ezra winton

I recently had the pleasure of watching a Canadian fiction feature that has come out on DVD in the last year. Thank the film gods that there are independent video stores like Montreal’s Boite Noir, or I may have never discovered the little gem called A Simple Curve. The fim’s plot is suggested in the title – a tidy little arc about a father and son living in British Columbia’s absolutely stunning Slocan valley. The son, played by Kris Lemche, is growing increasingly testy with both his business relationship with…read more

The IPS reports today that one of the worst threats to people living in poverty around the world – mainly in the “developing world” – is not HIV or famine, but preventable, non-communicable diseases. People dying from tobacco-induced cancer in the majority world reminds me of the kind of corporate colonialism that we’re seeing in the cultural industries. For example, as Playboy perceived an exhaustable market in “the West” it set its sights on the pure and vulnerable global south, readying the global company’s operations for India, where peddling soft-porn…read more

Last week’s Guardian published a story on a new study by former IDF soldier-turned psychologist Nufar Yishai-Karin. The report has shaken the political scene in Israel, a country whose government has always maintained that their military was the most “ethical in the world.” While activists and Palestinians have always known that in fact the opposite is true, this report offers first hand accounts from several soldiers who have admitted to enjoying atrocious acts of violence against unarmed civilians. Interviews in the report recount disturbing tales of beating on four year-olds…read more

We would do well to imagine a world of peace, harmony, equality and compassion. We would do better to snap ourselves out of our daydream between white privileged rituals and act on our dreams. The human condition has no colour, and certainly the negative aspects of our condition exist throughout the spectrum of ethnicity. But I maintain, it is North America driving the SUV. It is North America peering endlessly into the digital, each day, each night, as reality TV and FaceBook and other pleasures of electronic communication consume the…read more