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Had the Virgin Mary no girl friends?

Visiting an exhibit of Albrecht Dürer woodcuts at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria (AGGV) on Sunday, I was especially struck by one image in his series The Life of the Virgin: her death.

At this most intimate and final moment of her life, she is surrounded by a phalanx of ten solicitous and grieving men (the apostles).

How very odd, I thought.

In one of the earlier woodcuts – The Birth of the Virgin – we see Anne (Mary’s mother) surrounded by women. That seems appropriate enough, right?

Yet by the time the Virgin Mary is herself ready to give birth (to Christ) – a scene that’s not represented, replaced instead by The Adoration of the Shepherds – other women are missing in action. It wouldn’t be extraordinary if Joseph had acted as midwife (it wouldn’t be the first time that the husband fills that post, for midwives do get stuck in traffic or are otherwise late in arriving), yet we never hear about that. No agency is given to Joseph – no stories of how he heroically clamped or knotted the umbilical chord or wiped the mucus from the infant’s air passages. Nope, Jesus probably delivered himself, or else had help directly from the Holy Ghost.

In the interpretations given by scholars and artists centuries after the storied events occurred, women are very much on the sidelines.

You’d think that the Virgin Mary was much loved by women, wouldn’t you? Yet her death, in this all-men’s setting that seems more appropriate to Socrates’s suicide, leads one to believe that Mary only mattered when she was interpreted and understood and venerated by just one half of humanity.

I know that the iconography for Mary’s death is established by textual authority (how she was surrounded by the Apostles, etc.). But because Dürer in every other way captures a kind of stolid, bourgeois realism – his figures practically scream “Augsburg, here we come!” – it suddenly seems shocking to see that level of realism (in how the figures look) married to such a pig-headed level of abstraction (that the Virgin would be surrounded only by men at her death).

In most other ways, his realism (which includes an often insidious view of women, whom Dürer too often shows as vain or weak or selfish) wins out: The scene of Christ Taking Leave from His Mother presents another woman in a significant position – but she’s there to support Mary, who, in a moment of motherly weakness (wanting – selfishly [sic] – to preserve her son?), has collapsed in grief. In the earlier Presentation at the Temple (in which Mary is a girl-child), women are already diminished: there’s her mother Anne (looking smug), a couple of semi-obscured women in the claque of relatives, and two devious-looking female merchants. At Mary’s marriage to Joseph, we see a few females – relatives? Mere filler. The Sojourn in Egypt vignette seems to be men-only, which is downright weird. But overall, I don’t really have any problems with most of those scenes – Dürer was in many ways simply reflecting back what he imagined everyday and ceremonial life would have been like, and that meant no particularly significant roles for women, as well as a view of women that didn’t really highlight their virtues. But how idiotic to imagine that the death of beloved woman would take place without a single other woman around.

Below, two more images I snapped in situ (perhaps against the rules?) – for better images, go to this page.

Birth of the Virgin Mary: many women in attendance (no men, but appropriate to event)

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Christ leaving home: Virgin Mary, weak, is supported by a woman, another stands and observes

Addendum: Compare Dürer’s Death of the Virgin to Caravaggio’s Death of the Virgin, where several of the apostles seem almost feminine in their overt grief, a display of emotion that in no way diminishes them, and which also features – front and center, right where she belongs – Mary Magdalene.

Power/ Influence

A few days ago the Vancouver Sun published BC’s top 100 influential women – it’s entirely possible that I would have missed the Sun‘s report if not for Alexandra Samuel‘s extensive blog post, Vancouver Sun list of 100 influential women in BC shows influence beyond Twitter.

This evening I came across Are you an influencer? on The Next Web Shareables. There are two videos in this post – one is a short trailer, the other is a 14-minute version. The influencers are almost all – and I mean all – men. Young, too, and often pretty macho. There’s one woman who gets interviewed more extensively, and aside from her (and a brief image of Marilyn Munroe, of all people) it’s men, men, men: discursively, it’s a world where women simply don’t exist, except for exotic exceptions that serve to rub in how absent we are otherwise.

From my not-so-in-depth examination (so far) of the Vancouver Sun piece (I have some ambition to pick it apart later, but haven’t done so yet), it seemed to me that the top 100 influential women in BC are almost all from Vancouver: it’s as if anything beyond Metro Vancouver doesn’t exist.

Before seeing the Are you an influencer video tonight, I had been thinking, tangentially, about the importance of location / place in determining who gets to be counted as an influencer (and why), and about how location concentrates and drives influence and power. Specifically with the BC’s top 100 influential women piece in mind, I had been thinking about Vancouver and how it seems unlikely for that location to share power and influence with other locations in BC.

At the same time, I was recalling that 25 years ago Vancouver was for all intents and purposes a hick town, really: when my friend and fellow grad student Steve at the University of British Columbia announced to faculty that he planned to write an Art History Master’s Thesis about a Canadian art movement, one of the senior professors – an Englishman who studied Tiepolo, regularly removing himself from Vancouver as often as he could to pursue his studies in situ in Italia – warned Steve that, by limiting himself to such a provincial scope, he was burying himself “in a very shallow grave.” In other words, young man (or young woman), if you didn’t study Pollock or Picasso – or any of the other big-name brand-name all-male stars – and if instead you chose a new (but obscure!) topic that you cared about (or, gasp!, a woman artist to study), you were not going to be an influencer yourself. You could only become an influencer by attaching yourself to a Big Name.

Fact. Honest truth. The Tiepolo scholar was telling Steve that he could not, within the framework of the Academy, become an influencer if he chose to study something un-influential (sotto voce, that meant “study an important male artist, it will pay off for you – do not choose to study an insignificant movement or heaven forbid a woman artist”).

Do you see the contradiction? Sure, you might say, “well, hip influencers these days don’t want to work in the Academy,” but I’m telling you that there is no “out there,” and that instead, the academy is all around us, morphing to provide the context of power every time. Call it Academy 2.0, call it Influencer Academy: it’s still a power structure. If you’re outside that Academy, good luck flopping around in your shallow grave.

So the question with regard to the “top 100 influential women” article and its Vancouver-centrism might be, “how does a place become the sort of framework that allows certain things / people to achieve influence?” Vancouver has become that sort of place. Is it the concentration of capital and power, which in turn conveys some sort of benediction on those who do manage to achieve success within it?

As for the continued existence of the Academy, just watch the Influencers video and be amazed at how tightly it’s still controlled by men – but then realize that the video was created by two men. So, no big surprise, eh? If women don’t step up and make these kinds of documentaries, well, then, tant pis pour nous, as they say might say in Quebec. In that sense, I applaud the Sun‘s B.C.’s Top 100 Influential Women series and I’m thrilled to see every single woman on there.

The issue of place keeps nagging at me, of course. Victoria can certainly be the most shallow of graves…

I don’t know what became of Steve, who “sacrificed” becoming an influencer (aka, joining the Big Men) by instead studying obscure Canadian socialist art of the 1930s.

But how superficial would our culture be if we only studied the Big Men, amplifying a power structure that trades only within the Academy? We don’t need another hero, and we don’t need a fancier Echo Chamber either.

Women in movies: where are they?

Last night, while I was scribbling away on my “-ectomy” post, the spouse and son popped My Man Godfrey into the DVD player. We’ve all seen the movie multiple times, but it has such great dialogue that it’s a cinch to watch often.

Tonight, I’m not writing the blog post now in my (imaginary) “must-write” queue (namely, a follow-up to Salim Jiwa’s presentation at Social Media Club Victoria) because I went to PechaKucha Night Victoria Vol.2. Instead, tonight’s post is a quickie about movies.

So I’ll just leave you with a short video I watched this afternoon, The Bechdel Test for Women in Movies (only 2minutes 2seconds long). It made me wonder how well My Man Godfrey stands up to Bechdel’s test.

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Even though My Man Godfrey is a classic romantic comedy where everything revolves around the girl-gets-guy story, I’d say it passes the test. Cornelia and Irene (sisters) talk to each other – often enough it’s sibling rivalry and they fight about men, but they also talk about other things; Angelica (mother) converses with her daughters; and Molly (maid) talks to Irene – albeit about Godfrey. Godfrey certainly does, as per the film’s title, dominate many of the conversations, but at least the women have personalities and can talk to one another about different topics.

Then what’s with the slew of more recent films that fly by in feministfrequency‘s video – all of which fail Bechdel’s test?  Have men become more immature in recent decades and lost their balls (or are we – all of us – too culturally adapted to “swallowing” cartoonish men)? Even Princess Bride – a wonderful film – fails the test. Sure, it’s tongue-in-cheek, but let’s prick the fairy-tale balloon for a sec. It’s as if Buttercup is a proto-mommy, a mother in waiting, on the cusp of taking care of the boy who ran away to become a pirate.

Women don’t have conversations amongst themselves on topics not related to the little boys who are the apples of their mommies’ eyes (stuck in some strange mirror stage)… It’s segregation, a mono-culture (one-dimensional), over-processed (like Wonder Bread) – comfortable, goes down easy, practically digests itself.

Possible solution? Go to film festivals and watch movies outside the Wonder Bread mainstream.

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The mirror stage describes the formation of the Ego via the process of identification, the Ego being the result of identifying with one’s own specular image. At six months the baby still lacks coordination (see Louis Bolk); however, it can recognize itself in the mirror before attaining control over its bodily movements. The child sees its image as a whole, and the synthesis of this image produces a sense of contrast with the uncoordination of the body, which is perceived as a fragmented body. This contrast is first felt by the infant as a rivalry with its own image, because the wholeness of the image threatens it with fragmentation, and thus the mirror stage gives rise to an aggressive tension between the subject and the image. To resolve this aggressive tension, the subject identifies with the image: this primary identification with the counterpart is what forms the Ego. (Dylan Evans, op.cit) The moment of identification is to Lacan a moment of jubilation since it leads to an imaginary sense of mastery. (Écrits, “The Mirror Stage”) Yet, the jubilation may also be accompanied by a depressive reaction, when the infant compares his own precarious sense of mastery with the omnipotence of the mother. (La relation d’objet) This identification also involves the ideal ego which functions as a promise of future wholeness sustaining the Ego in anticipation.

The mirror stage shows that the Ego is the product of misunderstanding – Lacan’s term “méconnaissance” implies a false recognition – and the place where the subject becomes alienated from itself: the process by which the ego is formed in the Mirror Stage is at the same time the institution of alienation from the symbolic determination of being. In this sense méconnaissance is an imaginary misrecognition of a symbolic knowledge that the subject possesses somewhere. It must be emphasized again that the Mirror Stage introduces the subject into the Imaginary order.

The Mirror Stage has also a significant symbolic dimension. The symbolic order is present in the figure of the adult who is carrying the infant: the moment after the subject has jubilantly assumed his image as his own, he turns his head toward this adult who represents the big Other, as if to call on him to ratify this image. (source)

“Good-bye, Name-for-yourself…”

A while back I watched It Should Happen to You, a 1954 comedy directed by George Cukor. The film is often cited as being Jack Lemmon‘s career-launching vehicle, but Judy Holliday is the one to watch.

Holliday plays Gladys Glover, a pretty young woman who came to Manhattan two years earlier to seek fame and fortune. But when we meet her, she has just lost her modeling job because of a 3/4″ increase in hip size.

She’s kind of fed up with everything as she wanders through Central Park, annoys various people, and then becomes part of some documentary footage being shot by Jack Lemmon’s character, Pete Sheppard.

Naturally, Pete falls for Gladys, but never has a more stuck-up character fallen for a creative genius. Yes, I’m talking about Lemmon’s character as the stuck-up guy and Holliday’s Gladys Glover as the genius.

See, Gladys realizes something that the rest of the world – even Andy Warhol – doesn’t catch up to until much later: the importance of personal branding (or, alternately, securing one’s 15-minutes of fame). She succeeds in getting what she wants most: that her name become a household word. (See this Wikipedia entry for a succinct plot summary and description.)

But since the movie is from the early 50s, it’s inevitable that a man should bring Gladys “down to earth,” by reconciling her at the end of the movie to an ordinary life in an ordinary setting. It’s pretty obvious that they’re not going to settle down in Manhattan – they’ll go back to her upstate hometown or live somewhere just outside the city. In Westchester, no doubt.

Admittedly, Gladys Glover is a bit of a kook – but then, so was Audrey Hepburn’s Holly Golightly, who at least becomes iconic. In the end of course even Holly Golightly doesn’t soar to freedom, although it’s less likely that she ended up in as conventional a relationship with George Peppard’s Paul Varjak as Gladys must with Lemmon’s Sheppard.

Gladys – such a 50s name! – can’t stay kooky. Her initial act – renting a giant billboard that overlooks Columbus Circle just so she can emblazon it with her personal name – makes Lemmon’s character think she’s certifiable. “After all, no one hires display space just to put their name on it!” he splutters.

Or, how about his other “it-goes-without-saying” pronouncement, which certainly resonates today: “What most people – real people – want is privacy!”

“Not me,” the kook (aka Gladys Glover) replies.

He enjoins her to “learn to be a part of the crowd,” but that prospect just depresses her.

And so, Gladys ends up on a proto-typical reality show circuit, where a public-at-large speculates about her identity. “All she’s got is nerve,” someone says. And “that’s all you need these days” is the reply.

As the film builds to its climax (Gladys unhappy with the emptiness of fame) before the final denouement (Gladys finding happiness in being just another average girl who finds happiness with an average guy in an average relationship set in what will probably be an average suburban subdivision), her handlers (for she has indeed acquired professional handlers along the way) set out to exploit her “unusualness.” How? By showing that the average American girl is …unusual.

That right there is another brilliant foreshadowing of every marketing angle to hit the pike since this film was made.

But is there a clear-cut alternative? Lemmon’s character seems to think so, but its price-tag (the woman subordinating herself to her man) is unacceptably steep.

Sheppard’s otherwise conventional advice to Gladys, who wants to make a name for herself, was enlivened only by this: “It isn’t just making a name, it’s making a name stand for something.” That’s what Gladys latches on to when her creative quest for fame goes wrong.

When she says, “Good-bye, name-for-yourself,” and packs it in, she expresses how difficult it is to keep your name as yours once it circulates as common stock. Identity and privacy, particularly control over privacy, are clearly and intricately linked.

It’s too bad she opts for merging her identity into Sheppard’s. By the end of the film, I sort of hoped that the marriage wouldn’t last.

Developers v. NIMBYs: Lessons from “Johnny Guitar”

Watching Nicholas Ray‘s 1954 classic Western Johnny Guitar, I kept focusing on the antagonisms between Joan Crawford’s character Vienna and Mercedes McCambridge’s Emma Small as ones between developers and NIMBYs. The story is psychologically complex, conjuring objectively social and personally individual reasons for both the desire to maintain the status quo and the will to change it.

On the one hand, Emma Small’s security is threatened by change. She’s a big fish in a small pond, comfortably established as a landowner and cattle baron(ess). She has enough social status and power to boss the community’s menfolk around, too. No wonder she resists the changes that development would bring – and development is literally embodied in Joan Crawford’s Vienna.  Vienna runs a saloon where social control lapses and norms break down through risk when patrons enjoy enough alcohol, entertainment, and gambling. Vienna is a risk-taker herself, and she’s not afraid to peddle risk. Like any developer worth his or her salt, she’s taking a huge risk when she stakes everything (including social goodwill) on her main gamble: that the railroad will come to the area. Should she win, she’ll develop the depot and upzone her lowly saloon into a key mercantile hub and infrastructure powerhouse.

Intertwined in that objective description, however, are forces fueled by desire. For example, Vienna has also successfully sold herself as a purveyor of glamour. In one scene, Emma verbally pistol-whips the all-male posse to stop playing with themselves and to hunt Vienna instead. She taunts them for believing that Vienna is somehow better quality, or that they, by associating with her, are improved. In not so many words, Emma reminds the men that Vienna is cheap and that they’re still just cowpokes – in other words, that change (for the men) is an illusion. They’re essentially still swine (reversing Circe’s trick) and should remember their place. Change is for tricksters; real people should be content with their lot, especially if it’s a relatively cozy and secure one. Real people don’t take risks, it seems. If you can avoid risk, you can avoid change.

And here’s where additional psychological complexity comes into play: the change that’s very close to home for Emma Small is a sexual one. Emma has convinced herself that an outlaw named The Dancin’ Kid is behind a stage coach robbery that killed her brother. A not-so-minor detail is that The Dancin’ Kid frequents Vienna’s saloon and occasionally shares Vienna’s bed. It’s through the body of The Dancin’ Kid that Emma’s fear of change multiplies in her own mind, eventually encompassing all change, whether social or personal. As Vienna puts it in answering Johnny Guitar’s question why Emma has it in for The Dancin’ Kid, “he makes her feel like a woman, and that scares her.” In fact, toward the end of the film, Emma puts a bullet through The Dancin’ Kid’s head, literally stopping change in its tracks …temporarily, at any rate.

At its core, the story suggests that change has social and personal drivers – and in every case where we think we’ve identified the “objective” social reasons, there are underlying psychological reasons that drive the actors in individual ways both difficult to identify and to reason with.

I’ve seen Johnny Guitar a couple of times now, but this is the first time I watched it through the lens of urban development and community consultation.

Bonus: Image of Circe (via Flickr here)

Why I think the newspaper is a (waste paper)basket case

I updated my Facebook status yesterday with a note about being very angry at our local newspaper, The Times-Colonist, for essentially stealing a story and then not reporting it properly anyway, and for exemplifying the ugliest, but I mean the ugliest, aspects of an “old boys network” mentality. That prompted some of my Facebook friends to write on my wall or leave messages, asking what was up.

Even though I know that this local paper is a total waste paper basket case and that nothing will change it, I had better muster the energy and interest to write my reply. First, some background:

• around the middle of last month I submitted a paragraph-long write up to FastCompany, nominating Victoria for “fast city” status; you can read about the whole process here: So “fast,” I’m nearly invisible, my blog entry from July 18, 2007
• if you read through to the update and follow the comments on the comments board, you’ll see that Dan Gunn from VIATec commented on July 19; I communicated all the information he needed to visit, rank, and comment since, as I learned also that very day, Victoria had been accepted by FastCompany’s editorial team: see Victoria’s page
• on July 20, I emailed Bruce Carter of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce about my submission, explaining the nomination and asking him to rank / comment on Victoria (I never heard back from him: no response)
• I emailed as many people I could think of, but heard back from none — a disappointing process I wrote about on my blog on July 29, in a post called Benchmarks; I ended this entry with these remarks: “And so the response / lack of response has become another benchmark for me. Climates of trust are built on response and responsiveness.”
• in the middle of July, I wrote a brief article about Victoria, which dealt with the “fast city” submission and also addressed the findings of Geoffrey West, featured in the July/Aug.2007 edition of SEED Magazine (“The Living City” by Jonah Lehrer)
• on July 17, I submitted this article to another local paper, The Business Examiner, and while I received an email back from the publisher (Simon Lindley), I never heard once from the editor (Steve Weatherbe), who was on vacation initially but ignored all subsequent emails from me, including the last one on I sent on Aug.2; in that email, I wrote that since I hadn’t heard from him since his return from vacation on July 23, I assumed it was ok if I placed my article elsewhere
• on Aug. 13, Vibrant Victoria published my article (called The Race That Should be On: Victoria as “Fast City?”), linking to it from its front page as well as from the forum; I noted its appearance on my blog that same day with this entry: My “fast” appearance on Vibrant Victoria

I would argue that all of this establishes my role in this story — in fact, without me, there wouldn’t have been a story. And without Vibrant Victoria, whose focus is primarily on urbanism — not technology — my article would not have been published locally. Certainly The Business Examiner showed zero interest, aside from the friendly and courteous reply I received from its publisher. The editor, however, left unanswered what were at least 3 emails from me.

But now look what a cat’s breakfast our local daily paper, The Times-Colonist, and its allegedly professional reporter, Mr. Andrew A. Duffy, make of it. On Aug.17, co-incidentally (or not?) a mere 4 days after my piece appeared on VV’s page, he produced a front page — yes, a front page — article called Does Victoria make the cut? Its teaser intro states, “‘Booming’ Victoria should get quick trip to fast-city status, say tech workers”… Suddenly, this is solely an issue centred on technology, not urbanism; and suddenly, it’s also something that just sort of happened, and that was created — without Duffy ever writing who was behind it (me!) — by the technology sector. Who happen to be all men, too. Most galling is the fact that Duffy clearly interviewed Dan Gunn and Bruce Carter, and that even though they were in the picture from July 19/20 onward, they fail to mention my pivotal role.

And yes, I emailed both “gentlemen,” but have heard nothing back from either one.

Here’s what Duffy wrote in his fluff piece of distortion — it’s the full article, but I shall interrupt for clarity:

Does Victoria make the cut?
‘Booming’ Victoria should get quick trip to fast-city status, say tech workers
Andrew A. Duffy, Times Colonist staff
Published: Friday, August 17, 2007

‘Fast cities” are billed as creative, innovative places of the future, and a group of Victoria high-tech workers believes it’s high time B.C.’s capital joined their number.

That’s called fudging the facts. Duffy makes it sound as if these “high-tech workers” nominated Victoria. They didn’t — they’re not that fast.

Fast Company, a magazine that sells itself as a playbook for and chronicler of the “new economy,” recently released its Fast Cities issue, listing the 30 fastest cities — those deemed ideal for you and your business — in the world.

Victoria did not make the list, but Toronto and Vancouver did — the only Canadian cities to do so.

Ah, again: wrong. Duffy can’t get anything right, can he? Calgary also made the cut. Moral of this part of the story? Whatever you do, don’t believe everything that so-called professional journalists tell you.

But some capital region tech workers think Victoria should make the cut the next time round.

Already, 27 people, most tech workers, have gone to bat for Victoria on the Fast Company website ( www.fastcompany.com).

Poor Mr. Duffy is decidedly un-web-savvy, otherwise he would have linked to the page for Victoria, for it’s not exactly easy to find us otherwise. There’s the user map, but even that takes a number of zoom-in clicks to the Pacific Northwest.

“Victoria is booming! There are cranes everywhere. Jobs are plentiful and we were a host city for the FIFA U-20. We just need the rest of the country to recognize it,” wrote Thomas Guerrero.

I would guess Duffy was being very lazy here. That’s the first comment up, and it indicates to me that he didn’t bother scrolling down the page to read some of the other remarks.

According to Dan Gunn, executive director of the Vancouver Island Advanced Technology Centre, it’s about time people starting talking about Victoria in glowing terms.

“It’s very important to us if we are going to maintain our largest private-sector industry,” said Gunn of getting Victoria onto the world’s radar screen. “We can’t be a quiet industry anymore and that involves pumping up our chests once in a while.”

Gunn said that while Victoria’s high-tech industry has grown to a $1.7-billion sector and is going head-to-head with cities around the world for talent and investment, it sometimes gets forgotten.

“We’re not on the tip of everyone’s tongue like Silicon Valley,” he said. “Can we honestly expect to be put in the same category? No, but we can be considered one of the up-and-coming, most innovative and best places to live.”

Yes, it’s about time people started talking the place up, but you know what? It wasn’t your technologists at VIATec who did it, Dan. And it’s not about “pumping up” in some manly macho manner, either.

Bruce Carter, CEO of the Greater Victoria Chamber of Commerce, applauded the talk-up-Victoria campaign, saying Victoria has been too modest for too long.

Lovely, Bruce, glad to know that you applauded. But guess what? I didn’t hear you!

“It’s our job to do that, our job as associations, and as a municipality and citizens to say, ‘hey we’re not newlywed and nearly dead. There is lots of stuff going on here,’ ” he said. And, he said, the city can sell itself as a place for large companies to set down head offices by playing up the lifestyle for workers.

Vancouver made the fast cities list as a green leader alongside Chicago, Stockholm and Portland, Ore., while Toronto made the list as a global village alongside Johannesburg and Berlin. Other cities on the 30-fastest list include usual suspects like New York, San Francisco, Raleigh-Durham, N.C., London, Shanghai and Sydney.

The magazine also put out a list of five slow cities: Budapest, Havana, New Orleans, Detroit and St. Louis, Mo.; five too-fast cities: Cairo; Almaty, Kazakhstan; Greenwich, Conn.; Las Vegas; and Shenzhen, China; and 20 cities on the verge, which included Seattle, Los Angeles, Tokyo and Beijing.