Category Archives: Comedy

JD Halperin is looking for an intern! Apply within. Click here for details.

23 Friday Mar 2012

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JD Halperin, one of the internet’s premier writers, is looking to hire a team of interns! What’s that rumble? Oh, that’s people clamouring for the hippest, most creative gig in the city. If you’re looking to be a cog in the wheel or work in a sterile cube farm, look elsewhere! We here at JDHalperin.com work hard and play hard because we’re young and cool. So, if you’re a university student looking to increase your portfolio, a professional writer/editor whose career needs a boost, or a reprobate trying to turn his life around, apply herein.

To be my ideal intern, you must have:

• Belligerence, truculence, testosterone and a high threshold for pain.

• A scepticism of shamans, witch doctors, and advocates of social justice.

• Scorn for child-rapists, politicians, religious figures and the masses.

• Food and whiskey.

Currently there are big plans in the works for monetization, but as of now remuneration for this internship is non-fungible. So, if you’re a highly-motivated and creative self-starter who works well with little or no supervision, don’t miss this wonderful opportunity to land a position with a great brand in a dynamic work environment (my kitchen) where there are lots of opportunities for growth and expansion (namely into other sections of my living room).

Since resumes are boring and banal, please apply by writing a 3000 word response to one of these five topics:

1. Contemporary gender roles and sexual identity is a fluid concept constantly on guard against patriarchal stereotypes. Discuss as it pertains to the case of Ray Finkle and Lois Einhorn.

2. “A philistine is a full-grown person whose interests are of a material and commonplace nature, and whose mentality is formed of the stock ideas and conventional ideals of his or her group and time.” Apply and unpack Nabokov’s definition of the philistine as it pertains to the OISE administration.

3. Can horror be quantified? Compare and contrast the destruction during the German blitz of London 1940, the RAF bombing of Dresden 1945, and the self destruction of the Leafs’ season during February & March 2012.

4. “Race is purely a human construction.” Would Ralph Ellison’s novel be different if the nameless invisible man was white?

5. “Could it be possible? This old saint in the forest has not heard anything of this, that God is dead!” Using textual support and three critical secondary sources, answer: was Zarathustra being sarcastic?

Responses can be emailed to Halperin.Jeff@gmail.com–serious applicants only. Unfortunately, due to the volume of expected incoming traffic we can only respond to those being strongly considered.

Best of luck. Love,

-JD

What it is to be a Leaf fan: our condition

29 Wednesday Feb 2012

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Weeks ago, Joffrey Lupul said the Leafs should shift their focus and look ahead in the standings instead of anxiously looking over their back. It was good advice and a reassuring sign of leadership for fans who desperately hoped this team had turned a corner. Well, after that the Leafs lost 9 of the next 10 games, but still Lupul’s advice was good. So let’s take it one step further: let’s look past their 19 remaining games to see what life will be like in April when the Leafs are in the playoffs.

Thankfully this doesn’t take any imagination, as from experience we know that only one thing happens in every Leafs post-season: to look forward is to look back.

Leaf Playoffs 2012:

After days of freaking out, sporadic shakes, and ignoring life’s responsibilities in order to mentally prepare for playoffs, it’s finally game day against the senators. You watch all pre-game commentary even though experts have had nothing new to talk about for days. Normally a rational person, you’ve suddenly and unconsciously adopted several bizarre superstitions. You eat some delicious burgers, but overall life around you disappears; there is only the game and it’s still not on. Oh god, they’re dropping the puck. Oh god oh god oh god.

WE KILLED THEM! GOD THE sENS ARE CHEAP! WE MIGHT GO ALL THE WAY THIS YEAR!  Next two of three games are at home. Ahh, things look good and optimism abounds. The day after the game, you’re anxious and terrified. It’s puzzling that all around you, parents, teachers, and similar adults insist on continuing their lives with the unexplainable expectation that you will too, as if there wasn’t any hockey on at all.

It’s game day. You’re nervous and hungry for senator blood. After chicken wings and pizza, Bob McKenzie and others move their mouth but none of it makes sense. The game’s about to start. We’re gonna kill them we’re gonna kill them we’re gonna kill them.

STINKING RATS! OFFSIDE ON THE WINNER! FILTHY CHEATS! Typical. Yes, the Leafs could have used a goal, having lost 5-0. A split on the road. I can live with that. The next day you and your friends recount the incompetent refs, senator sins, and other miscellaneous abominations, each one a monumental scandal nobody else outside your group seemed to noticed. One sleep ‘til game three. You’re so overcome with anticipation and terror you could just rip out your hair and puke.

Naturally, after the highs and lows of five games and the commensurate chicken wings, burgers and pizza, the sens show their true colours and collapse, the ignominy marked by horrendous goaltending, some bizarre miscues that reflect terribly on the sens as both a hockey team and people in life, and especially the disappearance of certain key Swedish senators, or, more aptly put, there’s a hilarious and blazing spotlight on the Swedes’ conspicuous failure to merely appear after he guaranteed success and after flagrantly trouncing upon the unwritten player’s code, to say nothing of the written one. So, to Yonge Street, where the drunk and sober are indistinguishable but windows and cars remain intact, unlike in some cities—the expected behaviour during the well-earned spontaneous parade we’ve all been waiting for.

The days between playoff rounds are characterized by soaring pride, robust glee, and speculative anxiety, and there’s a total departure from the state of consciousness you had before playoffs started. It’s a new series, and Philly is going to be hard—they’re not pathetic wimps.

The daily routine during the series takes on the same shape as the last, only with more relentless gloom and foreboding; we’re getting dramatically outshot again, but we’re not getting shutouts. Optimism is difficult, but you work hard to totally divorce yourself from reality. Still, a debilitating feeling that you can’t shake off day or night keeps creeping in. Mercifully it’s over when the Flyers clinch the series in overtime after the Leafs miraculously tied the game in the final seconds—the greatest feat in 40 years.

Oh, elimination pain! The fog lifts and suddenly life has things to do. People in your life express sympathy, but they seem happy to have you back. You hold this against them—they’re not committed.  It’s impossible to process that your season is done, as your heart yearns to experience once more the restless anxiety and sheer terror of playoffs, but all that’s left is misery and a shame made more acute with the knowledge that redemption has to wait until playoffs next year. Oh, we’ll get ‘em next year!

Constructive Scholarly Disagreement on Robertson Davies

27 Friday Jan 2012

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A contemporary conversazione between Prof. David Wright and Dr. Phil Stein, two well-respected academics, about Robertson Davies’ Deptford trilogy.

Prof. Wright: The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies is a first-rate literary masterpiece, a unique accomplishment in the annals of Canadian literature. It is a strong testament to the power of both magic and wonder. It reminds us of the vitality of sensory experience over cold rationality, and it’s a convincing argument against history as merely a subjectively reconstructed document made of paper.  The psychological insights continually bowl us over–the Jungian especially–and even the dismissals of Freud are well laid out broadsides. The dialogue sparkles and crackles like the magic of Magnus Eisengrim.

Dr. Stein: Robertson Davies has a natural place in the canon of Eurocentric, patronizing dead white male authors. But surely Davies, the world-class elitist, would have considered this a tremendous compliment.  All the psychological talk talk talk and not even one positive reference to a gay character. Only coerced child buggery. The latent homophobia was palpable. What’s the author afraid of?

Prof. Wright: Davies isn’t scared of homosexuality, he’s just more interested in the myriad ways our inner lives fall into patterns or archetypes. Especially in the trilogy’s second book, the Manticore, psychologist Dr. Von Haller applies Jungian ideas, even some Adler, to unpeel the universal consciousness and lay it bare before the reader.

Dr. Stein: Yes yes, and after examination, or even well before, what do we find? A spoiled Anglo-Saxon brat given to cavalier dismissals of prideful, small Canadian towns as parochial backwater. We find a class war monger. A parasitic capitalist and unabashed colonialist. Best of all, the whole thing takes place behind the backdrop of a splendid castle in Zurich Switzerland, gained by inheritance no less. The whole thing is a bourgeois Marxist nightmare, and we hardly need a prescient psychologist to understand the character’s pathologies. This is the great Canadian writer?

Prof. Wright: I’m afraid you’re missing the point.

Dr. Stein: Oh yes, the rural bashing was too subtle, “villages as rotten with vice…incest, sodomy, bestiality, sadism, masochism.” David Staunton has adult problems because growing up his servants were sooo inadequate, wah wah wah. Do you know how many people in this city live below the poverty line?

Prof. Wright: Are we going to talk about the book?

Dr. Stein: How can we, when great chunks of our population have no access to medicare?

Prof. Wright: Well, In Dr. Von Haller’s words, when your unsophisticated feeling is aroused you talk like that. I wonder, what woman inside you talks that way? Can I help you find your anima?

Dr. Stein: You’re a priggish snob.

Prof. Wright: Come come now! We’re making progress. You go through life with an awareness of others, their wants and needs. You’re a sensitive man! But your antennae is only used for negative purposes.

Dr. Stein: You think social justice is negative? Are you a monster?

Prof. Wright: You’re projecting your pet cause on whatever comes before you. A distortion, no matter how compassionate its origin, is a distortion nonetheless. Reducing a writer, a vast thinker like Davies, to existing only on your fetishized level is false: You can’t read a piece of art with the critical lens you’d apply to a Marxist pamphlet.

Dr. Stein: “Critical lens”…the pomposity of the learned! Education is a great shield against experience.  

Prof. Wright: I know you’re quoting Davies there, confirming you’ve actually read the book, making your brutal interpretation yet more enigmatic and perverse, but I’m not apologizing for my education. And your sneer seems out of place for a man holding a doctorate.

Dr. Stein: Distract all you want. How are you missing the focus on class structures?

Prof. Wright: Hardly any book can avoid mentioning class concern, but it’s not what spurned the writing. You’re applying inorganic criterion. You’re judging apples using the standards you’d apply to judge oranges. This is literature, not politics. You’re in the wrong field, sir.

Dr. Stein: Now I’ve spent my life moving in the wrong direction?

Prof. Wright: I can’t get through to this guy. It’s hopeless. There’s nothing more I can do.

Dr. Stein: Egoist!

A complete history of music in under 500 words

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

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As a devoted historian I went to great lengths to untangle a long, complicated mess of history in order to compile a narrative that’s easy to understand, but, first and foremost, factually accurate.

THE HISTORY OF MUSIC:

Before Bach there was no music.  This seriously hampered the soundtracks of movies.  Bach’s music required specially commissioned music halls and churches with perfect acoustics.  For hundreds of years, Italians sang Opera and various European composers arranged notes this way and that.

This lasted until Black slaves sang while being exploited in fields, paving the way for blues, jazz, and rock & roll. This was by far the most positive thing to come out of slavery, though some countries that got rich may disagree.  At about the same time, deep in the backwoods of various small American towns, hillbillies played guitars, banjos, and had sex with their immediate relatives.  Elvis was a revelation because he showed White people could sing like Black people, even if they couldn’t yet drink from the same water fountains.  Then, psychedelic drugs rendered Black music trippy enough and sufficiently different to be considered not really Black music anymore.

Strangely, glam rock took off at the same time as heavy metal. Wardrobes were weird.  Then, musicians traded instruments for turntables, and the machine that used to play music started creating it.  Rap was a perfect medium for protesting and lamenting the sad state of affairs in Black America. White people ate it up in droves.  Simultaneously, grunge became the perfect medium for White people to vent about all the hardships suffered by the unoppressed.  Seattle became internationally renowned for rain, coffee, and angst.

The internet allowed everyone everywhere to hear everything, and we haven’t seen a distinct style of music since.  Modern bands are accurately described with paradoxical composite adjectives: “They’re a soul, poppy, jam band, with blues roots and an old-school urban, rural, new-wave feel.”

Sexy music videos brought in money, so the highest paid musicians no longer burdened themselves with bothersome time-consuming things like writing songs, singing, or playing their own music.  Auto tune could put a goat in perfect pitch. Computers liberated musicians from those old historical obstacles like money, instruments, and talent.  Rhythms and melodic samples could be found ready-made for click and drag stitching together. Yes, music has evolved to great heights where being a musician no longer requires being a musician. And all this on little speakers that fit inside our ears.

We went from Bach to this.

(An exhaustive list of bibliographical sources available upon request.)

This article is also published on Vivoscene.com, a home for me and other music writers.

The Curmudgeon’s Fall Fashion Style Guide for 2011

04 Friday Nov 2011

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The effortless, laid back look is so hot right now, but what do hard working fashion gurus know about effortless looks? When it comes to this style, the current vogue, their opinions are less than worthless. With this in mind, I am a male fashionista, a trend setter. My credentials are superb, as I haven’t gone clothes shopping in years and I hate fashion. Fashion and fascism both start out the same way. I find shopping for clothes a torture on par with waterboarding, and I see a very small distinction between Yorkdale and Guantanamo. Yorkdale Bay. Ironically, my total lack of care is what makes me a style icon. Even the media has complimented me on my dishevelled appearance.  Follow these fashion rules and you too can achieve the rumpled look without much effort.

THE HEAD-TO-TOE STYLE GUIDE:

The cornerstone of any fashionable wardrobe is good plaid. Red with bits of green is timeless, always a hit. I have another plaid with just greens too, and I’ve worn blues and browns in years past. Unfortunately, a shirt can only withstand so much wear, and those wonderful plaids of old have disintegrated, their ashes in an urn on my shelf.  Now that the Halloween rush is over, Value Village is civilized again. Spend between 5-10 dollars on a plaid, and if you see any sold for more, give the proprietor of the store/garage sale a piece of your mind. You need t-shirts too. When you visit a city or go to a concert, buy a cool shirt with Jerry Garcia’s face on it.

I recommend having two or more sweaters so you don’t need to wear the same one every day. A smart look is to wear your sweater over a plaid shirt so the collar sticks out. This gives my monochrome sweaters a hot accent.  I have a blue, brown, and green sweater: believe me boychicks, this fall, dark, earthy colours are totally in. Some sweaters of mine have a round neck, others are V.  If you do this, girls will just swoon over the variety.

When it comes to pants, jeans are a hot trend. Everybody’s wearing them. In terms of colour, I recommend blue.  I used to wear them baggy but I advise against that now.  Everyone has a different standard of how jeans should fit.  My rule of thumb: tight enough to go biking without getting caught in the chain, loose enough to play spontaneous hockey.  That’s some sartorial smarts right there.  Khakis are like jean’s older, sterner brother. Very smart. “First we get the jobs, then we get the khakis, then we get the chicks.”

You’ll need shoes. I like brown dock shoes because they’re versatile, and in the summer they can be worn sans socks, an added advantage when you don’t have a laundry machine at your place. I call my dock shoes the “BCs,” or the “business casuals.” They’re perfect for Saturday night business drinking and for recreational pints. Nikes are good too.

Leather jackets are timeless. Get one that’s soft to the touch…that nice butter leather. Mine is black with beige accents on the cuffs and collar, so I call it the “black and tan fantasy” in homage to Duke Ellington. Sometimes I name my clothes, but you don’t have to. Get a scarf too. It’s cold out there, and it’s an opportunity to accent your earth tones with stripes or geometric shapes. I wear a light brown scarf to bring out the colour of my dark brown jacket…smart.  There are thick scarves that keep you warm and there are those threadbare schmattes worn by terrorists. Fashion faux-pas. If you’re going to look like Al-Qaeda, do it in the summer.

Chic. Dapper. Dans le vent. Natty. Suave. You too can be these things, it’s not exactly rocket surgery.  Just follow my guideline and aspire to dress like me.

[Addendum: BlogTO readers/others who don’t know me: this piece is a playful, satirical shot at pompous, self-regarding fashion writers. It’s a humour piece. It’s become my most well read piece by far, but I never expected anyone outside my friends to read it. I’ve got flak, so let’s be clear: I don’t really think I’m a male fashionista. Hope you enjoy.]

Confession: My Experience As a Racist (a hockey story)

29 Saturday Oct 2011

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From a young age, Canadians are conditioned to revile racists.  We look back on American slavery and wonder how life was really like that.  We bemoan contemporary racism and wonder if the world will ever become truly egalitarian. I’m a pretty decent guy, but I know from personal experience that one aspect of my Canadian upbringing instilled in me a burning hatred for an identifiable group of people and wished nothing for them but the wrath of hell. I’m talking about the Ottawa Senators and their fans.

Ten years ago, if you had asked me if all Sens fans had horns and hoofed feet, I’d have said “no”, but I’d have given them no other benefit of the doubt.  I couldn’t be sure Sens fans even existed: I had never seen one in real life, and even on TV their arena was filled with Leaf fans loudly booing whenever alfredsson (that gutless puke) touched the puck. I had no reason on earth to believe somebody actually liked that team, yet I hated that theoretical person all the same. When the Senators signed a player, I hated him overnight.  This went on unchecked for years, as my friends were just as racist.

My first encounter with an actual flesh-and-blood Senator fan happened in 2003, while my hate was at a late stage of maturation.  Though I didn’t expect a Sens fan to behave with civility or dignity (these concepts utterly foreign to the organization) I behaved well and the meeting didn’t end in carnage, though it started off rocky.  I moved into my dorm during first year university, and immediately put up my Leafs’ flag when in walked my neighbour.

“Nice to meet you. Hey, why are you putting up that piece of shit?”

“Where are you from…neighbour?”

“Ottawa.”

Just like that. He didn’t seem to be suffering any certifiable mental condition detectable at first glance, so I looked again. Still nothing.  Maybe something was wrong in his frontal lobes, but he looked like a normal human being.

Over the year, I developed a friendship with this curious species fuelled by intense rivalry and beer.  To be sure, however amiable, a part of me hated a part of him.  We shared laughs and violent shouting matches in equal measure.  But like mushrooms after a rainstorm, more Sens fans appeared. It took a year among their kind to realise that, in actual fact, Senator fans are people.  For years, I dehumanized their fans and their players (sometimes fairly), but the sample of fans I met turned out to be good Canadian boys who simply had the severe misfortune of growing up in Ottawa.  I had to admit: my neighbour, and others of his race, were decent.

The roster still comprised soulless guttersnipes, but I was racially more sensitive and newly convinced my hatred wasn’t blinding. I had reversed my all encompassing hate and learned to give a fair appraisal of the team. “Volchenkov can block a shot.”  Wholly unbiased now, my opinion was fair, balanced and commendable.  I had reformed and was tremendously capable of praise when it was warranted…it just wasn’t.  That year, following another epic post season Senator collapse, the Leafs eliminated the hated rival for the fourth time. 4/4. Those who remember the game see Lalime clearly in their mind’s eye. Ahh, glory days!

Meeting Senator fans has enabled me to gain perspective on a disturbing time in my personal history, but my racism was of a variety that I suspect all Canadian hockey fans have to some degree.  Still, I look back on these years of unbridled hate with regret. I am grateful for the contact I had with good people who gave me a chance to reform.  Now I can view them as dignified human beings, and they have made me a better person for it.  That said, I do have some final observations:

Chris Neil is a cheapshot artist who seriously looks inbred.

On five occasions, Jason Spezza has contaminated out heroic National team by failing to win gold even once.

Despite just yesterday writing a lengthy argument for unequivocal free speech, I’m afraid of what I’ll put into print if I candidly write about daniella alfredsson [sic]. I have not cooled one bit after his vicious hit from behind on Tucker from game 5, 2002. He should still be suspended without pay.

Prediction: the Toronto Maple Leafs Will Win All 82 Regular Season Games

16 Sunday Oct 2011

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Is any NHL team capable of beating the Toronto Maple Leafs? After last night’s game, the answer is a resounding “no,” as the Leafs have proven that they can win in every way situation: shutout domination; annihilating their opponent, then barely hanging on; the come from behind victory.  This edition of the Leafs is literally unstoppable.

The defence has been poised and fearless, readily entering into the offensive attack while managing to scare the daylights out of opposing forwards, particularly those from France.  Woody Allen said 90% of life was just showing up: thanks to Phil Kessel, this is true for our other forwards.  I could describe Kessel’s domination by comparing his speed to Mogilny or his exploits to Achilles, but the damage he’s wrought to opponents is recorded authoritatively by the league statisticians: Phil leads the NHL in goals, points, and plus minus (a distinction shared with Phaneuf, that ransacking enthusiast).  Doubly impressive, Kessel’s managing to do all this with only one testicle.

The Maple Leafs are undefeated both at home (3-0-0) and on the road (0-0-0). At this rate, statistically speaking, we are heading for a perfect 82 win season. This would definitely be a triumph for a team that has failed to make the playoffs since the lockout. But in my opinion there will be doubters: “Reimer will suffer the sophomore jinx” (nah, he prays successfully to Jesus all the time); “Kessel is streaky and he’ll have another fourteen game slump” (no he won’t, how dare you!); “Bozak is a third line centre on your first line” (he’s been improving his faceoffs all summer…); “wait, you’ve only played three games” (hardly the leafs’ fault).  Be assured, these critics, depraved Senator fans, know nothing about hockey: they’re fans of a team who passed on a young Chris Pronger (prototypical defensive bully), Paul Kariya (989 pts), Jason Arnott (907 pts), preferring Daigle instead (umm…ya).  We’ve beat them four times in four playoffs. Currently sitting 1-4, the Sens have no shot at a perfect season like us.  Leaf doubters of this variety and others can all be thoroughly ignored.

But it must be said, we’re not out of the woods just yet. A bigger question remains to be seen: can the momentum from mission 82W carry over to Mission 16W?

As ever, we have no reason for doubt.

The Liberation of Chickens From Today’s Free-Range

30 Friday Sep 2011

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The literature and the images on PETA’s website about the deplorable way chickens suffer are beyond disturbing. The depraved details need not be retold: suffice it to say, it should come as no shock to learn Heinrich Himmler was once a chicken farmer. But today, even lucky chickens under the best conditions have a dull existence idling on a free range under the heavy surveillance of their executioner. Comparatively, free range is good, but we all know there’s more to life than mobility. Chickens need more. There’s a new, upscale market of pampered chickens waiting to be exploited.

In the future, allowing chickens merely free range outside will be considered a moral violation. Chickens will receive more and more perks until finally progressives will only buy eggs produced by chickens that have been on guided tours throughout Europe. This is undoubtedly more humane than any free range. How do you keep ‘em down on the farm after seeing Paree? Making nests and bathing in dust, those splendours of the free range, doesn’t hold up to gazing dreamily at the Tuscan countryside. Only after such pampering is the chicken ready for execution.  Eating what we kill is humane, so long as it’s taken to Italy first.  A dozen eggs will cost only $45.

This will change when progressives complain that only rich chickens who win the genetic lottery enjoy the privilege of travel. Meanwhile, lower class chickens languish in squalid, free-range ghettoes. Thankfully, they’ll point out, a full life does not require a huge purse.

These progressives will buy chickens that have been spiritually nurtured by enlightened farmers in ways that are inherently accessible. Each chicken will be personally named and fed by hand. If they’re lonely, farmers will curl up and cuddle. Paperback editions of world classics can commonly be found for under $5. Like children, chickens will love being read to. Movie projectors will screen classic cinema on the side of barns. Even if the deeper meaning is less than fully grasped, chickens will feel cared for. In other words, conscious consumerism will expand the definition of free range to include nurturing the chicken’s mind, body and soul. This is a free range.

Then, after farmers have ensured that every chicken has had a pleasant life on the road to self-actualization, they’ll kill them in their sleep and sell their bodies.