On my way home late-late Monday night (part of which was spent viewing La Rabbia di Pasolini, a reconstruction of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 essay film),  I was surprised to board the Dundas W. streetcar and find the driver sitting behind a plexiglass partition. The driver was gruff, bearded, burly guy — the sight of this bear-sized man squeezed inside a protective box on an otherwise empty streetcar seemed both comic and like another instance of Toronto’s over reaction to safety concerns. (It also made me feel like a potential threat.) Had I missed something while I was away? Via iPhone I status-posted to Facebook something reflecting my incredulity.

Some Fb ranting ensued —  starting from general comments re: the TTC,  on to what Toronto lacks for dynamism, social fluidity and everyday engagement. The recent G20 shenanigans figure, as does a recap of the thinking that went into the development of Toronto’s St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Here it is, mostly unedited, in its rough, epistolary form. (NB: Greg Spencer is a post-doctoral fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, specializing in economic geography.)

Christopher Frey: Has anyone seen the new plexiglass barriers on streetcars to protect the driver? Is this a late night precaution or has the TTC lost its bloody mind? Are we so savage?

Greg Spencer: A TTC driver is assaulted every day of the year. So yes, we are.

This seems part of a larger pattern so typical of Toronto, a city that over-reacts on the side of caution/safety, irregardless of the affect on how we socialize with one another… There are smarter solutions… this is ridiculous. Especially when TTC service can be so shitty, and the system as a whole is so behind other cities’ metros. (Why are we so late in implementing pre-paid pass cards for example?) … After spending so much time in other cities, especially Rio, & using public transit daily, I’ve developed a keen sense for what keeps Toronto from being a really vibrant, interesting place: social fluidity, quotidian engagements with people outside yr usual circle, plus what brian fawcett once called safety nazis. public transit is an important space where we’re forced to interact with our fellow citizens, and the people who work for the city we live in… In some symbolic & behavioural way the glass partition just altered the way I interact with Toronto.

Greg Spencer: http://www3.ttc.ca/Jobs/transit_operator_drivers_recruitment.jsp

Teresa Morrow: I think nice liberals like me are fence sitters when it comes to authority and the enforcement of rules. I deplore the guy who punches the bus-driver, and I grouch and curse about TTC employees and their smug and callous ways. Ditto re: the cops. And we have a lot of people in our city who are outsiders for one reason or another. Whether that means they don’t give a shit about the rules, or are afraid to get involved lest they become the victim of authorities that can be racist & discriminatory… I feel like we are civil people resisting our own strong undercurrent of antipathy.

Greg Spencer: Very true – way too many people take way too many things for granted. We love to complain and yet we do very little. We wear our political choices on our sleeves like it’s some kind of status symbol but we tend to put very little actual thought or action into our ‘beliefs’. I feel that there is a real lack of knowledge about the political/governance process. Part of this is the fault of our political class which does a horrible job at communicating with the public and part of it is a lack of true engagement on the part of citizens. The result is shrill voices on both ends of the political spectrum spewing conspiracy theories that people are all too eager to accept. We are very fortunate to live in a country with very strong public institutions but I do worry about their adaptability and resiliency in the face of rapid societal change.

Christopher Frey: When it comes to burden of proof, sometimes it seems conspiracy theories get an easier ride than traditional media. People mistake plausibility for proof.

Greg Spencer: Chris’ earlier point about atomization is very important. In a large diverse society where everyone has access to specialized media that is congruent with their own set of beliefs what is the glue that holds society together? How can people chastise others they believe are ‘wrong’ when people have very different ideas of what ‘wrong’ is?

Ken Dobb: Who are you people? And how did this discussion end up among the usual inconsequential chatter on my Facebook page?

This discussion reminds me of the theorizing that preceded the development of my neighbourhood – St. Lawrence. The designers of the neighbourhood were taken with the findings – then popular – of the urban theorist W.H. Whyte. Whyte’s findings indicated that fencing off space had the counter-intuitive consequence of actually increasing violence and street crime in public spaces. What worked, he claimed, was having private individuals invested in public spaces – eyes on the street. It’s why we have medium rise buildings with residential units that open directly onto the streets. And to a large extent, this theory seems to have worked in this neighbourhood where – despite its social composition, on-street criminal occurences have been roughly on a par with those of Rosedale, at least until recently.

I agree with Chris that the plexiglass shields are an abomination, an abomination that just might have the counter-intuitive effect of worsening the incidences of violence on public transit. If something is happening in the driver’s space behind the glass shield, what interest do I have to leave my space to intervene?

Archeologists and a team of scientists at the University of Tubingen believe they have found the oldest sex toy in the world, after piecing together over a dozen fragments. A spokesman from the university said the  28,000-year-old/stone age phallus was most likely used as a sexual aid rather than to light fires or club rivals. The eight-inch stone carving was found in a cave near Ulm in Germany. Made from siltstone, the appearance of carved rings around the polished “head” confirmed the researchers suspicions. The fragments were found in a cave complex associated with the activities of modern humans and not their pre-historic “cousins”, the Neanderthals.

Via BoingBoing

*

In spring of this year, a few weeks before President Obama announced a new American initiative to put men on Mars by 2025, the director of the Large Hadron Collider announced the European project would be shut down again for repairs for “at least a year.”

Once again, Inner Space and Outer Space collided in their paired dance through the frontier of our culture. Ten years earlier, in early 1999, NASA blew another couple of hundred million dollars on its failed Mars Remote Lander, while IBM announced the development of a super computer, a million times faster than its predecessors, engineered for the same amount of burnt-up cash, about two hundred million dollars. Meanwhile the medical journals began reporting that robotic nano-probes would soon travel the human body on search-and-destroy missions against biological invaders.

In the context of mechanical space exploration, a few hundred million bucks is nothing; in the digital world we inhabit, it’s more than enough to create revolutionary technologies and spin off further typhoons of social upheaval. What would have happened if the money spent by NASA since the Eagle landed, had gone to Inner Space R & D instead?

Apart from Tang orange crystals and silver space blankets, what has over 40 years of post-Moon blast-offs done for the Next Generation?

Not much. And perhaps that’s the point of Outer Space.

One of the great problems facing successful economies is what to do with their capital surplus. Spain’s economy was permanently warped by its failure to liquidate the profits and bullion plundered from its New World colonies; the resulting massive inflation created structural imbalances that led to a decline of both Spanish industry and agriculture from which Spain  never recovered. The task of the U.S. economy since the inflation of the 1970’s has been to find markets for cash surpluses that would no longer be contained by Vietnam war-budgets or Panama-style colonization schemes. IMF “loans” to countries like Brazil and Mexico are calculated to go bad. The job of Argentina, Greece and Portugal is to be a designated basket-case and drain off those cash surpluses; and the job of banking officialdom is to hide this truth behind thick wads of loan documentation.

Likewise, Outer Space drains our engineering surpluses. What would those hordes of computer nerds at Mission Control be doing, if they didn’t have their whirligigs crashing over Mars?  Patenting more, devastating hi-tech instability, that’s what. And then…?

Early Digital TV shows like The X-Files made this clear. Scully and her partner Mulder were always on the verge of discovering the bitter truth the government hides from the populace, hides even from itself. The big secret?

We are not going anywhere. Not now, not ever.

Not in the millennium to come as promised by science fiction. With The X-Files, we learned the aliens have landed here instead, because there is no out there. Like Nancy Drew, or the Hardy Boys, Scully and Mulder are on to their elders, on to the big adult secret. They’ve discovered the adult secret of consensual sex, but they have not quite figured out who does what to whom. Every week the two agents desperately rummaged through reports and sightings, to confirm their suspicions as to whether, like Christmas and the Easter Bunny, the promise of Outer Space is merely a trick played on the gullible children of Mission Control. And if so, why?

The X-Files is a drama of doubt, a meditation on the conflict between faith and distrust of our new, and only, secular religion: Science Fiction.

Science fiction itself predicted its own impasse 50 years ago. Robert Heinlein, Brian Aldiss, and others wrote stories about how the “world” is eventually discovered to be a space ship, and the ship’s not going anywhere. In Heinlein’s novel Starship, the interior of ship is overgrown with escaped vegetation: the lab animals have mutated into telepathic beings. They want to know from the humans, their elected gods, what’s the Purpose of it all?

The humans aboard don’t know.

They’re so stunted their ex-human discoverers must leave them in the rotting ship forever, orbiting an evolutionary path to nowhere. 

All high civilizations share the problem of the Cultural Box. Mayans, Etruscans, and Chinese devoted themselves to the problem of escaping their conceptual jails. The Egyptians not only built state pyramids, but employed tens of thousands of specialists on life-after-death technologies, using embalming, occult divination, prophesy, sacred orientation, astrology, and hieroglyphic incantations. The Greeks and Incas, too. A reference to the “Secrets of the Ancients” in pop culture invokes our Big Secret: we, too, are engaged in the job of perpetuating a cargo cult.

David LaChapelle, Lady Gaga: Electric Chair, 2009

The Alien Upgrade

Our cargo cult is called Outer Space and the job of Mission Control is to save us from it. The hard question is, as always, who shall be saved? On what basis shall we be saved?  The priests of Outer Space say we shall be fulfilled on the basis of self-illumination. When we saw the black plinth in 2001, A Space Odyssey, we understood we would be saved by an enlightened baby-Jesus astronaut. We would become enlightened in the process of getting off the planet and into Outer Space. But who gets to go?

The great fear – the paranoia that runs like a red streak through The X-Files and conspiracy theories of Roswell fans and the Unibomber alike – is that perhaps the technical agenda serves only the interests of an elite, not majority.  Will we masses get left behind, abandoned as evolutionary dead-ends? It’s not a matter of taxes, of state subsidies wasted on an elite government nerds who drop their costly toys into the void.

No, the secret public concern is precisely that an astronaut will become enlightened, that she or he will mate with fellow astronauts to produce novel, and genetically-enhanced, beautifully superior extra-human beings!

And leave us ordinary mortals behind in their toxic back-flash.

The X-File aliens are the superior beings who have already landed among us. It is the intimation of a final eugenics that the technical agenda dangles before us, the sweet but deadly elixir of Darwin. Evolution will kill off the Unelected, yes – but it will enable the remaining few big heads to survive and prosper.

How badly do we want to escape our box?

Christianity has spent 20 centuries negotiating the thin edge of this sharp, two-bladed sword called the Grace of the Elect.

Here’s the problem:  If you claim that only the Elect will be saved, then you offer no incentive for the masses to go on living every day, never mind paying the church tithes.

If you say that God’s Grace will determine who gets saved in the big spiritual lottery, then the hard workers might well stop their labours, once they’ve covered the long odds by simply buying a ticket, by joining up.

According to D.H. Lawrence, this ongoing social exegesis was not completed until the late 19th Century, when Nietzsche and Dostoevsky proclaimed Christianity was going extinct:

All that remains is for the elect to take charge of the bread — the property, the money — and then give it back to the masses as if it were the gift of life.  Otherwise, men shall be ‘free’ to get what they can, we are brought to a condition of competitive insanity and ultimate suicide.” — D. H.Lawrence: Selected Literary Criticism

Getting off this planet requires an incredible force of faith. Most people are not capable of sustaining it. The crisis of faith in The X-Files is the crisis of people with no other options, and the ubiquitous big-headed Roswell Alien represents our deepest concern in life. He’s the superior being  a few of our fellow earthlings aim on becoming, through applied genetics, nano-technology, cryo-technology, the works. We want the Alien to be a child’s bogeyman, a real-but-imaginary symbol like Santa Claus. We would prefer to pay our taxes and give lip service to the idea of Outer Space, just as we say “Santa does exist, in the spirit of giving,” when we drop five dollars into a Salvation Army box.

Matt Siber, Untitled #25, 2004

We cannot face the horrible prospect that we are contributing to our own demise as a species each time we switch on a computer. Serving the grim Alien we have worked so hard to really create? What a nightmare that would be!

For Marshall McLuhan, whose 1970’s interviews with Tom Wolfe and Mike McManus aired this week in conjunction with the 2010 Contact Photography Festival, the prospect of a new computer that operates a million times faster than its predecessors holds no special terrors in his imagined future.  It was an article of faith for McLuhan that mankind meets all new forms of technology, no matter how revolutionary, with stasis.

What McLuhan meant by this, was that we automatically reconfigure our consciousness to absorb the new effects.  Type moves us one way, film another, radio, a third.  It simply takes us time to catch up to such shifts, to reconfigure our media extensions. Extension, not centres – meaning that no technology can change the fundamental nature of our consciousness itself:

It will be Grace, if anything, that does that – not technology.

Man cannot create a Grace-Machine. (McLuhan was a practicing Catholic.)

But surely that’s what the black monolith in 2001 represents, no? Grace in a box?

Christian media soothes us with its McLuhan-conviction. In a music video played on the Christian Network in 1999, pop performers sang about faith while each member stood on his own little coloured planet. The song says, we are not spaceships, we are not marooned on the dying planet while the Big-Heads sail off to evolutionary heaven without us.

No, we are the planets, each and everyone one of us revolving around all of us.

Christians say we’re already home.

However, the observable truth is that new technology does create social elites. The horse stirrup was a new medium, an extension of a man’s leg, a medium that created the knightly class in Europe, and made feudalism itself. Our fear is we may indeed end as micro-serfs to Baron von Gates and his nerdy hordes. The anxiety is more real given that nerdly technologies do produce fundamental advancements in the transhuman realm: gene manipulation, hormone treatments, organ transplants, cloning, and cryogenics. Despite McLuhan’s salve we are approaching the final frontier, consciousness itself.

So who gets these upgrades? For what purpose?

Who dictates how, when, and where, in our market economy? Western society tries to ally our fears by claiming that technical advances are not significant, that we’re all the same “under the skin” despite the inequities of the political system. Render unto Caesar, etc.

The problem is, this blindingly fast evolutionary process is not about merely extending the human fist or belly or even the mouth, but the human mind itself. The  Roswell Alien has a big head and we want to know what’s inside it.

X marks the final frontier: fundamental changes in consciousness.

What are we going to think, when we get there? Can we buy our own evolution? Who among us has the hundreds of millions? Western philosophy has no real answers except its prohibitive finger-wagging: “All life is sacred.”

And with that, digital culture closes ranks against any understanding of the new media and forces us into strategies of passive accommodation, rather than political mastery, or even permit a critical dialogue. Christian orthodoxy has allied itself with orthodox Scientism, which also claims the discussion is hereby closed.

Yes, President Obama is a Martian. And McLuhan said it doesn’t matter who can afford the new technologies, and who cannot. Type Man is no better than Radio Man or TV Woman or Computer Boy. Just different, while the heart’s the same.

But is it? Is it?

On one of the last days of COP15, the United Nations climate change convention in Copenhagen last December (you know, the one that failed, the one that Naomi Klein called “the world’s biggest poker game”), I sat at a cafeteria table and propped up my legs on an empty chair. I was trying to check my email while also checking out French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who was at the next table. The same day I noticed NDP leader Jack Layton. (He didn’t recognize me.) Later, I waited for my next interview subject at the entrance to the media room and there, in fire engine-red pants and with his unmistakeable squint, was Thom Yorke of Radiohead. He wasn’t there to perform, unless you considered his newest gig a kind of performance. Hundreds of delegates had been shut out of the overcrowded Bella Center, but Yorke had snagged a coveted press pass and was wandering around the convention centre. (Yorke didn’t recognize me, either.)

The gloss celebrity brings to world affairs and to journalism isn’t new, but it reappeared Monday with not one but two guest editors at the Globe and Mail. Bono – he who sees the world through yellow-coloured glasses – and Band Aid founder Bob Geldof breezed into Toronto over the weekend to helm the Globe’s special on Africa. The Globe’s website carried stories about their progress, and the visit seemed to eclipse the news itself.

I followed this on the Globe’s website and it appeared as if Bono and Geldof were there for about five hours or so. It’s like Mario Batali going into one of his kitchens and straightening a piece of grilled asparagus on a dish before sending it out.

This isn’t the first time Bono has taken up residence as guest editor of a publication. In 2006 he edited an issue of the Independent and he’s a regular op-end contributor to the New York Times. He worked with Graydon Carter on Vanity Fair’s July 2007 issue. His editor’s note (called “Message 2U”) was transparent about his goals, quoting former U.S. Treasurer secretary Robert Rubin:

We are serious about our stuff we will have to improve on two fronts: (1) communicating to America the scale of the problem, and (2) convincing America that the problem can be solved. He added the challenge that we would need the kinds of marketing budgets Nike and Gap have at their disposal.

(Bono went on to give a shout out to companies like Gap and Apple, who support his charities.) Considering he had already edited an edition of The Independent, doesn’t that make the Globe issue seem like a rehash? If you’re going to go gimmicky, shouldn’t it be your own gimmick?

That’s not really the point, of course. On the one hand it reaffirms Bonos self-appointed role as an advocate for Africa. On the other, it draws celebrity power to the slowly dying world of newspapers. As former Globe and Mail reporter Stephen Strauss reminded us: “It’s good for brand Globe and Mail.” Strauss thought the Monday issue was fair, but brought up a question that needs to be asked every time a celebrity takes part in such stunts (see a list of other celebrity guest editors below):

Does this work? Working here means does it benefit the interests of all concerned? Does this stunt make a difference to the mesh of idealism and self-interest that the editorship is about? In a much, much larger sense does anyone believe that the problems of Africa are going to be fundamentally addressed by a billion articles in a Canadian newspaper? The issue, and Ken Wiwa referenced this in his essay on the matter in the paper on Saturday, is that Africans themselves have to figure out a way to reconstitute their ways of life so that they can participate in and add to the wealth generating and technology-creating symphony of modern life.

That’s precisely what’s so irksome. One of the potential covers for Monday’s Globe and Mail that Bono put to a vote in the newsroom on included a prominent logo for his own NGO, One. Think about how it would appear if the CEO of a multinational company or a bank were guest editing the issue and splashed its logo across the front. (See the cover the Globe went with here.) Lea Zeltserman put it this way: “By putting celebrities in charge, the paper limits itself in its ability to engage with Africa and issues around foreign aid and development. Bono and Geldof are a part of that debate, and a newspaper’s responsibility is to examine their role critically, not help facilitate their work.”

As Toronto writer David Hayes, who wrote Power and Influence: The Globe and Mail and the News Revolution, noted, bold-faced names are tapped all the time to dictate the news. “Stephen Colbert guest edited Newsweek a couple of years ago and Wallpaper makes a habit of it. Guest editors over the past couple of years include Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and artist/sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Penelope Cruz just guest edited French Vogue last month. (I loved one ‘news’ report, which noted: ‘The Spanish actress has left the movie sets for several days to devote her attention to the new activity.’)” Hayes pointed out that Tina Brown recruited comedian Roseanne Barr to consult on an issue of the New Yorker. Was it a success? Hayes points out that Gawker quoted Brown on the subject of celeb guest editors: “They don’t know how to get it right, any more than I would know how to commission a bunch of songs. As an editing idea, it’s fraught with road kill.”

We journalists can be a little prickly when rock stars usurp their turf. So can activists. The Globe recruited Ory Okolloh, the blogger-lawyer behind Kenyan Pundit, to run globeandmail.com coverage on Monday. Okolloh commented in her editor’s note:

I’m sure they have the best of intentions, but the role of the African voice both in addressing our problems and the solutions to those problems is one that needs to remain at centre stage if the continent is to make progress. So while the paper edition might focus on what the world can do for Africa, my role as the guest editor will be to return to the question of what can Africans do for Africa and what are we doing for Africa (and indeed for the rest of the world) by highlighting different voices and stories from around the continent.

Came across this while preparing for my assignment in Brasília last week (more to come on that later): the digital typeface Utopia, which, according to its makers, “portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities.”

And in poster format:

*

Given the demands its still-booming economy, it’s doubtful whether China’s leadership, the fourth since Mao, vets every new film it produces. The country faces serious policy questions over what do about the yuan, the One-Child Policy, privileged education, and the radical stratification that has overtaken its officially classless society.

Three films I caught a few years ago at the Bangkok International Film Festival acknowledge the accomplishments of the elder generations of filmmakers, while boldly examining the One Child Generation. New themes such as euthanasia, cyber-sex, Christian evangelism, and homosexuality mark the new Chinese film’s passage into the twenty-first century. Underlying these films is an intense yearning for connection in an increasingly lonely world.

In The Park (2006), directed by 35-year-old Yin Lichuan, the unmarried daughter of a retired army officer confronts a problem facing many educated woman in the world – how to fulfill family obligations and find a suitable mate while pursuing a demanding career.

“You’re too proud,” her widower-father announces, after discovering her boyfriend is a jobless, would-be musician – and unsuitably younger. “I will only make a suggestion. You, of course, will have to make the final decision.”

The father, played by veteran actor Wang Deshun, heads for a traditional water-park to “kill two birds with one stone,” along with other local retirees who gather to exercise and find a mate for their solo offspring.

China’s One-Child Policy, initiated in 1974, resulted in what psychologists call “emotional over-investment” in their kids. Actress Li Jing gives a luminous performance as a 29-year-old TV producer whom the father “markets” to other oldster parents. (“She’s 28, still young!”) Self-absorbed by her inner conflicts, paralyzed by indecision, and chafing under her father’s benign authority, the daughter fights him over domestic trivialities loaded with historical meaning.

“Have some intestines. I cooked it with garlic this time,” he says to her over dinner in their old-fashioned apartment. “You loved it when you were a child.”

“I never liked intestines,” she insists, furious at last. “And I never liked garlic either!”

She sulkily refuses to eat. Her father’s efforts to find her a mate are also doomed to fail, of course. His chosen marriage-target is revealed in a public washroom to be a closeted homosexual. The unhappy revelation is a huge blow to the old man:

“I fought our country’s enemies!” he cries bitterly at the modern glitzy streets. The obvious, unspoken, and real question is: For what? – So that tattooed young men are free to embrace in public? – So that his beautiful daughter can live alone in her new condo?

“You don’t understand the world today,” she tells him with almost eerie resignation. And here is the film’s power – it’s apparent the heroine doesn’t understand this new world either. She only knows what it isn’t. She is fully aware that their shared history is over – but she is also unsure what this new world is all about, or where it’s going.

But she can’t admit this to her father; she knows it will scare him. With breathtaking economy the director Yin Lichuan tackles the central issue of modernity:

Who are we now?

A pickpocket steals the father’s identity card at the railway station, just when he is “about to go home.” It’s up to the daughter to rescue him from obliteration in a forgotten history – even when her own future is provisional, and unknowable.

{Spider Lilies}

At the other end of the spectrum, but equally sophisticated in its treatment of controversial social issues, is Raised from Dust (2006) directed by Gan Xiao Er. It shows us a rural Chinese Christian community facing disruption from one of China’s vast infrastructure projects.

Actress Hu Shuli plays the cheerful young wife of a miner dying of silicosis in the local clinic. She struggles to keep her daughter in primary school and pay for her husband’s treatment, labouring at an illegal construction site for a few yuan by day, and salvaging usable coal bits from refuse tips at night.

Forced to make a terrible choice between the past and future, the heroine pulls the oxygen tube from her husband’s blue lips, loads him on a bicycle cart, and wheels him home to die. The camera lets it happen in what feels like real time: His bare feet dangle out of the handmade box in the cold light of a new spring.

Their young daughter, unknowingly saved by her parents’ sacrifice, sings grace over the family soup bowl to the Chinglish tune of “Frère Jacques” – “Thank you Jesus, thank you Jesus, for the food, for the food,” in a final scene which combines pathos, surreal humour, and existential terror at once. The film’s Christian themes resonate with the earthy life of China’s rural poor, who still live on the knife-edge of hope and despair.

This is the world of cheap labour that moves China’s boom-economy, shown dispassionately, without moralizing. Raised from Dust, with actors who don’t appear to be acting and a director who doesn’t appear to be directing, transcends national concerns, and illuminates our common lot under globalization.

Equally adept at examining moral authority in global society is 38-year-old Taiwanese director Zero Chou, 38. Her film Spider Lilies won the 2007 Teddy Best Feature Film at the Berlin Film Festival.

Spider Lilies (2006) explores international youth culture in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, where, like everywhere, tattoos, computer sex, and film-going are not merely urban obsessions, but fundamental ways of connecting to the world’s frenetic currents. A teenage web-cam sex performer falls for a lesbian tattooist, in a plot that unites the hard facts of our depersonalized age with the soft truths of private fantasy.

“I am a phantom in your dream,” the heroine reminds the darkened audience beyond the screen, “And you, too, live in mine.”

We, of course, are the unseen watchers whom Chou addresses, the multiple layers of watching watchers in a surveillance-mad society. The electronic audience is the real protagonist of her film. And, as screenwriter Singing Chen takes pains to emphasize, we are hopelessly isolated despite myriad electronic connections.

“I have no choice but to live in a virtual world,” confesses the heroine, a lesbian tattooist played by a stark beauty, Isabella Leong, 18. A violent earthquake, which takes her father’s life and sunders the family, can be read as Taiwan’s political divergence from the Mainland, or as the seismic shock of the new technology; but either way it only finds its cure in an act of personal will:

“If you remember me,” says Jade, the teenage cyber-stripper, seducing the older girl, “And I remember you, then we are real.”

This is the special burden society puts on the individual. A cogent bit of dialogue is central to both the Taiwanese and Mainland films. In The Park, the heroine’s vegetarian boyfriend refuses to eat meat at a family dinner with the response, “When animals are killed, they release a special poison in the blood.” In Spider Lilies the heroine warns that the spider lily flower of the title is “permeated with a poison that makes one lose consciousness and memory.”

Is this a Chinese folk tradition?

Or is it a comment on our increasingly narcotic environment?

*

Interview with Director Zero Chou

Zero Chou, director of Spider Lilies, was born 1970 in Keeling, Taiwan. She studied philosophy at university and became a journalist before embarking on a film career, with five films to her credit.

Were you playing with the film audience, their voyeurism?

The moment a movie begins to play, it forms a relationship with the audience. I wanted Spider Lilies to hypnotize the audience right from the beginning, so that they give the film attention under such a state, and enter a world of non-realism.

Were you deliberately making people uncomfortable with their need to watch?

The interesting thing about voyeurism is the discovery of human nature. On the surface, you are looking at an object. But in fact, you are hearing your own heartbeat, and looking at your own nature.

The film has lines about poison affecting memory. Is this a traditional Chinese theme?

The “poison” from the spider lily flower is also a “cure.” It can help one lose memories, become crazy… but it is also a defence mechanism to protect yourself.

Was the earthquake in the film about the split of Taiwan from the Mainland?

No, Taiwan is region of earthquakes, a natural force. The earthquake symbolizes a rift, a break in memory. The human heart is fragile, it is afraid of breaking, but it needs breaking to cure itself.

Who is your favorite director?

Pedro Almodóvar. I identify with his colourful style. Who said art must be grey and depressing? I always wanted to rebel against that!

At the outset of World War II, several Latin American countries had fairly close ties with Nazi Germany, among them Brazil. Or at least they were avowedly neutral. Although the United States hadn’t yet entered the war, in early 1941 the State Department convinced Walt Disney and his collaborators to tour South America (underwriting the excursion), with the purposes of creating films that would curry favour with the governments and peoples of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru. Four films were produced, the last in the series being “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolour of Brazil), which introduces the recurring character of José Carioca. José shows Donald Duck around Rio and gets him staggeringly drunk.

In 1942, Brazil entered the war on the Allied side, the only South American nation to dispatch troops to Europe. Like the U.S. and Canada, it also shunted its Japanese, German and Italian immigrants in internment camps.

In the late 1980s, the people of northern Somalia rebelled against the government of General Mohammed Siad Barre. After four years of fighting, they separated from the rest of the country, forming the Republic of Somaliland.

The cost of their de facto independence was heavy. Tens of thousands of people were killed during the conflict, many during bombardments by the Somali Air Force. Half a million more fled across the Ethiopian border, settling in refugee camps. A struggle for control of the breakaway republic followed in the mid-1990s.

Rebuilding has been slow. The last camp was dismantled just a few years ago.

Today, as Somaliland thrives in the shadow of its troubled neighbours, the scope of the war’s psychological toll has only begun to register. As many as two-thirds of people over the age of 25 have suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder in some form. Abuse of khat, a plant-based amphetamine chewed all over the Horn of Africa, complicates this and other mental health issues.

There are no psychiatrists in Somaliland.

The patients at Hargeisa Mental Health Unit receive professional treatment for only one month per year, when a Somali-Canadian psychiatrist returns to the country on holiday. He provides free treatment and diagnosis.

What follows are portraits from Somaliland’s only mental health hospital.

See also Separation Anxiety: Caring for civil war survivors in Somaliland’s only mental health hospital in The Walrus.