MF GALAXY

This is a longer version of an article published in Vue Weekly in the week of 2008 February 28 for a series of articles commissioned for African History Month.                       One of the most obvious indicators of injustice is the use of double-standards. We learn early in life that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. If geese are eating gravel and ganders and getting grain—and worse, the gander lobby is raising hell about geese wanting to get some—you know that someone is having the down pulled over his eyes. And that’s usually a prelude to getting roasted. The last several months in Toronto have been a furious battle over the just-approved proposal to create an Africentric public school as one means to address the disproportionate failure and drop-out rate of African-Canadian students in that district. But to hear Paula Todd on CTV Newsnet’s The Verdict — just one of a wailing chorus of opposition—such a sc...

  This is the third in a series of mini-essays commissioned by Vue Weekly for African History Month. In 1993 I visited an artists’ workshop in Nairobi while visiting my father’s home country. I saw there why so much of what passes in the West for "African art" is such absolute garbage. In little more than a hallway of a chop-shop, an assembly-line of men hacked pieces of wood into animal forms such as giraffes and rhinos, eventually smoothing them before finishing them with felt markers. Similar shops made “tribal masks” and other patronising, hackwork kitsch. Sure, I could blame Western buyers and the media culture that made them think such “rustic” feebleries were the best the continent had to offer. But I had to admit, so long as the supply existed, the demand would not dry up. If someone made money from the stereotype, the stereotype could never die.   Of course, legions of genuine artists from across the African planet have generated beauty and wonder for millennia, ...

If you'd like to buy a copy of From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain, please go to your local independent bookstore. If they don't have it, ask them to get it. If they can't, click here. BLOG T.O. SUNDAY BOOK REVIEW : “...a major accomplishment that is laugh out loud funny... This is the most revolutionary work of SF since William Gibson’s Neuromancer . Faust has invented a whole new genre of writing and rendered it in some of best prose in any genre. He’s basically given birth to the future . And it’s one good looking baby.... Although it’s only February, I’m confident in saying that the best SF book of the 2007 - maybe the best book of the year-- has already been published.” SUNQIST BLOG: “ The best book of the year , which has been out for something like four days at this point, is From the Notebooks of Doctor Brain , by Minister Faust ... [whose] first book, The Coyote Kings of the Space-Age Bachelor Pad... was also excellent. This is an amazing book.... It works o...