This Magazine articles from November 1999

This Magazine archives from November 1999

Canaan in Canada (utopian movements have flourished throughout Canada's history).
November 1, 1999... "A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing," Oscar Wilde once wrote. Any map of Canada that overlooks its many utopian communities, both...

Shooting stars (by anticipating news coverage of their actions, violent killers make the media accomplices to their deeds).
November 1, 1999... IN THE AFTERSHOCK OF THE COLUMBINE school shootings earlier this year, I suggested to a friend that if there were to be any copycat shootings, I'd wager southern Alberta as the locale most likely. I'd just moved here from Ontario and was...

Gates of hell (Microsoft engineered the synthesis of television and the Internet in response to threats to its monopoly).
November 1, 1999... LONG, LONG AGO, IN THE PRE-INTERNET days when Microsoft was just a new company, Bill Gates introduced the personal computer to the average consumer and the corporation sowed the seeds of its global might. All was well for the strapping young...

Everybody inside! (man's attempts to create artificial environments have been outstripped by the deterioration of the natural environment).
November 1, 1999... When it's too hot, we turn on the air conditioner. Too cold? There's always the furnace. To survive comfortably on earth, humans have always made small attempts to control their environment. But now it seems we'll go to the ends of the earth...

Alien like me (film treatments of extraterrestrial life form portray beings not terribly different from homo sapiens).
November 1, 1999... FROM THE BIG-EYED, PASTY-FACED ALIENS ON The X-Files to Star Wars's Jar Jar Binks, extraterrestrials visiting our TV and silver screens in recent years have received a warm (and lucrative) welcome from earthlings. The appeal of alien...

Home, sweet home page (Talossa, 13 square kilometres in size, is one of more than 60 self-declared nations on the Internet).
November 1, 1999... KINGDOM OF TAL0SSA THE INAUGURATION OF THE NEW prime minister--the country's 25th--takes place by phone. In a ceremony that displays its own brand of pomp and circumstance, the new PM, Michael Pope, is sworn in by King Robert I. Sadly,...

Death of utopia: we're too cool to dream, too hip to hope. In a world obsessed with irony, can Utopia make a comeback?
November 1, 1999... THE EXPIRING CENTURY HAS NOT been easy on utopias. Born in revolutionary optimism, determined (in Ezra Pound's succinct phrase) to "make it new," the era soon collapsed into bouts of cynicism, war and that ageless downside of ideological...

Appetite for destruction: environmentalists keep sounding warnings, but nobody listens anymore. A real apocalypse may be just what we need.
November 1, 1999... THIS IS NOT YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE: the earthquake Vancouverites have expected for so long, strikes. Predictable destruction follows: small electrical fires, downtown pedestrians cut by a shower of glass, a couple of concrete towers on suddenly...

Generation gap: we invented school to raise our youth to be enlightened adults. Now, we're trying to be cool like them. Won't somebody ... grow up?
November 1, 1999... AS THE TWENTIETH CENTURY CONVULSES to an end like an oxygen-starved smallmouth, North America appears to be entering its second childhood. How else to explain why the entire culture has become obsessed with adolescents? The fall television...

Middle-age madness: heavy gates, guarded entrances: welcome to today's feudal home - another sign of the "new medievalism" that's spreading ...
November 1, 1999... IMAGINE YOU ARE, SAY, A BISHOP IN medieval Europe. You have a bad relationship with the townspeople (probably because you've taxed them too much) and you want to sequester yourself from the rabble. What do you do? Build a wall around your...

My own private paradise: if activists spend more time building perfect collectives than taking action, how can we expect to change the world?
November 1, 1999... AS I RUN AROUND THE TRACK AT MY local YMCA, I notice an old "comrade" riding the stationary bicycle. I quickly avert my eyes out of guilt--there is a campaign on to boycott the x for participating in a workfare-type scheme. On the next lap, I...

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow: the free-market right are obsessed with the future - because it lets them ignore the mess we're stuck with ...
November 1, 1999... IT WAS A TYPICAL DAY AT THE OFFICE: EVERYONE WOULD work for five or six minutes, then nervously check their online stock tickers. I was visiting a friend at her workplace, a new-media company--the sort of place typically populated by...

Under the big black sun: hope and fear in the shadow of the Bomb: a photo essay by Kyo Maclear and John Massier.
November 1, 1999... IN 1950, AMERICAN SINGER PEGGY LEE RECORDED A song called "Show Me The Way Out of This World ('Cause That's Where Everything Is)." Written by Les Clark and Matt Dennis, it was the last song Lee would record for Capitol Records, a typically...

Hockey heaven, hockey hell: hockey night in Port Hawkesbury.
November 1, 1999... My hometown's hockey team was called the Port Hawkesbury Pirates. Their colours were maroon and white and they had a fierce pirate's-head eyepatch emblazoned in the center of their jerseys. Their greatest rivals were the Antigonish Bulldogs. I...

Maple Leafs elimination dance.
November 1, 1999... American rock stars who wear Toronto Maple Leafs hockey sweaters --Michael Ondaatje in Elimination Dance Anyone who has ever said, "It's only a game." Those who were irritated last spring by noise in the evenings--car horns and...

Wake up and retire: the ads urge us to work hard, save today - so we can retire in bliss tomorrow. In retirement, the sun will never set ...
November 1, 1999... MY GRANDFATHER, FAST APPROACHING HIS 90TH birthday, is what you might call "fun-loving" He still drives (sort of), still manages to "charm the ladies" (sort of--when I joked about it with him on my last visit, he admitted to me for the first...

Captains outrageous: on the trail of history's rebel army.
November 1, 1999... Kensington Market: 2020 "Why's it called market, anyways?" Oliver asked Colin as they walked through the neighbourhood. It was sunny and the pure white pavement glowed. "Well," the older boy said, thinking it over. "Probably for the...

Dear Mr. Brezhnev, I don't want to die: nuclear destruction ... The threat has certainly not gone away. So why doesn't anybody talk about it ...?
November 1, 1999... "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BOYS AND GIRLS" SAYS THE shiny-faced boy on the stage, back stiff, arms dangling like dead weight at his side. "Imagine, if you will, living in a world where there is no sun. Imagine a time when thick clouds of...

Rave against the machine: rave culture once promised something truly extraordinary, capable of transforming the world ... the spirit is gone ...
November 1, 1999... IT WAS ALL THUMP AND BLEEP. SIMPLE ANALOG computer sounds that, amplified to discotheque volume, somehow suggested a new future for the human race. A thousand kids, wearing no style in particular, dancing sexily, rhythmically, or even just...

Mr. Dystopia: it would be easy to dismiss Michael Rosenberg as ... another Luddite eccentric ... his dark take on computers may be ... on the mark.
November 1, 1999... "OH HONEY," YOU THINK WHEN YOU FIRST MEET MICHAEL ROSENBERG, "FORGET THE INTERVIEW--we've got to talk total makeover," for it is heartbreakingly evident that this man has reached the age of 35 with an astonishingly ill-developed sense of...

Shopping in paradise: from Nike Town in New York to the Roots Lodge in pristine Ucluelet, B.C., branded superstores are becoming ... utopias ...
November 1, 1999... YOU CAN PLAY ON AN NBA-CLASS BASKETBALL COURT while shopping at Nike Town or thumb though magazines while taking in live classical music at Indigo. You can test-drive thousands of discs at the Virgin megastore or relive summer camp at the Roots...

Changing heaven: a memoir of shifting utopias in the city of promises.
November 1, 1999... {1} COMING INTO THIS CITY, FRIGHTENED AND ELATED at 17, running out into the multiple-laned corner of Jane and Finch, dodging heavy traffic, huddled cold under snow for the first time, climbing onto buses and not knowing how to get off. Your...

What fresh hell is this? ... In a new breed of disaster flicks ... epistemologies fly along with the bullets and we get to change the end ...
November 1, 1999... A VERY IMPORTANT SORT OF PASSION PLAY WAS PERFORMED earlier this year, one that defined the beliefs of our age the way The Pilgrim's Progress did for the seventeenth century. You might have missed this intellectual milestone, since it took the...

Vixen.
November 1, 1999... memory Last night I danced a polka with the gods underneath the shadow of a moon. This morning I awaken to seek the lizard with knowing eyes, but instead I see a day nurse. "Good, you are awake" she says. "Oh no, I'm not" I answer...

2,500 superballs or chance operation with blue buttons.
November 1, 1999... On a clear Sunday morning in downtown Halifax, LUCY PULLEN and co-conspirator SANDY PLOTNIKOFF dropped 2,500 Superballs from the roof of a seven-storey car park. About 150 onlookers watched from a safe distance as the balls plummeted toward...

Marion bridge.
November 1, 1999... Robertson Davies once wrote that Canadian art was "frozen art by a frozen people." Clearly, he never met the high-strung likes of the authors below. Emotions are raging in this latest crop of new Canadian writing, and the hysteria is very...

Airborne photo.
November 1, 1999... If anybody needs to make new friends, it's Clint Burnham. His new collection of short stories, AIRBORNE PHOTO (Anvil), is the single most misanthropic book I've read since Not Wanted on the Voyage, and that crabby book had a cat for a central...

Am I disturbing you?
November 1, 1999... Anne Hebert has been writing exquisite, cool and calculating novels of love and displacement since before I was born. But her new novel AM I DISTURBING YOU? reads like a first novel--the kind of vibrant book you'd expect a youthful, Plath-prone...

for him and the girls. Hawksley Workman.
November 1, 1999... You could, if you liked, skip over HAWKSLEY WORKMAN's history ("I was born and raised on an old highway near a cold, spring-fed lake," reads the mock bio posted on his Web site) or his dapper-dresser persona. His music doesn't really need the...

Sweet dreams (the popularization of dreamcatchers debases aboriginal culture).
November 1, 1999... I USED TO WONDER WHY THE elders keep some things so secret. On the one hand, they impress upon us the need to spread our collective wisdom. On the other hand, they hide medicine masks and wampum belts from prying eyes, and keep some ceremonies...