[PHOTO] Selected images from Welcome to Colville, Art Gallery of Ontario

The Art Gallery of Ontario's Welcome to Colville exhibition was superb.

Colville's iconic "To Prince Edward Island" was the first painting visible to the entering visitor.



"Elm Tree at Horton Landing" served as the cover image of an Alice Munro short story collection.



There was plenty of video of Colville himself, being interviewed on any number of subjects. Here, he was talking about his connection to the Maritimes.



1964's "Church and Horse" was well-documented, from sketch to final project. I did not know that the horse was inspired by John F. Kennedy's Black Jack.







Animals--especially wise animals like crows--featured heavily in Colville's work. (His belief that animals possessed an innocence that human beings lacked may have been partly inspired by his experience in the Second World War, especially at Dachau.)





The theme of the deportation of the Acadians underlies "French Cross."



Colville's noir tendencies took form in, among others, "Pacific" and the later "Woman with Revolver."





The exhibition covered every stage of Colville's life as an artist, from his early work as a student artist to the end of his long relationship with his wife and occasional model, Rhoda Wright.





It was superb.

[BLOG] Some Monday links

• blogTO shares pictures of the stark modernism intended for Toronto's subway stations.


• The Broadside Blog's Caitlin Kelly notes problems with the American mass media's coverage of inequality.


• Centauri Dreams shares Andrew Lepage's essay on how, judging by radius and theoretical models, many of the supposedly Earth-like planets discovered are likely much more massive.


• Cody Delistraty links to his essay at The Atlantic talking about why people tell stories.


• The Dragon's Gaze links to a paper examining nearby red dwarf/brown dwarf binary WISE J072003.20-084651.2.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that Scottish separatism is still going strong.


• A Fistful of Euros' Edward Hugh notes the steady deterioration of the Japanese economy.


• Joe. My. God. notes that Apple is worth more than the entire Russian stock market.


• Language Hat examines the etymology of "fair dinkum".


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes the terrible Japanese treatment, in history and in life, of comfort women.


• Marginal Revolution notes the sustained territorial expansion of Russia.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer argues that Iraqi Kurdistan is likely to declare independence quite soon.


• The Russian Demographics Blog shares a table showing population growth in select major world countries since 1820.


• Spacing Toronto makes the case for humanizing the Toronto skyline by giving its towers nicknames.


• Towleroad notes that Nicolas Sarkozy would like to repeal France's same-sex marriage law, and looks at gay American director Lee Daniels.


• Window on Eurasia looks at Russia's fragile system of government, considers the fall of the Berlin Wall from a Russian perspective as a new partition of Europe, looks at reaction to a call to shift Ukrainian to a Latin alphabet, suggests Russian subsidies to Belarus may soon come to an end, and looks at radicalism among Tajik labour migrants in Russia.


• Yorkshire Ranter Alex Harrowell disbelieves rumours of an alleged Labour revolt.

[URBAN NOTE] "Kurdish bookshop turns page on dark past"

Al Jazeera's Samantha North contributed an interesting article about a Kurdish-language bookstore in Istanbul, Medya Kitabevi, its owner, and their survival of decades of political controversy.

In a narrow, haphazard alley beside Istanbul's busy Istiklal Avenue, hidden behind stalls of fake designer handbags and tourist junk, sits an unassuming little bookshop. Only a few titles are displayed in the window, and the shop's enigmatic name, Medya Kitabevi (Media Bookshop) does not give much away.

Inside, the place is buzzing, shelves piled high with colourful books. Customers flit in and out, stopping to exchange friendly words with the silver-haired shopkeeper, who sits at a book-cluttered desk at the back, talking on his vintage telephone.

These days, business is going well. Owner Selahattin Bulut has sold books for the last 18 years and made Medya Kitabevi - which specialises in a wide spectrum of Kurdish literature - famous among academic and media circles. But once upon a time, being caught here could have meant going to prison. Turkey has for decades been embroiled in conflict with Kurds seeking an independent state, and after Turkey's third military coup in 1980, the state began cracking down on "subversive" political organisations, imprisoning hundreds of thousands of people, including many Kurds.

[. . .]

Bulut's story began in the southeastern city of Diyarbakir, during this dark period of modern Turkish history. In 1981, Bulut, a Kurd, was locked away in the notorious Diyarbakir Prison, accused of carrying out operations for the separatist group KUK (Kurdish National Liberators). Conditions in the prison were so barbaric that some claim it encouraged the formation of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK).

Bulut says he endured immense suffering until his release in 1989, although he declines to go into detail. After being released from prison, he decided to help support his fellow Kurds in his own way: promoting Kurdish identity through the written word.

[URBAN NOTE] "The first (almost) Canadian President"

Late last month, Spacing Toronto's Adam Bunch wrote a nice biography of John Rolph, an aspiring radical politician in pre-1837 Upper Canada who for a time looked like he might become the leader of a Canadian republic. (This failed, needless to say.)

There’s a small town on the very western edge of England, not far from the River Severn, which marks the border with Wales. It’s called Thornbury. It’s a lovely place; the High Street is lined with flowers, filled with shoppers, and draped in bunting and flags. There’s a lot of history, too. Thornbury is where they found one of the biggest hoards of Roman coins ever discovered in Britain. There’s a church from the 1100s. And right next door to that is the 500 year-old Thornbury Castle, where King Henry VIII once stayed with Anne Boleyn after beheading the original owner for treason.

But Thornbury also has a connection to the history of Toronto. It’s the town where John Rolph was born. And for a few brief days during the winter of 1837, it looked like John Rolph might end up being the very first Canadian President.

The Rolphs were one of the most important families in Thornbury — a line of lawyers and doctors and landlords who owned a bunch of the buildings in town. John Rolph was the son of a surgeon; he was christened in that ancient church and grew up in the late 1700s with 17 brothers and sisters. In the early 1800s, his family moved to Canada. And as soon as he was done school, the young Rolph joined them. Eventually, he’d follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather, becoming one of the most respected doctors and lawyers in Upper Canada. He even co-founded our very first medical school.

But it’s his politics we remember him for. By the time he was in his early 30s, Rolph was one of the leading Reformers in the province. He fought in favour of democratic reform, equal rights for American-born citizens and the separation of church and state.

It was a bitter fight. These were the days when the Lieutenant Governor could pretty much ignore the elected assembly whenever he wanted. He was backed by the most powerful people in Upper Canada: the Tories of the Family Compact, who loved Britain, hated democracy, and could usually count on the Governors to give them what they wanted. People who spoke out in favour of reform tended to get arrested, exiled, or attacked by angry Tory mobs.

[LINK] "Argentina’s Feeder System Drains Talent From Nation’s Top Division"

The New York Times' Jonathan Gilbert wrote an interesting article describing how institutional problems with Argentine soccer have driven a diaspora of Argentine players worldwide.

[Eduardo Sacheri, 46, a prominent author of soccer fiction and an Independiente fan] pines for the era when a player like midfielder Ricardo Bochini could play his entire career at Independiente, which he led to a host of domestic and regional titles in the 1970s and 1980s. When Argentina won the World Cup at home in 1978, only one of the players on its roster plied his trade outside the country. When it added a second crown in 1986, in Mexico, more than half the team — including Bochini — still played domestically, though by then stars like Osvaldo Ardiles and Diego Maradona had begun to open the path to Europe ever wider.

The trickle soon became a flood. A surge in television revenue gave European clubs millions to spend on scouting networks and player acquisitions, and the proliferation of agents eager to facilitate deals only fed the market.

By last summer, when Argentina reached the World Cup final in Brazil, its roster included only three domestically based players. Two had spent most of their careers in Europe before returning home.

Now, European clubs scour the Primera División for talent. One representative of a Russian agency called Argentine players the “raw material” of world soccer. “That’s why we have to be here,” she said, adding that European teams are often viewed as finishing schools.

[LINK] "Has Aspen Become Too Popular for Its Own Good?"

Bloomberg's Stephen Orr writes about the ways in which the mass popularity of Colorado mountain resort town Aspen has undermined many of the very qualities which made it popular in the first place. Count me as unsurprised: mass tourism inevitably undermines remote areas' remoteness.

"What do you think of the place?” I asked the woman sitting next to me on the grandly modern outdoor staircase of the Aspen Art Museum on its opening day. I had noticed her, a stranger in a crowd of strangers, because of her quintessentially local look: an outdoorsy beauty with a clear, tan complexion, tousled sun-bleached hair, and a sensible if expensive layered outfit, one that would allow her to hike up nearby Ajax Mountain at a moment’s notice. “I love it,” she said as we listened to the angular melody of a dissonant musical performance in the foyer of the museum. “I tried to get some of my friends to come with me, but none of them would because of all the controversy—Aspen people hate new.”

They certainly appear to. In my ten years of visiting the town, I’ve often heard people grumble about the rapid pace of change in Aspen and the surrounding Roaring Fork Valley. They complain about the tide of new money that each year flows further and further downriver to towns like Basalt, Carbondale, El Jebel, and Glenwood Springs; the increasingly clogged traffic on Highway 82 (the only major road that connects the various valley communities); the swarms of private jets at the airport; the ever-climbing housing prices. Aspen, like other centers of wealth and power (the Hamptons, Napa Valley, Nantucket), fiercely resists development and does its best to stay small and quaint. Yet modern Aspen is a fairly recent invention and has always prided itself on being forward-looking.

To find the origins of the place Aspen is today, you need to go back only to the middle of the last century, when the once-tiny town of about 700 people began its greatest transformation. In the following decades, more and more people discovered this rarefied Shangri-la: The intellectuals arrived in the 1950s, the countercultural hippies in the 1960s, the ski bums in the 1970s, the celebrities in the 1980s, and the super-rich in the 1990s. Together they combined to create a sui generis culture, one defined as much by its growing wealth as by its improbability. But now, the appearance of this major new museum right in the middle of downtown is provoking a sort of identity crisis in the valley: Will Aspen’s very specialness also be its undoing?

Just 20 miles west of the Continental Divide and surrounded by high peaks on every side, Aspen’s dramatic landscape, deep winter snowfall, and isolation create one of those pockets that guidebooks grandly refer to as an “enclave.” But the settlement that first emerged in the 1880s as a silver ore boomtown was, by the 1940s when Chicago industrialists Walter and Elizabeth Paepcke first visited it, almost a ghost town. The German-American couple selected it as the setting for their Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival, in 1949, a celebration of the humanist poet that was meant to rehabilitate Germany’s reputation in the United States after World War II. The three-week event featured an impressive lineup of intellectuals, among them Albert Schweitzer, Thornton Wilder, Stephen Spender, and Arthur Rubinstein. Concerts and lectures were held in a tented amphitheater designed by Eero Saarinen. Bauhaus artist/designer Herbert Bayer created an accompanying campus of 98 hotel rooms (now called the Aspen Meadows Resort) with modernist sculptures and early examples of sculptural earthworks. Those first seminars developed over the years into the influential Aspen Institute and the Aspen Music Festival and School and established the town as a high-culture retreat.

[LINK] "Alone and Confused, Philae Breaks our Hearts"

Universe Today's Morgan Rehnberg describes how the adroit use of social networking platforms by the ESA for Rosetta and Philae helped create a strong human connection with the probe. This may, as he concludes, indicate that people are interested in space exploration after all.

I was thirteen years old when Columbia disintegrated. Space exploration was not even a particular interest of mine at the time, but I remember exactly where I was when the news came. My dad and I were sitting in the living room of my childhood home, listening to NPR. I don’t really recall how I felt when they broke into our program with the news, but I remember well the two emotions that seemed to permeate the coverage that soon become constant: confusion and sadness. As I watched the almost surreal saga of ESA’s Philae this week, I found my mind wandering back to that day eleven years ago. That confusion rang out was hardly surprising; after all, things weren’t going right and we didn’t know why. But it was the sadness, I think, that drew my mind into the past. Many of the countless people watching Philae’s distress unfold before us weren’t merely disappointed that a decades-in-the-making experiment wasn’t going as planned. The word heartbroken kept springing to mind.

Let me be unequivocal: the loss of a machine, no matter how valuable or beloved, pales in comparison to the forfeit of human life. The astronauts lost on Columbia, like those snatched from us before and since, left behind families, friends, and a grateful world. But, why, then, did it seem to feel so similar to so many people?

[. . .]

The questions in my mind are numerous. What’s the cause of this inequity? Why do we seem to latch onto certain spacecraft and blithely ignore others? What is it that makes us become emotionally attached to machines in the first place?

In part, I think, our attachment comes from the unprecedented view offered to us by social media. In 1990, an event not so dissimilar from this one beset NASA’s Galileo spacecraft. Flying by the Earth on its way to Jupiter, Galileo had just attempted to unfurl its main antenna, a maneuver critical to the mission’s success. In mission control, they received the bad news: the antenna was stuck. But, the world did not break down in despair. In the days to come, stories would appear in newspapers and on the nightly news, but a world where even email was in its infancy lacked a means for the average citizen to follow along with every detail.

Nineteen years later, this would not be the case. As soon as it became clear to those in ESA headquarters that something had gone very wrong during Philae’s descent, we all knew. And, as data began to trickle in about one bounce off the surface and then another, we all cringed. When the last power drained from the lander’s batteries, we followed along, one volt after another. Philae may have been the pride of the ESA scientists and engineers who designed it, but it felt like it was ours.

[NEWS] Some Monday links

• io9 describes the survival of Italian futurist architecture in Asmara, capital of the former Italian colony of Eritrea, and notes how The Hot Zone created unhelpful myths about Ebola.


• Al Jazeera notes complex problems surrounding Korean unification, notes the apparent normalization of Qatar's relationship with its Arab neighbours, looks at the plight of Syrian students trapped in Lebanon, and notes the hostility of many in upstate New York to fracking and underground gas storage.


• Bloomberg notes Russian criticism of Ukraine for cutting its financial links with its separatist eastern regions, notes the election of ethnic German Klaus Johannis to the Romanian presidency, notes issues of ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel with mandatory military service, and notes a Swiss ballot to limit immigration driven by a desire to control urban sprawl.


• CBC looks at the very unsettled mental state of Luka Magnotta at the time of his murder of Chinese student Jun Lin, notes how the hermit thrush makes use of musical structures known to humans to make its songs, and argues a recent Ontario court ruling granting First Nations parents the right to exempt their children from proper medical treatment does not serve them well.


• MacLean's notes the complexity of historical memories surrounding war, and argues that Toronto-style political divides might become quite common across Canada.


• The National Post's Matt Gurney argues people should feel compassion for Franck Gervais, a man who pretended to be a Canadian soldier on television.


• Open Democracy notes Spain's desperation faced with growing Catalonian separatism, looks at growing support for various regional separatisms across Europe, and suggests that British opposition to the European Union is nonsensical since the country already has the powers it might want, by and large.


• Universe Today notes concerns over the European Space Agency's readiness to share data, or not, from its various probes, and argues that dark matter is much clumpier than ever thought.

[BRIEF NOTE] On the effectiveness of PReP in preventing HIV infection

I first heard of pre-exposure prophylaxis drug treatments for HIV in December of 2005, when I came across a widely-syndicated article talking about the off-label use of tenofovir by sexually active gay men to ward off infection.

"Taking a T." That's what HIV-negative gay men call the growing practice of downing the AIDS drug tenofovir and, with fingers crossed, hoping it protects them from the virus during unprotected sex.

It's being sold in packets along with Viagra and Ecstasy in gay dance clubs -- and even prescribed by physicians, say doctors and AIDS prevention experts. The trend has alarmed public health officials. There is no proof that tenofovir protects against HIV transmission, they say. People who practice unsafe sex while taking the drug could still become infected or suffer side effects from it.

Recreational use of AIDS drugs also might increase overall resistance to the medications, HIV experts say. "This is a very worrisome development," said Dr. David Hardy, an HIV doctor at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He said the drug could lead to an even further erosion of condom use, which studies show has been falling among high-risk populations.

A survey released in July by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, conducted at gay pride events in four cities, found that 7% of uninfected men had taken an AIDS medication before engaging in risky behavior and that about a fifth had heard of someone who had.

[. . .]

"If we find out this works, even in some people, we would never recommend people stop using condoms or reduce their number of sexual partners," said Jeff Klausner, STD prevention director for the San Francisco Department of Public Health. Nonetheless, there is some research that suggests taking the drug prophylactically can reduce the risk of transmission. Based on promising earlier research, the CDC is funding two clinical trials, begun last year in Atlanta and San Francisco, on whether tenofovir, a staple of the current HIV drug regimen, may act as a shield to infection -- much like how a birth control pill can help prevent pregnancy. Each trial is giving 200 high-risk men a daily dose of tenofovir and monitoring them for two years.

The idea struck me, and my commenters, as somewhat ludicrous. Why abandon condoms--a technology that has been proven to be very effective in preventing HIV infection--in favour of a drug that might inhibit HIV infection? (That the article described how some gay users combined their tenofovir usage with ecstasy and other party drugs didn't make the idea sound much brighter.)

Even so, from these apparently unpromising beginnings tenofovir has lived up to its promise. When combined with emtricitabine as Truvada, the result is a drug that when taken consistently, does a superb job of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV between couples, whether same-sex or opposite sex. Pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV works. Combined with treatments for HIV that reduce viral load to undetectable levels and prevent further transmission of the virus, it's starting to look very much as if the HIV pandemic among gay/bisexual men is eminently controllable through drugs. As Josh Barro notes in The New York Times, only a few groups like the AIDS Health Foundation of Los Angeles criticize PReP, arguing that it might lead people to abandon condom usage altogether and paradoxically worsen affairs.

A.H.F. warns against widespread PrEP use on two grounds: In clinical trials, many subjects did not take Truvada nearly as often as prescribed, leaving themselves vulnerable to infection; and even though C.D.C. guidelines call for PrEP patients to use condoms, widespread reliance on the drug could discourage condom use, leading to an increase in H.I.V. and other sexually transmitted infections. In the ads running this week, the foundation warns that “the C.D.C.'s ill-advised strategy of mass treatment with Truvada poses a significant risk to the condom culture, which while it has eroded, has still prevailed among gay men for three decades.”

These sorts of concerns are frequently voiced by prominent gay men; last week, the actor Zachary Quinto wrote for The Huffington Post that he has “heard too many stories of young people taking PrEP as an insurance policy against their tendency toward unprotected non-monogamous sex.” But the consensus among public health experts is the opposite: PrEP’s effectiveness in preventing transmission outweighs the risk that people won’t take their pills, or will stop using condoms.

“I find the adherence is much better in real life, especially for PrEP, than in studies,” said Dr. Ray Martins, the medical director at the Whitman-Walker clinic in Washington, D.C., where approximately 170 patients are on PrEP. He said no PrEP patients at Whitman-Walker had contracted H.I.V. since the clinic started prescribing it two years ago. The iPrEx study, which led to PrEP’s approval by the F.D.A. in 2012, was a global one, and adherence was much higher in the United States than overall, especially in San Francisco, where 90 percent of tests of participants’ blood found detectable levels of Truvada eight weeks after it was prescribed.

As for driving people away from condoms, the iPrEx researchers have found that giving people Truvada has not led to riskier behaviors. That’s surprising, but it’s explained in part by the fact that baseline condom use among gay men is already often poor, PrEP or no PrEP.

Evan J. Peterson's essay in The Stranger, "The Case for PrEP, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love HIV-Positive Guys", draws from his personal experience and that of his peers to suggest that PReP simply provides extra safety. I could get behind that.

The only problem? Cost. Here in Canada, Québec is the only province to have PReP guidelines for Truvada; Québec also has a drug plan that soaks up most of the enormous costs associated with the PReP regimen. I do not have a thousand or so extra dollars a month here in Ontario to pay for this prescription myself, and I suspect that most other Ontarians would be in something like my current position. Until something happens--the cost comes down, perhaps, or some sort of government drug plan gets introduced--Truvada for PReP will be something I just won't be able to access.

I could, if I wanted, imagine a grim sort of scenario where the sexual marketplace shifted in uncomfortable directions as condom usage dropped in response to PReP while PReP itself remained inaccessible to many or most people involved. I'd prefer not to imagine this: I'd like to think modern medicine can save us all, properly incentivized. I suppose we'll have to wait and see what happens next.

(UPDATE at 11:13 PM: Crossposted to Medium. Let's see how this work.)

[LINK] "The Best Time to Take the Measure of a New Technology"

The Frailest Thing's Michael Sacasas had a nice brief post drawing from a book that the author found by chance in a local used book store, Electric Language: A Philosophical Study of Word Processing by one Michael Heim.

Heim’s book is a remarkably rich meditation on the meaning of word processing, something we now take for granted and do not think about at all. Heim wrote his book in 1987. The article in which he first explored the topic appeared in 1984. In other words, Heim was contemplating word processing while the practice was still relatively new. Heim imagines that some might object that it was still too early to take the measure of word processing. Heim’s rejoinder is worth quoting at length:

“Yet it is precisely this point in time that causes us to become philosophical. For it is at the moment of such transitions that the past becomes clear as a past, as obsolescent, and the future becomes clear as destiny, a challenge of the unknown. A philosophical study of digital writing made five or ten years from now would be better than one written now in the sense of being more comprehensive, more fully certain in its grasp of the new writing. At the same time, however, the felt contrast with the older writing technology would have become faded by the gradually increasing distance from typewritten and mechanical writing. Like our involvement with the automobile, that with processing texts will grow in transparency–until it becomes a condition of our daily life, taken for granted.

But what is granted to us in each epoch was at one time a beginning, a start, a change that was startling. Though the conditions of daily living do become transparent, they still draw upon our energies and upon the time of our lives; they soon become necessary conditions and come to structure our lives. It is incumbent on us then to grow philosophical while we can still be startled, for philosophy, if Aristotle can be trusted, begins in wonder, and, as Heraclitus suggests, ‘One should not act or speak as if asleep.’”

It is when a technology is not yet taken for granted that it is available to thought. It is only when a living memory of the “felt contrast” remains that the significance of the new technology is truly evident. Counterintuitive conclusions, perhaps, but I think he’s right. There’s a way of understanding a new technology that is available only to those who live through its appearance and adoption, and who know, first hand, what it displaced.