The oral history of Avalon reminded me of a formative experience.

Circa 1982, I took the long train ride to Halifax to visit the only young adult I knew – the brother of a friend of mine, who was now enrolled at Dal. Ensconced would be a better word for it, since he had an apartment in the graduate residence, Fenwick Towers.

Being rush hour on a Friday, it was pitch black out and the weekend had psychologically begun. My friend gave me the run of the place, so the first thing I did was turn the radio on. I did that by flicking up an industrial-quality stainless rocker switch on a receiver, then twirling a knurled steel ingot to turn up the volume. Through seriously high-quality speakers, I heard Bryan Ferry complete his last minute of crooning “Avalon” as I walked toward the balcony windows and saw nothing but bright lights and big city below.

Now, just you imagine for a minute what kind of a wallop that packed. Cosmopolitanism, refinement, urbanity, suavity, effortlessness.

This kind of experience, visual but with a connection to something else, leaves a permanent imprint. I see now this sort of thing had already happened to me (spending one’s teen years staring at Letraset catalogues) and to others of like mind (leaning one’s head off the bed to gaze at a double-page magazine spread on the floor showing a Jaguar parked in the semicircular driveway of a Tudor manse). When rock snobs tell you about the pleasure of removing a record from not one but two sleeves and lining up a stylus just to hear a song, the phenomenon they describe is the same.

Having lived in both eras, I doubt the kids today – bolt upright at a monitor or head down at a touchscreen – will live through anything resembling these epiphanic sensory conjunctions. Susceptible minds will miss the chance to be forever changed.

Here we have a rather curious article about a perfect Modernist house in that Modernist hotspot, Dallas.

“I always tell people, if you want to know what the inside of my head looks like, come see my house,” says Justin Crake, who owns the home with Kyle Schmid and Wolfe Kennedy.

Modernism doesn’t make sense for a house anywhere in a city, where such houses have no purpose other than to make the owner look smart. A Modernist residence belongs in the wilderness, where it acts as a lantern whose perfect rectilinear forms stand in contrast to nature. If you’ve got neighbours who can see into your bedroom, your house shouldn’t be Modernist. (I’ve been through this before. And anyone who doubts this philosophy needs to read up on architectural history and consult Nataliya Ilyin.)

Then there’s the accompanying photo (uncredited):

At least one All of those T-shirts are Nasty Pig logowear.

Any reasonable rocket scientist would jump to the obvious conclusion, which a chipper and amenable Justin Crake confirmed:

Yup, the three of us are in a relationship together, Kyle (big dark haired guy with beard) and I have been together almost 12 years, and the three of us have been together for almost three years now.

We were really impressed with the article as we though they would totally ignore our relationship and just focus on the house and art, but they suprised us and included all three of us and recoginized our relationship.

And all this is happening in Texas.

Can we be honest here? Isn’t this scenario rather bogglingly hot? Demerit points if you think it’s the house that makes it hot.

1. Web Typography: Book by Mark Boulton, Richard Rutter, Jon Tan, 2011

2. Web Typography: Book by Viviana Cordova, 2011

Jonathan Ive on Dieter Rams:

[S]urfaces that were without apology, bold, pure, perfectly proportioned, coherent and effortless[.]

“Surfaces without apology” should be the new slogan, rallying cry, and ideal of industrial designers everywhere. Have you ever seen a more concise summation of an entire design practice?

Here we have an advertisement (Xtra, 2011.06.18) from the AIDS Committee of Toronto congratulating “our community” for having “survived, thrived, and been resilient” through AIDS.

Except of course for those of us who died, suffered, and were forever diminished. We’ll set aside that particular dose of bullshit and concentrate on the more serious bullshit.

One certainly does not need a master’s in semiotics from Brown to understand what this ad actually means. Four old white gay men are doting on and indeed passing the torch to their natural and ineluctable successor, a young vizmin man. The advertisement achieves the amazing feat of depicting four times as many old white models as young vizmin models while still rendering them irrelevant.

Of course this is consistent with the ideology of the organizations that run gay Toronto. You don’t matter unless you’re a tranny, a vizmin, or female in some way that’s up to you to define. And we don’t even talk about anyone “old,” let alone the most egregious oppressor Toronto’s diverse LGBTTQQI2S* communities have ever known, the white gay man.

The old gay men at whom this ad is ostensibly targetted see right through it in an instant. It’s a sop to “diversity” that marginalizes their own lives. And if the Indic were Oriental, wouldn’t the ad be attacked as a racist rice-queen fantasia? (Despite the actual demographics of Asiatic gay males and their white boyfriends? Then again, it’s not as though South Asians date each other.)

The message here is that the real gay community is made up of young vizmins. (Not pictured in the ad is another necessary feature, effeminacy.) That’s certainly what the ruling class believes. I assure you this city has a gay ruling class, and it isn’t the rich gays who remain completely out of sight save for the rare annual fundraiser. The actual gay community here, despite its inability to so much as catch a ball, is in an unending steeplechase to prove who’s the most oppressed.

I asked ACT for comment and explanation. Communications coördinator Andrew Brett top-posted:

The ad you saw was the result of our Gay Men’s Community Health team wanting to celebrate the resilience of the gay community after 30 years of showing strength together in the face of HIV/AIDS.

The photograph in this ad is one of many that came out of a photo shoot in April of this year. We’re happy that over 50 volunteers participated in the shoot, reflecting the wide range of ages, races, and other identities that make up our community – including in this photo. Although it’s difficult to show the range of images that came out of the shoot through just one ad, you’ll be seeing more of those images in the coming months.

Thanks for letting us know how you felt about the ad. That reaction wasn’t our intention, but we’ll keep it in mind for the future.

Hence ACT’s management is too ignorant to realize that the target audience for this campaign is the most astute, the likeliest to understand its true message, and, frankly, in no mood to cheer on its own erasure. I’d love to hear from the white models in this ad, and I’d especially like to hear them make the case they were not duped.

Remember: Gay men over 40 and white gay men in particular are worthless in our diverse communities. It is axiomatic that an advertisement thanking “our community” for surviving AIDS would not actually address itself to the gay community or gay men. Nor would an organization dare run an ad featuring nothing but white males. Because any of that would be racist and transphobic.

Our inferiority is simply the way things are now. When will we ever learn? If only we were 25 years younger and coloured, and had a vagina even the best doctors couldn’t get rid of, then we’d matter. Then we’d be real. Then we’d be important.

By the time these oppressed young vizmins defend their master’s theses in semiotics, we’ll all have died, and they won’t have noticed, let alone cared. They’ll be running the show. But aren’t they already?

Homosexualist males adroitly avoid dreaded matched penguin suits:

• Richard & Jonno:

  

• Chris & Marv Roger:

  

Rebecca Connop Price:

I was cautioned by the instructor at Carleton University that the people most likely to feel culture shock were actually the people who went to Britain, not those who moved to the different cultures of say Chile or Italy. This was because the Britain-bound people didn’t prepare themselves for the change. They assumed living among English-speaking people in what is effectively the birthplace of English Canada’s culture would be just like home. In fact, it very much isn’t.

Excellent point. She goes downhill from there.

• He looked at me, clearly aghast that anyone could make such a mistake. “Er,” I replied, “I think I can explain.”

  No one, at all, ever, utters the word er (with rhotacism). Er is a British spelling of uh (the two words are the same). When deployed on this side of the Atlantic, er merely makes the writer look like a ponce. The word is uh.

• I ask “Y’all right?” instead of “How [are] you?”

  That is seriously meant as British English? It sounds more Alabaman. (Please write in with citations if you really have heard it.)

• I ask for a tomato-and-basil panini without any hard As.

  Vowels aren’t hard or soft. Price’s inability to explain basic phonology puts her in good company – in the company of every other writer who doesn’t bother trying. I’ll bet she thinks Gs come in hard and soft, too. (Look how much trouble the Telegraph had explaining how to pronounce Žižek: “[P]ronounced Gee-gek, with two soft Gs, as in ‘regime.’ ”)

  In case you’re wondering, a writer who really wanted to communicate would write tomayto and bayzil (and ZHEEzhek).

• One day soon, I’d like to move back to Canada. But it has been so long since I last lived there that I worry how I’ll cope. It breaks my heart that I could arrive in the country of my birth armed with the language of a foreign land. My vocabulary and accent have made me an outsider here, and I don’t want to be an outsider in Canada too. Equally sad, though, is the thought of never returning.

  Can you even understand that?

• In reality, no one can really explain how the English language can be used in such different ways in different parts of the world in this age of converging media and mass communication.

  Because you learn the language of your surroundings, which remains almost fixed and all but unchangeable after puberty. Your language does not change because Facebook invented the Wall.

Here we have what is easily the dumbest thing written about English linguistics in ’011. Where is Russell Smith when you need him?