Spacing Montréal has a map showing changes in rent between 1996 and 2006 (corrected for inflation). It’s fascinating, as is the link to a U of T study of gentrification. If I were a renter looking for a good deal, this would actually be very useful information. Of course that says nothing about property values except for rental properties, but certainly the whole exercise suggests some pretty interesting things about the affordability of housing in the city. If you’re willing to live outside the hipster districts, you can get a serious discount.
There is actually a real food called chow-chow
Checking out alternative chili recipes we found a recipe calling for a chayote. Not knowing what it was, I went to wikipedia. The entry may have the best opening line of any wikipedia entry I’ve found:
The chayote (Sechium edule), also known as sayote, tayota, choko, chocho, chow-chow, christophine or merliton, is an edible plant that belongs to the gourd family Cucurbitaceae along with melons, cucumbers and squash.
Who wouldn’t want to eat something with a name like that? Alas, the corner fruterie does not carry them and it’s too cold for a jaunt to the marché. Maybe next time.
Heavy Artillery Mittens
Yes, it’s cold here like everywhere north of the south, and when the weather is this cold, it appears to be actually interesting to talk about. I am fond of telling people that it got down to -40 when I interviewed for this job and I actually liked it. I stayed over the weekend and went for a walk around the underground city, but ran out of space and surfaced above ground a couple blocks west of St. Laurent on St. Catherine. Nice neighborhood, I know. Anyway, I started walking and at first it was brisk and then my face started freezing and I felt stupid. I ducked into a coffeeshop, then I caught a cab to my destination.
When we didn’t live here, there was something bracing about visiting Minnesota over winter break. We’d get out of the airport and there would be that first blast of cutting cold, and I knew I was finally home. That razor-like air is part of the landscape, part of what it means to be in a place. But it’s nicer when you get a little taste of it and then get back out of it.
Last night I visited some friends for dinner (Carrie is alas down for the count with bronchitis, but will be back in effect soon thanks for some good drugs from the doctor; codeine cough syrup: another reason to love Canada) and had a similar experience. Their place was a few blocks from a coffee shop and I thought it would be an easy walk. Everything is slower in the cold. Much, much slower. The first couple blocks were fine. But then suddenly it felt like wherever I turned, I was walking into the wind. I had the full-on winter armor too. The heavy artillery mittens (why are military metaphors so appealing for extreme weather clothing?) weren’t even cutting it. About four blocks into it, I was a guy walking by me with an SAQ bag and HE WASN’T WEARING GLOVES. His hands looked human but they could not have been. Finally, I make the turn onto their street and walk up the hill. What should have been a 10-15 minute walk turned into a saga where I felt like I’d been left for dead on an ice floe. My friends greeted me at their door and informed me that at that moment, it was colder in Montreal than at the north pole. I didn’t care if it was actually true. It was emotionally true.
Later, on the way home, I paid good money for door-to-door cab service.
The End of Analog TV
Fagstein has an excellent post on the end of analog TV signals in the US, and the same fate that will fall upon Canadians in 2011.
I say what I’m about to say as someone who enjoys watching my HDTV on a regular basis.
The switchover from analog to digital TV is one of the great hoodwinks of our time. It is a hoodwink on two fronts. First, we are sold on those flat screen TVs as inherently better than the old cathode ray tubes. Now, it’s true that CRTs take up tons of space, but in terms of things like color and image depth, a CRT of comparable specifications to a Plasma or LCD would do better in some ways (or at least compete). Of course, a CRT with a 42″ diagonal would eat up a good chunk of most Montreal living rooms. But the idea that CRT is a dead technology compared with LCD and Plasma is simply ludicrous. The “better” in the picture comes from the resolution, not the technology. In any event, this is one wing of the consumer electronics industry (TVs and monitors) following others (CD, DVD) that have figured out the best way to sell a lot of gear is to force everyone to upgrade. Sure you could buy a set-top box for $40 or whatever to upgrade your analog TV, but you’re already on your way to a new LCD. Why not step into the store and plop down your credit card? What’s that? You can’t? Well, in the US, the government will help you.
The spectrum reallocation, meanwhile, means another lost opportunity for reallocating the airwaves for the public good. The spectrum is a public resource, managed by the government, just like public lands. And yet it’s been given, or sold off, to commercial broadcasters in the US and Canada pretty freely. Canadians have done a better job of maintaining a strong public broadcaster (which would be sort of the equivalent of a public park except only professionals can play there), but the point still holds. Fagstein is right to say that the internet has largely replaced cable public access but consider the overall shift. Although the internet is governmentally regulated, it is not regulated as a resource in the same way. If all the ISPs in your neighborhood suddenly want to jack up prices beyond what you can afford, that’s the end of your internet. If they want to traffic shape or otherwise manage your bandwidth, your only recourse is another ISP, and if they ALL decide to do it, you are more or less stuck.
The thing about the electromagnetic spectrum is that it was socially shaped in such a way that what came over it was free or relatively inexpensive to users (I’m thinking of the UK’s receiver tax here). We are accustomed to praising the incredible variety and accessibility of contemporary media, but we should not forget the monthly cost. In 1970, your monthly communication bills would have included a bill for the telephone. You would own a TV or radio that you paid for, once, and watch whatever was on. Perhaps you would also subscribe to a newspaper or some magazines.
Now, our household pays out non-trivial monthly fees for telephone, cellular telephone, TV, and internet. And if we were motivated, we could even pay for radio (satellite). Of course we also subscribe to too many newspapers and magazines but such is the intellectual’s fate.
My point is that the freedoms of the so-called digital revolution come at a cost to consumers, starting with a cost that comes in the form of a monthly fee for things that could, should, or would have been considered public resources in another age.
NCA Post-Hoc
Sometime in December I mentioned some politics in the National Communication Association (US) around the San Diego conference. Beyond the whole Horowitz silliness, there was the fact that the Hyatt was in the middle of a labor dispute and was funneling money into the campaign to oppose Prop 8. This YouTube video isn’t exciting but it’s a nice document of the protest and worth sharing. Had I gone, I would have participated.
Coupland on the financial crisis:
it’s all in our minds. We just need to snap out of it. Like Y2K. Sure, that’s true to a point, but the more frightening prospect is that all the prosperity that people felt coming up to the crisis was also in their minds, largely fictional, and therefore incredibly dangerous. I know it was just sticker shock, but over and over as I watched real estate prices climb since I started paying attention in 1999 I just couldn’t fathom it. We know what median and mean incomes look like in the US and Canada. What did people think would happen when the cost of owning property sucked up the majority of people’s take-home income?
Also, the Globe and Mail ran a story about a Radio-Canada new year’s eve comedy show trading in racial stereotypes and how offensive it was “even” to other Francophones (as usual, implying that the Quebecois are more racist than Anglos). But then no editors catch Coupland trading in some also-not-funny stereotypes.
Dear Doug Coupland: I lapped up Generation X book with relish like everyone else, but please, even though you’re writing a biography of McLuhan, that “oral cultures live in constant terror” stuff is just racist. Cut it out.
On Managed Interdisciplinarity
One question often left unasked is why universities are now so interested in fostering certain kinds of interdisciplinarity. When I was first learning about university disciplines in the late 80s and early 90s, it was still very much in the “Theory” moment (to use Frederic Jameson’s term) and there was a lot of writing that assumed that remaining in one’s disciplinary space was fundamentally conservative (hence the proliferation of metaphors like “disciplinary silo”) and interdisciplinarity was fundamentally radical in some way.
Today, the world looks very different to me. Just as many interdisciplinary initiatives come from university administrations as they do from actual researchers working together. Sometimes, it’s a matter of efficiency: create a PhD in cultural studies and you can potentially avoid having PhDs in each of the humanities. Or if you’re in Ontario, create an interdisciplinary PhD and get more money flowing into your university while not expending additional resources (though of course your faculty will have to work harder). Or if you get people in business, liberal arts, and science working together you can bring in more grant money. None of these goals is inherently bad or regressive. I am not arguing that interdisciplinarity has been “sold out” in any of these cases. But it is worth noting that in each of them, the justification is institutional rather than intellectual and the ideas come after the fact: “here’s a group of people who should work together on a project: now make up a project.” Sometimes great good can come out of these kinds of initiatives. For instance, I have always thought every university needs an interdisciplinary humanities center, just so people can have occasions to come together and talk. But for every one of those, there are plenty of other plans hatched by administrators or grant agencies that have more to do with someone moving around institutional chess pieces or trying to get “more value for their money” as opposed to a genuine intellectual project. Maybe this was always the case and I just was unaware of the institutional dimensions as a student (or too eager to believe the radical posturing of capital-T-Theorists, which is also a possibility).
No matter how it happened, it has led me to a kind of double consciousness as a scholar. Yes, I believe my work is interdisciplinary (not the least because any field I could reasonably call a “home”–communication studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies–has a weak sense, if any, of itself as a discipline). It aspires to the kinds of interdisciplinary I mentioned in my first post on the subject, but it is always driven by specific intellectual questions (as opposed, for instance, to the need to speak for a field of “sound studies” or whatever). At the same time, I am more suspicious than I would like to be when others laud the interdisciplinarity of their own work or when I hear of a new interdisciplinary initiative. My first question now is always “why?”