In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” (1836), Parson Hooper causes a sensation in the sleepy New England town of Milford by donning a black veil without explanation. Parson Hooper continues to wear this veil throughout his life while his bizarre behaviour convinces his clergy that the veil must hide some sinister, unspeakable sin. On [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Québec’s Black Veil
May 12, 2010 by
Blind Man with a Pistol: ‘Police Brutality Is Not a Game’
August 2, 2009 by
The 2009 World Police and Fire Games kicked off in Vancouver this weekend. More than 12 000 police officers from around the world will compete in 65 sporting events over the next ten days. The event has prompted the Vancouver Anti-Poverty Committee to call for a mobilization against police brutality both locally and internationally, under [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Free and Fair
June 17, 2009 by
‘Free and Fair’ elections is quickly becoming a registered trademark, patented by the West, used only in the negative against enemies of Western hegemony. To wit, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and most recently and most sensationally, Iran, all attract Western solicitude, debutante champions of ‘democracy’ soberly measuring the ‘freedom’ and ‘fairness’ of brown people everywhere. When, I [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Happy Bloomsday
June 16, 2009 by
On 16 June 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first date, after Nora has stood up James two days prior. They walked to Ringsend, a small park near Dublin’s harbour, and may-or-may-not have engaged in intimate speculation. At any rate, the date made enough of an impression on Joyce that he used that [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Ten Things I Will Miss About Scotland
June 5, 2009 by
It’s been a busy month for BMWAP. Yesterday morning I woke up with the sun rising over the Forth Bridge, grabbed my bags and took a taxi to Edinburgh airport. Yesterday evening, I found myself driving down Highway 2 through the cornfields of Ontario. As I work through the trauma of leaving behind the old [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Pyrrhic Victories
April 30, 2009 by
On 20 March 2003, under false pretences, under the grotesque banner of ‘shock and awe’, despite the protests of the largest demonstration the world had ever seen, despite two-million marchers in London on 15 February that year, the armed forces of the United Kingdom invaded Iraq. On 30 April 2009, with 179 British soldiers and [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Back Bacon
April 28, 2009 by
Pandemics exert a particular hold on the social imagination. From as far back as Oedipus Rex, the plague reveals the fragility of the social bond, our fear and suspicion of the necessary connection that binds us. More recently, George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) exploits this fear—expressed in racism, sexual gaze and state [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Police on my Back
April 19, 2009 by
If you are a British citizen, you should be furious. The severe and brazen violence exercised by the London Metropolitan police upon its citizens during and after the G20 protests is the direct result of unbridled and rampant expansion of executive and coercive powers of the British state. The cream of the crop such expansion [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Apology Accepted
March 24, 2009 by
Peter McKay got the apology he demanded from Fox News after the late-night show Red Eye mocked the Canadian military on the day four more soldiers lost their lives in Afghanistan. I find it incredible that a senior Canadian politician would even comment about what four idiots on an American sideshow Fox have to say [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Liberals Can’t Read
March 17, 2009 by
I don’t usually deal with party politics on this site, but in this case I will make an exception. As many of you probably don’t know, in the last budget, the Conservative government tried to ideologically hack research funding for the social sciences and the humanities by stipulating that money given to support doctorate research [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: Cold Pastoral
February 2, 2009 by
Plenty of people are on to the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.
— John Givings, Revolutionary Road
I saw Sam Mendes’s Revolutionary Road (2008) last night, which earned Kate Winslet her first Golden Globe for her performance as a postwar housewife in suburban America, who is not only caught in the suffocating [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: This is not Bedford Falls
January 2, 2009 by
I always disliked Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) as a teenager. I couldn’t buy that George Bailey, the intrepid cavalier whose only reward for discarding his lifelong hopes and dreams for conservative family security was not committing suicide and not losing the livelihood he never wanted. I know there’s suposed to be something [...] …
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Blind Man with a Pistol: The Horror of Fascism
May 2, 2008 by
There is something terrifying about Spanish horror. Films like Alejandro Amenábar’s The Others (2001), Guillermo del Toro’s El espinazo del diablo (The Devil’s Backbone) (2001) and El laberinto del fauno (Pan’s Labyrinth) (2006) have ushered the genre into maturity. I recently saw Juan Antonio Bayona’s brilliant El orfanato (The Orphanage) (2007), a chilling, unsettling entry [...] …
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