Late last month, yet another investigation into police misconduct during the G20 was closed because Toronto’s police refused to cooperate. Last week, it was reopened after the resulting publicity brought forward new evidence. This is getting to be a pattern.
Dorian Barton, a protester, alleged he was attacked—unprovoked—during the G20 weekend by a police officer who broke his arm and bruised him badly. The investigation into the assault was closed because no other cops would identify the suspect officer. Then photos of the offender’s face emerged from an eyewitness to the attack, so the case was reopened. Then it was re-closed when 11 different police officers—one had been the suspect officer’s roommate, two others were supervisors—failed to identify the attacker from the close-up photograph. Now the case has been reopened again after the media outrage that resulted.
[. . .]
Every other investigation of police brutality during the G20 has been dropped because the SIU, the provincial body that investigates cops, has been unable to get police officers to cooperate. It’s starting to appear that we have a police department staffed by a mixture of thugs and cowards—some with hot tempers prone to laying a beating on citizens and others who refuse to say anything when it happens. That’s unacceptable.
[. . . S]ome of us, me included, were not that shocked that the policing situation at the G20 got out of hand. The absolutely ridiculous temporary detention of 1,000 people without charge, the assorted beatings, the confusion about laws—all of those were regrettable mistakes that need addressing, but they were also fairly predictable. You dress up a bunch of guys in masks and riot gear, give them guns and ask them to control a crowd of tens of thousands of protesters in a confusing situation, with the threat of terrorism hanging in the air, and there are going to be some who cross the line.
But knowing that such abuse is all but inevitable is not the same as tolerating it. When abuses of power occur, they need to be rooted out and punished. The credibility of the police force—and of every single officer who is a member of it—depends on bad cops being punished. The thin blue line is only as strong as its weakest segments. And the G20 investigations are shedding light on more significant problems than what happened on one weekend last year. If investigations into these abuses, which were so well-documented by the press and by camera-wielding bystanders, are so futile, what should we think of the hundreds of other investigations into police misconduct that are closed for lack of evidence in any given year?
The police department is one of the pillars of the justice system, its officers sworn to uphold a public trust. But their “no snitching” problem suggests that the officers entrusted to “serve and protect” us are no better than the street thugs we expect them to arrest. The code of silence, the disgusting TV-cop-show cliché that famously governs how police deal with internal investigations, is a crime against society. And in as much as it destroys our trust in authority, it’s a crime against the police force, too.
VS Naipaul, no stranger to literary spats and rows, has done it again. This time, the winner of the Nobel prize for literature has lashed out at female authors, saying there is no woman writer whom he considers his equal – and singling out Jane Austen for particular criticism.
In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society on Tuesday about his career, Naipaul, who has been described as the "greatest living writer of English prose", was asked if he considered any woman writer his literary match. He replied: "I don't think so." Of Austen he said he "couldn't possibly share her sentimental ambitions, her sentimental sense of the world".
He felt that women writers were "quite different". He said: "I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not. I think [it is] unequal to me."
The author, who was born in Trinidad, said this was because of women's "sentimentality, the narrow view of the world". "And inevitably for a woman, she is not a complete master of a house, so that comes over in her writing too," he said.
He added: "My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh. I don't mean this in any unkind way."
[. . .] The comments were dismissed by the Writers Guild of Great Britain, which said it would not "waste its breath on them". Literary journalist Alex Clark said: "Is he really saying that writers such as Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, Iris Murdoch are sentimental or write feminine tosh?"
According to a new study, new immigrants are surprised to learn that while our cereal boxes may speak both official languages, Canada's citizens often don't
[. . .]
Recent immigrants expect Canadians to speak both English and French mostly because our nation boasts internationally about its two official languages, finds the study from the University of Calgary, to be presented this week at the 2011 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences in Fredericton, New Brunswick.
Many of the immigrants interviewed by Albert Galiev believed all Canadians should be able to converse in either French or English in a matter of course and many admit to having been confused when told by Calgarians that they only speak English, said the doctoral student at the University of Calgary studying second-language teaching.
Their understanding of Canada’s language landscape boils down to personal bilingualism — that not only are public services and resources delivered in both languages, but that the languages are regularly used by individuals.
“They don’t see bilingualism as something the federal government is supposed to do,” Mr. Galiev said in a news release. The way Canada promotes itself abroad leaves these immigrants with the impression that everyone can speak both official languages, when in reality, only 17.4% of Canadians are bilingual, according to figures from the 2006 Census.
The survey included short interviews with recent immigrants. One such interviewee said “in Mexico, when somebody talks about Canada, we know everybody speaks French and English.”
He said immigrants who arrive in Calgary are flummoxed by the lack of French-speaking there (the same Census data found only 0.7% of Albertans speak French fluently). Why, then, does Canada market itself as bilingual? they wonder.
I could point to just one release that tipped me over the edge into bemused fascination with retromania, it would be 2006's Love, the Beatles remix project. Executed by George Martin and his son Giles to accompany the Cirque du Soleil spectacular in Las Vegas, the album's 26 songs incorporated elements from 130 individual recordings, both releases and demos, by the Fab Four. Hyped as a radical reworking, Love was way more interesting to think about than to listen to (the album mostly just sounds off, similar to the way restored paintings look too bright and sharp). Love raised all kinds of questions about our compulsion to relive and reconsume pop history, about the ways we use digital technology to rearrange the past and create effects of novelty. And like Scorsese's Dylan documentary No Direction Home, Love was yet more proof of the long shadow cast by the 60s, that decade where everything seemed brand-new and ever-changing. We're unable to escape the era's reproaches (why aren't things moving as fast as they did back then?) even as the music's adventurousness and innocence make it so tempting to revisit and replicate.
[. . .]
Cinema isn't immune to retromania. Directors such as Quentin Tarantino and Jim Jarmusch still gamely fly the postmodern flag with films that are pastiche genre exercises or larded with in-joke references to cinematic history. The remake has become a fixture of the movie business, not so much for pomo reasons but because it's what people in the industry call a "presold concept". Unlike with rock, where most of the biggest-grossing tours involve reunions or wrinkly legends from the 60s and 70s, people won't go into the multiplexes to see a rereleased classic or blockbuster from yesteryear. But they will, seemingly, turn up for glitzy, pointless updates of major movies, such as the recent travesty of Arthur starring Russell Brand. TV has got in on the remake game, too, with new versions of The Prisoner, Charlie's Angels, Hawaii Five-O, and Britcom faves such as Minder and The Likely Lads. You also have the retro-chic series Life on Mars and its sequel Ashes to Ashes, whose appeal depends heavily on the sensation of utter immersion in the past through a fetishistic focus on period details of clothing, decor, food and so forth.
Nonetheless, there is no doubt that pop music is the area where retromania really runs rampant. There is something peculiar, even eerie, about pop's vulnerability to its own history, the way the past accumulates behind it and hampers it, both as an actual sonic presence (on oldies radio, as reissues, through nostalgia tours and now via YouTube) and as an overpowering influence. If you want further proof, there is no better evidence than the record that at the time of writing enjoys its 16th week at No 1 in the UK album chart: Adele's 21. In the US, her success (No 1 album for nine weeks, No 1 single with Rolling in the Deep) is so unusual for a British artist these days, it's tempting to see it as a flashback to the glory days when the Beatles and Stones sold black American music to white America. Except that those bands were doing it with contemporary rhythm-and-blues. Adele is literally flashing back to black styles that date from the same era as the Beatles and the Stones.
[. . .]
Retro is not a completely new phenomenon, of course: pop has an extensive history of revivals and creative distortions of the musical past. What is different about the contemporary retromania is the aspect of total recall, instant recall, and exact recall that the internet makes possible. Fans can drown themselves in the entire history of music at no cost, because it is literally all up there for the taking. From YouTube's archive of TV and concert performances to countless music, fashion, photography and design blogs, the internet is a gigantic image bank that encourages and enables the precision replication of period styles, whether it's a music genre, graphics or fashion. As a result, the scope for imaginative reworking of the past – the misrecognitions and mutations that characterised earlier cults of antiquity like the 19th-century gothic revival – is reduced. In music especially, the combination of cheap digital technology and the vast accumulation of knowledge about how specific recordings were made, means that bands today can get exactly the period sound they are looking for, whether it's a certain drum sound achieved by Ringo Starr with help from the Abbey Road technicians or a particular synth tone used by Kraftwerk.
[. . .]
Head into the post-indie musical zones of NME/Pitchfork and most of what you encounter is "alternative" only in the sense of offering an alternative to living in the present: Fleet Foxes, with their beards and balladry modeled on their parents' Crosby, Stills & Nash LPs; Thee Oh Sees' immaculate 60s garage photocopies; the Vivian Girls' revival of what was already a revival (C86 shambling pop). In indieland too we're starting to hear 90s vibes creeping in, from Yuck's grunge-era slacker-isms to Brother's Gallagher-esque "gritpop".
[. . .]
What seems to have happened is that the place that The Future once occupied in the imagination of young music-makers has been displaced by The Past: that's where the romance now lies, with the idea of things that have been lost. The accent, today, is not on discovery but on recovery. All through the noughties, the game of hip involved competing to find fresher things to remake: it was about being differently derivative, original in your unoriginality.
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