[PHOTO] Looking west at the Gardiner Expressway, May 2012

Looking west from the patio of friends in their condo at Bathurst and Lake Shore, past the nascent condo developments, the storied Gardiner Expressway snakes on.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• BCer in Toronto and Liberal Party stalwart Jeff Jedras is happy that the NDP is encountering controversy on the national unity front.


• Centauri Dreams' Paul Gilster notes, briefly, exoplanets with retrograde orbits around their stars (revolving around their suns in a direction opposite their suns' rotation).


• Cosmic Variance's Julianne Dalcanton wonders if Google+ might have a future as a social network for niches, like young people who want to social network independent of their parents.


• Daniel Drezner notes that even Israeli hawks think Iran is several years from developing nuclear weapons. Why do some Americans choose to think otherwise?


• The Global Sociology Blog reviews Lawrence Wright's Going Clear, a book on Scientology that's an expansion of Wright's earlier article in The New Yorker.


• GNXP's Razib Khan posts some personal research suggesting that speakers of Austro-Asiatic languages in South Asia are historically recent immigrants.


• Norman Geras posts excerpts from a Matthew Parris article in The Times pointing out, contra Argentine claims of British colonialism re: the Falklands, that Argentina's own very white population is a product of its own genocidal state-building imperialism in the 19th century.


• Torontoist's Steve Kupferman notes that Ana Bailão, my city councillor, has pled guilty to charges of drunk driving, paying a thousand dollar fine.


• Inspired by Aaron Swartz, the Volokh Conspiracy's Orin Kerr starts a debate as to what the prosecution should do if a defendant becomes suicidal.


• Window on Eurasia posts an article suggesting that the Circassian diaspora is caught between two very strong globalization currents, one Westernizing them the other Islamizing them.

[LINK] "Prime Minister Mulcair and the Politics of Masculinity"

Facebook's John some time ago linked to this essay by one Stuart Parker analyzing NDP leader Thomas Mulcair. Parker thinks that Mulcair--English by language, but born in Québec--has what it takes to succeed in English Canada substantially because he demonstrates a sort of uninhibited traditional masculinity that plays really well.

English Canada fell in love with Pierre Trudeau in 1968 because he angrily seated himself in the direct line of fire of bottle-throwing separatists, not with calm and decorum but in an obviously enraged response both to the separatist rioters and to the handlers who sought to whisk him off to safety. Trudeau’s healthy libido, ability to shamelessly date (and even marry) mentally unstable women less than half his age, his willingness to order the assault of protesters and roll out tanks in the streets of Montréal and his expressions of contempt, punctuated with the odd obscene gesture endeared him to crucial voting blocs in English Canada.

[. . .]

In English Canada, men’s eligibility to join the elite is conditioned, in large measure, by their capacity to reflect the Victorian ideal of manliness exemplified in Upper Canadian culture. Like Hawaiians, Upper Canadians build their patriarchal culture around understated theatrical demonstrations of restraint, physical, emotional and sexual. Elite English Canadian men are not to shout; they are not to brawl; and, if they must engage in it, they keep their promiscuity invisible. Just ask the mayoral candidate who could have saved us from Rob Ford, Adam Giambrone, felled by what Torontonians called a sex scandal and what Parisians wouldn’t have called anything.

While I would never suggest that restraint and sensitivity have nothing to do with elite masculine status in Québec, I will suggest that they have much less to do with it. To non-elite men and women in English Canada, the relative freedom of powerful Québecois men from these standards is a powerful force, especially for non-elite men descended from Southern European immigrant communities that struggle to identify with the smallness and coldness of Anglo nuclear families and the disturbing bloodlessness of the surrounding culture. For Anglo chickenshits like Harper, aggression is often celebrated but when it is, it is always “serious business,” an exotic phenomenon; it takes a Chretien or Trudeau to indicate a real comfort with it by joking about violence (e.g. “I put pepper on my plate…”).

We remain a culture that is rooted in millennia of patriarchy. And generally, Canadians only hand majority governments to a party when one leader is able to embody the multiple definitions of masculinity that, together, comprise a majority, while the others are not. And, overall, the more bellicose, less restrained kind masculinity we find in French Canadian culture has resonance with more people in more places. It has resonance amongst working class Anglos in industrial towns; it has resonance on reserves; it has resonance in immigrant communities not yet domesticated to the passive-aggressive, restrained masculinity of neo-Victorian elites with its slut-shaming and excessive concern over female modesty. Really, the only place it doesn’t sell especially is Québec, where people are more used to it and, consequently, a good deal more tired.

But to us Anglos, a Trudeau, Chretien or Mulcair is a Tarzanesque figure, a creature from a world of which we know little, who has swung in on a vine to right wrongs and expose the hypocrisy, emptiness and veiled rage of the smug, little chess club patriarchs like Harper who run Anglo society. He can slam his fist on the table and threaten to break Peter van Loan’s nose if he steps an inch closer to Nathan Cullen — you know, that nice, mild-mannered House Leader, half a head taller than Mulcair and nearly a generation his junior.

[LINK] "RIM changes name to BlackBerry as BB10 launches"

I, for one, hope Canada can still have a high-tech future. From the CBC:

esearch In Motion launched two BlackBerry 10 smartphones Wednesday, banking on the hotly anticipated line of devices to save the company.

CEO Thorsten Heins kicked off simultaneous live events in New York, Toronto, London, Paris, Dubai, Johannesburg, Jakarta and Delhi, with the announcement that the company and its ubiquitous product were becoming one and the same — the company has renamed itself BlackBerry.

Heins unveiled a line of new smartphones the company says will help it win back market share in the competitive mobile space.

RIM launched two versions of the phone on Wednesday, the BlackBerry Z10 and Q10. The former is a touchscreen device, the latter has a full Qwerty keyboard.

"We know there are a lot of keyboard lovers out there," Heins said. "We heard you loud and clear."

In Canada, the touchscreen BlackBerry Z10 will be available on Feb. 5. Pricing will vary by carrier partner, but it will retail for around $149.99 on a three-year contract, BlackBerry announced Wednesday.

[. . .]

Canada will be the launch pad for the devices ahead of other markets, including the United States. Other countries have launch dates on Feb. 11. The U.S. launch date for the initial touchscreen version is some time in March, but BlackBerry declined to offer any further details.

[NON BLOG] My new Huawei U6150

As an addendum to my previous post hoping that Blackberry (formerly Research in Motion) can pull out of its ongoing death spiral, I thought--for honesty's sake, you see--I should share the last picture I took with my Huawei U1250.

What is it?



My new Huawei U6150.

Acquired in August 2011, my old phone and my WIND Mobile provider did a good job serving my needs. When it no longer accepted voice calls, staying with my provider was a given. Staying with the Huawei line also made sense, given my generally positive experience of my phone. A QWERTY keyboard sold this model.

One era has ended; a new one has begun.

[PHOTO] On the difficulty of being a photographer, a real photographer

In a post at blogTO, "Toronto photographers you can trust", Victoria Quiroz started an interesting discussion in the comments, one not about the subject of her post but on her assumptions.

Toronto is full of photographers. Those trying to make a living with a DSLR in their hands have only themselves to rely on. This past Saturday I spoke with several Toronto photographers doing exactly that, at the release of the collaborative photo book, Don't Trust Anyone Over 30.

The book features the work of nine photographers, all under 30 years old, from Vancouver, New York and Toronto. Sonia D'Argenzio and Dimitri Karakostas are a Toronto duo that often finds themselves outside of the country, and continent, for their work.

"Toronto is a finicky beast to master, and I'm fine with not mastering it for the time being," said Karakostas. "I like just doing the periodic one-offs like this as opposed to trying to do it frequently."

D'Argenzio told me about the difficulties of being a photographer when anyone and everyone is calling themselves one.

"Everyone's a photographer now," said D'Argenzio. "Everyone has Instagram, everyone has their iPhone, everyone has a Tumblr account and a Flickr account. It's standing out amongst a crowd of millions."

(For the record, I have a Tumblr account and a Flickr account, and take pictures with a smartphone along with a camera.)

Some commenters argue that Quiroz and D'Argenzio are being reductionist, that it takes particular skills to be a real photographer. Others--I'm among them--think that the genre has been demassified by inexpensive and efficient new technologies.

[PHOTO] "The End of an Era: Steve McCurry and the Final Roll of Kodachrome Film"

Someone, someone, linked to this post at Petapixel hosting a National Geographic documentary 23 minutes long. This clip, freely available on YouTubge, followed famed photographer Steve McCurry as he travelled the world--well, New York City and India mainly--taking the best pictures possible with the last roll of Kodachrome film ever manufactured.

Says Petapixel,

The video is much more than just a chronicling of how McCurry spent that last roll of film. As with any great artist, when the NatGeo crew put McCurry on camera he inevitably managed to spout some phenomenal advice. It really makes you appreciate digital (or perhaps miss film) to see McCurry being so careful with his shots, making sure that each one did the Kodachrome roll justice.

In reality, the days already came and went when that roll was shot and developed; the last lab to process Kodachrome stopped at the end of 2010 and you can see the gallery of those final shots on McCurry’s website. But this documentary acts as yet another farewell to a film so loved there are plans for a movie about its demise.