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“But Why Do You Hate Cars So Much, Jeff?”

22 Sunday Jan 2023

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A buddy who reads some things I tweet asked me to explain my loathing of cars when I saw him this weekend. We were drinking and someone asking me to rant was highly appealing, but I figured I may as well set the basics down soberly in print, too.

It’s not that I hate cars, exactly. I hate our over-dependence on them. That a person who doesn’t own a car is all but isolated from society is barbaric. Car culture has normalized enormous sacrifices for cars that don’t even strike us as sacrifices because we’re all accustomed to them.

When you look at a house or a property, look how much of it is taken up by the driveway or parking. It’s not uncommon for around half a new home’s façade to be a garage, or at least a very large chunk. Almost one quarter of the city of Toronto is taken up by roads! Not parking lots, roads. Basically, any outdoor space that isn’t a commercially or privately owned, or a park, is consumed by cars.

Homeowners spend thousands to accommodate their vehicles and the city devotes its budget to cars, too. The city of Toronto charges much less for housing for cars (ie parking), than housing for human beings. One parking spot is worth tens of thousands of dollars. The city subsidizes street parking but refuses to do the same for people, and Free Market boosters don’t even notice the former, while the latter enrages them. If you asked motorists to spend on street parking what the actual rate should be, they’d be livid. They think they’re getting squeezed now, when really they’re getting subsidized.

Parents are quick to point out that it’s easy for a guy like me, no kids and works from home, to be opposed to cars, but just try schlepping your kids to hockey on a bike or bus! I get that and I’m not here to scold exhausted parents dealing with shit as best they can. I have a car too! I hate that it’s necessary, but we’re living in a world designed for cars and not having one is indeed difficult (so is having one).

Between the environmental, health, financial, and just lifestyle, a sensible, modern city would follow the data and do its utmost to remove private cars from the road, not by banning them, but by making alternatives more appealing. Busses, streetcars and subways should be clean, frequent, and reliable, then people would take them. Instead, under John Tory, the TTC continues its death spiral of critical under-funding (no North American city of comparable size funds its public transit system with fares to the degree Toronto does, not even close).

The cycle moves in both directions: everyone would love to take transit! But transit here is shit. That’s not because transit doesn’t or can’t work, it’s because we defunded transit for decades and pour our money into private car infrastructure. And why do we do that? Because nobody takes transit and everyone drives.

Instead of retrofit outdoor space to encourages safe and active forms of transit that get people around for less money in a way that’s fun and promotes good health, Tory and Ford are making unjustifiable and unconscionable decisions auto executives drool over because they lock-in car usage for years.

Cars are excellent when nobody else around you is driving them because they let you get around quickly. Decades ago, this was the case. But the more people do this, the less useful and more expensive cars become. They’re not a perk anymore, they become the baseline form of getting anywhere, which makes them essential, and therefore a burden. If you need to go to a far-flung location far away, by all means, drive. That’s what they’re best for. For short trips in the city or daily commutes thousands of people do at the same time…it’s stupid.

Because everyone is expected to own a car, developers buy cheap parcels of land in the middle of nowhere. It doesn’t matter that there’s farmland around you instead of a baker or grocer you can walk to, because you can drive to these things. Land in the city that could be used for building high-rises are instead devoted to parking cars. Cars enable our worst decisions.

We should be fixing this by turning car housing into people housing. There’s acres of under-used or unused land in the heart of the city and across the GTA, but instead of focusing on that, Ford is re-writing/undoing the law to let donors develop environmentally protected greenspace they purchased weeks before he changed the law. The OPP is investigating corruption allegations.

Conservatives paint any critic of this obviously corrupt scheme as an opponent of affordable housing, as if Doug Ford is letting Gasperis develop environmentally protected land to house homeless people and immigrant laborers. It’s an absurd joke, but issues surrounding cars is very much related to the price and nature of housing. If you don’t believe me, ask anybody whose community was razed to build an urban highway (guess which communities get selected).

The above is far from the only reason I hate cars! There’s also the spiritual or marketing aspect. It seems incredible to me that anybody, let alone millions of people, identify themselves with their cars. Such and such a person should drive such and such a car. Macho right-wing guys with a penile complex drive monster trucks, even if it’s to get McDonald’s drive thru instead of hauling work-related loads in the rig or building an off-grid cabin. Meanwhile, flaccid-dicked little liberal cucks drive a Prius.

It’s the underlying premise I reject, that a person’s vehicle reflects who they are in some meaningful way. The extent to which marketing has rotted our brains is tragic and, frankly, embarrassing. It’s nonsense! Commute in a way that makes practical sense and stake your identity on higher things that actually matter.

Most of the trips people do in the city are walkable. Not all trips, and not everybody’s trips. But most people don’t need to drive to get groceries, they can just bring a nap sack and some bags and walk. But because we live in a marketing hellscape that promotes the automobile as the symbol of a person’s worth, many people view the idea of walking instead of driving anywhere as a form of giving up, or turning you back on society.

There are urban myths of CEOs who want to drive modest vehicles, but the company wants the BMW in the best reserved spot because otherwise it looks like a freak is running the company! Whether companies coerce executives into buying luxury vehicles or executives coerce themselves into thinking it’s necessary is mostly a distinction without a difference, but that they’re both entirely plausible is messed up.

To be fair, if people have an attachment to their car, perhaps it’s half due to marketing, and half due to the fact that our car-centric planning makes people attached to their car in understandable ways. For many working parents, their commute is a rare and important solo time where they can listen to podcasts or music and think their thoughts. They’re between work demands and family demands, and the idea of losing this private time to be on a crowded bus in bad weather and multiple transfers…it sucks.

The auto industry lobby is why we have such pitiful busses and trains–50% of Canadians live on a straight-shot route from Windsor through Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, and Quebec City, yet there’s no train service. Over-reliance on private cars ruins public transportation. Uber competes against the TTC, and the TTC is losing big time.

Again, I get that taking the neglected form of transit sucks! The point is, though, we should stop neglecting it!

I had a sad thought recently that’s related to this. It could be that most people’s main form of public interaction with strangers is, if not internet comment sections, driving. Cars let people navigate public spaces privately. We don’t talk with neighbours as much because, in a very literal sense, you can’t bump into someone when you’re driving and have a little chat. Instead of conversing, our interactions are all driving-based. This usually consists of things like, “Can you believe how this fuckin idiot is all over the road and in my lane?” We don’t talk to people; we try not to collide into each other on the way to everywhere.

Cycling and walking have no equivalent term for “road rage.”

This sad form of “interaction” shapes how we think of the people around us. The same thing that makes it convenient to get into your hermetically sealed and portable living room, with its infotainment centre, temperature controls, and whatever other indulgences, and cross a city without encountering another person is also extremely sad and isolating. And that’s sad for the person who has the car.

If you don’t have a car? The TTC is raising fares yet again, even while cutting services and investing in more Fare Enforcers. Tory spends billions to shave seconds off a suburbanite’s work commute, but wants you to spend more for less public transit. It’s known that fare enforcers treat non-white riders differently than white passengers, just like cops use car-related reasons to disproportionately pull over Black drivers, sometimes with violent and even lethal results.

On another basic level, Toronto drivers have never been more dangerous. Anecdotally, I’ve read stories in the last year about drivers crashing into poles, fences, businesses (a car drove through a bike lane, into a bike store, Sweet Pete’s), homes, even second-storey condos. And of course, people. Out on a walk a couple weeks ago, I saw the recent aftermath of a car that had driven through a bike lane, onto the sidewalk, and into a bus shelter. The previous night, blocks east, a driver crashed into a cyclist. A few days afterwards, a few blocks west, a car drove into a laundromat.

The hype over electric cars and self-driving cars is wrongheaded. As they say, if electric cars are the future of cars, car-free cities are the future of cities. Most “safety” feature only make it safer for the people in the vehicle. Cars, SUVs, and trucks are dangerously large now in North America.

The term “world-class city” is so embarrassing and I don’t mean to invoke anything like it. But right now cities worldwide like London and Paris are currently undoing car-centric planning to save money, improve health, and help people get around faster and safer. Instead, Doug Ford is proposing a bougie-ass waterfront spa costing taxpayers probably half a billion to pay for a private company’s underground parking lot. He campaigned on new highways and widening existing ones. In 2021, the private company that bought highway 407 owed taxpayers about $1 billion, and Doug Ford wouldn’t take the free money even while underspending on healthcare during a pandemic.

If something helps the auto industry, austerity governments that don’t have a penny for public services eagerly spare no expense.

Ultimately, cars kill cities in so many ways that it’s hard to even notice or convey. Indeed, there are sensational stories of violence in the TTC system lately, which are tragic. But there are deadly car “accidents” on the streets every day and those don’t put people off driving, and the media frames road violence stories as, essentially, a tragic whoopsie.

The idea that someone spends thousands to buy a car, thousands on insurance annually, then more for parking (from their wallet and city coffers), yet more for maintenance and fuel, all visit stores that could be located closer to them if planners didn’t assume everyone would own a car…it’s stupid! In a sense, the more refined and improved the individual cars get, the stupider the whole thing is. Just walk! Bike!

That the car industry promotes the idea that driving makes luxury car and truck owners somehow rugged individuals, not the cyclists braving the weather and lethal risks drivers present, is absurd and somehow funny and depressing.

The auto industry famously created the term “jay walker” in the 1920s because before then, people assumed public space was entirely for walking or tram, and private vehicles were the outsider. The classic “hey, I’m walkin’ here!” in the thick New York accent doesn’t register anymore today, because people identify with the driver. The car is now thought to be the city’s natural inhabitant, not the person.

In the same sense, shifting the safety burden away from city planners and drivers onto vulnerable roads users is illogical and dangerous. “Share the road” is bullshit! The whole point of physically separated bike lanes is cyclists shouldn’t share the road with drivers! Nobody wants that! Pedestrians are never told “share the road” because we’re used to them having “sidewalks,” a euphemism for the narrow lanes at the margins of public space (ie roads) reserved for people to walk.

It took me a while to grasp that all infrastructure is car infrastructure. Sidewalks aren’t for pedestrians; they only exist so drivers don’t crash into people walking. “Bike lanes” let motorists drive without the risk of killing a cyclist, which will raise their insurance premium and, also noteworthy, end a cyclist’s life. Cyclists and pedestrians would have unlimited freedom if it weren’t for cars! They don’t need paved lanes. Drivers need everyone else to be in reserved sections of public space so they, the motorists, can do their thing freely. Same with traffic lights, police enforcement (everything from cops at construction sites to highway speeding tickets issued from a Cessna flying overhead), R.I.D.E., “pedestrian bridges,” parking enforcement, crossing guards, street signs, and everything else we pour money into. It’s all for cars.

Injured, mained, and dead cyclists, pedestrians, and drivers are collateral damage.

City budgets and residents are being held hostage by the auto industry. Maybe it’s worse, and that they took control of policy decades ago and aren’t giving up control now. Worse still, people want laws written by the auto lobby because they’re convinced they can’t live without private cars. We’re getting bamboozled into pouring money into the blackhole that is auto-dependency because auto-dependency has made the alternatives to driving suck, and we can’t get out of that cycle. Plus, the voice on the commercial during the hockey game saying trucks are bad ass is gravelly.

It’s not too late to undo Toronto’s car-centric planning and design public space that people want to be in, instead of drive through.

(I was on the verge of drunkenly shrieking all this and lots more to my buddy Friday night but stopped myself last second because somehow this long complaint isn’t everybody’s idea of fun. I could have written more, too, because you can’t imagine just how insufferable I can be on this topic.)

Problems with Cars: Space

30 Wednesday Nov 2022

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It’s hard to describe just how much space cars take up because we’re so accustomed to them. Mammoth parking lots in a housing crisis don’t make sense, but they’re everywhere. It should strike people as wrong that property is valued by the square foot, but the city hands out countless sports for free parking.

In a very basic sense, let’s just talk about the figures. Toronto is 630 kilometres squared. Stats Can only has stats on how many vehicles are in Ontario, not Toronto. Estimates peg the total at 0.9-1.5 per household—needless to say, there are well over one million cars on Toronto roads. The average car is, say, 15 feet long, 6 feet wide. But you can’t just park cars tip to tip, so they essentially require more space they actually take up.

When driving, cars require an even buffer around them. Take the physical space on either side of a car that needs to be void for the driver to feel comfortable passing through—that’s a car’s real width. In other words, a 6-foot wide car is in effect 8-feet wide, or wider.

Imagine how much accustomed we are to sacrificing space on our lawns (driveways, parking pads), or even building structures specifically to house cars (garages). Cars take up so much room at both ends of their drive. They go from one designated spot to another, which means every every trip requires a special accommodation at each end, which usually results in a huge oversupply or undersupply of parking.

No place can always supply just the right amount of parking! If stadiums have sufficient spots for the game, they have way too much parking 98% of the time. Malls have enough parking for Boxing Day, which happens once a year, if ecommerce hasn’t made parking unnecessary. Downtown only has so many parking spots available because that’s where most of the stuff in the city is, so when there’s a big night on the town, there likely are way too few spots. There should be a parking shortage, in other words.

Stable harmony is hard to come by because cars come in spurts of waves, not constant waves. There’s morning and afternoon rush hour and, say, a Jay’s game bringing thousands of commuters some days but not others.

The physicality of cars themselves are the reason cars clog cities. There’s no way for cars to at once be in the world and yet not take up space in it. There’s no way for over a million cars to be in the city without sacrificing the space over a million cars take up. Remember, a car’s footprint is magnitudes larger than the car’s size!

I just read an article saying the average Canadian spends 3 days in traffic a year. A year is 365 days, so this is approaching 1% of life. Billions get drained in lost productivity because we are scrunched between cars and cannot get away from the other cars on the road to our destination.

Every driver imagines a rout with no cars on it, then they’re shocked, shocked, when the roads are filled with cars. They act like bad traffic is a surprise even though gridlock is expected to the point reporters specifically report on traffic! That there is such thing as a “traffic reporter” is an indictment of car culture we’ve come to accept. It’s proof cars as a mode of transportation are an utter failure.

No amount of tinkering with traffic lights will solve gridlock because the problem is the number of cars, not how they move.

Induced demand is the idea that widening roads encourages more people to drive, which offsets any gains the additional space from the widened road once provided. Therefore, widening the roads is doomed to fail. You can’t widen roads forever not only because it doesn’t work, but because the city is only so big.

Something like 20% of Toronto is roads. A fifth of the city! At some point, a city needs stuff for the roads to lead to. It shouldn’t all be converted to roads. Which neighbourhoods get selected to be the site of new highways? Phrased this way, I suspect the answer is clear. That marginalized people are the first victim of car culture is true across America, Toronto, New Delhi, and beyond.

Low caste people get pushed aside to build a “flyover” in New Delhi just like Black neighbourhoods were razed to build highways post WWII. So it’s not just a question of how much space cars take up, but whose space it is.

If you look at the stark wealth divide on either side of the Allen in Toronto…I mean, it’s hard not to notice roads are pretty much a literal class barrier, or at least a demarcation of class. Even if you try to just talk about the space cars take up, eventually you need to talk about whose space it is, and it’s an unsettling conversation. It’s no coincidence that the first communities displaced for highways are also the least served by public transit.

Today, Toronto celebrates the public backlash that stopped developers from extending the Allen through Cedarvale and the Annex to connect with the lakefront highway, led by Jane Jacobs. This was of course a victory, but the shame is most neighbourhoods can’t similarly defend themselves.

Add up all the space taken up by roads, parking lots, driveways, parking pads, highways…no electric vehicle fixes the problem of how much space cars consume. As it’s said, if the future of cars is electric cars, the future of cities is car-free. We need to stop relying on cars and build infrastructure that assumes people won’t be driving.

Most drivers are in a car alone, while busses and streetcars take dozens of people. Sure, busses are fuller at some time than others, just like roads are full of cars at rush hour but are totally empty at other times.

But we need to move people, not cars. That’s what efficiency means. There’s nothing less efficient than making everyone effectively 4000 pounds, 6 feet wide and 15 feet long.

People are so attached to their car today because our brutally underfunded public transportation system isn’t reliable or pleasant. The cycle moves in both directions at the same time: because public transportation sucks, people all but need their own private vehicle to get around, and because so many people own a car, they’re happy we widen roads and neglect the TTC, even though a vastly improved and properly funded public transit, as well as safe active infrastructure, offers the freedom promised in car ads.

It’s understandable but sad how many people enjoy their alone time in their car, and see it as a calm period to listen to music, podcast or an audio book. I don’t mean to scold people who really like their car and enjoy this time! But they love their car the way a person in a storm loves their safe haven. Highways are the storm, not the haven, and this endless cycle of governments spending billions to make the storm worse, then people personally spending tens of thousands to find shelter from the storm, only perpetuates the problem.

So I get that in this obscenely car-dependent world you like your car, of course you do!

But if we can’t agree that cars with just a driver in them effectively make that single person 15 feet long and 6 feet wide and weigh about 4,000 pounds, and that it’s impossible to expect free-flowing roads when you do this to millions of people in the city simultaneously, we won’t be able to agree on anything.

As the popular adage goes, “cars aren’t in traffic; they are traffic.” Toronto doesn’t have space for this many cars and this many people and we need to choose. The choice should be an automatic slam dunk, but doug ford’s decision to enrich donors by increasing sprawl and paving over the Greenbelt is corrupt (that’s another article!), dangerous, braindead, and proves we’re going down the wrong road.

Long-Term Don’t Care: a Doug Ford Crisis

21 Saturday May 2022

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Photo Credit: Vlada Karpovich via Pexels

Canada had a relatively low COVID mortality rate compared to other OECD countries, but residents in Long-Term Care (LTC) died in disproportionately high numbers. To be clear, it’s not that COVID killed LTC residents in greater numbers here than it did young people because older people were more susceptible. It’s that LTC residents in Canada died in vastly higher percentages than LTC residents in other OECD countries.

Canada’s long-term care problems extend beyond Ontario, but our country was uniquely dangerous for seniors in LTC compared to other similar nations, and Ontario was and is a particularly dangerous province. In Ontario, seniors in for-profit LTCs were substantially more lethal.

Doug Ford’s ministers didn’t do much for LTCs when the virus hit in 2020. The Ministry of Health and Ministry of Long-Term Care submitted their reports, memos, and briefing notes concerning COVID-19 and long-term care to the CBC, which determined it sat back and was ill-prepared.

By May of 2021, 70% of all COVID deaths in Ontario were in LTC settings. This number has only gone up.

Doug Ford promised an “iron ring” around LTCs on March 30, 2020. He did not create one. A 2021 report by the Canadian Armed Forces led to widespread outcry as a picture emerged of seniors dying preventable deaths in “horrifying” conditions. Think cockroaches, dehydration, patients with ulcers neglected in beds, staff wearing contaminated gear. The backlash was so intense even Doug Ford promised an investigation and accountability. He had said the investigation was already underway, when in reality it had never begun and would never begin.

Instead, Doug Ford rushed to create a law protecting privately-owned LTCs from lawsuits. He claimed the law would protect all businesses from unnecessary lawsuits that could bankrupt them. That explanation seems a little convenient given the conservative connections to privately-owned LTCs.

For example, the former Conservative Party leader Mike Harris has sat on Chartwell’s board since 2004, and has made great piles of cash by reducing regulations and oversight. IE, cuts made prior to COVID resulted in LTCs being so deadly when the pandemic struck.

For-profit LTCs hire lobbyists with conservative ties. Current MPP Melissa Lantsman was a registered lobbyists for Extendicare. The list goes on. The revolving door between the conservative party and for-profit LTCs is such that the LTC’s failures are Ford’s failures, too.

The Liberals also deserve blame for overseeing the privatization of LTC for 15 years. This isn’t all on Doug Ford, but this is a story about governments deliberately sacrificing elderly Canadians’ quality of life for shareholder profits, a pattern that Doug Ford repeats so often, it’s about the only approach he knows.

Abandoning seniors was just the first stroke.

The federal government donated COVID tests to Ontario that somehow people never received unless they were students in private schools, and instead, for months, people paid Shoppers Drug Mart and other pharmacies $30 or $40 for a rapid test countries like the UK, US, and Germany made free or inexpensive (say, $4). (Ontario Pharmacies only began handing out boxes of free rapid tests weeks before the provincial election.)

By approaching the pandemic as a money-making opportunity for government insiders instead of treating it primarily as a public health crisis to solve, the Doug Ford government ended up relaying COVID tests to the very communities least likely to get COVID, and neglected communities that needed support the most.

This is a mutually reinforcing cycle: COVID initially spread in poorer, non-white communities because people there were more likely to work in-person jobs that couldn’t be done remotely. Existing systemic injustices made “frontlines heroes” more susceptible to getting the disease. But because Doug Ford governs primarily for the wealthy, poor people had to fend for themselves, which inevitably resulted in them getting COVID in higher rates while getting no to little government support.

Doug Ford refused to give working people paid-time-off, which experts said was required so workers with COVID symptoms could stay home rather than risk spreading the disease because they couldn’t afford to not work for a day. Ontario workers had more paid-time-off before the pandemic than during it.

Vaccination rates were initially lowest in communities where spread was highest. This pattern repeats itself and has done so throughout the pandemic.

It may sound like a cliché or oversimplification to say Doug Ford repeatedly put profits above people’s lives. I am confident that the more you read about his failings, the truer it will seem. This, despite his platitudes about representing ordinary people.

The idea that “frontlines heroes” were so actively neglected by this government, left to fend for themselves while the premier essentially handed over control to lobbyists and tycoons…it’s heartbreaking and unconscionable.

I half-joke that the media backlash was fiercer when a few young people tweeted “OK, boomer” in 2019 than when seniors died in appalling conditions under Doug Ford, who reacted by changing nothing except to further cement the dangerous conditions. We need to reckon with the underlying lethal economics behind our lethal long-term care centres. Indeed, conservative ministers were buying stocks in for-profit long-term care centres during the pandemic, while Doug Ford handed out millions of tax dollars to upgrade for-profit LTCs and changed laws to let LTCs increase their rates for rooms and charge extra for private ones.

The profiteers are already inside the government; they must be voted out in June.

War, Convoys, and the Point of it All

03 Thursday Mar 2022

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I’m sure everyone thought a lot about life during the pandemic, the point of it all. If we were going to make it to the other side, what would we do once we got there? What is the point of life, society?

Being privileged as fuck, I was situated about as nicely as somebody can possibly be in a pandemic, and it was a fucking misery on all sides. The choice was doom-scroll or feel guilt and powerlessness at being unable to prevent what felt like society’s collapse.

I thought I was a cynical bastard, but it never occurred to me that people would oppose public health measures during a pandemic by invoking “Freedom.” The so-called “truck convoy,” which never represented the majority of Canadian truckers let alone Canadians, was fake-ass right-wing theatre from top to bottom.

Like all elements of cheap partisan political theatre, it needed some very real people to get swept up in it to give the appearance of legitimacy, and there were, but it was organized and coordinated by political extremists and violent crooks, including ex-military and ex-police. You can tell from the support it got from the alt-right shitbag pundit community that this was not a grassroots movement.

If it was actually a working-class protest, conservatives would have opposed it with every fibre of their being. The province’s conservatives have gouged workers and fought to undermine labour rights for the last 24 months of a pandemic, refusing not just what union reps said would be decent compensation but what doctors said was necessary to combat the pandemic–ie, paid sick days. Not even a global pandemic could shake the conscience of doug ford. The conservative support for the convoy was all the proof a person could want that the convoy was in no way working-class. Elon Musk, perhaps the world’s richest person, vocally supported it too.

The alt-right were deliberately conflating the right to protest with the right to park enormous trucks in very tight public places. Just like “50,000 truckers” became maybe hundreds at the pinnacle of that fake-ass protest, the presence of trucks made the size of the protest seem a lot bigger than it was. The physicality of the trucks compensated for the relatively low number of people.

All of this felt foreboding at the time. I saw a picture of a maga militia member (three-percenter) in camo fatigues and patches standing at University and College. The flags with swastikas, confederate flags, and other hate symbols in Ottawa have been well-documented.

But it feels small now that war has broken out in a major European city. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is horrifying for reasons too obvious to state. Seeing trucker carlson of faux news go from promoting the convoy to defending vladimir putin after the invasion…

Alt-right ratfuckery is all connected. I’ve seen rabid social media support from the same accounts for the so-called truck convoy, putin’s invasion, modi’s hindutva pogroms, the January 6 insurrection on the US capital…they’re all inter-linked.

Condemning the war is inevitable, but what else is there to say?

Despite everything, the crushing hopelessness gives way sometimes to optimism based on my belief that normal people are doing amazing things behind closed doors, in their private lives, things which will never be reported. Little things to cheer up those around them, support people. From community solidarity, people helping strangers and kin.

I’m not saying that these good and great private deeds will be enough to overcome war, the inherent violence of alt-right politics, end the pandemic, or fix the climate crisis. It’s just that people genuinely give me a good feeling. Being cynical about politics is reasonable right now, too utterly reasonably, but that’s not the same thing as misanthropy. I love people and always will.

I’ve had spiritual musical-revelations lately involving Parliament Funkadelic and somehow, not to be flippant, but this to me feels like the kind of thing that can fill in society’s hollowness. I’m not sure what the point of North American society is. It feels wasteful and dangerous in a stupid, vulgar sense.

The things people commonly point to as the crown achievements of civilization feel to me not just bad but anti-civilized. A legal code is an achievement compared to what you find in the jungle, but ours enshrine and protect racism as basically its central premise. Our technology is advanced, but it only exists for advertising, which in turn only exists to sell things probably unsustainably-produced things made by horrifically exploited people, if not outright slaves. Phones make people miserable, they’re expensive, and wasteful. Cars are sophisticated machines that can be beautiful and convenient, but they waste resources to a shocking degree, are the sole source of murder-inducing traffic jams, and they injure or kill people every day. Gas is rising in costs and our corrupt premier does everything possible to lock-in cars for the future in a way that disfigures the natural world, solves 0 problems, causes new many problems and exacerbates old ones, wastes billions of dollars, and benefits nobody except his oligarch donors and pandemic profiteers like galen weston (ford nixed public charging stations and is now putting them at en routes which galen weston owns; ford received COVID tests from the federal government, which mysteriously never got distributed, while galen weston sold COVID tests for $40).

During the pandemic my apartment got broken into while my girlfriend and I were asleep and her car was stolen and totalled, I developed shingles from stress, our place had roaches and neighbours who made my gf uncomfortable, we had to finally move apartments and after a year of not seeing anyone got COVID from the movers pre-vaccination Dec 2020, my GF broke her collar bone in a bike accident…still, I feel fortunate, humbled, grateful to be alive.

I can’t be the only one who has wondered, am I depressed, or is this merely a reasonable reaction to this moment?

We are governed by culturally impoverished aristocrats who don’t give a fuck. John tory, ford, and trudeau are all spoiled sheltered nepotism hires. If a private equity firm could take human form, it would take basically these human forms.

I’m from Forest Hill, I grew up anything but a radical leftist. Indeed, if anything, my upbringing only helps me to recognize a tycoon politician on sight. Toronto is lopsided as hell, and deliberately so. The mayor of a city where housing costs rose 28% in one year claims to be fighting for affordability? Our leaders aren’t failing to do what’s right, they’re successfully doing wrong.

So long as we continue to elect slum landlords as our representatives, who cancel public service under the guise of “savings,” homelessness will only grow and increase in severity and life will get harder and more brutal. I also feel like upper class people are miserable here, too. Depression is everywhere. What is the point of this city?

Either you need to rent a home to people to gouge them (ie, be a landlord) or be gouged yourself. Fuck or be fucked. Housing should be a human right, not a retirement strategy. If this is a wealthy society, what is the point of being wealthy if people need to either live on the street or stress about a mortgage their entire life?

Is it better to be a hammer than a nail? Maybe, but that’s a false choice, and the hammer is stressing over failing to live up to inflated, vulgar, unrealistic class expectations and feeling like shit because at heart it knows to “make it” in this society may involve causing harm to oneself or others or both.

I’m glad organized religion has lost its central position in society, but this is a society that doesn’t value human life or culture properly or at all. A spiritual crisis underlies our political ones. I encourage everyone to be outrageously nice to each other, read novelists like Roberto Bolano or Tolstoy or actual political writers and academics not the disgraceful postmedia blowhard class, and listen to deep funk and spiritual jazz very loudly on the best speakers you can access. Pamper your own soul, because we’re all going to die some day and you owe it to yourself. The point of life has to involve loving other people, friends and family and neighbours, but love for the species means spreading the work of our best artists and contributing to the life of the soul.

People need to come together now, at whatever stage of the pandemic this is, and that means privileged people with power need to condemn the racist violent barbaric tycoon politics being conducted in our name and exchange it for something genuinely peaceful, civilized, and cultured.

The Breakup Suite, by Trevor Abes — Poetry Review

19 Monday Apr 2021

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The series of poems contained in Abes’ beautiful collection is almost too raw emotionally to be judged fairly in aesthetic terms, yet the language is undeniable. The Breakup Suite is about exactly what it sounds like.

You seldom ever see someone else at their lowest emotional moment, fresh after a breakup of a 5-year relationship, and if somehow you do, you don’t expect it to be written about at all, let alone like this. You expect the person to be a fucking mess, yet the outpouring of a heart here is graceful, measured, balanced, contained.

The poems are as much a triumph of spirit and resolve as of language. The love of writing is as palpable as Abes’ love for “E.”

I felt like, for Abes to move on in life, the sentence and the sentiment had to be pitch perfect. Working out his own feelings and expressing them just so was the same act.

Which writer said, “I write so that I know what I think.” Whereas poets and writers may sometimes select frivolous subjects or go on sentimental trips, the stakes here are high. Abes writes poems where another person may go on a bender, with the same level of sobriety and reflection that the debauchee invests into getting drunk. He’s responding to devastation by trying to master his emotions, not get conquered by them.

The result is poetry that documents the collapsing of a shared rich, complex, loving inner world without any such collapse in the poems. That these poems can face the onslaught of raw emotion like this and endure suggests the poet can, too.

Talking about the actual breakup feels like I’m cheapening out on the language, which is continually impressive. The love felt is inspiring, even if it’s over now. The poems come almost as a secondary accomplishment, like, they’re great, but, holy shit, this poet really knows how to love someone and live life!

Abes says in the intro that maybe these poems could help someone else who is reeling after a breakup, but the world of love he describes is, well, lovely. That it was written during COVID is incidental in a sense. It mattered to the couple in their lives, not to the poems per se.

“The number of hours I’ve spent worrying
About whether or not I’d ever be able to ignore your Facebook and
Instagram to get a taste of the life we had even though it stirred my guts
to tears…
It’s not embarrassing so much as evidence of how I loved you big enough
To not take insurance out on us…”

-Excerpt from When Hope Returns

The language is precise but modern and matter of fact, not overblown ornate Poetry. It’s honest and unassuming. Sensitive, but tough, and even muscular in its sensitivity. If being raw and vulnerable, open and honest at your deepest point, is a tough form of modern masculinity, The Breakup Suite lays a blueprint.

These poems contain a slice of love as charged as you’re likely to find, and, despite Abes’ contention it may only be suitable for people fresh off a breakup (“poetry for the dumped”), these are simply very moving poems. In the way you can listen to the blues even if you woke up this morning and all you had was not gone, anyone can and should read these poems.

Writing them was a courageous act.

If you’d like to read The Breakup Suite, please email transfer $10 to Trevor (trevorstevenabes @ gmail dot com) and he’ll send you the PDF, or you can order a copy of the physical book from Amazon.

Disclosure: Trevor and I briefly worked for the same company in 2019. We’ve met exactly once, at a staff party. I describe the extent of our relationship because a review this positive may sound like sponsored content. It’s not! Only, had we not worked together, I wouldn’t have found his poetry.

Ode to My Grateful Dead T-Shirts

01 Thursday Aug 2019

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Looking through pictures from overnight summer camp a while ago really made me miss, of all things, my old Dead t-shirts. I wore a dead t-shirt consecutively every day between 1997-2000.

Bootleg Grateful Dead t-shirt culture has been written about at large. In my day I competed against CWP counselors for who had the coolest Jerry shit and the best tapes. I  held my own.

Today is August 1, Jerry’s Bday: happy birthday, big guy! Love you forever! In honour of it I’d like to catalogue My Dead Ts for posterity, with pictures where possible.

  1. “Space Your Face”—First Dead T, acquired in 1994. Standard Dead Skeleton with cool space shit inside it. This is me and my younger bro. This pic shows how long I’ve been in the game!

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2. “You know our love will not fade away”—Silhouette of Jerry’s face with lyrics from Not Fade Away on the back. Purchased in Vermont by my parents on a trip in ’95 or ’96.

3. “Nothing left to do but smile, smile smile”—This T was given to me by a family friend, herein called The Source, which he got from the parking lot of a Jerry-era Dead show. I got it in 1996, an early long-sleeved gem. Black and purple on either side of the stealie, with a smiley inside and the lyrics from He’s Gone, “Steal your face right off your head,” underneath.

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4. Sugar Magnolia T—Stealie with green and yellow on either side of the lightning bolt. Underneath was lyrics from Sugar Mag, “She’s my summer love in the Spring, Fall, and Winter…” Tour dates on the back from Fall 92 Dead tour. Shirts like this get reproduced today, but you can’t find ’em like this anymore.

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5. Blue tie dye, Skeleton with Roses—Blue/white tye dye. Acquired from The Source. I’ve seen this shirt on other people, but it was cool! I had the same image on a window sticker that’s still beautifying my parent’s house.

6. Deal T—Jerry-era parking lot T from The Source featuring a cartoon Jerry playing poker against cartoon skeletons, with the lyrics to Deal in bubble letters. Tour dates from 92 Tour on back. This was the best shirt of them all! In 1999 I happened to be wearing this shirt at a Merl Saunders concert, who played keys with Jerry in the Legion Of Mary. Merl sang Deal that night and I was in the front row, pointing to the lyrics on my shirt he was singing. He smiled. RIP, Merl! I wish I had a picture of this T somewhere!

7. VW Busses—Lot shirt from The Source. Dates from 90s tour on back. Everybody who saw me was envious of this BEAST of a shirt, and I’d kill to have it back and in good condition (I wore it to shreds). It was the best shirt I or anyone else ever owned.

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7. American Gothic Skeletons—Classic Grant Wood American painting rendered in Grateful Dead styles, a male and female skeleton farmer in tie dyes and overalls, etc. Lot t-shirt given by a good friend’s older brother—Source 2. This shirt was COOL!

8. Yosemite Sam Dead—frosh shirt from early 90s, inherited from Source 2. You can’t see the ‘stache on the skeleton, but it was there alright.

yo sammity sam Dead t

10. Blues for Allah—Dead at the Pyramids Egypt t-shirt, acquired in 1998. “What good is spilling blood, it will not grow a thing.” A friend bought it for me when she visited Israel. I still have this shirt!

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11. Warrior skeleton—this low key Dead T-shirt had a pic of a skeleton on horseback wearing native regalia, on his shield was an ad supporting the Rex Foundation, named after a Dead roadie who died. Acquired from The Source.

12. The Wheel—Jerry Bear riding a motorcycle, green tye dye. I gave this to a close buddy and devoted Dead Head. I got a lot of shirts in my day, more than I gave away.

13. Jerrymeister—people think this is a booze shirt, but it’s Jerrymeister. Lyrics from Brown Eyed Women on the back. Purchased at Grateful Fest in Ohio, ’09.

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14. “Grateful Dead Ain’t Nothin’ to Fuck With”—Dead and Wu Tang mash-up. Phish show parking lot, SPAC, ’14.

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15. San Diego Chargers/ Stealie—Chargers/Dead mashup. Grateful Fest, ’09. Pretty much just a white t-shirt at this point.

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16. Ohio Buckeyes/Stealie—Dead/Buckeyes mashup, Grateful Fest ’09. Gave to a beloved friend.

17. Pink/Salmon Jerry Stealie—from Grateful Fest, ’09. It’s a nice thick cotton piece, of higher quality than other bootleg shirts, which you come to appreciate after a while.

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18. Jerry Bear—this one was a gift, a friend saw it at The Gap! Weird, but hey. Dead shirts once supported people in need of money to see more Jerry shows and now it’s sweatshops, but this shirt does

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19. Sphinx Jerry Bear tie dye—This had a Jerry Bear as a Sphinx, and there was a pyramid or two. I vaguely remember getting it at Kensington in the 2000s. Looking through pics I saw it. I also had another Space Your Face tie dye, and probably some others I can’t remember to be honest.

random tie dye

20. Cats Under the Stars: I got a JGB T-shirt in San Fran in 2012, with the famous logo from the Cats album.

Honourable Mentions:

You get to spoon with Jerry every night when this is your blankie. Acquired in late 90s from The Source, who I understand got it from Haight/Ashbury.img_20190801_095657.jpg

Technically this is not a Dead shirt. My good buddy, younger brother of Source #2, is seen rocking a serious tie dye skiing/snowboarding Jerry Bear shirt.

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Against categorizing people

12 Monday Nov 2018

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How odd it is, the number of people with intense opinions / judgements about millions of total strangers.  Whether these opinions are positive or negative, the very underlying premise–that a person can have an accurate opinion about millions of strangers–is ridiculous, even if it’s quite commonly done.

It usually take the basic form of, people from ____ country are _____. Nations get reputations, or people from these countries are thought to embody certain supposedly national traits.

Another form of generalization comes from people making an assessment of the government of a certain country, and judge citizens of that country in relation to what they think of the people ruling it.

It’s usually subconscious, and it’s done even though it sounds quite stupid when said aloud.

People from rich Western countries look down on people who live under totalitarian rule, like North Korea, or under more or less military rule, like Pakistan. I suspect North Americans will say they care about the lives of such people, and they may, but there’s still a quiet and automatic feeling of superiority. We have no control over the system of government we’re born into, but I suppose many people here feel like we earned it. Like we deserve to have been born in a stable, wealthy nation.

I know people who hate Trudeau, yet are prepared to judge millions of people in another country by who rules over them. There are people who make an assessment of a foreign country’s leadership, then, based on this, believe these countries should be militarily invaded and attacked. Really, consider this.

My rule of thumb is, anybody who can’t name the language spoken in another country, let alone actually speak it, can’t really have an opinion about that country worth hearing. I lived in India for 1.5 years and didn’t learn Hindi. I only interacted to a subset of people who speak English, and this was very limiting. I know a lot more about India than I used to, but for a real political opinion, speak to a native. Natives from different regions. You can begin to understand another country’s politics when you understand their political cartoons.

The thing that determines status worldwide is money: Rich nations export their culture, and their culture becomes international pop culture. It’s not necessarily because it’s better art, there’s just money behind it, and confidence, and this sends it around the world. The fact that it’s been exported convinces people it ought to have been exported, and they’re more likely to embrace it because it was presented to them than they would if they stumbled on it themselves in some remote corner of the internet.

That art from their country is present around the world makes the people from that country feel superior, even if they have absolutely nothing to do with the art’s creation. That’s why politicians eagerly claim artists born within their borders, even if they didn’t fund or inspire or have anything else to do with the art. Countries even brag about writers who spent their lives denouncing that country, or at least its government. Politicians are likely to praise local writers they have never read, let alone understand.

It’s not a coincidence that America’s culture has circled the globe, and so has its military. Beyonce is great! Coca Cola is shit. Governments judge art not aesthetically but by how much Soft Power it’s worth. Art in this sense has no artistic value, or at least is not valued for its actual artistic value, it just confers status and prestige. If you see the way people scream at concerts, from Beatles to Bieber, you’ll see it’s as if they’re responding to partaking in their status by being in its presence, rather than showing appreciation for music they enjoy.

I am definitely not criticizing American artists! Most writers and musicians I love are American. I repeat, I love them. But all countries produce excellent artists, and we simply never come to know them. I’m sure of it. People claiming prestige because they come from the country that produced Melville, even if they’ve never read Moby Dick, are the same people judging strangers by what cultural capital that country has allegedly produced.

Culture in North America usually takes the form of ready-made Products–songs, novels, something ready for sale. In India, I found culture was mostly created to make the surroundings more beautiful. Textiles were created so people have something nicer to wear, and even though of course they are sold, its inspiration was artistic rather than commercial. Music is played in temples, to accompany prayer. I went to Piano Man to see some jazz, but small venues like that are rare. When I wanted to listen to some music, I went to my local Gurdwara.

Cultural needs to be understood in its context. There are people who think Pakistan isn’t a cultural capital because it allegedly hasn’t produced novels in the Western Canon. This is like saying American writers are behind because it hasn’t produced any good ghazals.

Anyway, I submit that people shouldn’t judge strangers by things that have absolutely nothing to do with them: their government, their artists. The truth is, they say you can be married to someone for years, and one day wake up and realize you don’t really know them. How is it then, that people form such strong and rigid views about millions of perfect strangers?

We’re probably hard-wired for the days when humans lived in way smaller groups, and even though it’s tempting to do we’re not mentally equipped to process reasonable verdicts on millions let alone billions of people. Especially total strangers. So it’s good to recognize this limitation, and only judge people or things after making reasonable contact. Don’t judge things without context. It sounds easy, but we all kind of do it.

Calibrate your outlook according to your staggering ignorance (no matter how many things you know, there’s way more you don’t…this has nothing to do with lack of intelligence, there’s just way too much out there to grasp–it’d take many lifetimes), be humbled by this, and keenly appreciate how little we know. Then judge, or not judge, accordingly.

 

On what I currently listen for in music

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

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My musical ear has changed. I always listened to excellent music—my first loves were MC Hammer, Aerosmith, Dance Mix 92-95, Phish and of course Grateful Dead. I don’t regret one note I listened to, but I wasn’t listening to the whole of every song, and gravitated too heavily to the guitar.

It’s begging the question: Did I focus too much on guitar because I was a guitar player, or is that why I became a guitar player in the first place? In either case, I didn’t properly value rhythm sections. I should have listened to everything. This might seem like not really a big deal but actually I think of it now as a sonic sin, akin to watching only 80% of the every screen while watching a movie. Musically, I was crooked.

Rhythm sections were something I responded to, I felt them, but didn’t hear. To be fair, I listened to a lot of bootleg Dead tapes with varying degrees of audio quality. But to listen to the drums without really hearing the bass is to hear the drums without their context. Drums and bass live together, there’s a dialogue between them in the music, and to only hear one is to really miss both.

I have known this for a while now, maybe months, but felt this quite intensely the other day messing around on a bass while my buddy drummed. The bass drum and the bass guitar are a tandem. It’s very possible to like a band because of their rhythm section without quite knowing that’s why you like them. That’s why Dave Byrne of Talking Heads wore that big suit, to make his head look small and his body look big as a reminder that music is fundamentally physical, not intellectual.

Early, the jazz bass player’s role was to support a soloist improvising over the tune’s harmony. They soloed, too, but it was mostly a supportive role. In 1970 Miles gives us Bitches Brew, which isn’t just a killer album title, it provides musical hints about the new direction: the instruments simmer together in a cauldron. Gone is the formula for 50’s jazz and even the freer 60’s stuff, where all instruments play the head of the tune, principle soloist solos first followed by second and third horn, drum solo then close with the song’s opening melody. Rather, there’s one groove that everyone participates in at the same time.

I had one saxophone lesson in 2007, wherein my teacher made an astute observation that astonished me: Coltrane was a hog! He kept soloing forever and forever, with the best rhythm players backing him. There was no melodic exchange. Now, I love Coltrane deeply, but this is more or less what he did.

A nasty alto player who used to run the Dal sax department told me something similarly astonishing: He said Cannonball Adderley was content with his bad ass swing, while tortured Coltrane changed his sound every week because he was just unsatisfied. I had thought Coltrane’s quest to find music’s highest height was a service to humanity. I will never say a bad word about John Coltrane, whose sublime music has genuinely given to me more than what religious people get from religion. Once in a while I’ll play him and have a kind of sacred experience, but generally I need music structured differently.

Miles said he learned from Sly and the Family Stone how to dismantle that old standard jazz formula, and melt his horn into the other instruments, rather than playing one after another in their turn.

The Band is the perfect sound for me now because of its balance. On the surface they don’t appear to have anything in common with Miles, but not only did they play on bills together in the early 70’s, their music is both a cauldron even if the brew is nothing alike.

The Band was a bar band for 10 years before they recorded their first album. This is key to understanding them. They had played loud high-octane Rock in every bar in the American South and Ontario. In the studio, in Big Pink, they wanted to turn the instruments down, hear each other, play songs on which their instruments intertwined. No virtuoso guitar or drum or bass solos. Their music is on a foundation of interdependence.

Most bands only have one or two super talented members whereas everyone in The Band is an all star. So maybe other groups can’t be as balanced as they are because their talent is dispersed lopsidedly—it’s a question of talent, not vision.

Glenn Gould said it’s “anti-democratic” for a pianist to have one dominant hand. Sure, but commitment to democracy isn’t enough, it’s very difficult to have a left hand that plays as deftly as the right. Gould would call The Band democratic. They are perfectly, utterly balanced.

There’s something so tacky to me now, even vulgar, about million-notes-a-minute guitar solos. So guitar-centric. “Play rhythm for me while I shred” is like asking friends for a favour rather than hanging out together on equal terms. This kind of solo is a physical achievement of dexterity, not necessarily a musical one. I can marvel at Steve Vai and G3, even feel envy at their shocking chops, but I don’t really want to listen to it.

Picasso had to prove he could paint in a renaissance style before his more abstract stuff was taken seriously. Why? For many people art can’t be serious unless it passes a certain threshold of technical achievement. This is understandable to an extent—you don’t want to celebrate an artist that produces something an untrained infant can.

Yet complexity does not equal quality. Would his abstract work be any less incredible if Picasso couldn’t also paint in a renaissance style? Does Neil Young need jazz chops to be taken seriously? Of course not, it’s ridiculous. Every artist is their own genre.

Most art presupposes the possession of certain amount of artistic skill, but not all. Judging art purely by the skill required to pull it off, rather than by the vision or soul behind it, is nearly as vulgar as judging paintings by how much money the Art World says it is worth. A solo isn’t good because it’s hard to play, but because it’s musical. Of course it’s OK to be impressed with a tough passage, but only if it’s musical.

Art is a mood, a vibe, a sound, a feel. Art is not ranked along any one ultimate hierarchy. But in music, I think it’s important to give the same weight to all the instruments. Actually I think Western Classical generally privileges melody and harmony over rhythm, the first conditioning of the Western ear. This dynamic trickles down.

The ironic thing is African music was often called “primitive” specifically because the rhythms were literally too sophisticated for Westerners to process. There’s a moment in the Ginger Baker documentary when he’s hanging privately with one of his hero drummers as a teenager, who plays records of some African drumming. Baker is asked to name the time signature, identify where the beat starts. He cannot.

Balance for me in music is along this axis to, between harmony, melody and rhythm. Rhythm should be a feature, not in service to the other two. I listen to a lot of Atlantic Soul records now, where the punch is the groove, not some dazzling soloist.

Music is infinite permutations of tension and release. I want to caution against confusing sophistication in music or art for quality: Like I said, I still love that old Dance Mix stuff, and a lot of old E-A-B blues is basic on paper but sounds like shit unless you play and sing with feel. If you can dance to a tune or you like hearing a song, that song has done its job.

But the music hitting me hardest now has togetherness, it’s communal. The Band sounds like they’re all having a great time hanging out together (and when they stopped enjoying hanging out, their music immediately suffered). It’s not an accident that they all play each other’s instruments, live and on albums. They’ve transcended their particular instrument and are playing music.

A wise friend told me once there are four stages to music. The first is “unconscious-unknowing.” Think of a child who plays air guitar because they feel the music in their bones but have no idea how to play actual music. Second is “conscious-unknowing,” the beginner who labours to follow the basic instructions, but is now playing music. Third is “conscious-knowing,” the accomplished musician who knows what and how to play but still must think about it. The final stage, that almost nobody reaches, is “unconscious-knowing,” where music is simply felt and transferred to the instrument immediately, without thought required.

This fourth category is filled with musicians who have transcended their instrument, or maybe two or more instruments. Their music isn’t a physical phenomenon anymore. It’s not even a cerebral one, because while it takes brains to play, it’s about feeling as much as thoughts. Not just the degree of thoughts and feelings—not how much intelligence and feeling is there–but the nature of these things.

The only pertinent question to musicians in the fourth category is: what are their musical thoughts like? How good are these thoughts/feelings? Charlie Parker’s music is nearly impossible to play, but that isn’t his real achievement. It’s his ideas that are impossible to conceive of. Lots of people mimic Parker today, and they are incredible musicians! It’s very, very hard to do! But they are reproducing his licks, not the mental originality that gave rise to them in the first place.

Musical ideas need not be complex to be good. It’s instructive that when musicians get tired of playing bebop, they mellow out and play grooves. Miles’ Birth of the Cool or even Kind of Blue. Thought of this way, the idea of ranking musicians or bands in sequential order is ridiculous.

I worry that a lot of people hear music on YouTube and it sounds like shit. MP4s, or iTunes, sounds like shit. Non-flac digital files compress music so that a device can store a million songs. Really, the sound waves have a narrower range. It’s a real distortion. Apple, Spotify and YouTube offer immediate access to every song on earth, and in exchange, they don’t sound as good. This may differ from recording to recording, or on your speakers or something, but I suspect there is a generation hearing subpar music. As TVs have improved their picture, our audio quality has gotten worse.

I say this not merely as grumpy man, but from having taught guitar to kids for years and seeing how they listen now, on devices or computers. I suspect the worsening audio quality impacts the way contemporary producers and DJs create and play music. Medium Is The Message kinda thing. But that’s a longer story for another day.

An old proverb I heard is “chess is an ocean in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.” Same goes for music. Take from it as much or as little as you want. If you like having it on in the background, cool! But listening actively is a life-long activity that evolves, and pleasure really deepens. However far you want to go in listening to music, there are many who have already gone further. That this is true is just such, such a blessing.

Response to Professional Essay: Exercise 3.16–Writing By Choice, Eric Hendersen

04 Saturday Aug 2018

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Writing By Choice, Third Edition. Eric Hendersen. Oxford University Press. Don Mills Ontario. Page 96-96

  1. Briefly analyze the essay’s introduction. Consider the effectiveness of the opening and the thesis statement. Is Halperin successful in establishing his approach to the topic of dog versus houseplants?

“They’re barking money pits, these dogs, and for too long we’ve been under the false impression that they’re better than houseplants.”

Yes. Halperin’s opening and thesis statement are effective–finally, a writer addresses the crucial issue of “dogs versus houseplants,” for so long neglected by the Mainstream Media.

 

  1. How could you characterize the writer’s tone? Give specific examples. How could awareness of tone affect your reading of the essay?

Halperin’s tone is fearless. Resolute. Some writers are glib in the face of society’s most dire crises, relying on humour as a crutch because the grimmest truths are too uncomfortable.

“Unlike dogs, plants will forever maintain their poise no matter how many times you ring the doorbell…Dogs, on the other hand, are famous for attacking mailmen—an obvious sign of class warfare.”

In an era where mafia states infiltrate Western countries, where the planet’s ecology is systematically destroyed and sold, and global economic disparity is increasing grotesquely in an age of post-scarcity, these are dark times and it is comforting to find a writer as serious and perceptive as Halperin.

 

  1. Analyze one of the body paragraphs, using criteria discussed in this and/or previous chapters.

“Finally, after years of attachment, your plant will grow and so will your pleasure with it. With casual care, your plant can actually outlive you. No matter how much you care for your dog, it will end up dead in a crumpled heap on the floor…”

Here, Halperin’s overflowing optimism is balanced against his aversion to sentimentality. Without being mawkish Halperin manages to describe love’s unfathomable ability to survive death, so long as the heart in which it resides is true.

The world has not seen metaphysical musings combining cosmic seriousness with comic playfulness since John Donne, 1572-1631. Of course, no criterion in this university textbook can sufficiently describe the lofty heights reached in this paragraph or any other.

 

  1. Identify the compare and contrast method Halperin uses and the bases for comparison. You can use the appropriate diagrammatic model on page 95, above, to show method and bases for comparison.

“It’s not all economics. Plants give back oxygen without even being asked. This is a real kindness because you can’t overestimate the importance of oxygen…dogs only give you something with the understanding that you’ll throw it back to them in an endlessly futile cycle.”

Halperin uses the compare/contrast method in body paragraph 5 to denounce the way capitalistic societies have become totally transactional—where the commercial pay-or-be-paid ethos filters down to inner lives, so that even personal relationships are conducted like bookkeeping where every positive and negative action/remark is kept inside a ledger, where all existence is reduced to a realm where altruism by definition does not and cannot exist. This is definitely what Halperin is really getting at.

 

House Plants Are Better Than Dogs

[full text]

[1] Some people believe that a home isn’t a home without a dog. To hear these people talk, you’d think that shedded hair, sharp fangs and crap on carpets are trivial matters. They’re barking money pits, these dogs, and for too long we’ve been under the false impression that they’re better than houseplants. Let’s investigate.

[2] Unlike dogs, plants will forever maintain their poise no matter how many times you ring the doorbell. Calm, cool and collected, the houseplant is a model of patience and even temperament. They bow down to nobody, see no race or class. Perfectly reflecting the modern zeitgeist, plants represent the highest ideal of egalitarian tolerance. Dogs, on the other hand, are famous for attacking mailmen–an obvious gesture of class warfare.

[3] You can be sure plants won’t harass the company at your next dinner party, but don’t be fooled into thinking they’re entirely dormant. They grow in response to Bach fugues, which would be a compliment to their ear, if they had one.

[4] In light of nuclear disaster and the rising cost of gas, there’s a big hubbub about how best to harness the sun’s energy. But plants settled this millions of years ago. Living off the sun’s rays, plants are their own solar panels. Scientifically way ahead of us and financially more responsible, plants don’t need government handouts for their energy exchange program. Shame dogs don’t eat rain and sunshine, eh?

[5] It’s not all economics. Plants give back oxygen without even being asked. That is a real kindness because you can hardly overstate the importance of oxygen. Plants can’t help but be givers. In comparison, dogs only give you something with the understanding that you’ll throw it back to them over and over in an endlessly futile cycle. Also, dogs need to go to school just to figure out how to sit down or play dead. Plants don’t need to be taught how to play dead. They’re autodidacts

[6] Admittedly there’s something to be said for a dog that quietly nestles on your lap after a hard day’s work. But ask yourself: has your dog signed a contract indicating he won’t revert to pissy pre-housebroken days? What if some horrible canine violence on TV suddenly provokes him and he becomes a biter? Plants offer unrivalled peace of mind. You can take plants at their word. Nothing can make them bite you or crap under your bed.

[7] Finally, after years of attachment, your plant will grow and so will your pleasure with it. With casual care, your plant can actually outlive you. No matter how you care for your dog, it will end up dead in a crumpled heap on the floor. If you have kids, they’ll cry. All’s well that ends well, but it never ends well with dogs.

[8] Yes, dogs can be sweet, cuddly and affectionate–they aren’t wholly without commendable traits, even though it’s much, much better to get a houseplant. But in all fairness, at least dogs are a cheaper, lower maintenance, and cuter alternative to getting a baby.

On Trudeau in India

24 Saturday Feb 2018

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Indian’s love for Trudeau was palpable to me when I was there. I’d ride on the Delhi metro, people asked where I was from, I’d say Canada, and they started praising him, eyes lit up. Colleagues went pretty gaga too. Not everyone, but many.  
That’s worn off, it seems. Indian media got a whiff of how thick he lays on overt shows of multiculturalism. Corny and embarrassing, he made an exhibit of himself. You can wear Indian garb without drawing too much attention to yourself. Trudeau wore juutis to meet SRK.  It’s hardly apocalypse, though. Just clothing. I’d rather have a leader who tries too hard to appear multicultural than one mostly silent in the face of Muslims being lynched, or another who is soft-on-Nazis.

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The author at a wedding in Delhi, February 2016.

Oddly I’ve just been reading Khushwant Singh’s old essays on the roots of communal violence in Punjab. The Atwal episode is indeed strange and unjustifiable– a mistake was made. There are questions not just about how Atwal got invited, but about how he was suddenly allowed to enter India, when Jagmeet Singh was denied a visa. More will be learned about this. Right wing Indians suspect Trudeau’s government covertly supports Khalistan independence. I doubt Justin knows what that is. Likewise, it’s amusing how the attack dogs in conservative media here are suddenly experts on Khalistan.
 
While Trudeau’s India trip went stunningly bad, it’s not like the stakes were very high. What would real ties with Modi–the Hindu nationalist killer of gujarat–look like? What was to be gained here was relatively low in dollar value, high in cultural exchange between nations with a strong, historical fondness for each other…ie a great trip for Trudeau would have brought about results mostly symbolic anyway. India’s economy has lost its sheen post-demonetization/gst and Nirav Modi has the spotlight back on ol’ fashion crony corruption. Trudeau is in Delhi now with Hayley Wickenheiser and Ladakhi hockey players on an exchange–My loves, combined! Canadian Ice hockey and not just India but Ladakh coming together, it’s a warm thought.

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Ladakh!! August 2017.

Modi has less to gain than Canadians may think by posing with Trudeau. They each represent countries that get along well, apart from that they have nothing in common. Some from India’s right celebrate trump’s birthday by eating cake in Jantar Mantar. Trudeau may be more useful as a person to be distanced from. Not even his worst detractor here will call Trudeau a strong-man leader. Modi’s coolness wasn’t an accident, but the Canada-India cultural connection is too strong for him to sideline Trudeau altogether. They hugged in the end.
 
But Modi ran to the airport to hug trump the instant he landed because he feels a kinship with a leader who also leads via personality-cult and fascist tendencies. And trump has new condos to sell in India, so he pretends to care about India. Indeed, trump Jr is in India right now talking with billionaires, to try to get their money.  Trump backs India enough to hug Modi and do the photo op because it suits his personal economic interests, but will deny H1B visas to Indians seeking to come to America because ultimately they’re not white.
 
That’s my view of things, from the vantage of TO. By the way, I love and miss you India!! Reminder: a country is much, much more than its leader. Indeed, national leaders almost never reflect their country’s actual inhabitants.

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Canada at 150 in New Delhi at the Hyatt Regency Hotel.