Sunday, December 11, 2011

"The federal government responded [to increased labour hostility in Canada due to the 1975 wage controls imposed by the government] by abandoning the idea of generalized wage controls, substituting instead changes in monetary policy that would drive up unemployment. A policy document prepared for cabinet by the Department of Finance in late 1980 argued that a policy of higher unemployment would reduce the bargaining power and militancy of unions and workers, driving down the rate of increase in money wages and eventually inflation."

- Building a Better World: An Introduction to Trade Unionism in Canada, by Errol Black & Jim Silver

If anyone can provide me with further information on the policy document mentioned above, I would much appreciate it.




Friday, December 9, 2011

"In most films, the setting or background of each framed scene augments the main action, which involves a plot or story concerning human beings. One aspect of the perspective implied by such a construction bears on the centrality of human beings—and especially of certain human beings: the ones we call the stars—in relation to their environment or setting. Beginning with [Days of] Heaven, Malick presents human action as if it were indistinct from its setting. Frequently his camera enters in the middle of conversations between characters; the “story” is interrupted by mysterious strangers or the taking flight of birds; crucial plot developments are elided for features of landscape or light. Commentators have tended to describe the non-narrative aspects of Malick’s art in familiar ways—as metaphors for inner states or the conflicts between his characters. But one senses in his films an imagery that resists being reduced to metaphor; it is through this imagery that Malick introduces us to a variety of significance that exists independent of man’s ability to discern or even to destroy it."

- from The Perspective of Terrence Malick




Friday, December 2, 2011

"Are you not afraid that the poor man put into the dock for snatching a piece of bread from a baker's stall will not, one day, become so enraged that stone by stone he will demolish the Stock Exchange, a wild den where the treasure of the state and the fortune of families are stolen with impunity?"

- La Ruche populaire, November 1842,
quoted in Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault.