The Antisocial Socialist

"– Your goddamn herringbone tiles in the toilets cost more than half our salaries put together.
— Yes, that's true.
— Aren't you ashamed of that?
— You watch, in fifty years they're going to come here and gape at the herringbone and the copper roofs. We need excess, something to live up to. I fought tooth and nail for that herringbone.
— You fought. You fought. Think about those who built the intake tunnels. Do you know how many of us died in there?
— There was no record kept." — Michael Ondaatje, In the Skin Of a Lion

This one's been on the bucket list since Grade 11 English. It opens to the public once a year, for doors open, and I finally got to see it.

( it's been a hundred years and people gape at the herringbone. )

 I'm really trying not to cry. It seems so strange, crying over a building that I have never even seen in person, but it's something so important and beautiful and irreplaceable and just doesn't seem like something that could just cease to exist.

And it is just one of many important, beautiful, irreplaceable things that has been lost in my lifetime. It seems like a metaphor for how carelessly we walk over the world.

We rolled into Vilnius, Lithuania just before 10 pm last night after a four-hour long bus ride. It was pouring rain, which is typical for here (apparently the weather is awful in one way or another at least 60% of the time), and late, so we grabbed dinner at a vegetarian bar and crashed out at the hotel. Today, it was supposed to pour--our cab driver assured us that this time, the entire city would be flooded--but our luck held and we were able to do a walking tour of the Old Town and the Republic of Užupis.

Vilnius has a messy, dilapidated charm. I think, perhaps, my lack of bonding with Riga was due to the fact that it's kept in such good repair; letting a city crumble a bit is much more aesthetically pleasing. It's slightly less Westernized--people here speak Russian as much as they do English, though mainly Lithuanian--and just, well, weirder.

( photos )

I don't have a ton of spoons left over tonight for a long post, so have some photos around and about Riga.

After the aesthetic exuberance of Odessa, Riga seems much more restrained, even dour. It's impressively old (founded in 1201, and there were settlements well before that) and lovely, but also more orderly, less lively, less organic. And, of course, much more expensive: welcome back to Western Europe.

This said, it's gorgeous and fun. Everyone speaks English here, which is relaxing. I don't mean this in a chauvinist way; mainly that I don't need to bother Anya to translate everything. Actually, where we're staying in the old town, it doesn't seem like anyone other than people working here are from here; it's pretty heavily touristy.

Which also means that it's incredibly easy to find vegan food. Including an entire vegan restaurant. I was like, "GIVE ME ALL THE PROTEIN."

The most important story I learned today was this: There were two powerful guilds in Riga. One was for skilled craftsmen, and admitted every eligible craftsman who applied to join. The other was for merchants, and only admitted Germans. A wealthy merchant from Riga applied to join and was rejected on the basis of his nationality. Accordingly, he built himself a giant fuck-off house across the street from the guild building and put black cats on the roof with their asses facing the building, as if shitting. The guild immediately sued to have the cats removed, but because lawsuits take time, WWI broke out, and no one gave a shit about cats' asses. The cats were mysteriously removed anyway in the 1920s, and replaced just as mysteriously in the 1950s, this time facing towards the guild, as it is now the home of the Riga Philharmonic, and no one has any quarrel with them.



( photodump )

We went to the Odessa Opera House, one of the most famous and beautiful opera houses in the world.

( behold! )

There's so much stupid out there, and it's hard to know when to start when savagely mocking things, even without the US elections stealing a problematic plot point from an episode of Doctor Who. But here are three things that made me roll my eyes so hard that simply a link and a snarky remark on FB was not enough.

1. Facebook, as you probably heard, took down a post from a Norwegian daily featuring the famous photo of Phan Thị Kim Phúc, best known as the "napalm girl," but be a decent person and call her by her name, okay?  Espen Egil Hansen, the editor-in-chief of Aftenposten, retaliated brilliantly, as you can read here, and eventually Facebook did relent. However, their justification—that is is just too much effort to distinguish between one of the most famous photographs of all time depicting a massive political turning point and child pornography—is what's hella stupid.

Fortunately, I don't need to do a takedown of the whole thing, because Dan Hon did it rather beautifully here, and do take some time to read that post, because it's great and includes one of the most awesome trigger warnings I've ever seen on an online article. But the key takeaway is encapsulated quite nicely here:

Facebook - and, more or less, Silicon Valley, in terms of the way that the Valley talks about itself, presents itself and so-on - is built on and prides itself in solving Difficult Problems. At least, they are now. Facebook is a multi-billion dollar public company where *some* things are difficult and worth doing (e.g. Internet access to 1bn people using custom-built drones, but other things are, by implication, *TOO HARD* and don't warrant the effort.

I was going on at great length yesterday to a friend about my hatred of Facebook's sorting algorithm, and how it can cause some friends to disappear and some to become disproportionately prominent, and make you feel as though no one is listening to you and you're shouting into a void when it decides it doesn't like one of your posts. (It's bad enough when it happens on FB; worse when it happens in cases like hiring practices or policing techniques; we are increasingly delegating large parts of our lives to supposedly objective technology that's created by subjective, and generally speaking, racist, humans.) LJ solved this particular problem in a very simple way, by showing you every post by every friend in the order that they posted it, without continuous scrolling. Now, obviously, this doesn't fit with FB's business model at all, or the way that most people use it, but it does show that the problem can be solved.

Historically, we have not asked big monstrous corporations to solve all of the world's problems, but Silicon Valley seems determined to solve all the world's problems, or at least "disrupt" and create problems where there weren't any problems before. And we seem willing to surrender the questions of what problems exist, and which are worth solving, to them, which is why the US seems to have delegated creating its educational policy to Bill Gates, of all people. Which brings me to a tangential point raised by someone in the BoingBoing forums: At what point do we make a distinction between the traditional definition of free speech being freedom from government repression, and start being honest about the control over the discourse that corporations get. At what point is Facebook equivalent to or more powerful than a state actor? I think we're there; Facebook is the primary news source for a huge chunk of the population, and at some point we need to force it to act responsibly or force it to abdicate this role.

Anyway, fucking stupid. Hire some humans who can distinguish between a black-and-white news photo of a naked child on fire and actual porn, and pay them a living wage.

2. SPEAKING OF A LIVING WAGE...Okay, I've mocked this to shit already today but I'm not done mocking, no I am not.  Via Everyday Feminism, currently vying with Upworthy for the Worst Place On the Internet: 20 Ways to Help Your Employees Struggling with Food Insecurity and Hunger.

Now, for a site that claims to be all about accessibility, EF is slightly less accessible than, say, Alex Jones after 72 hours of substituting Red Bull, vodka, and crystal meth cocktails for sleep, which is to say it's one of the worst-written sites I've ever seen. I'm guessing they don't have paid editors. Every article is skimmable at best, and tends to amount to: "Be gentle, check your privilege, and don't forget to self-care with your yogurt." But this is possibly the worst article of every bad article I've ever read there, because not one of these 20 ways is "pay your employees a living wage."

Because, sorry. A minimum wage is supposed to be a living wage, and if your employees are on food stamps, you are not paying them enough. If you "can't afford" to pay them enough, as EF suggested in their equally ludicrous rebuttal to the criticism this article garnered, you are a shitty businessperson and deserve to go bankrupt. And if you have the time and money to learn about your employee's food sensitivities—again, you are not paying them enough, and hardworking taxpayers should not be expected to subsidize your lack of business acumen.

Should you be in the odd position where you cannot control how much you pay your employees (let's say you're the just-above-minimum-wage manager of a McDonald's, though if you were, I'm not sure why food sensitivities would be an issue), plenty of helpful friendly unions would be happy to come and visit your employees and assist them in organizing to get their wages raised.

Also, they include the worst suggestion of all time, which is to load up on meat-lovers pizza. Please do not do this, whether your workers are starving or not. In 100% of catered work events I have attended, the "meat-lovers" go right for the paltry vegetarian options and eat it all up before the vegetarians can get to it.

3. Finally, let's talk about architecture. Check out York U's new building! Now, York U is already the repository for a collection of the worst architectural trends in the last half-century (as is Toronto in general; we spawned Frank Gehry, after all) but this one is just too hilarious to be believed. It's like the Edgy White Liberal of buildings. You can practically see the #hashtags in #every #sentence in that #puffpiece.

Guess what, starchitects. People figured out hundreds of years ago how to make buildings work, and you can't improve on it all that much. Human beings like to feel relatively contained, and more importantly, like their ambient noise to be contained, particularly in places where they're supposed to work or study. That's why universities have quaint, outmoded features like "classrooms" and "lecture halls." Ever tried to work in an open concept office? It's distracting as anything. I'm all for less productivity—productivity is one of the Great Lies of late-stage capitalism—but I would rather be unproductive on my own terms. And common areas for meeting with students? When students want to meet with me outside of class time, it's quite often to tell me that they're struggling with family or workload or mental health issues, so why not just shout that all over the #learningspaces where the whole #engineering program can hear it?

Plus, like every building erected in the last 20 years, it looks like the architect gave up, crumpled the blueprints, and submitted the balled-up paper as the actual design.

Kill it with fucking fire.

Pop quiz: What's worse than letting starchitect wanker Frank Gehry crumple up a bunch of paper, 3D-render it, and plunk it in the middle of Toronto like so:



Letting him do so in the middle of a reasonably nice area of the city, in the process demolishing the quite lovely and human-scale Princess of Wales Theatre in order to shit out his architectural abortions.

Gehry apparently intends to TP several city blocks in the heart of the entertainment district. As you might know, I have a special hate-on for Gehry because he doesn't like wheelchair ramps. He represents the worst trends in contemporary architecture: utter contempt for usability and accessibility, aesthetic hideousness in the service of appearing avant-garde, and a complete disregard for the particular context of city spaces.

My first reaction was to projectile vomit. My second was to make sure that James Howard Kunstler knew about it ASAP. He is probably sick of people from Toronto writing him to tell him about our city's perverted love affair with monuments to poor taste and unsustainability by now. But really, is there any other city besides Dubai so slavishly devoted to uglifying itself?

Oh, and screw David Mirvish, too. He's apparently determined to fuck up his father's legacy as thoroughly as possible.

ETA: And Kunstler e-mailed me back, ZOMG! /fangirls

MY GOD YOU GUYS I AM SO TIRED. Totally worth it. But I feel like I'm going to sleep for a year and do nothing but watch TV and read cheesy fantasy novels for a bit.

Today's panels:

The Circuits of Labour and Capital. Translation: Migrant labour, and I chose this one both out of interest and because I knew three out of the five people involved. Alas, two didn't show (including the one who's in 2 Revolución). The other two were really good, though.

Marxist Aesthetics and Utopia. This was the perfect note to end on. Relevant to my interests in a big way, and we got into a debate about Tatlin's Monument to the Third International that ended up going way overtime and summarizing many of the themes in the conference as a whole. I Googled the presenter, Travis English, and I think he might also be the guy who does all of those cool minimalism posters that you see all over the intertubes. Not sure. Anyway, the discussion induced pangs in me because when I was thinking about grad school, I was thinking about working on Russian Constructivism stuff, which is at the intersection of art, design, and radical politics. Also, I love Monument to the Third International. It's brilliant on every level, encompassing both the power of the theory of dialectical materialism and the fragility of the revolutionary moment. And as someone pointed out in the discussion, as much as it was a failure in the sense that it was never built, given the history of the Russian revolution, it might have been more of a failure if it had been built. As an ethereal work that exists in the imagination instead of in reality, it's a more powerful symbol of revolutionary potential than if it existed as an actual physical object.


I shouldn't be so surprised to find out that people have Photoshopped the hell out of what it would have looked like if built.

SPEAKING OF SCULPTURE! Bad sculpture, this time. I failed utterly for the third day in a row to capture the glory that is the dick sculptures. However, I realized I could just Google it, and so here they are:


Fontana d'Italia by Enzo Cucchi.

Notice that the water is jetting out in the photo. In reality, it drizzles down the shaft and looks more like this. Ah, York. How much I do not miss you at all.

Anyway, all in all the conference was even better than my already inflated expectations, and I'm so glad I went. I think this is the longest I've been consistently in a good mood since Maggie's diagnosis.

It seems that my little rant about the accessibility fail at the AGO has garnered some attention. It was apparently discussed at a conference (that I'd heard about through other means, and wanted to attend because it looked amazing) and then mentioned in the Ottawa Citizen!

"I'm so thankful that they put that out into the world, and that they put it in writing," said Syrus Marcus Ware, the program co-ordinator for youth at AGO.

She [sic] said the gallery has gone through a massive re-thinking of its existence, beginning as the new design was being planned, and has poured its efforts into trying to serve a wider population. This includes free nights for people who can't afford to pay admission, and better access for disabled visitors.

But she [sic] said there are always staff who feel defensive and resist change. The outside criticism, she [sic] said, "gave us a great push."

You guys. You guys. They are actually doing something about this, maybe. Words effecting concrete change that makes people's lives better and such.

Thanks a million to writer_grrrrl for passing said post around to the right people and for sending me the article.

EDIT: It is a lot dismaying to have learned that the article on accessibility!fail committed gender!fail. We have such a long way to go.

Hey troubleinchina, I'm stealing your tag.

I finally got around to visiting the redesigned Art Gallery of Ontario this afternoon. I went for the Surreal Things show, and the less-publicized Dada and Remix shows, but the art didn't leave much of an impression on me. The architecture, however, is deserving of some analysis.

Entering the building, I was struck immediately by two things. The first was the light-coloured wood and soaring ceilings, reminiscent of the recently built Four Seasons Centre. The second was that the twisting narrow ramp that leads to the ticket booth has enough room for either a wheelchair to go up or a stroller to go down, but not enough room for two-way wheeled traffic. Accordingly, halfway up the ramp, we had to reverse my step-father's wheelchair out in order to allow a man pushing a stroller to leave.

From the main hall leading into the museum, there's a large open court featuring a sculpture and a video installation. A ramp leads down into the court. If you are an able-bodied person, you can continue on through the court through the rest of the gallery. If, however, you use a wheelchair or you are pushing a stroller, you find yourself confused and disoriented, trying to figure out where the other ramp is. As it turns out, you have to head back out the same way you came, and then follow a narrow, counter-intuitive corridor to the exhibit halls.

At this point, we asked one of the museum guides if there was an easier way to get to the exhibits we wanted to see. (The visitor map provided was of little use; it showed things that looked like ramps but were actually stairways, with no indication of which routes were accessible and which were not.) She explained that Gehry's design was intended to encourage the museum-goer to explore the existing galleries (though one could circumvent more galleries by using the stairs), and that the re-design had taken out most of the ramps. "Frank hates ramps," she explained. She was sympathetic; it was clear that she had heard this question before, and she encouraged us to write letters and provide feedback via the website.

The architecture is strikingly sculptural: winding staircases lead up through airy spaces. But the building is primarily a self-contained sculpture rather than a functional space where the public can view art. I watched as an older woman struggled to make it up the stairs—they are tall, narrow, and lack resting spaces. But the space is even more overwhelming and difficult to navigate if you can't climb the stairs at all—you are instead forced into indirect routes that lack signage, occasionally having to cross most of the building in order to find an elevator.

Both signage and staffing are minimal—using the routes available to able-bodied people, a very alert individual can find his or her way. I found myself flagging down the guides far more than I was used to (and far more often than I have done in any other museums, including museums in countries where I didn't speak the language) in order to find routes that avoided stairs. The signage does include some Braille, which is fortunate because the lighting is so low in places that even a sighted person might be tempted to use it.

The washrooms, while they have a handicapped symbol on them, are just as malevolent as the rest of the building. The doors don't have a wide enough swing to allow a wheelchair easy access—it requires two extra people (besides the person using the wheelchair) to get the door open, keep it open, and navigate the person inside. There are things that look like automatic doors, but half the buttons to open them are broken.

The gift store is a particularly interesting case. It has two levels, two staircases, and no ramps. A person using a wheelchair can access both floors of the shop, but in order to get from one to another, he or she would have to exit the shop, find a ramp, and enter through another floor. Apparently, the AGO plans to have only able-bodied people work in the gift store.

The AGO is a public institution; its promotional material promises a welcoming space, a personalized experience, an innovative environment, and "programming and services that reflect the diversity of our audience." The architecture of the building, however, creates something different—while some people are free to experience the space in a variety of ways, a large part of the museum-going public—families with young children, elderly people, people with disabilities, and family and friends of the aforementioned visitors—do not have the same level of choices. Anyone who uses a mobility aid will have a vastly different experience of the museum than someone who does not.

The result is a building that serves the architect's personal aesthetic, but not the audience's needs. It may technically comply with Ontario building and human rights codes, but in practice, it is alienating space that creates a two-tiered experience, dividing its audience into people who are worthy of culture and people who are not. For a new building, and especially in light of the structure it replaced, this is unforgivable.