Towards Crash: Two Films informed by J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel, Crash.
Category Archive: writing
Jan 31
Beat Takeshi: The Invisible Audience
Toughness has been rather out of fashion, as a masculine virtue, and Takeshi simultaneously radiates it and suggests its wounded core. There can in fact be no depiction of genuine toughness (not brutality but a sort of excess of substance of soul stuff) without this concomitant indication of that wound, else the piece simply becomes the pornography …
Jan 23
Robert J. Sawyer and William Gibson at Appel Salon
Although I’m not too big on leaving the house, I attended this talk by Robert J. Sawyer and William Gibson at the Toronto Reference Library. Aside from trips to the tailor and organizing my cupboards, This is the sort of thing I get excited about. I’ve been wanting to see these two in conversation for years. Reason …
Jan 07
Philip K. Dick: We Can Rebuild You
Some of you might remember the Philip K. Dick robot that went missing. As a fan of science fiction and the strange, I posted about this weird incident back in 2006. Well, this creature has been rebuilt. Hanson Robotics just rebuilt the Philip K. Dick Android! To replace the android that we lost in 2005, …
Dec 22
Illustrated Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
I’ve put some hours in and made an illustrated, tumblr version of Guy Debord’s 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle. You can find the first post here. When you finish reading it, simply hit NEWER and it’ll bring you to the next paragraph. Some of you are probably familiar with the book. Others of …
Dec 12
Q&A: Michael Williams
I interviewed Michael Williams of A Continous Lean for The National Post. The piece ran this weekend. You can find the interview here. Don’t really have much to add to that so . . .
Dec 09
The Alchemists of Kush: Review
I want to give you some background. Be patient. My reasoning will, I hope, become clear. Before I was published, I walked into Bakka Books and was recommended a novel by Minister Faust. Coyote Kings of the Space Age Bachelor Pad. I read it and cursed him out. It was the book I wished I …
Nov 18
Mapping the Republic of Letters
Mapping the Republic of Letters is a Stanford University project to map the intellectual correspondence of the Enlightenment. Brain Pickings says: The project pulls data from the Electronic Enlightenment database, an archive of more than 55,000 letters and documents exchanged between 6,400 correspondents, and maps the geographic origin and destination of the correspondence — something we’ve come to take …
Although Ryan Oakley began his career as a simple rake (drunk) he has since become Toronto’s most renowned flaneur (no car) and notorious dandy (overdresses). A misanthropic composer of psycho-geographical fictions (sci-fi), he is also a server of food, a tender of bar and a washer of dishes. While performing all these functions with efficiency and elegance (disdain and malice), he somehow finds the time to publicly criticize friends, strangers and cultural crap.
