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mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

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Portraits of Queen West

Tomorrow (September 14), I'm hosting the EFF Awards in San Francisco. On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy.

Portraits of Queen West is Kevin Steele's extraordinary photo-book, a work of "sequential art" featuring time- and space-series of a single – rather glorious – stretch of Toronto's Queen Street West:

https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest

Steele himself is as extraordinary as his book. I first ran into him through Mackerel Multimedia, the pioneering Canadian multimedia shop that he co-founded in the early 1990s – one of those art-school kids who discovered the Mac, fell in love with the radical possibilities of digital art, and changed the world:

https://craphound.com/nonfic/mackerel.html

Steele's pioneering work – in Hypercard, then CDROMs, then Flash – helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an urbanist feel that owed a debt to Toronto's most beloved adopted urbanist, Jane Jacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable.

Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web's critical "view source" affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful; this affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against enshittification.

Mackerel didn't survive the first great multimedia mass-extinction, but it launched the careers of a whole generation of talented web-writers and builders, and not just its former employees, but also the millions who were touched by its work.

I haven't seen Steele in person in decades, but I follow his work – not as a multimedia artist, but as an urban photographer. Kevin and I follow each other on Flickr – the once great and great again photo-sharing site that survived decades of abuse from Yahoo and Verizon before being taken indie and rescued by the Smugmug folks.

Back in November 2010, Kevin started posting photos of individual storefronts on Queen Street West to Flickr. They were painstakingly labeled and dated, and they multiplied. By the end of the year, there were a couple dozen of them:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1294552799

A year later, there were hundreds:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1326088799

Today, there are over 1,200 of these:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1

Now, I know Queen Street West very well. It was once one of Toronto's most bohemian neighborhoods, where my paternal grandfather's fellow refugee Benny Yacht has his schmata shop and where my maternal grandfather took my mother and her siblings to trade in their comics for credit at cramped, crammed used bookstores.

I discovered Queen West as a pre-teen, thanks to Bakka Books – now Bakka Phoenix – the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world. I haunted Bakka, and, on the way, found myself drawn into the other stores around it:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/48476314831/in/photolist-2gRFMvz-2oJJDCY

There was Silver Snail, a massive comics shop, but a bounty of used bookstores, vintage clothing stores, thrift shops, the indescribably great electronics store Active Surplus and, later, nightclubs like the Rivoli, the Diamond, the Bovine Sex Club and the Zoo Bar.

For a critical decade of my life and more, the stretch of Queen Street that Steele obsessively documented in his Flickr feed had been the center of my life. I watched it thrive and grow – and then collapse into a kind of self-parody, as the original landlords (like Bakka's landlord) died, and their failsons and faildaughters kicked out longstanding tenants and replaced them with multinational "brands" that turned Queen West into a less-convenient, open-air version of the sterile Eaton Centre mall.

Steele, it turns out, was having similar feelings of dismay as the organic, grown, chaotic delight became groomed, sterile and homogenized. After a 2008 fire wiped out an entire block of Queen West – including Duke's Cycle, a city institution that eventually shuttered after more than a century of service – Steele began his documentation project.

Steele had started documenting the street in 2001, but that fire turned a hobby into a project. Over and over again, Steele returned to the street, meticulously photographing the same storefronts, capturing a time-series that eventually spanned 16 years, from 2001-2017. Steele gradually stitched these photos together into panoramic collages, reproducing whole blocks:

https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=linearpanorama&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1

It is these "linear panoramas" that form the backbone of Portraits of Queen West. The book runs 162 pages, and it meant to be read forwards and backwards – start from the front cover and turn the pages to see the north side of the street, along with insets showing details (like the storied Graffiti Alley), and then flip the book over and start again, seeing the south side.

For more than a decade, I've thrilled to my unexpected trips through Steele's time-machine, as he posted his space-and-time-series images of a vanished urbanism, an old, good city that paralleled the old, good web. I got a peek at a PDF of the new book that collects these extraordinary image and immediately pre-ordered a copy.

Steele and his publisher Black Eye Books are crowdfunding presales of the book on Crowdfundr; the book is CAD40 with shipping (there's also a deluxe edition at CAD55, which comes with a signed bookplate and six postcards):

https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest

After a string of ghastly mayors – each finding new depths of depravity, selfishness and mismanagement to plumb – Toronto just elected its first progressive mayor in a generation, the wonderful Olivia Chow, for whom I used to ring doorbells support of her city council campaigns:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/27/olivia-chow-wins-election-as-torontos-first-chinese-canadian-mayor

Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The enshittification of the old, good web continues apace, but there has never been more energy to build a new, good internet – and banish the enshitternet of Big Tech to the scrapheap of history.

In the same way, Toronto's much eroded urbanism, pluralism and liveability are both at their lowest ebb in my lifetime – and also at their most hopeful moment of the century. In 1998, the dead-eyed Romneyoid Premier of Ontario Mike Harris "amalgamated" Toronto with its suburbs, putting it at the mercy of car-addled out-of-towners in an act of gerrymandering that all-but-guaranteed that city residents' political choices would be swamped by suburbanites who could be convinced to vote for laughable Tory bumblefucks like Rob Ford.

Overcoming the gerrymander required a massive turnout – not merely a supermajority, but an ultramajority of politically motivated, organized, committed, pissed off Torontonians; Chow's election is a minor miracle that part of the wave of other historic reversals, like the DoJ awakening from its coma to drag Google into court on antitrust charges.

We are a long way away from making a new, good internet that's a worthy successor to the old, good internet, and at least as far from a new, good Toronto that the people of the old, good Toronto would have built but for Tory wreckers and the Christmas-voting turkeys who elevated them to office. But both are possible – and both demand that we fight for them.

Steele's beautiful photodocumentary of one slice of that old, good city doesn't just memorialize the world we lost – it is inspiration for a world that is ours to win.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/13/spadina-to-bathurst/#dukes-cycle

EFF Awards, San Francisco, September 14

#pluralistic #books #gift guide #photography #urbanism #toronto #kevin steele #mackerel multimedia #canada #queen street west

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biglisbonnews · 2 years ago

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Pluralistic: Portraits of Queen West (13 Sept 2023) Today's links Portraits of Queen West: Kevin Steele's "sequential art" book of the glory days of Queen Street West. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Portraits of Queen West (permalink) Portraits of Queen West is Kevin Steele's extraordinary photo-book, a work of "sequential art" featuring time- and space-series of a single – rather glorious – stretch of Toronto's Queen Street West: https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest Steele himself is as extraordinary as his book. I first ran into him through Mackerel Multimedia, the pioneering Canadian multimedia shop that he co-founded in the early 1990s – one of those art-school kids who discovered the Mac, fell in love with the radical possibilities of digital art, and changed the world: https://craphound.com/nonfic/mackerel.html Steele's pioneering work – in Hypercard, then CDROMs, then Flash – helped define the look-and-feel of the old, good internet; an urbanist feel that owed a debt to Toronto's most beloved adopted urbanist, Jane Jacobs. Steele and Mackerel made things that were beautiful and human-centered, human-scaled and human-adaptable. Not for nothing, Hypercard presaged the web's critical "view source" affordance, which allowed people to copy, modify, customize and improve on the things that they found delightful or useful; this affordance was later adapted by other human-centered projects like Scratch, and is a powerful tonic against enshittification. Mackerel didn't survive the first great multimedia mass-extinction, but it launched the careers of a whole generation of talented web-writers and builders, and not just its former employees, but also the millions who were touched by its work. I haven't seen Steele in person in decades, but I follow his work – not as a multimedia artist, but as an urban photographer. Kevin and I follow each other on Flickr – the once great and great again photo-sharing site that survived decades of abuse from Yahoo and Verizon before being taken indie and rescued by the Smugmug folks. Back in November 2010, Kevin started posting photos of individual storefronts on Queen Street West to Flickr. They were painstakingly labeled and dated, and they multiplied. By the end of the year, there were a couple dozen of them: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1294552799 A year later, there were hundreds: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-posted-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1&min_upload_date=1073368800&max_upload_date=1326088799 Today, there are over 1,200 of these: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=queenstreetwest&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1 Now, I know Queen Street West very well. It was once one of Toronto's most bohemian neighborhoods, where my paternal grandfather's fellow refugee Benny Yacht has his schmata shop and where my maternal grandfather took my mother and her siblings to trade in their comics for credit at cramped, crammed used bookstores. I discovered Queen West as a pre-teen, thanks to Bakka Books – now Bakka Phoenix – the oldest science fiction bookstore in the world. I haunted Bakka, and, on the way, found myself drawn into the other stores around it: https://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/48476314831/in/photolist-2gRFMvz-2oJJDCY There was Silver Snail, a massive comics shop, but a bounty of used bookstores, vintage clothing stores, thrift shops, the indescribably great electronics store Active Surplus and, later, nightclubs like the Rivoli, the Diamond, the Bovine Sex Club and the Zoo Bar. For a critical decade of my life and more, the stretch of Queen Street that Steele obsessively documented in his Flickr feed had been the center of my life. I watched it thrive and grow – and then collapse into a kind of self-parody, as the original landlords (like Bakka's landlord) died, and their failsons and faildaughters kicked out longstanding tenants and replaced them with multinational "brands" that turned Queen West into a less-convenient, open-air version of the sterile Eaton Centre mall. Steele, it turns out, was having similar feelings of dismay as the organic, grown, chaotic delight became groomed, sterile and homogenized. After a 2008 fire wiped out an entire block of Queen West – including Duke's Cycle, a city institution that eventually shuttered after more than a century of service – Steele began his documentation project. Steele had started documenting the street in 2001, but that fire turned a hobby into a project. Over and over again, Steele returned to the street, meticulously photographing the same storefronts, capturing a time-series that eventually spanned 16 years, from 2001-2017. Steele gradually stitched these photos together into panoramic collages, reproducing whole blocks: https://www.flickr.com/search/?sort=date-taken-desc&safe_search=1&tags=linearpanorama&user_id=92518741%40N00&view_all=1 It is these "linear panoramas" that form the backbone of Portraits of Queen West. The book runs 162 pages, and it meant to be read forwards and backwards – start from the front cover and turn the pages to see the north side of the street, along with insets showing details (like the storied Graffiti Alley), and then flip the book over and start again, seeing the south side. For more than a decade, I've thrilled to my unexpected trips through Steele's time-machine, as he posted his space-and-time-series images of a vanished urbanism, an old, good city that paralleled the old, good web. I got a peek at a PDF of the new book that collects these extraordinary image and immediately pre-ordered a copy. Steele and his publisher Black Eye Books are crowdfunding presales of the book on Crowdfundr; the hardcover is CAD40 with shipping (there's also a deluxe edition at CAD55, which comes with a signed bookplate and six postcards): https://crowdfundr.com/queenwest After a string of ghastly mayors – each finding new depths of depravity, selfishness and mismanagement to plumb – Toronto just elected its first progressive mayor in a generation, the wonderful Olivia Chow, for whom I used to ring doorbells support of her city council campaigns: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jun/27/olivia-chow-wins-election-as-torontos-first-chinese-canadian-mayor Anything that can't go on forever eventually stops. The enshittification of the old, good web continues apace, but there has never been more energy to build a new, good internet – and banish the enshitternet of Big Tech to the scrapheap of history. In the same way, Toronto's much eroded urbanism, pluralism and liveability are both at their lowest ebb in my lifetime – and also at their most hopeful moment of the century. In 1998, the dead-eyed Romneyoid Premier of Ontario Mike Harris "amalgamated" Toronto with its suburbs, putting it at the mercy of car-addled out-of-towners in an act of gerrymandering that all-but-guaranteed that city residents' political choices would be swamped by suburbanites who could be convinced to vote for laughable Tory bumblefucks like Rob Ford. Overcoming the gerrymander required a massive turnout – not merely a supermajority, but an ultramajority of politically motivated, organized, committed, pissed off Torontonians; Chow's election is a minor miracle that part of the wave of other historic reversals, like the DoJ awakening from its coma to drag Google into court on antitrust charges. We are a long way away from making a new, good internet that's a worthy successor to the old, good internet, and at least as far from a new, good Toronto that the people of the old, good Toronto would have built but for Tory wreckers and the Christmas-voting turkeys who elevated them to office. But both are possible – and both demand that we fight for them. Steele's beautiful photodocumentary of one slice of that old, good city doesn't just memorialize the world we lost – it is inspiration for a world that is ours to win. Hey look at this (permalink) Revealed: The Country that Secretly Wiretapped the World for the FBI https://www.404media.co/revealed-the-country-that-secretly-wiretapped-the-world-for-the-fbi/ (spoiler: Lithuania) Celebrating Ten Years of the Marrakesh Treaty https://www.copyright.gov/events/marrakesh-treaty-tenth-anniversary/ (h/t Proton411) Gilead Delayed Introduction Of New Version of HIV Drug, With Fewer Side Effects, Maximizing Its Patent Monopoly And Profits https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/11/gilead-delayed-introduction-of-new-version-of-hiv-drug-with-fewer-side-effects-maximizing-its-patent-monopoly-and-profits/ This day in history (permalink) #15yrsago Little Brother in the New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/14/books/review/Grossman-t.html #15yrsago Mounties review Tasers, conclude that they’re dangerous, misused and under-researched https://web.archive.org/web/20080917202538/http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2008/09/12/taser-review.html #15yrsago Mom accused of stealing daughter’s identity to attend highschool and become a cheerleader https://web.archive.org/web/20080916071716/http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ipppcZU-H4xC9lQiAOQFSF-cfrdAD935H3G80 #15yrsago DHS: HOWTO stop (other governments’) creepy spooks from reading your hard drive and email https://web.archive.org/web/20080913005403/http://secure.wikileaks.org/wiki/US_DHS:_Foreign_Travel_Threat_Assessment:_Electronic_Communications_Vulnerabilities_2008 #10yrsago Feynman lectures as HTML https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_toc.html #10yrsago David Cameron appoints a Witchfinder General for copyright https://torrentfreak.com/uk-prime-minister-appoints-new-anti-piracy-enforcement-advisor-130913/ #10yrsago Google’s lobbyists go big on climate change denial, raise money for Inhofe & Competitive Enterprise Insitute https://memex.craphound.com/2013/09/13/googles-lobbyists-go-big-on-climate-change-denial-raise-money-for-inhofe-competitive-enterprise-insitute/ #10yrsago Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel apologizes for decades of police torture https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2013/0912/Chicago-Mayor-Rahm-Emanuel-apologizes-for-two-decades-of-police-torture #10yrsago Why fingerprints make lousy authentication tokens https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/iphone-5s-thieves-may-mutilate-owners-in-bid-to-gain-access-to-fingerprintreading-handsets-expert-warns-8808577.html #10yrsago Porno copyright trolls Malibu Media sanctioned by court for “extortionate” tactic https://www.techdirt.com/2013/09/11/copyright-troll-malibu-media-sanctioned-bogus-copyright-abuse-intimidation-tactic/ #10yrsago EFF’s guide to NSA reform bills https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/effs-cheat-sheet #10yrsago Doomed to repeat history: Kafkaesque FBI watchlist screwups of the 1940s https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2013/sep/11/tale-two-irvings-mistaken-identity-height-red-scar/ #10yrsago Cognitive blind-spots of Silicon Valley successes http://quarry.stanford.edu/xapm1111126lse/docs/02_LSE_Cognitive.pdf #5yrsago Mandalay Bay to mass-shooting survivors: we’ll donate $500 to charity if you stipulate that we’re suing you https://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-biz-mgm-las-vegas-lawsuit-donation-20180911-story.html #5yrsago This is the golden age of Chinese science fiction https://www.scmp.com/culture/books/article/2093892/science-fictions-new-golden-age-china-what-it-says-about-social #5yrsago Europe just voted to wreck the internet, spying on everything and censoring vast swathes of our communications https://memex.craphound.com/2018/09/12/europe-just-voted-to-wreck-the-internet-spying-on-everything-and-censoring-vast-swathes-of-our-communications/ #5yrsago Sony: OK, OK, we don’t own Bach https://www.eff.org/takedowns/sony-finally-admits-it-doesnt-own-bach-and-it-only-took-public-pressure #5yrsago Machine learning scientist quits Google over plan to launch censored Chinese search tool https://theintercept.com/2018/09/13/google-china-search-engine-employee-resigns/ #5yrsago Charter, ordered out of New York State, begs for its life https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/09/charter-negotiating-with-ny-to-avoid-being-kicked-out-of-the-state/ #5yrsago 20% of New York retail space is sitting vacant https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/09/06/nyregion/nyc-storefront-vacancy.html #5yrsago Viral road-rage video sparks mob violence in Beijing, revealing deep regional rifts https://www.whatsonweibo.com/fury-and-loathing-in-fengtai-how-one-incident-sparked-chaos-in-beijing-neighbourhood/ #5yrsago Six years ago, North Carolina Republicans passed a law decreeing that the seas weren’t rising https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/12/north-carolina-didnt-like-science-on-sea-levels-so-passed-a-law-against-it #5yrsago How anarchist organizers in rural Puerto Rico rebooted their power grid after the privatized power company abandoned them https://www.newsweek.com/puerto-ricans-restore-power-after-hurricane-maria-1114070 #5yrsago “Spread Pricing” transparency reveals the millions CVS rakes in by gouging Medicare and prisons on prescription markups https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2018-drug-spread-pricing/ #5yrsago Trade negotiators are increasingly unwilling to entertain “corporate sovereignty” clauses https://www.techdirt.com/2018/09/13/corporate-sovereignty-wane-as-governments-realize-more-trouble-than-worth/ #1yrago Survival of the Richest: Douglas Rushkoff on the eschatology of libertarian exit https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/13/collapse-porn/#collapse-porn #1yrago Spotify steals from artists, a Spotify exclusive https://pluralistic.net/2022/09/12/streaming-doesnt-pay/#stunt-publishing Colophon (permalink) Today's top sources: Currently writing: A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Moral Hazard, a short story for MIT Tech Review's 12 Tomorrows. FIRST DRAFT COMPLETE, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation (audiobook outtake) https://craphound.com/news/2023/08/01/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation-audiobook-outtake/ Upcoming appearances: EFF Awards (San Francisco), Sept 14 https://www.eff.org/awards/effawards/2023 DIG Festival (Modena, Italy), Sept 22 https://dig-awards.org/en/dig-festival-2023-first-speakers-announced/ Launch for "The Internet Con" and Brian Merchant's "Blood in the Machine," Chevalier's Books (LA), Sept 27 https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-internet-con-by-cory-doctorow-blood-in-the-machine-by-brian-merchant-tickets-696349940417 An Evening with VE Schwab (Boise), Oct 2 https://www.thecabinidaho.org/all-events/ve-schwab Wired Nextfest (Milano), Oct 7-8 https://eventi.wired.it/nextfest23-milano 26th ACM Conference On Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing keynote (Minneapolis), Oct 16 https://cscw.acm.org/2023/index.php/keynotes/ Seizing the Means of Computation (Edinburgh Futures Institute), Oct 25 https://efi.ed.ac.uk/event/seizing-the-means-of-computation-with-cory-doctorow/ Recent appearances: Sci-fi and Amazon's empire (The Workers' Speculative Society) https://soundcloud.com/reimaginevalue/doctorow An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet's Enshittification and Throw It Into Reverse (Defcon 31) https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2031/DEF%20CON%2031%20video%20and%20slides/DEF%20CON%2031%20-%20An%20Audacious%20Plan%20to%20Halt%20the%20Internet%27s%20Enshittification%20-%20Cory%20Doctorow.mp4 Life Doesn’t Have to Zuck (Bungacast) https://bungacast.podbean.com/e/362-life-doesn-t-have-to-zuck-ft-cory-doctorow/ Latest books: The Internet Con: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/. "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com "Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html "How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59 (print edition: https://bookshop.org/books/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism/9781736205907) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html) "Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html "Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/. Upcoming books: The Lost Cause: a post-Green New Deal eco-topian novel about truth and reconciliation with white nationalist militias, Tor Books, November 2023 The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://pluralistic.net/plura-list Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection): https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic Medium (no ads, paywalled): https://doctorow.medium.com/ (Latest Medium column: "The proletarianization of tech workers: If there is hope, it is in the proles. https://doctorow.medium.com/the-proletarianization-of-tech-workers-ad0a6b09f7e6) Twitter (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://twitter.com/doctorow Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising): https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic "When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/13/spadina-to-bathurst/

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kamalamackerel · 7 years ago

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This is a project I have been dreaming for more than 2 years now & I am so excited to see its first iteration come to life on Oct 20, 6pm @studio303. I am grateful to @qpirgmcgill, @lgbtq2ihm, The Arts of Trans, Gender Diverse and Two-Spirit Lives and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) for making this event possible! Oct 20, 6pm Studio 303, 372 Ste Catherine O. As vocal & public trans women of colour, we have a lot to say, IRL and URL. We make our presence and points of view heard through incendiary essays, truth-telling interviews, poignant tweets, tender poetry collections, ferocious performances & sassy Instagram stories. We push through every single barrier that seeks to silence us & render our lives invisible: we rise, we spit, we spit back, and claw our truths out of our throats so we be heard. Contemporary Poetics of Trans Women of Colour Artists is a collective poetic performance featuring a.a., Arielle Twist, Gwen Benaway, Kai Cheng Thom, Kim Ninkuru & curated by Kama La Mackerel. In this piece these contemporary yet intergenerational poets, artists, performers & media-makers interweave personal narratives, political rants, poetic renditions & didactic lectures to create intellectual, aesthetic, and embodied spaces of expression where trans women of colour voices are centred. Through poetry, performance, storytelling and spoken word, the artists create a live immersive environment within which they foreground their distinct subjectivities as well as their collective voices. This piece comes out of a collective multimedia storytelling workshop facilitated by Kama La Mackerel. This piece also comes out of years of friendship, mentorship, peer support, deep love and shade throwing. (at Montreal, Quebec) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bo4SNLcnR7F/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=d9dkfa1xqit0

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cutshawsnidowoa · 6 years ago

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What It Means to Be a Tabby Cat

The post What It Means to Be a Tabby Cat by Sandy Robins appeared first on Catster. Copying over entire articles infringes on copyright laws. You may not be aware of it, but all of these articles were assigned, contracted and paid for, so they aren't considered public domain. However, we appreciate that you like the article and would love it if you continued sharing just the first paragraph of an article, then linking out to the rest of the piece on Catster.com.

It’s common to talk about tabbies as if they represent a cat breed. But they don’t. In fact, the word tabby denotes a coat pattern. And they don’t represent just one breed; the pattern is common to many breeds.

The origin of the word tabby has an uncertain history. Some claim the name is associated with a type of striped, patterned silk called Atabi made in Attabiah in the Middle East. Others claim that it comes from the translation of the French phrase “striped silk taffeta,” the root of which is tabis, meaning “a rich watered silk.”

Tabby cat coat colors and patterns

Tabbies come in many different coat colors. Photography ©Daniel Rodriguez Tirad | Thinkstock.

Tabbies come in many different colors, including brown, gray and a variety of red shades often called orange, ginger or marmalade. Some have stripes and others spots and many a combination of the two. You can tell what color a tabby is by looking at the color of his stripes and tip of his tail.

The tabby pattern is determined by the agouti gene, which causes the individual hairs to have bands of light and heavy pigmentation, and the tabby gene, which denotes the type of tabby patterns, namely stripes, blotches or spots of hairs of solid color.

Research done by feline geneticists Carlos Driscoll and Leslie Lyons at the beginning of this millennium confirmed five genetic clusters, or lineages, of wildcats from various parts of the world (such as Africa, Europe, China, Central Asia and the Middle East) and dating back some 10,000 years to be the ancestors of today’s ubiquitous domestic tabbies. And, it’s easy to understand how a coat with stripes and spots could camouflage well into natural surroundings.

4 tabby coat patterns

A classic or blotched tabby cat. Photography ©VladislavStarozhilov | Thinkstock.

1. The classic tabby coat, sometimes called blotched, has wide, dark stripes curving over the flanks and the shoulders and three large stripes running from the shoulder blades to the base of the tail. It’s often likened to a marble cake.

2. The mackerel tabby has either continuous or broken stripes running perpendicular to the spine, like a fishbone.

The spotted tabby cat. Photography by Tierfotoagentur | Alamy Stock Photo.

3. The spotted tabby has distinct round spots against a background of lighter fur.

4. The fourth tabby coat pattern is called ticked or agouti. The coat on the body has almost no stripe. However, the legs, tail and face sport very thin stripes.

Facial features of tabbies

A feature common to tabbies is their facial markings that include a distinctive M on their foreheads and expressive pencil-thin striped markings around the eyes, affectionately referred to as “eyeliner.” Photography by Casey Elise Photography.

Another distinguishing feature common to tabbies is their facial markings that include a distinctive M on their foreheads and expressive pencil-thin striped markings around the eyes affectionately referred to as “eyeliner.”

This is where legend pushes genetics aside with these intriguing notions as to how these markings came about.

The prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was an acknowledged cat lover. It is said that the M marking on the forehead of the tabby cat was created when he rested his hand on the brow of his favorite cat.

Christians believe that when newborn baby Jesus wouldn’t stop crying, a cat climbed into the manger and started to purr, sending him off to sleep. In gratitude, the Virgin Mary marked the cat’s face with the first letter of her name.

A non-religious version suggests that the M is a set of frown lines, the result of a cat staring at a mousehole in concentration, waiting for a mouse to emerge.

Tabby cat personality traits

When it comes to personality traits, tabbies are considered friendly, happy-go-lucky cats, intelligent, sassy, very affectionate and wonderful companions. Red tabbies, often called orange, ginger and marmalade tabbies, can be feisty and bossy. But this trait is linked to coat color (as in fiery red) and not to the tabby pattern.

No matter the science behind tabbies, if you’re a cat person, you’ve undoubtedly been enchanted by a tabby cat, whether it’s your own fabulous feline, a tabby that “works” in a local store or even a cartoon tabby such as Garfield who identifies with the very human trait of hating Mondays.

Famous tabby cats

Garfield. Photography by Carlos Cardetas | Alamy Stock Photo.

1. Garfield is the world’s most famous cartoon orange tabby.

2. The first Algonquin Cat was an orange tabby that hotelier Frank Case named Rusty. The cat was a stray and had wandered into the hotel seeking refuge from the rain. He was renamed Hamlet by actor John Barrymore, who had played the Danish prince on Broadway. All the male Algonquin cats since have been named Hamlet, and the current feline is Hamlet VIII.

Orangey the cat in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Photography by Ronald Grant Archive | Alamy Stock Photo.

3. Orangey was the orange tabby that starred with Audrey Hepburn in the movie Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

4. Tabby cats feature in a myriad of advertisements on TV endorsing their popularity as beloved family members.

Winston Churchill loved orange tabbies. Photography PA Images | Alamy Stock Photo.

5. Sir Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom twice, loved orange tabbies. It was his dying wish that a marmalade-colored tabby with four white socks and a white bib and named Jock should reside in perpetuity at Chartwell, his ancestral home in Kent, England. The incumbent cat at Chartwell is Jock IV and visited by ailurophiles from around the world.

6. Morris, an orange tabby, became the world’s first spokescat for 9Lives cat food and has been one of the most recognizable tabby faces in the United States since 1969. The current spokescat is the fifth to represent the brand.

Tell us: Do you have any tabbies? What types of tabbies are they?

Thumbnail: Photography by Casey Elise Photography.

This piece was originally published in 2017.

About the author

Ziggy and Tory “work” as feline muses for Sandy Robins, an award-winning multimedia pet lifestyle expert, author and pet industry personality. They like to disrupt the workflow by playing fetch with wand toys and directing food operations in the kitchen. Learn more about Sandy at sandyrobinsonline.com.

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