Author: joshuajamescollis
Joshua James Collis is from the West Cost of Canada. He sold cell phones for a while, then settled on earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UVic.
He’s also played the bass in dive bars, been in one of Victoria’s largest art collectives, edited a theatre review and written and directed some University films that no one has ever seen.
Let’s Talk Every Day
January 30, 2019
The great tragedy in the face of an epidemic, is that it takes corporate virtue signaling to spark a conversation when there is an absolute wildfire beneath the skin.
Bell Let’s Talk Day comes around every January, and in its wake follow genuine enthusiasm and all the hot takes. For every person earnestly and eager to raise awareness, there follows some edgelord offering burning opinions on the inherent evils of corporate philanthropy.
Let’s Talk on the surface seems to be a genuine expression of helping people in need. Suicide rates are up. We are living in a fentanyl crisis. Everyone and their siblings have anxiety. How many more suffer with their lips sewn shut, unable to cry for help or find a platform to rise on?
Sure, Let’s Talk, but what about tomorrow? What about next Friday at 7:45pm? Sometime in July? The other 364 to…
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Let’s Talk Every Day
January 30, 2019
The great tragedy in the face of an epidemic, is that it takes corporate virtue signaling to spark a conversation when there is an absolute wildfire beneath the skin.
Bell Let’s Talk Day comes around every January, and in its wake follow genuine enthusiasm and all the hot takes. For every person earnestly and eager to raise awareness, there follows some edgelord offering burning opinions on the inherent evils of corporate philanthropy.
Let’s Talk on the surface seems to be a genuine expression of helping people in need. Suicide rates are up. We are living in a fentanyl crisis. Everyone and their siblings have anxiety. How many more suffer with their lips sewn shut, unable to cry for help or find a platform to rise on?
Sure, Let’s Talk, but what about tomorrow? What about next Friday at 7:45pm? Sometime in July? The other 364 to 365 days of the calendar year have to matter just as much.
There’s irony in that a Canadian cellular giant is pioneering this initiative considering the mental health toll wireless can take. The constant connection and sociological impact of technology and social media is a topic for another day.
Bell, like any Canadian wireless company does not guarantee their retail employees full time hours, and offers them commission as an incentive instead of an assured living wage. Commission sales is an environment where the shrewd and steel-willed can thrive, but can leave behind those without a cast iron gut. These are often the ones who suffer mental health issues.
Commission sales exist as a means for the employers to have their workers suffer the brunt of a slow month.
Variations of Bell Let’s Talk and mental health issues are the top six trending topics in Canada on Twitter as of this writing. Let’s Talk is moving people, fingers are clicking keys and conversations are moving forward, guided by the safe and familiar voices of Ellen and perennial stoner pal Seth Rogen.
Yes, they want to save us from our mind dungeons so we can grin while coughing up for financially bloated cell phone plans and ludicrously overpriced cable services. All to fatten the coffers of CEO George Cope and his empire built upon the bodies of young people struggling to make it on minimum wage plus commission.
But also by increasing their brand awareness, we generate income and advertising for them, they donate to a good cause. Maybe someone comes out of the mental health closet today and takes the first steps towards standing in the sunlight again. Is that not in of itself a win for us all?
The discourse around Gillette’s We Believe campaign pulls similar threads. Does Gillette really want men to be better? Do they just want to sell some garbage razor blades to keep our faces clean and inevitably stock our landfills with more plastic? Does it matter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koPmuEyP3a0
It’s all subjective. Each individual chooses to engage with it and react accordingly. The reality is that whatever Ma Bell’s phantom intentions are, something good will come.
Let’s Talk today. Let’s talk everyday. Let’s braid each other’s hair and drink from the cup of conversation until the sun comes up, it’s 5am, and we’re supposed to work today. Share the Bell hashtag, share the counter hashtag. Publish your own hot take.
The healthiest thing we can do is seek out the quiet ones, the individuals we’ve lost contact with, the ones who stopped talking. You never know what you’ll hear when you cut open the strings sewing lips shut.
Ecstasy of Gold
Attack the Sunrise
Pygmalion
Eighty Nine
Memory Lapse
The data files corrupt
fast-forward eats the tape
the CD is scratched
from the sky, the sun eventually escapes
time eats the memories
fire burns the photography
supermassive black hole drinks the known universe
the inkwells will dry
keep filling empty pools
spring follows winter fools
All good things eventually collapse
it is in the nature of memory to lapse
Apathetic Poetics
I knew I would regret it If I grew up to be Apathetically Poetic The cynics, behind the scenes The black Klansman high-fives the Jew-Nazi While the gay-bashing homo tells all of his friends, About all his threesomes with lesbians The good politician tells us the truth The clown gives you a low-fat sandwich and A friendly pat on the tush The Pope does something about the boys being poked Israel tells Syria it was all just a joke Here comes the loud-silent complacent commotion Here comes the oilman to save the ocean Let’s move to a democratic Iraq, Iran, I laughed! The young girl had a hot flash Water froze in the Antarctic Wall Street gave back Let Obama be black Will there ever be a white president? Will they ever set precedence, Or allow factual evidence? It’s full serve in Oregon, You’ve been served on Earth Drink the Kool-Aid It’s the cure for Aids Hold me closer great big dancer Kevorkian found the cure for cancer And the disease from which we can’t be saved Let’s set a precedence of affirmative action and Steal Neil’s heart of gold right out her chest Straight between real fake breasts Go to war for freedom, Buy smart, it’s cheaper at Wal-Mart My favourite agency Where we can throw down our values and Keep a space for complacency The world’s best poetics Apathetic Poetics: goddamn them
Litstrips
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell vs Litstrips
In the fall of 2013 I took Writing 326 at UVic which is a course in transmedia, media which crosses multiple platforms with a focus online. I wanted to see if I could make art out of something that is essentially artless. I wanted to take something bland, boring, and banal and attempt to inject some semblance of meaning into it.
Bitstrips. Some love them, most hate them, why? These intrusive little polarizing comics place what Martin Heidegger called “average everydayness” upon a public pedestal and attempt to bathe these moments in attention. The mundane and the inside jokes clog our newsfeeds and attempt to pass themselves off as worthwhilewhen they have about as much charm and intellectual value as clumps of drain hair. Therefore, I decided to take something with no cultural value and inject it with one of the most sacred institutions of art, literature.
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk vs Litstrips
I was so intrigued by the backlash that occurred when Bitstrips gained popularity. Why do we have such a negative reaction to such a benign and fairly innocent format of expression? First we must address the burgeoning attention economy. The internet is frothing with so much information as we navigate it. The time we choose to allocate toward a post, a video, or a status update is becoming rare, and therefore, a commodity.
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens vs Litstrips
When we spend time poorly online the reaction is akin to losing a $10 bill on the way to work or getting stood-up by a friend; a complete and total waste. The reaction to Bitstrips is similar. As there is little to any value to be gained from learning what people ate for breakfast, how much they hate their job, or what ambiguous event they’re counting down to, there is just as little learning about it in cartoon form. Aren’t cartoons meant to be a source of humour, or action, excitement and certainly pathos?
L’Étranger (The Stranger) by Albert Camus vs Litstrips
We must then ask ourselves, what makes something funny? That is a philosophical debate about as massive as “what is art,” or why? For simplicity’s sake, I subscribe to the Incongruity Theory of Comedy. The simplest form of humor is the reversal of expectations. Person goes for a walk, person reaches destination = not funny. Person goes for a walk, then that person slips and falls down = hilarious. Comedy is built on the foundation of the fulfilment of a promise of the reversal of expectations (this is a very baseline simplification and entire books have been written on the matter). Bitstrips attempts to show us an incongruity, yet they’re far too predictable, fulfill our expectations of everyday life, and therefore are not artful.
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger vs Litstrips
A person who hates job, you don’t say? A person is counting down to something ambiguous, who cares? A person bought a lovely meal at a restaurant, worst. post. ever. Bitstrips built itself on a foundation of fulfilling expectations of everyday life without reversing said expectations. I found this fundamental failure compelling enough that I had to find a way to give them a second life.
“Putin on the Ritz” The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde vs Putin vs Litstirps
I was also inspired by Teju Cole’s Seven Short Stories about Drones, in how he repurposed lines from literature in order to call attention to the atrocities of drone strikes. I decided I could satirize current events, mix them with literature, then put them into Bitstrips in order to skewer them. At the time, Vladimir Putin was making headlines for his human rights violating stance towards homosexuality. Rob Ford was also in office in the city of Toronto, making headlines for his antics and substance abuse.
Ulysses by James Joyce vs Rob Ford vs Litstrips
Bitstrips are more irrelevant than ever. Their only claim to relevance came in the absolute outrage and vitriol we spewed at one another before realizing we could block them from Facebook newsfeeds. I decided to take something timeless, something revered and insert it into something that time will inevitably forget. Quotes from our beloved literature crossed with average Bitstrips situations and often mixed with timely figures and current events. That was Litstrips.
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald vs Litstrips
And like their inspiration, Litsrips never really lasted in relevnace. Perhaps I didn’t properly promote them but I think that they were doomed to sink into obscurity alongside the app that spawned them. Chuck Palahnuik even retweeted the Project Mayhem one after I tweeted it to him (which made me giddy like a nerd on game day). Internet fads come and go at such an exorbitant speed, they’re often over before you hear of them. The dead horse is already so beaten you’ve generally just found your best blunt object by the time people are three horses away.
The internet evolves, the extinct are long forgotten and we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge vs Rob Ford vs Litstrips
The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky vs Vladimir Putin vs Listrips
for more visit http://litstrips.tumblr.com/
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