Yes, the title of my new Tumblr site is a play on leisure material. I'll be updating it regularly with illustrations and other design-related projects, from posters and prints to random doodles.
Perhaps an odd title, but now that I'm working full-time it seemed appropriate. Given that I'm doing most of my work by hand, without relying too much on design software, I thought it would also be important to highlight my process. And, of course, there's the fact that the labour involved in producing my work has a material foundation. I thought it might be helpful to post an explanation, originally written during my first attempts to put the site together a couple of weeks ago. I realize it's a bit precious, so I decided not to bother with it. However it still articulates what I was thinking with regard to the title.
Material Leisure showcases my ongoing work without the pretence cohesion or, for that matter, coherence.
Material Leisure addresses the concrete relation between material conditions (i.e., the working day) and the leisure activities that assist in their reproduction. Leisure, in this sense, is a material phenomenon that emerges from the social and economic limitations we confront on a daily basis. Our habitual escape from labour’s routine is aided by various cultural forms, modes of entertainment, and therapies. Such commodities manifest the labour process and are, in this way, no less material than tools and activities used to create them.
Material Leisure is the vehicle that assembles the products of my leisure time for the leisure time of another.
June 27, 2013
I wrote an article about my experience at Calgary's short-lived Sled Island music festival for the Spectator Tribune. It features some of my photography. For more photos from the festival, you can head over to CJSR's tumblr page.
I've been hosting a college radio show called Dyck's Pycks off and on for over a year now and last week I finally got around to making a website for it. The show is an eclectic mix of (mostly) new independent music with a strong nod to the nineties (no surprise there). I also try to showcase local artists from Edmonton, Winnipeg, and sometimes even from the rest of Canada. I'll be posting a Souncloud file as well as a playlist every week, so if you've ever got a hankering for indie rock, you're in luck. Anyway, here's a link to the site.
I should also mention that I designed the gnarly spaghetti and meatballs themed logo. Not really sure why, but at least it works with the colour scheme. I'm hoping to have another blog up soon to showcase some the art/design stuff that I've been working at over the past year. And so begins the great process of compartmentalization! Soon I'll have three avenues for self-promotion.
One of the better music critics around, Carl Wilson, is still struggling with crescendos and populism (now a common pairing that was, arguably, ruined by U2). And, as usual, it makes for great writing.
Like most comedians, Louis C.K. is at his best when he follows a cultural logic to a point of absurdity. In the video below, he ridicules Christian conservatives for their laissez-faire stance on the environment and their fixation on the economy. It's not a mind-blowing observation. For most of us who've given the issue any thought, the absurdity is there in plain sight, unfolding all the time, and C.K.'s irreverent delivery prevents us from downplaying our own part in the joke. The harder we laugh, the more we're laughing at ourselves.
Watching Louis C.K.'s stand-up comedy (or his HBO series) can be an awkward, often shame-inducing experience, even when you're alone. In fact, it's rare when it doesn't make you feel terrible. C.K. is probably the most popular comic in America right now, and for good reason. He's up front about his love for obscene words and he loves to stir his perverse fantasies into America's sacred mixture of family, morality, religion, and class. Get a few minutes into any of his routines and you'll realize that what's really on display is C.K.'s well-considered misery: this is self-loathing disguised as comedy.
A few months ago, a blog post at TheNew Yorker compared Louis C.K. to Gogol, after the comedian named him as his favourite author in a Vanity Fair questionnaire. Realism, dark humour, frequent absurdity, and a love for melancholy losers seem to unite the comedian and his nineteenth-century Russian counterpart. But what I love most about C.K., and, why I think he deserves such esteemed comparisons, is that his comedy is structured in a way that makes him complicit with the worst of what he describes, no matter how disagreeable it is. So, when ridicules the baseless ideologies of American culture, he's keenly aware that he's not doing so in a vacuum, and neither are we.
For this reason, Louis C.K. contrasts with another (perhaps more) popular American comedian, also known for his off-colour humour, his politically incorrect one-liners, and for a crappy show called "Family Guy." There's no need to point out the obvious about comics like Seth MacFarlane: since February's Oscar ceremony, plenty of smart writers have laid into him for turning a night of pathetic self-congratulation into a night of misogyny, racism, and pathetic self-congratulation. Cheap jokes about boobs, pedophilia, and jewish hollywood types weren't unexpected (by now, most of us are familiar enough with Family Guy), nor were the arguments offered in MacFarlane's defence. If we found the jokes distasteful, we were told, that was simply our opinion. If we went so far as to say that this kind of humour is inappropriate, then, we were told, it's because we're close-minded, thin-skinned, and so on. When accusations of misogyny and racism get thrown around in comedy, the same rhetoric is almost always deployed by conservative viewers. Look at the comments section for any hot-button issue and more often than not you'll see defenders touting free speech as though it justifies lazy bigotry.
What we often forget in these arguments over sombody's right to say this or that is that our conception of free speech is essentially a conservative tendency, which almost always plays into the hand of the powerful. So it's not surprising that condemning censorship has become the rhetorical strategy of wealthy fundamentalist groups and corporate lobbyists. If we're going to talk about free speech in the same breath as equality, then we have to acknowledge that the freedom to say whatever the hell you want to say depends first on whether you have a voice, an audience, and whether you're lucky enough to have a platform from which to speak.
