[PHOTO] "Ingrid Cryns, 'A Doorway', 115 The Esplanade"

This poem was by the door of OWN Housing Co-Op, a housing cooperative aimed at older women founded by the Older Women’s Network Ontario located at 115 The Esplanade. The poet, Ingrid Cryns is an architect and artist who, in addition to the poem, sculpted great winged handles for the door.



A doorway, A portal
Opens
What are the possibilities?
Bones
The symbolic structure of our soul
Merging, integrating with
Wings
Our spirit in flight
Soaring
The freedom of our choices
To leave, To end
To enter, To begin
Again

- Ingrid Cryns
July 1997

[ISL] On the gay kissing incident at Jack Cameron's in Charlottetown

I was told by Facebook's Ryan about a gay couple kicked out of a bar in Charlottetown--Jack Cameron's Nightclub and Eatery, formerly the Velvet Underground--for kissing.

Two gay men claim they were singled out for kissing at a Charlottetown bar, but one of the owners says it's all a misunderstanding.

The two men say they were on the dance floor of Jack Cameron's Nightclub and Eatery on Friday night when they kissed. They say co-owner Gordie Cameron pulled them aside and told them to stop.

The men, who asked to remain anonymous, say they were told the bar has a new policy against kissing on the dance floor, but other straight couples were kissing and weren't told to stop.

"Targeting one gay couple and no straight couple puts a bad image on him. It's just sad to see that on Prince Edward Island. We have a larger population of homophobic people," one of the men said. CBC News agreed not to name him.

The men posted their story on Facebook. It wasn't long before hundreds of posts appeared on the bar's Facebook page and some personal pages, accusing the bar and Cameron of being homophobic and discriminatory.

A news item in Charlottetown's Guardian goes into more detail. The incident went viral across Facebook and Twitter--I saw myself that the official Facebook page, before it was deactivated, was filled with Islanders who were complaining about the action. A googling for the bar/restaurant reveals that this incident is closely linked to Jack Cameron's now, as evidenced by the way it took over a discussion thread at PEIInfo about the place.

Interviewed by Xtra!'s Niko Bell, Cameron claims that he was trying to enforce an orientation-neutral policy. Others reached by Bell seem to think that any bias on the owner's part was relatively minor and not likely to be repeated.

Cameron, who took over managing the bar two months ago, sounded tired and a little defeated when he took Xtra’s call Dec 11.

“I’m the farthest person from homophobic,” he says. “I’m the most open-minded person in the world.”

"They were hardcore going at 'er in the middle of the dancefloor," says manager Gordie Cameron. "You're not allowed to do that, no matter what gender you are." Cameron says he is just trying to clean up the reputation of his nightclub, which means stopping excessive displays of affection from gay and straight people alike.

Jack Cameron’s, which used to be the Velvet Underground, was once nicknamed “the Dirty,” one of Charlottetown’s sleaziest dives. Cameron says that everyone has to adjust to his new rules, and Jay just took the comments the wrong way.

“They were hardcore going at ’er in the middle of the dancefloor. Necking, you know,” he says. “You’re not allowed to do that, no matter what gender you are.”

Amy MacQuarrie, a member of PEI’s gay community, was at Jack Cameron’s and saw the event take place. She says she thought Cameron acted sensibly and professionally. “He quietly took them aside and told them to knock it off,” she says.

MacQuarrie says that there were straight men giving Jay and his boyfriend “some nasty-looking looks” and that Cameron’s actions made things safer for everyone.

However, there were plenty of heterosexual couples kissing similarly without repercussions, she notes.

People with closer connections to the Island than me, thoughts?

[PHOTO] "The end of analogue film"

Many long-time readers of A Bit More Detail may remember that some of my earliest photos were originally made on analogue film, processed digitally but with the peculiar graininess of the original stock intact. My photos are all digital, now; advancing technology, whatnot. A post by G.F. at the Economist's Babbage blog takes a look at a book by Toronto-based Robert Burley talking about the ongoing, inevitable decline of analogue film, suggesting that even as a hobbyist's tool it's doomed. Many commenters disagree, one pointing to Fujifilm as a company likely to last.

When Robert Burley began documenting the global implosion of the silver-halide roll-film industry in 2005, he used an analogue camera. A digital one would have been a quirky choice for his style, unable to deliver the same precise results he was used to after decades of photographing architecture and landscapes. But as Mr Burley's journey progressed, he watched the ecosystem of film rapidly dissolve around him. "I was starting to feel like a blacksmith," he says, recalling the large-format camera kit he would unpack in order to capture his waning industrial subjects. The final result of his efforts, "The Disappearance of Darkness", is a book full of poignant insights, both visual and literary, into a bygone technological era.

Mr Burley, an associate professor at Ryerson University in Toronto, did not set out to write this book. Rather, he heard in 2005 that Kodak would shutter long-standing Canadian operations in his city. So he asked the firm if he could take pictures of the plant. This turned into 18 months in which he documented the layoff of workers, carting off of plant equipment and destruction of buildings.

[. . . F]ilm refuses to die. But neither can be it resurrected, says Mr Burley. Kodak's bankruptcy filing in January was a result of decades of mismanagement. But it was also the victim of rapid technological change for an industry based on chemistry and large-scale production of an obsolescent good. The spike in silver prices was no help, either, for a product that must needs use it. (Your correspondent, who once worked for Kodak, witnessed it fritter away the technological lead it held in 1991.)

Consumers and professionals ditched film first. Then health-care services, which used it for X-rays, shifted to digital scans. The final blow came with the film industry's switch to digital projection. IHS iSuppli, a supply-chain analysis firm, estimates filmmakers consumed 2.5m miles (4m kilometres) of film each year for the distribution of prints at its height. That was just a few years ago. By 2012 this plunged by two-thirds. In 2015 it will be next to nothing. Mr Burley says that after years of talking with the workers, chemists and engineers that ran the plants he foresees a tipping point beyond which consistent quality photographic film will be impossible to make because of the scale necessary to maintain operations.

That point has not yet been reached. Polaroid factories in Massachusetts may be abandoned, but those in Enschede, the company's former European headquarters in the Netherlands, live on. That is thanks to the Impossible Project, which aimed to reboot instant-film production using original equipment (as well as a fair amount of reverse-engineering, or reinventing, lost secrets). With the expertise and hard work of a handful of people it succeeded, and has shipped millions of units of print film, including new variants that go beyond anything Polaroid made. It relies partly on Ilford, a British manufacturer of black-and-white film based in Mobberley (and also documented in the book). Ilford has so far survived bankruptcy and upheaval. But the Impossible Project as a whole depends on ancient equipment, a limited term lease and chemicals and processes provided by other firms.

[PHOTO] "Prepare for the New Cameras-Everywhere World"

Inspired by the recent shocking New York Post front page photo showing a man minutes from death, Slate's Dan Gillmor writes about the future of photography in a world where the ability to take and share photographic images at high speed will be ubiquitous. There's a risk, Gillmor argues, that between the demand of mass audiences for all sorts of powerful images, the collapse of photography as an economically viable industry via free amateur images, and the development of panopticon-aiding photo recognition technologies, things might become rather unpleasant.

(Here in Toronto we've had just a taste of this sort of thing at work in relationship to the TTC, as some TTC riders who are angry at the performance of some TTC employees have taken and shared images (and video) of these employee performances.)

For example, the choices made by editors will still matter. Mass media are not going to disappear entirely. Even if we witness the demise of bottom-feeders (like the New York Post, which in this case put the subway picture on Page One with a lurid headline), we'll still have media organizations with reach and clout. Interestingly, there's been no outcry about the New York Times' decision to post a surveillance-camera shot of a man who's about to murder another man. The key differences are a) a passer-by didn't take the picture; b) the police are trying to find the murderer; and c) the Times didn't troll for readers with a seamy headline.

Over time, the more important choices will be made by the audience. Even if “mainstream media” (whatever that means) choose to behave with common decency, there will be no shortage of other outlets for gruesome pictures and videos that aren't legally obscene or (like child porn) just plain criminal. Not long after the 2001 terrorist attacks, major media outlets made the lockstep decision to stop airing videos of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center or people jumping from the burning towers. But these are easy enough to find online. With more and more videos, it will increasingly be up to you and me to make our own decisions.

Meanwhile, the role of the professional spot-news photographer won't merely change. It'll just about end. People in that business should be looking for new ways to make a living. As I wrote in my book Mediactive several years ago, a cameras-everywhere world makes it much more likely that an “amateur” will get the most newsworthy images. But because tabloid-style media will always have an audience, probably a big one, new kinds of content marketplaces are sure to emerge, giving non-pros a way to sell and license the most newsworthy material. Look for bidding wars will erupt for items that are sufficiently interesting or ugly or titillating.

The more important implications of the cameras-everywhere world are about the surveillance society we're creating. This isn't a new idea, of course, as any reader of George Orwell or David Brin knows. But the degree to which pessimists' fears are coming true is remarkable—and terrifying to anyone who cares in the least about liberty.

Online surveillance has gotten most of the recent attention, but it is also very likely that a variety of Big and Little Brothers will record us everywhere we go—eventually, with sound, too. Facial recognition and other techniques will mean that our every move will be trackable. The purveyors and adopters of this stuff like to say we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide. That's police-state mentality, but it's getting more common. Benjamin Franklin would be hooted down today for his famous and eternally right admonition, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

[LINK] "In Girl’s Last Hope, Altered Immune Cells Beat Leukemia"

We know we live in a science-fiction present by the fact that--as reported by the New York Times's Denise Grady--the latest hot cure for cancer involves the use of a tailored version of HIV. 30 years ago, HIV hadn't been isolated in the laboratory, but now ...

It is hard to believe, but last spring Emma [Whiteside], then 6, was near death from leukemia. She had relapsed twice after chemotherapy, and doctors had run out of options.

Desperate to save her, her parents sought an experimental treatment at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, one that had never before been tried in a child, or in anyone with the type of leukemia Emma had. The experiment, in April, used a disabled form of the virus that causes AIDS to reprogram Emma’s immune system genetically to kill cancer cells.

The treatment very nearly killed her. But she emerged from it cancer-free, and about seven months later is still in complete remission. She is the first child and one of the first humans ever in whom new techniques have achieved a long-sought goal — giving a patient’s own immune system the lasting ability to fight cancer.

[. . .]

“Our goal is to have a cure, but we can’t say that word,” said Dr. Carl June, who leads the research team at the University of Pennsylvania. He hopes the new treatment will eventually replace bone-marrow transplantation, an even more arduous, risky and expensive procedure that is now the last hope when other treatments fail in leukemia and related diseases.

Three adults with chronic leukemia treated at the University of Pennsylvania have also had complete remissions, with no signs of disease; two of them have been well for more than two years, said Dr. David Porter. Four adults improved but did not have full remissions, and one was treated too recently to evaluate. A child improved and then relapsed. In two adults, the treatment did not work at all. The Pennsylvania researchers were presenting their results on Sunday and Monday in Atlanta at a meeting of the American Society of Hematology.

Despite the mixed results, cancer experts not involved with the research say it has tremendous promise, because even in this early phase of testing it has worked in seemingly hopeless cases. “I think this is a major breakthrough,” said Dr. Ivan Borrello, a cancer expert and associate professor of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

[. . .]

To perform the treatment, doctors remove millions of the patient’s T-cells — a type of white blood cell — and insert new genes that enable the T-cells to kill cancer cells. The technique employs a disabled form of H.I.V. because it is very good at carrying genetic material into T-cells. The new genes program the T-cells to attack B-cells, a normal part of the immune system that turn malignant in leukemia.

The altered T-cells — called chimeric antigen receptor cells — are then dripped back into the patient’s veins, and if all goes well they multiply and start destroying the cancer.

The T-cells home in on a protein called CD-19 that is found on the surface of most B-cells, whether they are healthy or malignant.

[LINK] "Mexican Mennonites Mull Migration to Tatarstan"

The prospect of Mexican Mennonites migrating to Tatarstan in search of inexpensive land and social peace, as described by Reuters in the Moscow Times, strikes me as being as unlikely as the mooted Afrikaner migration to Georgia that I blogged about last year. But is it really unlikely? If land is relatively inexpensive, the polities governing the land stabler, and the peoples inhabiting the territory more welcoming, why not move?

More than a century after Mennonite farmers left Russia for North America in search of new lands and religious freedom, hundreds of their descendants in Mexico are thinking about completing the circle.

Shortage of farmland, drought and conflict with rivals have made some Mennonites in northern Mexico wonder if the best way of providing for their families is to go back to the plains of eastern Europe their ancestors left in the 19th century.

This summer, a delegation of 11 Mexican Mennonites went to Tatarstan, on the southern fringe of European Russia, to look at land that could help them protect their Spartan way of life from the impact of population growth and climate change.

“We’re looking for a future for our children and grandchildren,” said Peter Friesen, 59, one of the farmers who traveled to the town of Aznakayevo in August, himself the great-grandson of Mennonites born in the Russian Empire.

[. . .]

Dressed in plain cotton trousers, a dark shirt and cap, Friesen uses short, simple sentences in Spanish, his face tanned from years spent harvesting crops under the cloudless skies of Chihuahua, which covers an area bigger than Britain.

Only when Friesen’s mobile phone rings and he switches to Plautdietsch does the tempo change. Words trip off his tongue in a much softer cadence than High German and are all but unintelligible to speakers of the modern language.

“You know, we Mennonites always want to grow. And that’s what we can’t do here. Everything’s already taken up,” said the father of 13 and grandfather of 25.

Enrique Voth, who also went to Tatarstan, said farmland can be purchased there for one-tenth the price in Mexico. “We need 10 times more than what we have,” said the father of 11.

The “100 or so” families interested in Russia are still undecided about whether to go, partly because they did not find a single bloc of land big enough for them, Friesen said.

But his blue eyes glitter when he talks of the dark soil, mild climate and rich water supplies the Mennonites found in Tatarstan. Once part of the Mongol Golden Horde, an empire spanning Central Asia and Eastern Europe, the republic harbors flat, fertile terrain fed by the Volga and Kama rivers.

Originally about 7,000 strong in Mexico, the Mennonites today farm about three-quarters of the irrigated corn fields in Chihuahua. But much of the land is leased, and their holdings have increased far slower than their population.