This Magazine articles from January 2000

This Magazine archives from January 2000

Glamourchist (a guide to what the stylish social activists are wearing).
January 1, 2000... You know political protest has hit the big time when Glamour magazine calls looking for a WTO-fightin' anarchist woman (between the ages of 20 and 35, please) to profile. That was the request left on the voicemail of the Toronto office of TAO...

Can you see the difference? (the anti-corporate RTMark alarms the World Trade Organization with a parody of its Website).
January 1, 2000... Speaking of image knock-offs, the WTO inspired a good one before the Seattle meetings. Notorious anticorporate activist group RTMark created a Web site that closely mimicked the official sites for the WTO. Mock Web sites are... um... a...

Growing concerns (business corporations adopt ecological metaphors to describe their activities).
January 1, 2000... IS IT JUST ME, OR HAS THE BAY STREET crowd doffed their Armani suits and SUVS in favor of plaid shirts and John Deeres? If you've thumbed through a business publication in the past few months, you may have noticed that terms such as...

Curious George (Gilder) and his amazing influence-peddling machine (a former U.S. political speechwriter now offers insight on technology).
January 1, 2000... From his early days as Richard Nixon's speechwriter to his current incarnation as techno-prophet and the darling of the business media, George Gilder has had no trouble staying in the spotlight. An author-turned-economist-turned-techie, Gilder...

Cross purposes (evangelical Protestantism wins many converts in Latin America).
January 1, 2000... THE FAITH MAY BE THE SAME, BUT IN CHURCHES THROUGHOUT Latin America, Christianity's message has changed drastically. Since the early days of 1960s liberation theology and its critical view of capitalism's exploitation of the poor, the pendulum...

Home free (a commune in Christiania, Denmark is a bastion of imagination and self-sufficiency).
January 1, 2000... CHRISTIANIA, DENMARK: In the heart of Copenhagen's most famous community, a five-sided house, like a giant diamond, floats above the water on stilts. Nearby, a bright red cottage is covered in mismatched windows. The roof of another home juts...

Everybody in leather: renegade queers pronounce the End of Gay ... Is it possible we've reached a new, postgay world where labels are obsolete ...
January 1, 2000... AMERICAN LESBIAN COMIC LEA Delaria used to tell a great joke: "I was in this store in Provincetown run by these two dykes. They put up a sign that said: Lesbian Discount 20 percent. I mean, what difference would it make to call yourself a...

Great white north: our immigration levels are below target ... But when ... Chinese migrants show up at our border ... there's a national crisis ...
January 1, 2000... UNTIL THE JUMBO JET, WE WERE all--aboriginal peoples excepted--boat people. The boats were sometimes absolutely unsafe, like the so-called coffin ships built of rotting, creaking timbers that brought the Irish who were fleeing famine in the...

New politics (workings of the World Trade Organization are subject to closer scrutiny and transparency as a result of social activists' pressure).
January 1, 2000... IT'S NOT AN EASY TASK, IN OUR MULTICHANNEL UNIVERSE, to get a trade meeting to register on the mass-media Richter scale. (Who cares about all that politics stuff these days?) But the enviros, labour- and human-rights activists, industrial...

Services with a smile (activists oppose the privatization of health care and education - an inevitable consequence of world economic integration).
January 1, 2000... The thousands of chanting demonstrators who marched through Seattle last month drew the world's attention to the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and to the impact of free-trade deals on the environment and jobs. No agreement was...

Cowboys in cyberspace: "hacktivists" claim they mark the next wave of fight-the-power protest. Skeptics say they're not political enough ...
January 1, 2000... IN LATE OCTOBER 1998, BRONC BUSTER, AN AMERICAN computer hacker, broke into the Web page belonging to the Chinese Society for Human Rights--a page featuring China's official line on human rights--and made his statement. "I simply [cannot]...

Family ties: a brief, brief history of the Left in Canada.
January 1, 2000... Social Gospel Its proponents imagined Christian beliefs could improve conditions created by industrial capitalism. By WWI, it was a major force for social change. Among the reforms advocated were women's suffrage and the expansion of...

Green machine: green politics is on the rise across the globe. And it's come to B.C., where Greens beat the NDP in a by-election last month ...
January 1, 2000... iN THE BALLROOM OF THE INN AT KING'S Crossing in the car-culture suburb of Abbotsford, the leader of the Green Party of B.C. is making promises, pounding the pulpit, even weeping to rally his forces. A fretful 27-year-old with aqueous eyes,...

Class clown: ... beneath the well-trod narrative about (Glen) Clark's missteps is ... a deeper ... tale about the internal warfare over class ...
January 1, 2000... EVERYBODY IN THE ROOM KNEW WHAT WAS COMING. AFTER FIGHTING OFF the daily barrage of questions about his political future, Glen Clark finally announced he was resigning as premier of British Columbia, effective immediately. There he was, in the...

Seedling for Samantha (random association with a name mentioned in a radio broadcast proves to be a lifeline for a schizophrenia patient).
January 1, 2000... DAVID RUSSELL WAS BORN IN 1957. THAT SAME YEAR, LAIKA would circle the globe, but the logical question was never put to the ballot: "What was it going to be, dogs or bombs?" In the early days of psychiatry, there was a man who had been a...

Worms.
January 1, 2000... THE SKY BEGINS AS A SQUARE, BLUE AND CLOUDLESS, IT IS a glass of flickering light, but if' you reach across to one of the corners, touch it, and rub it between your fingers, then clouds eventually appear. One cloud hangs low, near to the...

40 lines of explanation.
January 1, 2000... I emerge from the diner splattered by ketchup fall prey to a falling piano (well almost) I leap to the side like a guy leaping sideways an evasion I do not condone but just a block away my feet get tangled in the next...

Carrying the shadow.
January 1, 2000... Something wonderful is happening in poetry. Poets are back. For the last 10 years, poetry in Canada was bedazzled by the whorish charms of its evil fraternal twin, Spoken Word. But the thrall is gone--and writers who choose their words...

Her absence, this wanderer.
January 1, 2000... Rachel Zolf is not of "a certain age," but her first book, HER ABSENCE, THIS WANDERER (BuschekBooks), is my favourite debut book of the season. Why? Because the poetry is all about identity, personal history and self-actualization, and yet it...

Hammer & tongs.
January 1, 2000... For a more light-hearted read, but one no less accomplished, flip through HAMMER & TONGS, an anthology of poetry (and some fiction) culled from B.C.'s legendary Smoking Lung micropress. Like Zolf, most of the writers in Hammer & Tongs are...

Julie Doiron and the wooden stars. Julie Doiron and the wooden stars.
January 1, 2000... When I first stumbled on Ottawa's Wooden Stars at a live show some six years ago, I thought I'd gone to indie-music heaven. Their complex, polyphonic melodies and ricocheting, arithmetic rhythms finally gave me refuge from Southern Ontario...

Antagonist.
January 1, 2000... With the political power of graphic design currently trapped somewhere between semiotic theory and activist posters stapled to a creosoted telephone pole, it's time for a rescue mission. ANTAGONIST, a new Toronto zine spearheaded by designer...

BirkenStocks are up! (the sandals have travelled a long way from hippie connotation).
January 1, 2000... THIS SUMMER I TOOK MY GIRLFRIEND TO MEET MY FAMILY for the first time. My reportedly "fine-with-it" brother-in-law, upon spying her Birkenstock sandals, announced with relief, "Oh, if I'd seen you were wearing those I would have known you were...