The Ink — December 2
The Hand of Man, Masabumi Hosono, Kill Your Darlings, and more...
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Articles. Art. Music. More. The Ink is some stuff we found—or found interesting—recently.
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“Trump Got Away With It — Because of the Biden Administration’s Massive Missteps” by Ankush Khardori
Peter: Amidst the flurry of takes and takedowns since the election, this one stood out to me as the most pointed and novel with regards to Biden. The author argues convincingly that the pursuit of legal actions against Trump was sorely mismanaged from the very start of Biden’s term. The delay between Trump’s election crimes and their prosecution was too long; the wrong cases were pursued on weak evidence; and the obvious risk that Trump might run for re-election and win, thus escaping justice, was not taken seriously. The author doesn’t heap all the blame on Biden. The Republicans that let Trump off the hook on impeachment and proclaimed he should be pardoned, notably even his primary opponents like Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, get their share of criticism. The Supreme Court justices, with their shocking ruling on presidential immunity, a concept rejected by 70 percent of Americans, are not spared either. But as a lover of fiction, the Biden angle is the most interesting; it has the makings of a Shakespearean tragedy. He was too slow, too proud, too late. A real Lear, out of touch and overly trusting of the next generation, now unloved and left out in the rain.
“Airbnbs in Quebec: Loopholes, lack of enforcement make a mockery of new laws” by Zachary Kamel
Peter: A thorough investigation of the shady tactics landlords and real-estate investors are employing to continue profiting off the housing crisis. New laws in Quebec constrain short-term rental on sites like AirBnB to primary residences — the home the host actually lives in. This is meant to restrict unlicensed hotels of the sort involved in two deadly fires in Montréal, as well as the slew of AirBnB-only apartments cropping up across the city that limit the housing supply while returning fat profits to real-estate barrons. Unfortunately, a lack of enforcement coupled with an inefficient spread of responsibility across municipal and provincial bodies has made these regulations entirely ineffective. The article details the numerous illegal and sketchy schemes that landlords in our community are employing to continue squeezing us dry. If you are a renter in Montréal, read this and get mad. If you visit Montréal, please do your research before renting an AirBnB. Unless the host clearly lives in the unit, I implore you to consider other options. You may be directly supporting a criminal, or even risking your life.
Peter: I’ve long been a fan of Japanese pop music legend Haruomi Hosono, leader of Yellow Magic Orchestra, composer of one of my favourite chill-out albums, and creator of catchy, earnest pop tracks. I was interested to discover in reading his biography that his grandfather, Masabumi Hosono, was the sole Japanese passenger and survivor of the Titanic. A railroad director, he had been travelling home from a research trip in Russia and boarded the Titanic as a second-class passenger. Hosono was ostracized upon his return, seen as dishonouring his family and nation by saving his own life in place of others. There is some interesting scholarly discussion over where the notion of “women and children first” entered the Japanese national consciousness. Some more sensational reporting around the release of James Cameron’s blockbuster film suggests he may have “betrayed the Samurai spirit of self-sacrifice”; others have investigated the introduction of this value to Japan in the 19th century via an influential British book titled “Self Help.” Hosono’s experience, as well as that of more notorious Titanic survivor J. Bruce Ismay, ignites in me the pathos of their shame and an interest in processes of intergenerational dishonour.
Look
The Hand of Man — Alfred Stieglitz
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Julian: The Hand of Man is a photograph I came across recently while going down a Wikipedia rabbit hole. Its author, Alfred Stieglitz, was an important innovator and advocate of American fine-art photography (and later in life, a partner of renowned painter Georgia O’Keefe). Beyond being visually captivating, this image speaks to something I find fascinating about the documentary power of photography: often, the true value of a photograph can only emerge with time. The eerie atmosphere and grit of a fully-industrialized urban America were likely so familiar as to become invisible to the denizens of the era, but are especially intriguing to a 21st century audience. The Hand of Man captures a world that is familiar and yet somehow almost alien. Stieglitz was an early advocate of embracing this documentary nature of photography with a deliberate artfulness, and it is the success of his practice that renders a photo of a railyard haunting to me 120 years later. Two of Stieglitz’s other photographs of the ostensibly unremarkable, Winter, Fifth Avenue and Old and New New York, have a similar effect on me and are also worth checking out.
Listen
Julian: Friends of The Squid Keira and Josh have recently launched a new podcast! Kill Your Darlings is a critical exploration of reality television. Each episode tackles a different topic to unpack “the societal implications behind the drama and the power behind the media machine”. I just listened to the episode “Beware the Homunculus” which explores how reality TV shapes the lives (the realities, if you will) of those who star in it. There’s a great team behind this show and I’m very excited to see where they take it—and I didn’t realize that Keira and Josh have such nice voices until I started listening! Check it out on Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
