Consider this excerpt from an 1826 essay by William Hazlitt (quoted by Sasha Abramsky in his article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2010 – Look Ahead in Anger: Hyperbolic rhetoric threatens to swamp our politics).
It came across my reading pane as I am wrestling with the issues of funding cutbacks to the not-for-profit arts sector in B.C. and finding alternative and more productive responses……
It brings to mind a quote from William Hazlitt’s 1826 essay “On the Pleasure of Hating“: “The pleasure of hating, like a poisonous mineral, eats into the heart of religion, and turns it to rankling spleen and bigotry; it makes patriotism an excuse for carrying fire, pestilence, and famine into other lands: it leaves to virtue nothing but the spirit of censoriousness, and a narrow, jealous, inquisitorial watchfulness over the actions and motives of others.” Cultures that self-identify as victims and come to see their defining historical references as a series of grievances have a tendency to mutate in ways that range from unpleasant to catastrophic*…
*my emphasis – and I love that William Hazlitt was clearly also a visual artist as well as an essayist.
I wanted to let you know about a recent epiphany that has me finally grokking the digital policy landscape and what needs doing about it. All because I was sick and channel surfing.
I happened to catch a broadcast on CPAC of the June 8 Panel at the Telecom conference and I think it gave me the best overview of the background/lead-up to our current state of digital affairs AND the overview of what IS and WHO has what agenda in it all. And why.
For a fairly smart, somewhat tech-savvy but overwhelmed Canadian, this hour I spent hearing the CTRC guy talk regulation changes, Bell Canada talk infrastructure, Nordicity explain content issues, Industry Canada moderating and somewhat baffled about what to do, and the awesome Gerri Sinclair from the Centre for Digital Media placing things in context and offering actions to take – this has finally penetrated to some sort of understanding. And a sense of urgency that isn’t just impotent anxiety. I think there are actually things I can DO. It’s pretty amazing, really.
I’m recommending to anyone who should ‘get’ this stuff, that they go watch this Video on Demand on the CPAC site. http://bit.ly/arRmoC asap.
Barbara Eirenreich speaks. We listen. It’s strangely familiar…
Pulling back the curtain on the paradigm of employment and jobseeking in white collar America, even in 2005 when this interview took place, reveals some hard truths about how we are preparing our graduates for (futiley) pursuing their Dream of a great career. Although some issues such as health care being tied to employment are slightly different here in Canada, the way that jobseekers and corporations as job creators fill their respective roles is much the same.
The corporations should not have the power they have over our economy because we don’t have any access to them….They are completely undemocratic institutions but they have all this power over us both as consumers and as employees.
I love synergistic thinking. Clay Shirky has hit on something that I appreciate with all my quirky soul. A fascinating analysis of the side-effect of paradigm shifts on the humans trying to cope with them. This is an excerpt from the transcription of the video presentation I’ve included at the end of this posting. Worth watching …
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom….
Despite the need to make deep cuts in spending as a result of steeply-reduced revenues, Vancouver City Council recognized the importance of maintaining the momentum on implementation of the Cultural Plan as a contributor to local economic regeneration.
Full details of how the budget reduction will impact the implementation process has yet to be heard, but in the immediate term this decision helps sustain the commitment of multi-sector stakeholders to keep working together on development.
For a brief description of what Council decided, see Arts Notes in the Georgia Straight April 9 – 15, 2009.
This is an excerpt from an email alert I sent to my networks in the creative community earlier this week. The ‘troops’ rallied and spoke eloquently on behalf of this keystone project, we continue to advocate and the decision is on Tuesday April 7 09 at the regular Council meeting:
Vancouver City Council considers cutting implementation of Cultural Plan
At last week’s Council meeting, City staff presented a report on recommendations for ways to increase revenue and cut expenses (a response to the economic downturn and resulting drop in City revenues). Informing these recommendations was a consultation done with citizens in January using various means, including a Mayor’s forum. Included as one of the recommended cuts – considered a low priority project (based on this public input) – is the implementation of the Cultural Plan, which this year includes the Facilities Plan and the Cultural Tourism Strategy. Continue reading →
When artists and creative sector groups begin to face the need to fundraise and establish a more organized and permanent structure for the projects they want to develop, the question I am most frequently asked is: “How do we form a nonprofit society?” followed closely by “Where do we get grants and how do we apply?”
Less rarely, do people ask themselves the question that is my first response: “Why do you want to do that?” and then “What else have you considered?” Continue reading →
Image via Wikipedia
