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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 you just don’t know you are. Some of you should be.

You could say that it was the guiding text behind punk, culture jamming and has informed most critiques of commodified culture up to and including the Occupy movement and, certainly, its parent Adbusters.

As for me, I came to this book quite late in life. I knew of it for some time –since it was first recommended to me by a fascist in a bar– but found Debord’s writing impenetrable. This was, perhaps, due to bad translations. A few years ago, I gave it another go. I can see why the fascist recommended it. Quite a bit of my own thinking is made lucid here. I, of course, had the dis/advantage of living in a era that seems to have reached a saturation point of spectacle and commodity.

Tumblr seemed like the perfect vehicle for this book for a couple of reasons: First off, it epitomizes so much of what the book is about. Secondly, the book it made up of 221 single paragraphs, which suits the ADD just fine. Thirdly, full frontal nudity and gifs.

If you’re at all interested in my methodology, and I don’t know why you would be, I used a combination of pictures from my computer but, mainly, just what was coming across my dashboard at the time.

At any rate, it’s my hope that this treatment might make the book a bit easier to digest for those who, like me, found it difficult and that some others might be exposed to it.  If not, I’m just happy to have it for myself.

You can find the first paragraph/post here and advance through it by hitting NEWER.

Best of luck.

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“Last, but not least, the man who probably better than anyone else understands the psychology of the Attentäter is M. Hamon, the author of the brilliant work Une Psychologie du Militaire Professionnel, who has arrived at these suggestive conclusions:

“The positive method confirmed by the rational method enables us to establish an ideal type of Anarchist, whose mentality is the aggregate of common psychic characteristics. Every Anarchist partakes sufficiently of this ideal type to make it possible to differentiate him from other men. The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,–opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,–endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.”

To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanour, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.”

–Emma Goldman; The Psychology of Political Violence

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“Media stars are spectacular representations of human beings, distilling the essence of the spectacle’s banality into images of possible roles.  Stardom is a diversification in the semblance of life – the object of an identification with mere appearance which is intended to compensate for the crumbling of directly experienced diversification of productive activity.  Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue in a global manner.  Themselves incarnations of the inaccessible results of social labour, they mimic by-products of that labour, and project these above labour so that they appear as its goal.  The by-products in question are power and leisure – the power to decide and the leisure to consume which are the alpha and omega of a process never questioned.  In the former case, government power assumes the personified form of the pseudo-star; in the second, stars of consumption canvass for votes as pseudo-power of life lived.  But, just as none of these celestial activities are truly global, neither do they offer any real choices.”

–Guy Debord

The Society of the Spectacle

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Honour is obsolete.  The culprit, as usual, is the modern era and its devices. A better word than obsolete might be endangered.  Due to habitat loss.

It has always been a difficult value to uphold.  It’s one of duty as opposed to pleasure.  The honourable choice is very rarely the easy one.

When we think of honour, we often think of the large and historic examples. We think of Oates walking into the snow to die so that his party might live.  We think of the most extreme cases and there honour sits:

Strong and divorced from our day to day routines. A museum piece of expectational people on the outreaches of human experience.

But it’s usually a much smaller thing.  A matter of keeping appointments and doing what you say.  The Yakuza, who have a notorious fetish for honour, demand punctuality.  They know that a person who can’t even be on time, can’t ever be depended on for jail.

You won’t make the Olympics if you don’t do your push-ups.

And it’s these little exercises in decency that are vanishing. Not because people are bad but because they are unnecessary.  When they go, the big actions of honour will go with them.  As a sport, it requires a lot of training.

I’m not attempting to draw any ethical conclusion here.  I’m not saying that the world requires honour (though it once did) nor am I going on some Socratic rant against the youth and their perceived lack of ethics.

What I am saying is:  The world has changed in certain fundamental respects and certain fundamental values will change with it.  Honour is one of them.

When stripped of all Klingon, Mafia and military sentimentality, honour, like most social ethics, is a function of communication.

pic nicked from here

For many years, to meet someone, you had to set up a time and a place.  You would both travel to the destination.  Effort was expended and you both expected the other person to be present.

Plans had to be kept because they could not easily  be changed.  Not showing up, when someone travelled half a day to meet you, was a real asshole move. It was dishonourable.  All you really had was your word and breaking it was so serious a faux pas that people would show up to duels, where they had a good chance of being shot, and whole armies would show up in fields to battle each other.

Often at prearranged times.

The telephone might have been the first serious techno-blow to honour.  It allowed for quick changes to plans.  You still had to catch the person at home but, instead of sending a missive to inform them that you would fail to keep your word, you could now just pick up the phone.

You just had to do it before they left the house.  If you were really lucky, you just explained yourself to their answering machine. Phew, you thought.

pic nicked from here

With this small habit changed, it should come as little surprise that we saw less of the big acts of honour.  That the people who still took the concept seriously were criminal organizations who couldn’t use the telephones and remained dependant on appointments.  For the rest of us, the soil had been contaminated.

New technologies, such as the Web 2.0 and mobile computing devices are not just change in scale from the telephone but a complete change in type.  Unless you’re in the mob, dealing with an old person or just paying lip-service to an obsolete institution, these techs made appointments obsolete.

We live half-hooked up to the hive mind, reacting to the people near us, whose locations we now know.  There is no need to plan ahead, hold to our word about meetings or be on time.  Rather, our paths cross or they do not.

There is no need for honour.  Who can possibly hold to their word when they have tweeted so very many of them?  Who can develop bravery when they can criticize behind a fake name or no name at all?  People will take the easy path.

For better or worse, that’s generally what people do.

People’s words will become divorced from their actions, becoming noise, their actions divorced from their personality, becoming persona, and their integrity divorced from their work, becoming slavery.  A sort of sycophantic, childish cowardice will be the norm.   A bleating whine between cheek kisses.

With honour failing to be a necessary, let alone important, part of our ordinary dealings, it will not appear again in our extraordinary ones.

Is that good?  Is it bad?  You’ll get no opinion from me.  I have no idea.

But I do believe the world is fluxier than it’s ever been.  Things move faster, change quicker and make more noise.  Whoever coined the term websurfing was more accurate than s/he could have known.  Because of the internet, today’s social world is a liquid place, moved by waves, pulled by undertows and occasionally spraying you in the face.  Sometimes there’s even a shark.

Like surfing, rapid adaptation is of much more use than dogmatically holding the course you planned.  Unlike surfing, there will soon be no shore left to return to.  Even the real world seems below social media water.  Just look in any big-rich-city cafe.

We just have moving liquid.  Endless.

A new system of ethics will emerge from all this weird new tech (hopefully before it’s replaced by the next generation- just once, I would love to see morals catch up to technology) it seems that people just crave fame.

I don’t know why but I see a lot of that.  Motherfuckers really seem to think they deserve acclaim.  Guess that’s what happens when the media raises your kids.

If celebrity is the only place people want to go, the only shore they want to reach, then we’re fucking lost.  Way out at sea and about to start eating each other.

But all that is probably hopefully a temporary thing.

The death of honour is not.  It’s always been private value and the modern world is very public.  Online, we’re all turned inside out.  Honour will die and it will be replaced by a society of snitches.  The opinions of others and a lack of privacy might even be a better check on our actions than our own consciences.

I don’t know.

But I do know this — we’re going to find out.

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There are few things in life as rare and beautiful as a no hitter. In the whole history of Blue Jays baseball, only one has been thrown by a Blue Jay.  It’s not something you see everyday.  As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen one.

It’s a magical moment. The only fellow who ever threw a Blue jays no hitter, Dave Steib, caught the homerun ball that broke up Halladay’s no hitter with two outs in the ninth.  Tell me that’s not magic and I’ll tell you you’re blind.

Because it’s magic, there are some weird rules about the whole thing.  Superstition is the government in this territory.  It’s the only thing that makes sense.

While it’s happening, the words “no hitter” must never be mentioned by anyone lest speaking its name jinx it.  If you look at the bench, late into a no-no, you’ll see the pitcher sitting by himself, shunned by his peers and alone with his thoughts.  At the apex of achievement, there is only solitude.

Whatever a pitcher might do with the rest of his career is irrelevant.  Throwing a no-hitter makes you one of the greats.  If you were a hunter, this is like shooting a unicorn.  Who cares how many rabbits you killed?  You once shot a unicorn!

The magic governing the no-hitter is very clear for the team throwing it.  For the other team, it’s a bit shakier.  There are certain unwritten rules.

You should probably never bunt to break up a no-hitter.  I say probably because I think it’s okay to bunt to break up a no-no.  A bunt is, after all, a type of hit.  And it’s not the job of the opposing team to ensure the no-hitter.  Their job is getting hits.  What makes a no-hitter special in the first place is that it has to be earned.

But what is not okay, what can never be okay, what is just plain fucking wrong, is what AJ Pierzynski did to Rickey Romero in the eighth inning of a no-hitter.

He pretended to be hit by a pitch to reach base.

The next batter broke up the no hitter with a home-run.

Although he pitched one hell of a game, this is how the very young Rickey Romero looked after losing his no hit bid.  And why not?  He may never do that again.

No one knows or will ever know if Romero would have thrown that no-hitter if Pierzynski had not of cheated his way to first.  Maybe Pierzynski would have broken it up himself with a single up the middle.  We’ll never know.  We were cheated out of knowing that.  And the man who did it is just plain fucking scum.

He disrespected the game, the pitcher and himself.

It is just not the sort of thing that you do.  Ever. You don’t fuck around with a pitcher throwing a no-hitter.  You beat him or he beats you.  You play the game, you don’t play the umpire.    If you want to be hit by a pitch, you step into one.  You earn your base and you take your medicine.

And when you don’t, the umpires should make you.

But umpires miss calls and make mistakes.   Like cops and judges, they’re just humans in serious looking uniforms.  I can forgive their fallibility but not their stupidity.  Why an umpire would believe any acting job sold to them by AJ Pierzynski, who has a history of this bullshit, is beyond me.

The law failed.

It was time for frontier justice. In baseball, that means Mr. Pierzynski gets hit by a pitch.  Next game, first at bat, first pitch.  You hit the fucker and watch him drop.

This may sound savage but it used to be a big part of baseball.  There were a species of pitchers called headhunters who acted like the enforcers on hockey teams.  If you tried any bullshit up to and through the 1980s, you would get yourself hurt.  And some bullshit like this?  You might have a hard time stepping into the box against anyone for a while.

I don’t know.  I’ve never heard of anyone trying some bullshit like this.

Cheating is a part of baseball.  So is hard-nosed play.  Those things are baseball.

Ty Cobb, who was baseball’s most notorious villain, often sharpening his cleats to use them on defenders when he wasn’t attacking black people for “disrespecting” him in elevators, once said: “Baseball is a red-blooded sport for red-blooded men.  It’s no pink tea, and mollycoddles had better stay out.  It’s a struggle for supremacy, a survival of the fittest.”

But those who would invoke the Cobb defence should remember that he was a Nazi son of a bitch and then reflect on something else he said:  “I may have been fierce but never low or underhand.”

Ty Cobb would have reached base by reaching base.  If he had to knock the shit out of the first baseman, mess with the pitcher’s mind or put his face in front of a fastball to get that base, that’s exactly what he would have done.   Would he pretend to be hit?

Not fucking likely.  That, my friends, is pink tea.

But that’s what AJ Pureshitski did.  It’s what he’s known for doing.  It’s why things like this happen to him and everyone cheers when they do.

In baseball, as if life, you can’t prevent assholes from cheating you.  It will happen.  Even though they should know better, no matter what incredible magic they’re cheating you out of, assholes will come along and they will cheat you.

But in baseball, unlike in life, these assholes have to step into the box against your team tomorrow.  And that’s when your team has to be there for you.

A.J. Pierzynski pulled his act on a Tuesday night.  I heard about it on twitter while at work.  He stepped back into the box on Wednesday.

The wife and I attended the game.  We were amongst the very few who did. Wednesday’s game was an all time low for attendance at the Skydome.

There’s something to be said for a quiet stadium.  You can hear every heckle and cheer.  The game is as intimate as anything at Christie Pitts.  It’s like you’re hanging out with the players and no one is really a stranger.  You’re part of a very small and dedicated crowd.  The people at this game know baseball and love it.

We got ourselves some good seats.  Right behind homeplate.  Beside us, with stopwatch and stack of papers, sat a scout for the New York Mets. (He took the above picture.)  In front of us was another from team unknown.

We were in a well of professional baseball knowledge, radar guns, stopwatches and charts.  This was a real treat.  For while my love of the Blue Jays is of the heart, my love of the game is of the brain.

My love of ballpark footlongs, however, has to do with my belly.

Pitching for Jays was the hard-throwing Brandon Morrow.  A frustrating guy to watch.  His fastball is in the mid to high nineties, his curve-ball can be devastating and his change up, well, his changeup needs work.  So does his control.  He’s not known for throwing a lot of strikes.

But, far as I was concerned, he only needed to throw one.  Right into the back of Pierzynski.  A straight ahead, no nonsense 96mph sphere launched from 60 feet away.  Something that would hurt.  Something to give A.J. something to cry about.  I wanted to see blood on the diamond.  Wanted to see if A.J. bleeds red.

Justice had to be served.

When A.J. Stepped into the box, there were boos and heckles aplenty.  Everyone thought they knew what was coming.  Brandon Morrow, who looked like a nervous kid, came set on the mound.  He wound up and threw. Up and in.

A brushback but not a bean.

Not good enough.

“ALMOST!” I shouted.

And that was it.  The moment was over.  A.J. never got his comeuppance.  Not even when the Blue Jays were down by ten runs and the game was lost, did they hit him.  They walked him.  They pitched around him.  With an open base and the soft hitting Omar Vizquel on deck, they pitched to him and he got an RBI.

No justice was served.

Brandon Morrow with one pitch could have become a fan favourite.  He could have sent a direct, clear and much needed message to the American League about what happens when you fuck with the Blue Jays.  He could have shown some character.  He did none of that.  He mollycoddled a scumbag.

Yet, we stayed and watched the whole 11-1 drubbing of our team.   Baseball isn’t always about winning, you see.  It’s about philosophy, the crack of the bat and the double play.  These are all uniquely beautiful things.  The score is just the score.

And I was happy we stayed because the most interesting lesson about baseball, games and the people who play them came last.  In defeat, it often does.

As A.J. moved towards his dugout, late in the game, after dealing with a crowd who wanted to see his blood, he did a very strange and sweet little thing.  He gently tossed a ball towards a kid in the stands, giving the child a souvenir to treasure and making a lifelong fan out of him. It made me smile.

That A.J. guy’s not all bad, I thought. But that kid should have thrown that ball right back at him.  Because A.J. is pretty fucking bad and even Hitler liked dogs.

Its not an excuse.

Continue reading »]]> In the 1980s, Domino’s Pizza created and ran its famous Noid campaign.

The Noid was a creature who carried a gun that made your pizza cold.  It was remarkably successful series of ads.  Just like “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” or “Where’s the beef?”, its catchphrase, “Avoid the Noid”, became part of the American parlance.

This was all fine and dandy for Domino Pizza.

Not so much for Kenneth Lamar Noid.

Kenneth was a mentally unbalanced chap who believed the ads were a personal assault on him, cooked up by Tom Monaghan, the head of Domnio’s Pizza.

Kenneth did what any reasonable crazy  person would do:  He stormed into an Atlanta Domonio’s Pizza with a .357 Magnum.

He took the employees hostage for five hours, demanded  $100,000, a copy of a trashy novel, a getaway car and a pizza.  He only got the pizza.

This week —INSERT YOUR ASTROLOGICAL SIGN HERE– I want you to be like Kenneth Noid.  Take back what’s yours.  Even if you fall short of your goals, you might still get a free pizza and the psychological help you need.

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It’s a habit of youth and one that too few people ever grow out of: Building oneself a box and getting stuck inside it.    A human will assign themselves a category and then play that role out.  I’m a punk, they’ll decide.  I like this and hate that.  I’m a feminist, I hate this and like that. And so forth and so on.  Their personality is a check-list.

In a sane society, it would be considered a form of retardation.

Our society, however, is far from sane.  We consider an identity to be a personality.  When talking about who someone is, we often describe them in short-cuts and symbols:  That’s Joe: he’s a Chinese, hippy art student.

Why, you almost feel like you know the fellow!  But you don’t.

The bad news is that Joe might also describe Joe like that, even to Joe.  In that case, he doesn’t even know himself.  All he knows is the check-list.  Where he conforms to the category and where he differs from it.  But his personality?  Who knows what the fuck that is?

Not Joe.

The categories often seem passed down from on high, like stone tablets from the hand of Hollywood Moses.  The jocks do this, the preps do that, poets live like this and bankers live like that.   A thousand movies reinforce these stereotypes and a million people act them out.  It goes on and on.

It all seems oh-so-very real.

But it’s not.

It’s all just some shit, invented by some dead bozo to explain something he didn’t understand.  Those stone tablets are cardboard.  These identities were created by people who know no more than you.  They all shat sitting down.  And most of them are long dead anyway.  So how much fun can they be?

Just the other day, at the football game, I was sitting close enough to get a good look at the cheerleaders.

Like any painted corpse, they seemed attractive.  Looking closer, I saw that the whole thing was a glamour.  Their faces were average, their bodies unremarkable and their sex was some bleached teenage fantasy.  But all that was hidden behind a series of symbols.

They had pretty girl, blonde hair.  They wore pretty girl boots and had pretty girl make-up.  Pretty girl skirts and pretty girl pom-poms.  You see all of that, all of those short-forms for beauty, and you conclude: That’s a pretty girl. Yet, stripped naked and given plain hair, I doubt you’d think the same.   They’re only average.

Their beauty is just a glamour.

Sadly, so are the bulk of personalities.

It’s something I try to avoid in myself.  I never describe myself with titles and categories unless I’m kidding and I flinch from any attempt to press me on the matter. Pressed further, I can quickly grow irritable and rude.  Calling people by categories is as vulgar, stupid and ignorant as racism or astrology.

I attempt to dress with a complete lack of subcultural references; no buttons declaring allegiance, no t-shirts celebrating bands who celebrate some way of life and no haircuts that make a statement.  A simple exploration of colour, texture and fabric, concerned only with quality and written within the confines of the suit.

The suit is not genre.  It’s language.  The English language. Same as I speak.

And if even this has become, to twits, some sort of subculture, that’s their problem.  Not mine.

I have my own problems and my obsession with suits is a psychological one.  In James Gilligan’s book: “Preventing Violence” he claims that shame is a necessary ingredient in any violent act.  Though time weakens the daily blow, my past causes me a great deal of shame.

While drunk, I acted badly towards stranger, friend and family alike.  Things were done that can never be undone.  I’m lucky to have any friends left.  I had become utterly repugnant to myself.

I wonder how many of you know what that feels like.

Some, I’m sure.

It’s a shame so complete that it can’t rationally be dealt with.  There’s no talking to it, no explanations or excuses and no conversation.   It’s a place beyond apology.  Something you can’t reason with.   Luckily, there are tools other than rationality.

To regain any sense of power or control over my own life, I needed to commit an act of violence against myself.  By my reasoning, I should have taken blade to gut.  But doing so would have been yet another selfish act, only punishing those around me who had already endured so much, only punishing them to salve my battered conscience.  They did not deserve that and I did not deserve to feel better.  Live in shame.  Fight through it.  Keep my mouth shut.

Denied the easy route, I instead took obsessive power and control over the thing closest to my body.  My wardrobe.   My every suit is an act of violence committed upon myself.  It’s become a pleasure but it started as a bludgeon. I’m something like a torture victim who suddenly finds themselves interested in S&M.

pic nicked from here

As such, it’s deeply irritating and offensive to be categorized based upon my clothes.  It completely denies my personal truth in favour of some hand-me-down reality, often spoken by some half-smart pedant, who doesn’t know the first god-damn thing about the subject they’re speaking on.  Not from the gut.  Only slightly from the head.

None of this was easy for me.  I did not accidentally shatter my whole image of myself as a decent human being and painfully rebuild myself from the scraps just to become someone else’s fucking cliché;  to easily fit into their prison and be chained by their ignorance.  Not a dandy, not a writer, not a blogger nor a Taurus.

I am, first and foremost, Ryan Oakley.  Everything else is just trees snapped by a storm.  None of it can stand in front of the force of will and personality.  Just as you are you, I am me, and neither one of us needs to be a category.