(UPDATED) Let’s catch up with the most acclaimed homosexualist film since Parting Glances, Weekend, written and directed by the graceless Andrew Haigh.

Now, this is a great picture

(Ian Gavan, Getty Images)

News items

• Did you know the movie has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes? That’s only because Ed Champion and I aren’t included in their rankings. Oh, whoops! It’s actually 93%, because those marginal contrarians at the New Yorker panned it.

• I told you this thing would make money: Weekend, which cost about 100,000 quid to make, has already raked in 189,000 bucks just in limited U.S. release. Of course everyone up and down the line takes a cut, but please: Even Hollywood studio accountants couldn’t turn this thing into a money-loser.

• Anderson Cooper went to see it. With Ben, I assume. Bret Easton Ellis loved it.

  Nick Denton, who fell in love with the picture as though it were a million extra pageviews, held a private rooftop screening. Or maybe it was just the afterparty. At any rate, didn’t a marginal filmmaker know somebody who knew somebody who “thought the film was bad? He nodded. ‘You’re an idiot,’ [he] snapped.”

• Russell and Glen really aren’t drug addicts, are they? (“Neither is as wasted as he probably should be.”) Obviously not: “There’s always some people, because there’s quite a lot of drugs in the film and all this kind of thing, people sometimes say I’m not sure you’re representing the community in a correct light.”

• But finally some honesty from Haigh about who isn’t going to show up for what all their girlfriends would call a little gem of a picture: “I’m under no illusion that a bunch of straight guys are all going to go to the cinema on Friday night and watch it.” (Weekend manifestly is not “a gay movie for straight boys.”)

  Because, at root, “progressive, accepting, straight [people] wish gays all the best, but they’re probably not too actively curious about what that best – or its opposite – means for their gay friends, if they have any.” Haigh agrees:

  We all know what it’s like to tell our family and the people we love that we’re gay. That fear is still there. I think especially if you are not obviously gay, or if you could be perceived as straight, that it’s almost harder because you’re constantly having to come out.

  Even with your straight friends, they almost forget you’re gay until you say something and they’re, like, “Oh, yeah.”

  And you gauge your straight friends’ reactions, their visible discomfort if the conversation steers a certain way, the ways they can be oblivious to the ways in which your life and theirs is just not the same, and you condition yourself to censor yourself… because you feel uncomfortable. They can talk about girls they’ve had sex with and feel free to go into all sorts of details, but if you mention it, they’re, like, “Um….” So you censor yourself. The thing is, you shouldn’t censor yourself. You should just be as open as you can.

  Elsewhere, Haigh admits:

  Most of my friends are straight as well. Everyone is very accepting and everyone says it’s no problem, but I don’t really discuss too much with them. I think that may be the case for a lot of gay people whose friends are all straight. It’s not that you’re necessarily embarrassed. It’s just a hard thing to talk about and I think it’s hard on both sides.

  The way, when guys get together and all talk about their girlfriends, it’s a bit different when you’re gay and talking to the guys about that. There’s an element of feeling uncomfortable. In this film, it’s Russell’s fear of what his friends will think rather than the actual reality.

• Chris New says it was horribly embarrassing to fuck a straight guy on film. As opposed to real life, where it really brightens up your day.

Did you know that customers – sheeple that they are – “pay a steep price premium for every Apple product they buy”? Well, surely they must be doing that, because the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, Roger Martin, said so in Toronto’s national newspaper.

I thought I’d ask him why he was so fucking lazy. That isn’t what I actually asked. This was:

Your piece in the Saturday paper claimed – as if by rote – that customers “pay a steep price premium for every Apple product they buy.”

I gather you didn’t actually research the facts: Rivals are unable to produce reasonably competing products for as little as Apple charges for the real thing. There is no such thing as a MacBook Air manqué running Windows, for example, or anything resembling a $1,699 iMac manqué (with 27-inch IPS screen) also running Windows, or any remotely credible tablet other than the Kindle Fire, which neither of us has used and in any event doesn’t even try to compare on build quality.

I assume you do not really think that a commodity Windows personal computer bought at a chain store is actually a “competitor.” But you’d have to think that to believe what you wrote.

Do you not see that you were reciting conventional wisdom that has long since been disproven?

And Martin’s top-posted response? “What a moron! I get lots of stupid E-mails but this one takes the cake.”

I like to read reference works on defamation and publish important points from them – with comments, of course. My purpose is to provide a point of entry you could search for if you need to know details about the basic facts of defamation law. I’m not writing how-to guides; I’m excerpting from the basic texts of the field to explain difficult concepts like malice and issues like balance in reporting and right of reply.

J-Source published a compendium article on a few noteworthy cases, but left out a case with the biggest single lessons for any online publisher, including bloggers: Vigna v. Levant, 2010 ONSC 6308. The case is important because it sets out two important facts:

1. Rushing to publish a statement in the absence of urgency can contribute to a finding of defamation.

2. Very simple ways of contacting a source can satisfy the responsible-journalism requirement.

I take issue with the latter, but let’s start at the beginning. As the judge put it (some elisions):

Giacomo Vigna, a lawyer for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, has sued Ezra Levant for libel based on several allegedly defamatory statements published on his internet website blog.

(Presumably his online “internet website blog.”)

Giacomo Vigna won the case. Ezra Levant was found to have published defamatory statements. Not all the attested statements were ruled defamatory. (In a case like this, losing on any count is as bad as losing on all counts, I feel.)

Urgency

The court found that Levant rushed to publish his defamatory statements even though there was no rush.

The matter was not urgent, as Levant was writing his blog in March of 2008 almost a year (11 months) after [a relevant event happened] on May 11, 2007….

The Barreau du Québec had also dismissed a claim by Lemire that Vigna had breached the Code of Ethics on November 22, 2007. As a result, I find there was no urgency to publish the defamatory communications in this case and that a diligent effort to verify the truth of the allegation should have been made by Levant before publishing the defamatory statements.

On the topic of another of Levant’s statements:

Levant’s statement… is a statement of fact and not one of opinion, and therefore the defence of fair comment does not apply. I find that Levant should have made inquiries from the Commission and contacted Vigna to confirm… before publishing these statements. The public interest in this matter is minimal and there was no urgency to the matter.

Interpretation

I view this as a significant ruling that should serve as a warning to anyone running an “Internet Web site blog” in Canada. If you intend to write something that could be remotely construed as defamatory, you absolutely must not rush to do it. By implication, there has to be an “urgent” real-world event that would force you to publish early. Self-publishers have no deadlines, so a deadline will not suffice as an “urgent” event because it does not exist.

If you work for a newspaper or other news organization, I interpret this to mean that your paper’s deadlines and news hole are irrelevant. No matter how much you or your editor would like you to file by deadline, if you haven’t covered all your bases you absolutely must not rush it.

I think a legitimate case of urgency might be described in this hypothetical example: Only two companies submit bids for an important public tender. A journalist finds evidence that one of the companies bribed or illegally lobbied the government, which is set to award the tender on a certain date. It would seem that publishing before that date is a legitimate goal. If you contact the company (repeatedly, let’s say) but still don’t get a comment, you can publish anyway. “Urgent,” in this example, means “there exists a moment beyond which irrevocable damage could occur if the statements aren’t published.” But that’s just a thought experiment.

All this will be bitter medicine for a lot of writers, who are accustomed to banging out copy all day and at whim (and, at farms like Gawker and HuffPo, have contractual quotas to meet). The ruling butts up against the unspoken demand to publish first or publish fast. It might just be a voice in the back of your mind telling you to hurry up, but surely you agree that, on the Web, there is an instinct to publish first and ask questions later.

You need to ignore that little voice whenever you’re dealing with potentially libellous statements. You need to break your habits.

Responsible journalism

What does “covering your bases” mean? Here we return to the responsible-journalism defence, a new reading in Canadian defamation law that permits journalists to publish unrebutted statements as long as they made “responsible” efforts to secure a rebuttal. (RyeHigh J-school has a pretty good wiki on the subject.)

The Supreme Court of Canada, in Grant v. Torstar, provided a list of requirements for the responsible-journalism defence to succeed. (It isn’t a made-in-Canada invention, but we have it now.) At its core is a requirement that the writer absolutely must go to some length to secure a comment from any entity that might be defamed. In the ruling’s terms, to succeed, it must be true that

[t]he publisher was diligent in trying to verify the allegation, having regard to:

1. the seriousness of the allegation;

2. the public importance of the matter;

3. the urgency of the matter;

4. the status and reliability of the source;

5. whether the plaintiff’s side of the story was sought and accurately reported;

6. whether the inclusion of the defamatory statement was justifiable;

7. whether the defamatory statement’s public interest lay in the fact that it was made rather than its truth (“reportage”); and

8. any other relevant circumstances.

I interpret “diligent” as “diligent.” Vigna v. Levant doesn’t. And that makes the Vigna ruling important.

• First of all, the court found that Levant didn’t even read the transcripts from a hearing “in a diligent manner, but rather chose to extract only one part of the exchange which was taken out of context.”

• Next:

  Was the plaintiff’s side of the story sought?

  Vigna testified that Levant never contacted him to get his side of the story before publishing the above blogs. Levant acknowledged that he never contacted Vigna, but testified he tried to contact Vigna by calling the Commission. Levant has not pleaded that he attempted to contact Vigna before publishing his blogs, and produced no telephone records or any other evidence to corroborate any attempt to speak with Vigna to verify if he had provided a medical certificate to the Tribunal.

  Levant’s evidence in this regard was very general and nonspecific. I do not accept his evidence in this regard and find that he did not make a serious effort or take reasonable steps to contact or communicate with Vigna to get his side of the story. Levant did not leave a voice message for Vigna, and did not send a letter, fax or E-mail to Vigna to obtain his side of the story. Given the total lack of urgency, Levant should have sought Vigna’s side of the story before publishing the defamatory statements.

  I find that Levant did not contact Vigna to obtain his side of the story because he wanted to use Vigna’s unusual words… as part of his campaign to discredit and denormalize the Commission.

As I read this, in the Vigna case a reporter would have had to do two things:

1. At the very least, leave a voicemail. By implication, an actual telephone interview is better.

2. And also “send a letter, fax or e-mail.”

Because of the ambiguity of the sentence, another reading holds that any single action on this list will suffice:

• Talk live on the phone or leave a voicemail

• Send a letter

• Send a fax

• Send an E-mail

This reading is supported by a summary later in the same ruling: Levant “did not send a letter, a fax or an E-mail or, as I have found, make any diligent effort to speak with Vigna.” Another sentence to the same effect is found further on. You could probably assume all four methods are equivalent and your requirement is to carry out only one.

Nonetheless, taking one or at most two actions to get the other side’s comment on a story is a considerable dilution of the Supreme Court’s demand that a “publisher [be] diligent in trying to verify the allegation.” Dashing off a single E-mail hardly seems to suffice, but according to Vigna v. Levant, it does.

This ruling lowers the bar substantially

Because it is so easy to meet the test of responsible communication (at least this single line item on the list of tests in this one precedent), if you don’t do it, your failure to act will surely be used against you and will strengthen your opponent’s case.

What I am saying here is that if all you need to do to act responsibly is dash off a single E-mail and you don’t bother, then you are by definition not acting responsibly and that alone could lose the case for you.

Vigna v. Levant lowers the bar from being “diligent” to making any effort at all. And if you don’t bother to do that, you might get in trouble.

What I do

I have always sought a comment on any statement I intend to make that could be considered defamatory. Now, though, I also make sure to wait what seems like an inordinate amount of time to receive that response before publishing.

Globe columnist and journalist Katrina Onstad has been known to get things seriously wrong, then seriously right, in the past. Here she manages both at once in a single column.

The set of assumptions behind [Ikea’s] Manland doesn’t flatter either sex. Once again, here comes the baby-man meme, wherein men are unable and unwilling to participate in the rote side of domestic life…. Upholding the clichés of masculinity – real men hate shopping and love Space Invaders – doesn’t make men manlier; it makes them seem a little pathetic. […]

I’m not sure what’s less appealing: a man who wants to go to Manland or a woman who wants to “drop off” her husband there. Every baby-man in pop culture has his counterpart in the eye-rolling/arms-across-the-chest bemused female killjoy. Manland perpetuates the myth that ladies love shopping only slightly more than they love demoralizing their husbands.

Well said.

Now, though, Onstad poisons the well.

[I]t’s a touch difficult to see “invisibility” as a male issue. The (small) number of women in senior management positions at Canada’s biggest companies has barely moved in the past decade. And in 2010, fewer than 30% of Canadian MPs were female; our Parliament is behind 25 other nations in terms of makeup of women.

The issue of women CEOs and MPs has nothing to do with retail shopping and amounts to changing the subject. The fact remains that women don’t want to be senior managers and politicians as often as men do. Since women don’t want parity in these two fields, which they find repellent, it shouldn’t be forced on anyone, nor used as a guilt trip. (Sheila Bakshevin makes the same failed argument more troublingly.) And surely “makeup of women” was a distracting double entendre.

Along the way, Onstad incidentally reiterates the myth – a favourite of the Globe and Mail – that Ikea is “Swedish.” It isn’t. At a corporate level, Ikea is a Netherlands holding company masquerading as a charitable foundation to avoid taxes.

Thirtysomething, though unfairly derided, was a formative experience for the intelligent viewer with an interest in design. (It also provided a stunning example of Jewish American manhood, in Ken Olin’s performance as Michael Steadman, that has never been rivalled on television.) I watched every episode on first run, cursing the shitty NCI captioning every single week. Then, in 1997 and 1998, Showcase reran the whole series from start to finish. I programmed one of my expensive Sony VHS decks to record the show.

And after about the second episode, I decided to handwrite my own episode guide. It runs 330 pages and takes ages just to flip through.

Things were a bit tricky that one time I tried out to be a comedy writer for TSN and missed an episode. That hole took a while to fill in. But I did it, and now I have the only Thirtysomething episode guide in existence.

These loose-leaf and scrap-paper pages would be an astronomical amount of work to scan, what with different stocks, pre-punched and post-facto-punched binder holes, and varying recto and verso usage. I’d be more than willing to do it if I had reliable equipment.

As you can see, then, in fact I have been a perfectionist and a completionist for a very long time.

Globe columnist Tabatha Southey insists, in a column that made her Toronto journo chums misty-eyed, that the Macintosh allowed her to write despite her learning disabilities.

At 21, I bought a Macintosh computer and it was like giving someone with terrible eyesight her first pair of glasses. In many ways the field was levelled…. I needed a prosthetic limb for the parts of myself that failed me, and Steve Jobs – with his insistence that computers be intuitive and responsive, and his uncanny sense of what that meant – made Apple products exactly that.

This makes no sense whatsoever. Is Southey trying to say that she tried using MS-DOS and couldn’t? She preferred the Macintosh desktop user inteface? She kept on preferring it even after Microsoft sold a rival UI?

Is she trying to say that Macs had unique adaptive technologies that would allow her to spell better and write better? In fact, the preponderance of such utilities work on Windows and always have (including Toronto-made WiViK and WordQ, the latter now in a Mac version). Moreover, there was a gap of a full decade in which Macs were essentially inaccessible to every disabled person.

If Southey’s problem is bad spelling (a problem she shares with Peggy), how do a mouse and pull-down menus help?

My answer: They don’t. What she’s really saying is her Mac allowed her to enjoy using a computer for the first time, which removed a number of painful associations that writing used to hold for her. (No more pads and pens, no more typewriters.)

Because she promoted her own column on Google Plus (one of its few plausible uses, I gather), I asked her there what she was talking about and got no response.