Canadian Literature classroom, just so everyone around him can hear the utter poetry of his hatred and discontent at the ‘bullshit’ he is listening to. Todd is a strait up Christian badass. He rides a motorcyle, and sports tattoos that shrink my penis. He is also a fighter, with what looks like a right hand that could remove the chromium from some loser punk’s 1986 Cadillac Seville with one swipe. He is muscly and tough all right, yet he is sensitive, loving and a hopeless romantic, awww. He’s one of those guys ladies would just love to bring home to Mom for quiche and rosé, then go fuck the shit out of on his motorcycle listening to Slayer… If called to battle, Todd and I would fight valiantly side-by-side, annihilating anything in our path, and then eating it afterwards, blood, bone fragments and hair smeared across our faces… Then we would go home and have sex with our girlfriends and meet for beers afterwards, giving each other high fives and discussing the existence of God and the inner workings of faith and nihilism. To Handsome Toddy Tickles, I present the #10 spot, a perfect cap to an epic list of beautiful people. God bless you, kind sir.

9. The Underdown Siblings.

Do you remember in Anchorman when Ron Burgundy says he’s going to have a family band, and that he is going to roam the countryside with them and that Brick, Brian and Champ aren’t invited? Well, these kids are just like that band. Clad in robust 1970’s matching pants suits, wearing colourful headbands with flowers in their hair, playing flutes, harps and fiddles… Julian has the voice of an angel, like Gabriel foretelling the birth of John the Baptist and Jesus from on high… His version of Lay Lady Lay by Bob Dylan this summer lit a fire within my heart that’s still burning strong. Margot is like Cher when she was young and extremely beautiful and still able to hold a tune… She’s so regal, and her fashion advice is spot on, plus she’s like the mother hen, everyone loves hens, I know I do…  And then there’s the delightfully adorable Vivien. A shining beacon of cuteness that can be compared to rolling The Land Before Time, the The Fox and the Hound, and Thumper from Bambi all into a cute little innocent ball, with rosy cheeks. But the star of course is Flynn the Dog, a gentle, yet mammoth dark haired beast with a heart of gold. A valiant soul who was taken perhaps too soon from everybody this year. He was like Falcor from The Never Ending Story! Sometimes I would imagine I was Atreyu, riding him like a magic Luck Dragon, fighting against the Nothing and saving the Princess and the Ivory Tower from evil! To all of you I wish a fantastic year, and perhaps a full world tour of your wonderful ’70s style band with Ron Burgundy ‘n’ Friends… Cheers kids, you made my list, you’re cool cats.

8. Cody Hawes

Cody is the fist person to be inducted into the most intriguing list twice, and back-to-back to boot (except for Annie, but that’s different). Cody is like a country homestead in the fall, with a wood stove burning, apple pie cooling on the windowsill and hundreds of cats roaming the yard and wooded thicket just outside. Cody is going to be a radio personality for the CBC, I can feel it. She’ll be the next Sheila Rogers, interviewing famous authors about their books from places all over the world, plus a deluxe interview from the top of a light house in Halifax, with some famous bearded author guy that’ll take her out for dinner after and tell her its ok to have hundreds of cats, then bone her… Doesn’t that sound nice? I owe a monstrous debt of personal troubles and griping to this girl and an encore spot in the list is well deserved. Jimmy Jazz Trivia Tuesdays have been the feather in my cap so far this year at l’ecole. Thanks for makin’ my bed, feeding me breakfast and being so lovin’ good to me. XOXOXOXOXOXOX

7. The Love Gloves

A band of merry men with the combined skill on the baseball field matching the likes of Kelly Gruber and Juan Guzman from the 1993 Blue Jays World Series win. But only Kelly Gruber and Juan Guzman, any more talent and we’d be pushing it. That’s right, we’re pretty horrible, but fuck can we turn at least one double play a season. For some ungodly reason, in the past two years, the Love Gloves have managed to get all the way to the championship series at the end of the season, only to lose out to some surly fucks who drink too much and had kids too early… There’s a sense that we’re revered in the league as wild men, drunk with arrogance and high on a false sense of talent and good looks. At least I feel that way. Most of these boys I’ve grown up with, others, I’ve forgotten their full names…. But there is a real and tangible sense of camaraderie. There’s nothing like fielding a speeding softball on a baseball diamond fit for the crew of the Jolly Roger, I mean fuck, its like sacrificing your bottom row of pearly whites for an underfunded city relic, punctuated by spot lights that blind you, just as the ball reaches your unprotected skull in the outfield… It’s because of the Love Gloves that I’ve come to enjoy the smooth, white supremacist flavor of Pabst Blue Ribbon. A dollar a beer is ok in my books… This is my tribute to you boys, the Love Gloves, a fitting pseudonym for a condom. Cheers fellas, next season we’ll take it all, I can feel it in my bones.

6. Caitlin Faragher

It’s a pleasure and delight to pay tribute to number 6 on my list. Caitlin is one of the most beautiful souls I have ever met. With a smile that shines like the sun, her presence is like the warm familiarity of Christmas morn, or that time you tasted ice cream for the first time, or even that time you realized you could purchase the boxed set of Fraggle Rock on Amazon.com for half price! Caitlin is like adding salt to a meal, without her, there’s just no flavor in life. I mean, how can I not have flavour? I have skillfully spared the #6 spot for a girl that fills mine heart with the joys of a thousand mornings and the ability to look really good in almost any picture that is taken of her, from any angle, in just about any light. I mean, you’d have to catch her taking a shit to get a fouled print… Just sayin’. To you m’lady, I bestow a year filled with success, warmth and kindness of only the highest caliber and quality. Keep on keepin’ on sister, you’re the cat’s pyjamas.

5. Conor Hedley

This cat’s the shit. A world-class English student with writing skills rivaling the hard-boiled fiction greats of the ‘30s and ‘40s, like Hammett and Cain. Makes me jealous. Conor is a wicked bad photographer as well, making pretty pictures for fashion designers and skate board punks alike. Conor and I seem to share the same mindset when it comes to school; go to class, but leave all the work to the last fucking moment, and still pull of high marks and earn respect from professors. This year we saw the likes of a self-absorbed teaching asshole. A thespian prick, acting out scenes of Shakespeare in a disgusting melodramatic display each class, stroking his own ego for all to lament and falsely applaud. Disgusting. In contrast, we both experienced the wonder and oddity of a professor who knows just about everything, and I mean everything. If you think of something, anything, Gregor Campbell will have an anecdote that relates exactly what your speaking of to some kind of theory or criticism, be it tampons, Karl Marx or Vogue Magazine. The guys a goddamn sponge of information. I see Conor becoming a successful writer in the future, perhaps a journalist, a photo journalist even, but who knows, all I can say is I dig this kid, and he makes some days at school so much more pleasant than not. Happy New Year, fucker.

4. Ania Mallard

An enigma and a joy, Ania Mallard is but the icing on the cake in my English program. Unique is an understatement. She’s stylish, good lookin’, smart as fuck, and very well written. I’ve never met a girl with a passion for Star Wars as thick and viscous as this one. If I were as hairy as Chewbacca (I know this sounds weird), I’d feel safe in knowing that I could mate and reproduce smaller, yet equally as hairy and intelligent offspring with Ania. She would be my Han Solo (except Han Solo is a dude…. I get it). She’ll understand… Ania seems to break free from the uncomfortable norms you get from the ‘masses’ at school. I would very much hope for her sake that I see much more of her in the next year, for we are both kindred spirits, lovers of science fiction, fans of Carl Sagan and feminist theory, and we look really good while we’re at it. Keep it fucking real Ania, you make a nasal septum piercing sexy as hell.

3. Mikey Riddell

Micheal Jordan Riddell is quite a fella. His taste and style are original, different, he opens my eyes to seeing things differently; be it fashion, design or even photography, of which I’ve had a hand at helping him develop this year. Mikey’s had a successful year. After living in his car for most of it, he earned a job at The Design Exchange in Downtown Toronto, a hot spot for fashion events and design culture in all of Canada. Fuckin’ kudos right there my friend. He was able to move into town into the belly of the beast, and now the city should work its magic and carry this guy to places he deserves to go. Good things are on the horizon for this cat, personal ventures and new interior design jobs that should open doors for continued success up the ladder to the top. Don’t quit now brother, the light keeps getting stronger. Have a look out for this guy in the future. Happy New Year bro, #3 is yours.

2. Justin MacLean

With the soaring height and arm span of a giant man the likes of myself, MacLean comes in at #2. He’s got a winning smile, abs of steel and if your looking for concise and well-written analysis on the UFC scene, give Justin here a ring and he’ll talk your ear off. Feeling shabby at the bar? No problem, Happy Flask Man here is at your rescue; just a couple splashes from his magic flask cures any ailment or bar type affliction. Super! Are you feeling ambiguously gay, yet you’re the most heterosexual person you know? Hang out with Justin and his good buddy Eric, they’ll make you feel comfortably homo-social on any occasion, they stay up late on weeknights! Justin has a powerful thirst for seeking out the most fun in just a few short hours that the nighttime provides for a nocturnal beast such as he. If you have 6 hours to party harder than Robert Downy Junior in 1996, Justin will make damn sure you’re well equipped and well on your way to depravity, debauchery and the guy’s got a high leg kick that rivals Mike Vanderjagt when he played for the Colts! How can I not have this guy as number two? But seriously folks, in the last year I’ve come from the outskirts of Justin Town to living right at City Hall, making Council meetings almost weekly to discuss women, religion, current events, alcohol and even more women. Here’s to a good dude. Cheers sir, the coveted #2 goes to you.

1. Aubrey Underdown

Aubrey’s my main squeeze. She and I are like peas and carrots. She’s Bonnie and I’m Clyde, I’m Harry she’s Loyd? You see? Yep, if I were a sandwich, she would be the tangy zip of Miracle Whip, all creamy and slathered all over my delicious focaccia bread, rich with 5 healthy grains and full of nutritious fiber (I’m healthy). The sprinkles to my icecream, the icing on my cake, the jelly filling inside my vanilla strawberry jam doughnut. She is the oxygen carried by hemoglobin through my blood stream, allowing me to type these poetic words and smell pretty flowers, or yell loudly at senior citizens. She sums up the definition of pretty, I mean sheesh, look at that delightful punim. Don’t you just wanna squeeze it and take a little bight out of it? I sure do. To every beastly hairy freakish man like myself, there must be a delightful, sunny and far less hairy counterpart, and by golly she’s the one. I’d give 10,000 dollars if she were ever kidnapped, any more and I’d be broke, so 10,000 it is, no offense. Also, she spills everything, its really fucking annoying, I have stains all over my clothes and shit, and sometimes I get really worried when I have expensive electronics around her, she might pour a whole glass of cola on them… It’s nerve racking. But that was a digression and I apologize. Aubrey makes my world go round, and to her I have reserved the #1 position on my list of the most intriguing. I’m just so fucking intrigued, I just hope I stay that way, and that she doesn’t run away with an illegal immigrant named Raul. It’s a legitimate fear…. I’m smitten.

And so ends my list of the most intriguing. A cunning way of thanking and pointing out the good people in my life. I hope everyone had a good year, I sure did, and the next one will be just as super awesome as this one was, I assure you all. Check out last years list and the year before, its a Jeff Dalgleish tradition that should last until I die, but get progressively less hilarious and more pessimistic as time passes. Happy New Year, losers!

Jacque Derrida

Anyone around here ever stuck their nose into the realm of Literary Theory? Y’know, the crazy place that Sigmund Freud emerges from, or Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, and Stephen Greenblatt? Even Karl Marx, damned communist… Well, I have. At first it seemed like only a place that really intelligent people with cardigans and thick rimmed glasses decided to venture, and its easy to see why, but theory is something that I think has solidified the legitimacy of my pursuance of an English degree, it kind of separates it from the fact that I want to go to teacher’s college, it’s something that really makes sense to me.

Stephen Greenblatt

Literary theory has sort of placed itself in a void created by the lack of recent philosophical and sociological endeavors of the cultural sphere. It has taken the seeming failure and stagnation of philosophy and has risen up to work to find connections between many disciplinary practices that seek to allow us to understand and contextualize ideas and thought within the cultural and literary umbrella. Its pretty interesting stuff, as it’s used as a framework to navigate and map out areas of modern art, music, literature and almost any other form of genre or media in ways that provide new and better understandings of their significance. Theory pursues the creation of a realm of critical understanding and a way of looking at text that focuses strands of philosophical argumentation together, linking and excluding ideas and thoughts, and forming a semblance of clarity on the intricacies of literature and culture.

The dissemination of literary theory on the texts and articles I have been researching has opened up a great deal of differing avenues with which to further my insights and delve deeper into more specialized subject matter that relates to the overall themes I’ve been looking into. In this comparative article, I want to take a look at an essay I found recently from an online journal of sorts, called Proof – Reading Journalism and Society. It’s called ‘New Journalism’, Subjectivity and Postmodern News and it delves into the idea of subjectivity and the ideology of objectivity in journalism, how Tom Wolfe’s brand of ‘New Journalism’ sought to work against it. I’ll compare it to Roland Barthes essay The Death of the Author, which will allow for a more tangible way of defining ‘theory’ for me.

I’ve chosen New Journalism as a basis for applying theory in the past weeks. A couple of the key concepts that have arisen over and over in my research on the topic are the subjects of objectivity and subjectivity in the medium. In Maitrayee Basu‘s ‘New Journalism’, Subjectivity and Postmodern News, the question of objectivity is dealt with at length and she discusses the way in which the journalist-author is influenced by ideologies of objectivity and how it can lead to constructs within the realm of journalism, like ‘status anxiety’ and an epistemological gap present in its history. As well, she shows that this division of subjectivity and objectivity can cause rifts in the system of journalism, a blurring of the lines between non-fiction and fiction. Basu states, like many other scholars on the subject, that Tom Wolfe’s anthology, The New Journalism, was a confirmation of the postmodern shift from the objective reportage that dominated the late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century. New Journalism sought to move towards a way of reporting that ‘read like a novel,’ unfolding more like a story with character development, dialogue and symbolism, and an intimate involvement of the journalist himself (or herself, of course), rather than fact based deliverance of information. It meant a rejection of the objective ideology, a penetration of a barrier that was coveted by most journalists who believe that objectivity allows for a neutralized, unbiased and more reliable ‘truth’ in reporting. Wolfe and his contemporaries reworked the definitions of the journalist, and the way journalism could be viewed and read.

Roland Barthes

A reflection of this idea can be found in the work of Roland Barthes in his essay The Death of the Author. In it, Barthes contends that the conventional ideals behind interpreting text can be argued as flawed and inappropriate. He states that there can be no author connected to the text, that there is only the text alone and to critically analyze that text one must remove the ideas of the author’s politics, biography and social stance completely, and focus only on the language and structure that forms what the audience reads. Therefore, Barthes is stating that the audience, or the reader, then becomes the author, as if to say that authorship is differed to the person reading. This concept relates directly to the idea of subjectivity in journalism, for if you were to transcribe the position Barthes has on authorship onto the objectivity of journalism, you could come to the conclusion that objectivity can be seen as something subversive and ultimately against the idea objectivity sought to carry out in the endeavor of neutrality in reportage.  If objectivity exists in the journalistic piece, than its subjectivity is differed to the audience, or the reader, and therefore the audience inscribes their own meaning into the news, and that objectivity is essentially lost.

I think this link that I have discovered within the comparison is important to relating the idea of objectivity in journalism to a post-structuralist viewpoint on the ideologies inherent in how journalists convey their message. It lends a helping hand to Wolfe’s position on New Journalism being as important as it was at the time when he coined the term in the late 60’s and early 1970’s. This comparison also relates back to what I stated at the beginning of the paper, that theory provides new and better understanding of the significance of literature, no matter what the genre. Theory, in this case worked to focus an argument, helping to exclude the idea of objectivity in journalism, and this is how ‘theory’ can come to be defined in a way for me to use in cultural and literary study, its not that difficult to break down and articulate. Theory is a navigational tool for understanding literature as it helps to clarify and contextualize ideas and thought within the literal sphere.

I returned to a place that had me relishing in the virtuous trappings of the real and intimate, the fresh and ephemeral, the quiet and the loud, the softs and the stubborns, the dreary and the blossom of the outdoors, and the feel of another human being beaming with joy or tearing with the sadness that catches your breath when you can hear it in their trembling voice. It’s almost sad how much I had missed instances like that, and believe it or not, I’m almost certain that it’s because I was too busy worrying about bullshit on the Internet and not the tangible beauty of my everyday.

As if I’m picking up the long abandoned rotten log to beat the dusty remnants of the dead horse on the subject, Facebook seems to be everything. Well, at least to some people. Sometimes I would take it as seriously as some of the people I’ve turned a fussy eye towards, so at least I can admit that misgiving, but over the summer I came to a sobering realization that Facebook has come to solidify itself as a permanent and all too meaningful part of the way in which we as human beings carry out our social interactions. An offhand comment here, or an out of context ‘like’ there, can send your friends fleeing from you as a person like booty-laden bandits from a bank alarm. Some folks can get up in a huff over the way you portray them in a tagged photo, others will take great offense to a deletion of friendship, or even use the social network as a way to discredit, mar and psychologically ‘get’ to someone. It’s not for me, and I hope some people can relate, I think they can.

I know that there’s an incredible benefit to this website; I can keep in touch with friends that live in far off bustling cities, take pride in my colleagues photography and creativity, and always look to my news feed to learn something new everyday, as a well of information, inventiveness and soulful textual banter crosses my screen. But for the most part, its drivel, and it takes me further and further away from a place that I have come to hold quite sacred for the past few weeks. Good old-fashioned reality.

Everyone I spoke to at school in recent weeks seemed to have much more to say to me when I spoke to them. I seemed to have a great deal more to say in return. It’s like the blur and white noise from Facebook had numbed my sense of what it was like to converse with other human beings, face to face. When I would reach for a sip from my pint glass at the pub, everything would slow down. My ear would prick up and catch more intonations of the delight of conversation and laughter around me. When I drove to work or school, I would see houses, trees, hills and valleys that I hadn’t noticed before. It made my time on campus more explorative, interested and filled with a sense of agency and a drive to get more tasks completed. I would find myself looking around more unseen corners and make more room for taking film photographs of the interests and compositions that were rendered all the more vibrant by a lack of mental bullshit, as it were.

Here lies another interesting item of discussion. I borrowed a film camera from my friend Katie a few weeks ago, and I’ve been taking exposures around my hometown in Dundas, at school in Guelph and where ever I seem to find good subject matter and good friends or family to keep closed inside my roll of color film. It seems to me, the fact that each exposure is hidden from my scrupulous eye until it gets developed, injects all the more value, delicate touch, metering, composition, and time spent on simply finding a great shot. Noting the light that spreads across a grove of birch trees, the look in someone’s eye as they stare back at you before you shoot their familiar face, or the sense of being in the right place at the right time, when the light and composition are just fucking perfect. Little, insignificant moments and building blocks of my everyday were all the more enhanced as I re-examined them for a possible burn onto the negatives inside the camera, as opposed to taking a bulk of simple exposures from my digital SLR and instantly knowing what I’d done, or not in most cases, with the exposure. It’s the real that makes it so much more important, and enjoyable.

I think what I seem to have discovered, is that I was ignoring some fundamentally important things that make me happy. More insight, more attention to just about everything, sound, touch, sight and how everything can fit together in a friendship, a rivalry, a new birth or a long over due passing of someone important. You can’t get these things from Facebook. I learned to cut away from it a lot more readily. I seem to have been able to log off and stay off for a couple of days and not have a care for what I might be missing. If someone wants to speak to me, they can find my number and call. If someone is having a party, I’ll find out and make my way like we always did a few short years ago. And if something really happens, something that is worth my time and attention, I’ll see it, know about it, and it will make me all the more who I am, without seeing it or hearing about it passively and silently, sluggishly scrolling past it on my computer screen.

So friends, maybe take solace in what I’ve said, or simply disagree. But the core of the message here is that I think there is a great deal of merit in taking time to move back to a place where the reality and tangible interactions that we seem to have lost in recent years are more abundant and commonplace. Because there is nothing worse than feeling uptight, undone and in a fuss about a world that only half exists, and can cause the all-important human soul to become burned out and perhaps a few shades darker than its bright and shiny likeness to the sun.

Brave New World

Imbued with poetic representation, Huxley works the novel’s characters, plot structure, and interconnected Shakespearian, Pavlovian and Marxist themes to allow for interpretations of political discourse, technological ethics and the advancement of the human condition, in almost every era of human progress since it was written in 1932.  What Huxley sought to do, like any other dystopian writer, was to project the discomforts of his present into the future. The 1930’s saw the rise of the ideology of consumption, the Soviet Five-Year Plan, the synthetic creation of vitamins, the spectacle of a chicken heart that lives on without the body, and the control of diabetes that had massive implications for the progress of medicine and technology.

Mr. Huxley utilized these anthropomorphic progressions to underlay the way in which economic security and absolutism could work to allow for the placid servitude of the human race. The true genius of Huxley’s novel is the way in which objects, names, items or novelties have a function for his symbolism and relation to his present. Names like Bernard Marx, literary references to Othello and Romeo and Juliet, the displacement of the talkie by the ‘feelie,’ and the careful placement of poetry and ‘hypnopaedic’ repetitions to drive home his message. Each parallel to the progressions and relations to reality are profound, and connect in a way that mirrors a true master of dystopian satire.

Huxley intricately laced the New World society controlled by the ‘World State,’ with a mutation of religious regard for technology and the assembly line of the Ford Model T; the mass production of the automobile. All dates are preceded by ‘a.f.,’ or ‘After Ford.’ Places of worship are referred to as ‘Church of Our Ford,’ and in a bastardization of the Christian cross, the top is removed to form a ‘T.’ It is the assembly line metaphor that forms the basis for the World State’s ability to condition individuals from birth; genetically, physically, and psychologically for their ‘inescapable social destinies’ inside of a stabilized caste system, separating each ‘echelon’ of human segregation by size, intelligence and appearance. It is also for this reason that Brave New World finds itself prominently cited on reading lists the world over, almost 80 years later.

Huxley uses Brave New World to deal with ‘the problem of happiness,’ anticipating that as technology progresses, it is not what suppresses the human individual; it is what pleasures and distracts it. In Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell sought to depict a world that was controlled by surveillance, repression, the eradication of information and language, as well as intimidation, through fear in Big Brother. What Huxley develops through Brave New World is the concept that it is not what suppresses us, takes away from us, or instills fear in us. It is what makes us numb with convenience, pleasure, comfort and complacency, so that it is not the banning of books, the eradication of history or the constant threat of oppression, it is the individual itself; conditioned from birth, to come to be controlled by promiscuous sex, drugs and the technological wonderment that causes its own servitude, and lack of awareness.

It is this very core idea that places Brave New World in a realm of literature that makes it fundamentally essential to read. Because Huxley, in 1932, had such foresight to see within the way that human beings could harness technology for their own use and ultimate enslavement, the relevance of his vision jumps out into the present and points out some alarming similarities, perhaps now more than ever. What reason do I have for literature if I have a glowing rectangular box to fill my imagination with delight (and commercials)? For what reason do I require information when my life is constantly bombarded by so much of it that I become passive and complacent? How do I know what truth is when it is drowned in a sea of irrelevance? Why experience life in the flesh, in the present and in the beauty of reality, when I can get it for cheap and easy through ‘feelies,’ ‘obstacle golf,’ and the ‘centrifugal bumble puppy?’ I can take a holiday on Soma, the perfect drug that Huxley foresaw as well. Zoloft, Percocet and Prozac? His vision is eerily accurate.

Huxley used his genius to present his readers with an all out ambiguity of prose and symbolism. The future is ultimately unknown to all of us, but it can be pieced together by making judgment and extrapolations of the present into that unknown. As human beings it is interesting to note that only our own actions as a species can allow us to anticipate, learn from, yet still take steps in the directions we can see will take us to ruin and darkness. Huxley could imagine such enhanced states of our future and it is through him that the production of such masterpieces of speculation, such as Brave New World, can come to fruition and turn the dreams we have for our future, into nightmares.

With a heterosexual love from the heart, Hubert and Humphrey show their affection in the most ambiguously gay way possible. HOWLS.

View the whole album in large format here.

15. Liam Kearney and Stina Dios:

Liam and Stina are like Bonnie and Clyde. They’re criminals, sociopaths, sexual deviants and they’ve robbed me of my ability to appreciate just how sexy a couple can be, because lets face it folks, they’ve topped it (sorry couples to follow). I once witnessed Liam brandish a tommy gun, firing several rounds into the roof of a local TD Waterhouse Branch, just so he could be first in line to cash his paycheck, while Stina looked brazenly out the tinted windows into the bright afternoon sky, as her golden, Swedish locks rippled in the cool exhaust from the wall mounted air conditioner beside the branch manager’s office…. Stina and Liam are so much fun, and I thank them for brightening any house party, bar romp, or wedding I attend. They provide me with food and shelter when I’m in Toronto, and of course, provide me with something to aspire to, a badass, loving relationship. Take a bow, comrades.

14. Tyler Young:

I met this cat by coincidence, while editing a documentary film for an English class last year near the end of school. Little did I know, we shared some mutual friends, and to my surprise I discovered quite a talented man. Tyler Young is a photographer, film editor and all around multi media expert. He also moonlights as a private detective on weekends (he once helped recover a signed copy of Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man from the clutches of a evil vinyl collector, downtown. What can I say? I just love Uptown Girl, its a classic). On the very few occasions I’ve seen him since we’ve met, he always has a smile on his face, and in no time at all spreads the delight onto everyone else’s face. Ty heads up a multi-media company, Full Affect, you can check out the work here, its pretty excellent and of course a motivator for yours truly. I hope in the next few months we can kick back at the Albion with some beers and an exchange of our photographic know-how. A Guelph resident, and by proxy, a wonderful human being and father, this man lands #14, a tip of the cap to you, sir.

13. Dave Heidebrecht:

Dave Heidebrecht is super human, like I mean he could be a fucking android, built in a retired, top-secret soviet missile silo outside of St. Petersburg, Russia. Sent to Canada to spy on just how righteously awesome Canadians are. I’ve had suspicions…  I once saw the bastard toss 14 perfect strikes in a softball game this summer. To boot, in one game, Dave sacrificed his beautiful face for the betterment of the team by barreling headfirst into a chain-linked fence, ultimately saving a run, but unfortunately we lost the game. I could swear I saw a metallic interior skeletal frame protruding from the gash on his face, it might have been the Hamilton air in my lungs, but I could have sworn…. This talented human being leaves me reeling anytime I catch a glimpse of his work. Dave is one of the most gifted and worldly photographers I know. To match, he’s generous in lending out equipment and humble when it comes to compliments on his work. He specializes in landscapes, culture and images that capture the essence of the here and now, of anywhere he’s been, and he’s been far and wide. You can check his work out here, please be seated as you do so. #13 is reserved for such greatness.

12. Brett McClean and Christy Duncan:

I can’t say enough about this next couple. Christy an Brett are full of laughs, love, good food, good company and good music, all the trimmings of what a great pair should have. Missed terribly from here in Ontario, Christy and Brett now reside in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They also celebrated their marriage this summer, and holy fucking moly, what a hum-dinger that was. I’ve been to weddings in the past, but this one included so many close friends and colleagues that it made the event all the more intimate, and all the more a smash up. A first for me at the wedding was the concept that instead of tapping your glass or plate for a kiss from the bride and groom, you had to earn it, by writing a poem and then taking to the mic, and delivering it to the crowd. Only then would Brett and Christy share a smooch. That concept is of course, epic wedding history. They seem perfect for each other, and I don’t know when I’ll see them next, but I sure hope its soon. Come to Ontario for gosh sakes!

11. Duncan Martin:

Duncan Martin is another well-rounded chap I must pay homage to. If you’re unable to grasp the concepts of this world, from a geographical perspective, I highly recommend speaking with this guy. He’s a pretty decent photographer and by golly he’s an excellent musician too. Duncan once climbed to the peak of Mount Everest, BY HIMSELF. NAKED. He told me he took a disposable Kodak camera and that he has photos of his journey, but when I asked to see them, the look in his eyes said ‘don’t you fucking dare question my Everest summit, you unworthy man-child.’ Well, at least that’s what I thought his eyes said, so I backed off and continued on with a sip from my coffee and a slow downward glance at my study notes…. Duncan is a staple study partner, and for that reason, I hold him dear to my heart…. Even though he doesn’t make the top ten. Rock on, my good sir.

10. Jason Donovan:

Jason Donovan always puts a twinkle in my eye. He’s just full of it. Twinkling. The twinkling of a bright, shining star… I once saw Jason wrestle a fully grown Great White Shark in a lake in Peterborough. What boggled my mind about this sight was not the visceral power of his adrenalin filled body striking blow, after forceful blow at the bulbous, sensory nerve center located on the sharks head, no, it was the shear improbability of an actual shark, or any salt water predator for that matter, making its way up the Trent-Severn waterway to wrestle the likes of such a man. Donovan is a man of many talents, one being improvisation. I have a lot of respect for improv artists, I’ll even argue that its a tougher gig than stand up comedy. How the heck can a guy get up in front of a crowd of hundreds of people and consistently entertain them, let alone hold their attention, with nothing but mere suggestions of material and subject matter? TALENT, that’s what! I respect that, and I love what Jason, Jeff Higgins, Evan Moir and the whole Van46 crew have done with themselves in the last year. Check out their comedy skits here and give praise. To Jason I say, keep on keep’n on, and let me know when that taxidermist finishes stuffing the shark. Man, that thing was like a 14 footer, jeepers!

9. Rebecca Spring and Darryl Johnston:

Rebecca and Darryl have been good friends of mine since first year university at Guelph. For some reason they’ve been together since then, I can’t figure it out really…. Maybe its because of Darryl’s world famous clam chowder, or his award winning spicy sausage gumbo, or even his tantalizing roasted corn on the cob, all these things, mixed with a chiseled figure, rapier wit and of course a Dodge Mini-Van equipped for toting they’re future offspring. Of course Rebecca’s radiant beauty, kindness, incredible patience, great taste in photography and of course, those legs….. help the situation as well. I guess I just figured it out. Another amazing thing about Darryl and Rebecca, is this one time during World War Two, Darryl and Rebecca rode onto the battlefield at Normandy on the back of a giant mutated squirrel. Somehow Darryl was able to fashion a mount for this brutish, forest dwelling, nut forager, and as Rebecca brandished a high powered machine rifle, Darryl guided his trusty steed directly into the path of some of the most fearsome National Socialists the war had ever seen. They won the battle, yes indeed they did, after delivering a high-powered explosive device to the enemies headquarters, while galloping past at an incredible rate, and detonating it as they both gazed passionately into each other eyes. Then, they made out, squirrel-back, as the dust and brick and stone of the explosion whizzed past them at high speed. James Cameron, eat your fucking heart out. I love you guys, congratulations on getting hitched, may 2011 be a splendid year for you both. #9 is reserved for you.

8. Polina Bam:

Polina Bam. In this patriarchal society, one weeps at the possibility of such a fantastic last name being folded away into the realm of history. With great namesakes come with them greatness by association, and #8 goes to Polina. I’ve never met a more kindhearted individual, and it’s thanks to her that I was able to find one of the most horrible course loads of my post secondary career, bearable. Hey Polina, remember that time we were in a group of like, 8 people and then like, only 3 people like, did any work and then the rest of the group probably got decent marks because like, we worked so hard? That was the best! If ever there were a woman who could traverse the entire globe with a backpack and a walking stick, I would most definitely slot her in as the top pick. Travel success includes smiles, kindness and knowledge of food and wine. Polina embodies each, and as this was her last semester at Guelph, I wish thee prosperity and wonder as you travel the globe spreading Bam cheer and delight as you go, like a beautiful flowering vine, that smells of honeysuckle and watermelons. Yaaay!

7. Liam Quinn:

Tiny Liam Quinn is but the apple of my eye, and the eye of Rob and Meghan, his makers. He can barely form perfect sentences, but the way this guy constructs and maintains a whole train yard full of the complete cast of Thomas the Tank Engine, is nothing short of extraordinary. As well, Liam’s coloring skills have ripened, as his ability to color inside the lines improves everyday. Liam also excels at impressions, and in particular of his doggy, Poppy. For some unknown reason, Poppy has the tendency to gargle and ‘cack,’ if you will, when confronted with a situation not to her liking. Think of it as the sound your Uncle Tim makes when he’s smoked too much from his tobacco pipe, and needs to clear the nasal cavity, that’s the sound. Well, Liam captures it perfectly, and the facial expressions to match, a man after my own heart. May your year be filled with toilet training success, new pre-school friends and an even more careful and detailed stroke of the Crayola. Hi Liam! Sorry for yelling.

6. Eric Fallon:

If you’ve been to a party wherein Eric Fallon has attended, you’ve probably encountered the fucking ringer. Nudity and coarse language abound the atmosphere when Fallon attends what was once a mild mannered dinner party, strong parental discretion is recommended to attend such get-togethers. Eric is not a model for 1980’s Chatelaine Limited Edition couples photo-shoots, nor an accredited Zoologist, no; he is a professional Michael Bolton look-alike. I once saw Eric bring the house down at a local retirement community, as his rendition of ‘When a Man Loves a Woman’ soared forth, proving that even a cover of a cover can be even more breathtaking than the original. Eric has brought much joy to my life in the past year, he seems to attract the fun, and the people I meet through him bring equal joy. Fallon is a well-dressed cat too, and while he looks like a million bucks, the guy has an academic and eclectic taste in literature, something you may not assume from the ‘enthusiastic’ that Eric embodies. I reserve #6 for this man, as he truly is one of the most intriguing of 2010.

5. Mandeep Flora:

Dipp, or officially known as Mandeep Flora. I love his photography, I mean, that shit just makes me jealous. #5 goes to this man, a fine man at that. I don’t know if anyone saw, but recently in the Globe and Mail, there was a story about a guy who saw two old ladies being robbed on Dovercourt, in Toronto. Well, that was Dipp. The guy ran 8 blocks up the street; only realizing the petty thug he was after, had lured Dipp onto his turf, as when he finally ran around the corner at Dovercourt Park, there were six other dark, shadowy figures. Little did this posse of seven strong realize, Dipp is a 9^th degree black belt, and has been listed by the Guinness Book of World Records as being the fastest human being to wield a collapsible Billy club. Before those despicable thieving bastards knew it, two of them needed reconstructive face surgery, one required a synthetic knee cap, another two died from shear terror, and the other two broke their OWN arms upon realizing the immense pain and suffering they would have undergone if Dipp had gotten hold of them. Jeepers. He gathered the purses, and then returned them to their rightful, senior citizen owners. The top five of the most intriguing must be kept for such greatness, but for fuck sakes, maybe ease up on the stellar photographics, it hurts my feelings. I love you.

4. Jamie Morren:

Jamie Morren is yet again another impeccable photographer. He’s been taking a photograph, or several, everyday for the past year, in fact he’s at 354, today. That is no small feat, and it’s a respectable one. I find it hard to get motivated and pick up the camera; let alone find composable material that compliments my style and lens, and mood for that matter. Jamie is able to do all of these things, everyday. My God. He’s also excellent with a guitar and to boot, holds a mean garage party every Christmas Eve. A party that leaves me smelling like a synthetic campfire made of cigarettes, but filled with the killer energy that a solid group of people generates, stoking the real fires for the rest of the year. Parties like these truly embody the expression that it’s not where you are, it’s who your with.  Jamie recently moved to Toronto to pursue a career in photography and advertising, a creative like myself. To you my good man, I bestow the wishes of success and good health and may every year from this one forth, may I find myself in your garage, spouting prose like a beer-crazed banshee. Ahoy!

3. Julian Pinder:

Julian is someone I hold in very high esteem. His accomplishments in the last year are undeniably something we should all strive for. He released his documentary film, LAND, a piece he had been working on since late 2005. Its quite a film, and I say so sincerely, as it came from a rookie director, and from a budget that was self financed, and built upon a schedule that involved quite a lot of world travel, and of course hard work. Julian also co-owns Toronto’s first urban winery, V1 Wines, and was kind enough to entrust me with shooting V1’s annual grape stomping in Etobicoke. Julian is a Dundas boy like myself, and is an all around talented fellow, sporting skills with the guitar on top of his skills with the camera. I look forward to his next project, through his production company, Deliberate Films, a story following the ever-spreading oil and fuel industry in the Northwest of Canada. For the first of the top 3, I reserve this spot of Mr. Pinder. May your year be as prosperous as 2010.

2. The Guelph Harem:

Number 2 is reserved for a group of ladies that could combine to form a super power zord, even the Power Rangers themselves could not defeat. How exactly they would combine is completely up for interpretation by everyone reading this. I don’t know, some kind of surgery or something? Anyway, I owe a whole two semesters of fantastic partying, laughs, and all around tomfoolery to this bunch. Cody seems to know how to uncontrollably laugh at almost anything, and I mean anything, don’t take her to a funeral; a comedy show of some sort would suit her much more. Sarah, in her glory, can outdrink me. How this relatively tiny girl can do so, is up for scientific review, and if there are any scientists reading, I’m sure you’d be eager to study the inner workings of Sarah’s alcoholic digestive system, wink! Maddie can speak to animals. Yep, she once had a full on conversation with a Black Grouse, and discussed the troublesome nature of migration and the difficult task of culling his young grouse chicks out of the nest, to fly. His name was Harold, and he was hatched on the shores of the Mississippi. Finally, Vanessa is like the glue that holds the group together, perhaps butcher’s glue, the kind that really gets you going after you fill a zip lock bag half full and haul a lungful. Somehow she seemed to be able to make it through the semester this year, even with crutches and without a cellphone.  To this fine group of young ladies I say, may the force be with you, and may the next year bring you joy, success and may your hangovers and sicknesses last but a few moments and may your hair not have bad days and may you not break any bones and may you find happiness and joy and love. God bless.

1. Momma and Poppa Dalgleish:

Finally, we come to number one, and for such an honor I reserve for my parents, Momma and Poppa Dalgleish. For if it were not for them, this list would not be made possible, in fact, a heck of a lot would not be possible and I must here take my place as a humble son, and give thanks for this miracle of a marriage. I don’t say miracle lightly. I’m not privy to the exact statistics, but to have parents still in love and holding a strong marriage after some 30 years, is quite something, and it does wonders for the rest of the facets of their lives. Like me, my brother, our pets, our home and all the security, love, companionship and trust that comes out of something like that. Marriage aside, these two individuals are pretty damn interesting. Patricia, or as I’ve deemed, Trish the Dish, is a hard working Educational Assistant. I’d say its one of the most thankless jobs in the education industry, or for any industry at that. A great deal of humility, patience and heart is required to work with disabled and troubled kids, and from what I’ve seen and heard, she does more than her share of a fantastic job. Doug, or Douggles if you will, is a prison superintendent. Until this year, I’d really no idea just how big the scale was for the guy, in his position. He runs Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton, Ontario. Its a high security prison with a staff of around 500 and a budget reaching into the 8 figure category. How this man goes to work and deals with the conundrums of a giant government facility, holding some of the worst assholes Canada has to offer, and then comes home with the bright demeanor I encounter everyday, is nothing short of intriguing. Let’s face it ladies and gentlemen, if it weren’t for the love, wisdom and grace that my (as you can see) quite attractive parents, bestowed upon yours truly, I’d be simply a worthless bum. No ifs, ands, or buts…. And so, with my most fervent and exclusive endearments, I present the number one spot, reserved for my makers. Thank you for everything, and may the next year bring you joy, happiness and maybe a little less of your son’s personal indiscretions (taps the nose). I love you both.

To all who read this in full, I thank you kindly. For further reading, check out last years list. Also, to those who know me and know me well, and to those who didn’t make this list, its a little arbitrary, and if I had all the time in the world, I’d write a blurb and a homage to each and everyone of my friends and acquaintances. Try to take the love and kindness I show here and pay it forward, the Earth could always use a little more of both. Happy New Year!

I always wondered what it would be like, and how much merit there would be in gathering some caring folks, some do-gooders, some decent heart felt people like myself together, to form a roaming band of Roadkill Funeralists. Y’know? Hit up the rural roads, the local city streets and hold vigils, roadside respects, paying our two cents of dignity to these wayward animal souls that gave their lives in the name of human progress (more like interference and encroachment). We’d fashion a little altar, maybe even a tiny little podium and we’d all gather ’round, long faced and grim, but noble and stiff upper lipped. Real British like, I guess….

“Today we gather here, to mourn the loss and celebrate the memory of Chip. Chip the chipmunk. He was a great chipmunk, a swift and graceful chipmunk. A chipmunk who if challenged, could probably have filled his tiny chipmunk mouth with so many nuts and berries, not even the great chipmunks of the ancient chipmunk times could have comprehended such a mouthful. Chip most likey left behind a lovely wife, and of course some tiny little chipmunk whipper snappers. Well, our words spoken here today are to acknowledge and respect Chip’s life, that was so quickly taken on this day, perhaps from a Mazda 3, or even a Subaru……. Well, here’s to Chip, the chippiest little chipmunk in the whole gosh darned forest….”

Then, we’d pick him up and give him a proper burial, something nice, like near an oak tree, or a babbling brook. Something worthy of his chipmunk greatness. A far cry from the shovel or spade of a disheveled, unshaven, smoke mouthed city worker with a hankerin’ for break time…..

Yep, roadkill funerals, I could see it, maybe you could too. I guess the real moral here is, be sure to take a few seconds as you speed by a flattened toad, a squished turtle, or the ever elusive battered crow (crows almost never get hit, those wily bastards…) to think about and appreciate just how secret, yet how most probably wicked awesome that little guy’s life must have been. Amen brothers and sisters.

Its the sound of the World Cup horn, or the “Vuvuzela” horn, like the kind the one fan from a CFL game brings to compensate for the lack of 35,000 other fans… This vuvuzela horn has been the only sound heard at World Cup 2010, as tens of thousands of South African fans take them to games, and blowthem as loudly and for as long as they can. So there is my point, its annoying as hell, but now its a danger? Read on.

What was just an annoying din, has now escalated into a health threat with authorities and specialists claiming that prolonged exposure to the noise emitted from the World Cup horn could result in hearing loss and in some cases deafness. Woooow.

To illustrate their point about the World Cup horn, they tested its output and found that the vuvuzela emits a noise at 127 decibels. At thatmeasurement, the vuvuzela is shockingly louder than a drum (122 decibels), and the ref’s whistle (121.8 decibels). A 10 decibel increase in sound means that a 127 decibel noise is twice as loud as a 117 decibel sound. Local fans have been blowing these tuneless horns mercilessly since the tournament began and it has caused no end of irritation to viewers and fans, well at least the ones I’ve spoken to at pubs and with friends.

There have been petitions to FIFA from authorities but the president of the organisation, Sepp Blatter, refused to ban the World Cup horn on account of its traditional ties to South Africa. However, players similarly are not amused and have complained that the racket completely puts them off their game. One solution would be for World Cup broadcasters to simply transmit the audio from their commentators only and omit crowd noise all together, but that could take away from the subtleties of what we hear between the minuscule spurts of silence between horn blasts, right? Well, maybe I shouldn’t complain, I live in a world that allows me to enjoy the fruits of a peaceful, global party and the game football, that’s pretty exciting. I just wish I didn’t have to feel like an entomologist collecting worker-drone data at a hive every time I tuned in to the Netherlands tuning they’re opponent.

But the tables turn, and the political battles that took place in the elections of 2006 bring about land reform and power is returned back to the people. But it is the corruption of this power that ironically renews itself in the hands of the Nicaraguan natives.

LAND trailer for feature documentary from Julian T. Pinder on Vimeo.

Power corrupts, and the 28 year old director captures the essence of this fact with some ballsy documentation and filming with almost no budget, yet with great ambition. This film has garnished rave reviews, including a rare 4/4 stars in the Globe and Mail. It screens this week on Wednesday the 9th at 9:00 p.m. and Thursday the 10th at 7:00 p.m., at The Royal Theater on College Street in Toronto. I highly recommend this film to anyone who supports Canadian film and for those of us who can appreciate relevant, provocative and informing media from an entrepreneur like Julian. With a potent mix of the eye opening truths that can be compared to those of Noam Chomsky,  and the raw vision of a budding new director, I too give this Canadian Doc a 4/4 stars. Big ups, yo.