Saturday, in catches and glimpses, unordered: learning by doing • designing by making • art as its own language •  art as its own, different way of interpreting the world • or each artform as a unique way of interpreting the world • Nancy Adler: strategic planning by design, rather than by analysis • or designing an option worth choosing, not choosing an option • or focusing on a positive vision, rather than a negative criticism • Tim McDonald: the difference between making buildings, and making buildings on paper • weight, balance and tension • don’t try to design an experience; art is not a meatgrinder to push people through • but also “I don’t design buildings, I design communities” • Marx and Hayek: emergent and planned, top-down and bottom-up, edge versus centre • drawing as a conversation with what comes to the surface • thinking with your hands • Richard Serra as an artist of weight • “have you ever seen a Rothko?” • depiction versus representation • Paul Klee ~ do not paint the thing, but what brought it into being • Phil Ochs: “Ah but in such an ugly time the true protest is beauty.” • art as a tool • the need for beauty in the mess of today’s world • cactus music • the sun and planets • and the music of the spheres • 250 cardboard boxes • abecedarians • clowning works by going to the essence; that is why it works without words • thinking so essentially all the time would be exhausting • the birth of the modern public • problem solving through dance • art as a tool • found phrases and found sounds • the gap between sound and music • “do you smell me?” • “thank you for sharing your privilege” • music and brain science • “I wish I could be friends with all of these people” • dancing around a conflict point • stone and water • circle, full circle • creation as an act of humility • How Should a Person Be and the value of recognizing ugliness • “really quite accomplished pieces” • eight dimensions of the actor’s work • having the patience and humility to let the ideas come to you • thinking with and without concepts • the role of language in thought • writing, dead and alive • you can just tell when writing is a lie • teaching writing by revealing lies • breaking social codes as the core of humour • and timing, always timing • music as a material, spatial medium • the role of collaboration in artistic discovery • letting what it will be unfold • the need for new ways of understanding the world • the hegemony of the word and the hegemony of the image • how collaboration changes art • the centrality of making art, not just experiencing • Mark Antaki: “Art thinks somatically, bodily.” • The Tempest • playing with the idea of performance and performativity by switching the actor half-way through the scene • the depth of the text • frenetic, but only when she is thinking with words • Karl Polanyi • Quebec Solidaire • day camp for art nerds • finding the wallness of the wall • architecture as a dynamic medium • and musical • Adorno v Heidegger • radical politics, in theory and practice • global leadership, “as if that were a thing” • language, art and dream as  forms of thought • the combined and inseparable presence of two actors in one character • as I wrote, the poem revealed quite deep, intimate memories • Pop-pop • men who want to harness energy, which is to say, us • down here with the dancers • poetry, which wants to hitch a ride on the freight that words already carry • drawing without looking at the object • drawing without looking away from the object • disability studies, forcing us to re-examine our assumptions about ugliness • social structures and the structures of thought • the mess we are in • and who is “us”? • teaching an art form in three hours • progress, balance and beauty as regulatory ideals • capitalism and its agendas • what we need more of and what we need less of • the need to look at the world differently • “and of course, repetition” • the impact of framing on the experience of the audience • the impact of framing on the experience of the participants • “we have raised a lot of questions, but not found a lot of answers” • fresh-ground jasmine • spandrels • collaboration and meta-collaboration • picturing and planning versus making and finding • small failures and experimentation • capturing light, literally and metaphorically • don’t work towards an imagined user experience • let me paint you a picture • the productive possibilities of artistic thinking • artistic thinking as counter-narrative to economic rationalism • revealed rather than curated experience

Addenda: how could you teach an amateur as much about law in three hours as the facilitators did about art, given that they had to curate collaborative art-pieces to be completed for presentation once the time was up?

A friend asked me what I have to say about the results of the ‘historic’ Quebec election. It seems that the French press have slightly misread the tea-leaves on this one if those relying on such coverage see the victory as having some meaningful contribution to global independence movements.

After all, support for sovereignty among Quebecers is at historic lows after the separation question was narrowly defeated in a 1994 referendum. The newest generation of Francophone Quebecers is certainly still seized by the belief that Quebec’s distinct culture requires a high level of autonomy within the Canadian federation, but the focus is on determining the society’s own future, not leaving Canada.

Marois’ victory is historic in one sense – if she succeeds in forming a government with the minority of seats she won, she will become Quebec’s first “première ministre” (emphasis on the “being a lady”). It is also historic in another way, but probably not in the way you would imagine. Because of the first-past-the-post electoral system, Marois’ Parti-Quebecois (PQ) was able to win a plurality of seats despite receiving a lower percentage of the vote than previous elections where another party formed a majority government. Looking province-wide rather than seat-by-seat, it’s their second-lowest level of support in any election since 1973.

As for what it might mean, even if they had received a strong mandate: the PQ itself nominally supports independence, but their game is a long one, indeed: their goal is only to have a referendum on independence “at some point” and almost certainly not before the next election. They realize that there is insufficient support in the province to win a vote – so their main goal is to increase that support by getting into fights with the federal government. Another party, that promised an immediate referendum, received negligible support. Why then, was Marois able to form government? First, Quebec has been seized by a sizeable political corruption scandal, which goes at least as far back as the last PQ government, but which Jean Charest’s Liberals did nothing about during their ten years in power – save for being strongarmed into holding a public inquiry; unfortunately for them, voters assumed that the dirty laundry belonged to the people currently living in the house. Second, the province was seized by protests causing significant disruption which, though sparked by a student strike against a proposed tuition fee increases, eventually expanded to include concerns about civil liberties and a challenge to neoliberalism more generally. Opponents and supporters of the protests both felt that Charest’s government had failed them, either for being too heavy-handed, or not being heavy-handed enough. A new party, the CAQ, essentially billing itself as the law and order option bled much of Charest’s support away, despite being nominally sovereigntist. Despite the softness of her position, Marois was also able to attract supporters of the student strike to vote against Charest with her mixed message of solidarity with the students, bolstered by one student leader standing as a candidate for the party (successfully).

The second explanation of the victory is, unfortunately, also what makes the election historic. And not in a good way. It can easily be claimed that the PQ campaign marked the greatest amount of fear-mongering against linguistic, ethnic and religious minorities of any election in Quebec – at least in the last fifty years. One key plank of the PQ platform was the exclusion from any public employment – firefighters, clerks, teachers, doctors, police, administrators, secretaries, policy advisors; anything – of anyone wearing a visible religious symbol. We are talking about firing a significant number of public employees, essentially because of what religion they belong to. Another was disqualification from any elected office of anyone who does not speak French – presumably, despite the province’s large English minority population, a job which could be ably done by the electorate. The PQ then reversed and said this would only apply to new immigrants…sigh. The subtext here was a concern about those people (read: immigrants) who could not speak ‘proper’ French, i.e. who were not pure-laine. All of this, of course, was backed up by spurious claims about threats to the French language and Quebecois identity in the province.

These things might have scared away some voters. The PQ has traditionally been seen as a progressive alternative, and I know many anglophones who voted for another, left wing sovereigntist party, Quebec Solidaire, while holding their nose on the sovereignty issue. The PQ was obviously happy to be rid of anyone of this stripe who might have voted for them in the past. It was clear that the PQ’s strategy, and a successful one, was that any loss was significantly made up by the support of a base rallied by the worst forms of paranoid, parochial, pseudo-racialist nationalism, ensuring that they did not vote for another sovereigntist party, or simply choose to stay home. It seems to have worked; the only thing which prevents it from significantly tarnishing the great affection I have for my adopted province is that it worked, but only barely. The victory they were able to scrape out of deploying these tactics was a narrow one.

So, is the Greek government a massive overspender? Greek government spending as a portion of GDP is 49.5%. This compares to 56.2% for France, 43.8% for Canada, an OECD average of 44.5% and a Euro area average of 50.5%. That’s 2010 numbers. In 2007, Greece was at 46.6, France at 52.4%, Canada at 39.4% and the Euro area and OECD averages at 47% and 41.4%, respectively.

Are the Greeks, as suggested by many commentators, a lazy nation which retires early? Recent numbers from Eurostat on employment rates [direct link, pdf] show that Greek participation in the labour market until age 64 are not lower significantly lower than elsewhere in Europe. The overall employment rate for 20-64 year-olds is 59.6%, compared with a Euro area of 64%. Among 59-64 year-olds, the Greek rate is just over 3% lower than the Euro area’s 46% average. As this data shows, the source of the lower Greek numbers are caused by a lower participation rate for women: the employment rate for men is 1% higher than the 75% reached on average in the Euro area. The gap between Greece and Germany, which currently has a 71% employment rate among 20-64 year-olds would have a more significant impact on competitiveness if it weren’t for the significantly lower GDP per capita in Greece.

So it’s true that Greeks are retiring somewhat earlier than elsewhere in Europe – but one might consider them entitled, considering that they work more hours per year than anyone else in Europe. They work 25% more hours per year than the average European, 200 hours per year – the equivalent of five weeks work – longer than Americans. So, even taking into account the retired and unemployed, Greeks aged 20-64 are still working on average, 1222 hours per year, compared to a European average of 1040 hours per year. Lazy greeks, indeed.

The question then becomes, how did the government get into such dire financial straits? The answer is that the richest and best-paid in Greece don’t pay their taxes: Germany collects 37% of its GDP in taxes, Greece 29.4%. As of 2010, two thirds of Greek doctors self-reported incomes under 12 000 Euros – in a country with a GDP per capita of twice that amount – which entitled them to pay no tax at all. The Greek crisis is not about the average worker; it is about Greeks best-paid, and if they had been paying taxes for the last ten years, Greece would not be in the financial mess it is in right now. No doubt, the failure to collect those taxes falls on the shoulders of the government, but that is no justification for the amount of calumny which is continually heaped upon the Greek people for this mess.

In late October, parliament voted against adopting Bill C-300, which would have provided some level of human rights accountability for Canadian mining (and oil and gas) companies operating beyond Canadian borders. The bill, originally introduced by Liberal MP John McKay, was defeated 140-134 by the votes of a unanimously opposed Conservative party, and supported by the absence of numerous Liberal party members. Among those who chose not to appear was Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

The bill had passed two earlier Parliamentary votes. Most believe that the vote was a result of aggressive, last-minute lobbying from industry representatives, who claimed that firms (read “they themselves”) would be driven to incorporate elsewhere were the bill to become law.

What drastic measures would the law have imposed were a Canadian company involved in a ‘violation of international human rights standards’? As put concisely by Canadian Business Magazine, the project in question “…would become ineligible to receive financial services from EDC, and the Canada Pension Plan could no longer invest in [the Corporation’s] securities.”

There may have been problems with the administrative scheme set up under the Bill, shortcomings which could have been overcome if more MPs had taken an interest in rendering the bill workable. One would expect that kind of effort from a party, and a leader, which have made their name promoting human rights values. Their decision can hardly be called disappointing, however, since that would require the result to be out of character. In practice, Ignatieff has made an art of supporting those values while undercutting the rights themselves.

How is it possible that human rights protection, seen as trumps in Canadian law, fell so easily to the wayside when it came to regulating business practice? Chris Brown, an international relations professor at LSE, has put the matter plainly: “The enforcement of rights by the international community has been determined, in practice, by the foreign-policy imperatives of the major powers, and political, commercial and financial considerations frequently get in the way of a high-priority, even-handed policy on human rights.”

The vote on C-300 draws that lesson squarely, but also sharpens the edge of its rule: in buying into a standard for the protection of human rights, even middle powers don’t feel that they can afford to pay for more than lip service.

—
Refs: Chris Brown, “Universal Human Rights? An Analysis of the ’Human-Rights Culture’ and its Critics” in Robert G Patman, ed, Universal Human Rights? (Houndmills [England]: Macmillan Press, 2000) 31, at 40

Is it the internet killing the publishing industry, or just plain old anti-competitive practices? Take the comments of Colin Robinson of OR Books on their reasons for not selling through Amazon:

To sell our titles, Amazon would require a discount of 55% or even 60%, that’s $11 or $12 on a $20 book. Amazon would use some of this money to discount the book to its customers — that’s what gives it its edge. If, as a publisher, you try matching their reduced price, Amazon will insist your new, lower price is the basis for their discount, so they can cut their price still further. That makes it pretty much impossible for you to compete with direct sales to your customers.

In fact, it makes it impossible for any other seller to compete with Amazon. Insisting on the lowest possible price is fine – insisting on a price that’s half of the otherwise lowest price is ridiculous.

One of the fascinating thing about globalization is the cases like these which blur the line between monopoly and monopsony. Speaking of which, it is time to break up WalMart, whose success is tied, contrary to what might be thought, not primarily to egregious anti-union practices, but from globally exercising a pseudo-monopsony on purchases, and acting as a local monopsony employer hundreds of times over. Here, then, is a lesson to those starting law school: you can be on the side of the little guy and efficient markets by focusing your career on competition law.

ht to paperpools, quoting Huffington Post