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If Bike Lanes Cause Traffic, Where is the Data?

27 Tuesday May 2025

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The frothing hatred many people have for bike lanes comes with an untrue assumption; whaters say bike lanes increase traffic for cars, without a shred of evidence. To them, seeing any unused space on the road that doesn’t have a car on it is all the proof they need. If there was no bike lane there, they could drive there! But there is, so they can’t!

On this level, it seems like anybody who can’t manage to wrap their head around this simple concept must be either a very stupid person or an ideologue, a guerilla fighting against cars in the War on Cars because they hate the freedom and innovation cars represent, or something like that.

If you’ve spent any time in these conversations you’ve heard things like this. I’m sympathetic to it! To the naked eye this is really how it all appears. To get a sense of why this isn’t how it really works, let’s consider it from a different angle.

In Toronto, somewhere between 25-30% of the city itself is devoted to car lanes and car parking. Between one quarter and one third of the city, roughly. Let’s imagine there were no bike lanes, or even that bikes didn’t exist.

The city is finite, physically speaking. It cannot grow because you cannot add more land within the same boundaries. Any additional roadways you add necessarily takes away from some other land use, whether it be residential homes, commercial properties, a park, sidewalks…whatever.

If you keep adding more and more cars within the same finite space, traffic will only get worse and worse as a result. That is the root cause of traffic: more cars.

If your task is to relieve congestion and get more people moving more efficiently, quicker, and more reliably, the last thing you’d do is any action that added private cars to the mix. Nothing is more efficient and effective than public transit. On the average work day, the TTC moves 2.5 million+ people. There are 2 million car trips a day in Toronto by commuters, as of May 2023.  

If roads seem congested now, imagine how much worse they’d be without public transit. You cannot understand this topic by looking at the problem through your windshield. You need to pull back and realize the only way to “solve” traffic is by reducing the number of cars on the road, since that what traffic is. Making other modes of transportation more attractive accomplishes that.

It seems a little paradoxical! Fixing traffic by ditching your car eliminates the benefits of fixing the traffic, since you aren’t there to benefit. So drivers hear this and assume it’s communist gobbledygook designed for some ulterior, nefarious motive. When people like me say “we need fewer drivers on our roads,” many people hear “you must stop driving.”

Let’s be clear: even the most adamant bike lane proponents understand that there will always be cars on the road and nobody is trying to remove them all. The point is to reduce reliance on cars, so people who don’t want to drive can stop driving.

You can gauge our city’s devotion to serving the private automobile by how we bend over backwards again and again, sacrificing nearly unlimited physical space and unlimited money to build roads, street, avenues, and highways for cars. If building more roads reduced traffic, Toronto wouldn’t have any traffic!

At some point, cities run out of more space for private cars because a city needs other things in it. I’ve joked in a tongue in cheek way about “fixing” traffic by razing hospitals, schools, homes, sidewalks, parks, and businesses and replacing them with roads. But actually, this is historically pretty much what we’ve done!

Entire communities were eliminated to make way for highways and onramps. Some 50s politicians were militantly opposed to sidewalks in the city, specifically because they took space away from cars to drive. This kind of blind, devouring entitlement is related to the blind spot many drivers have today, where they blame traffic woes on a streetcar carrying dozens of people, but one lone driver holding up a busy streetcar because they’re turning left is never responsible for any delays.

So what we have is an endless tussle between cars and everything else. Drivers expect infinite space and infinite money in a world that is physically and financially finite. Where will it end?

In a world where politicians spend billions to allegedly shorten a driver’s commute by 30 seconds, drivers are accustomed to this whole conversation revolving around them, so much so that they are very confident that the data from scholars and engineers is on their side.

It isn’t! Not even close!

Study after study in multiple cities across North America and elsewhere show that business improves after bike lanes are installed. Crucially, they also show that local business owners routinely overestimate how many of their customers arrive by private car and underestimate the percentage arriving by transit, bike, or foot.

In Toronto, the Bloor-Annex BIA representing 250+ local businesses is fighting to keep the bike lanes installed under John Tory, a conservative insider who is anything but a crazed bike lane guy. Doug Ford swooped in unbidden with $40 million to remove the bike lanes, which were only installed after years of studies and consultations. He’s openly defying local residents and local businesses without invoking one shred of evidence. For the Ontario premier to override the municipality and force his personal whims on the entire city is anti-democratic. For him to do it without any evidence is sheer stupidity.

If I’m wrong, please show me the data! I’ve read a few books on this lately that delved deeper into these types of questions. Killed By a Traffic Engineer; Urban Mobility: How the iPhone, Covid, and Climate Changed Everything; Shrink the City. They were great, especially the first one.

None of these books found any study claiming what Doug Ford and millions of people in Toronto assume to be true, namely that bike lanes increase traffic.

Following the data leads to the exact opposite conclusion they’ve reached: bike lanes help local businesses. Taking this logic to its natural conclusion, excess road space for cars is an attack on local business. The anti-bike lane people identify as pro-business, so hearing this point makes them go nuts. They want comfort and the intellectual high ground.

The reason congestion seems so intractable is that selling vehicles is a pillar of our economy, and it’s impossible for masses of people to both buy enough vehicles to keep the economy rolling without having to encounter each other while driving them. More cars is more traffic. The number of cars you need to sell to boost the economy is the root cause of traffic jams, not bike lanes. Put another way, our economy and our lifestyles are at odds with each other.

Think about it this way: If you think bikes clog streets, imagine how much worse they’d be if bikes were physically the size of cars or trucks! How could opposing what’s small, nimble, and effective fix congestion? To get a sense of how vehicles’ physical size and cumbersome nature is the root cause of traffic, imagine if pedestrians had to line up behind each other if one person walking in front of them was making a left turn, or even a right turn. Cars are uniquely prone to stopping and starting and creating bottlenecks.

Drivers have this idea that there’d be no traffic if only everything was optimal. If the traffic lights were set properly, if every driver drove and parked perfectly, if construction wasn’t excessive, then there’d be no traffic. There’s only traffic because some people are idiots or the city screws everything up!

Let’s be clear: it’s physically impossible for millions of cars to all drive quickly on the same roadways at the same time without crashing into each other. That’s what people expect their drive to be, and they are shocked, shocked when they never ever encounter these impossible optimal conditions. There would have been no traffic except for ___, and the ___ is never all the other cars. This blint spot is captured in the common urban planning refrain, “you’re not in traffic, you are traffic.”

“Induced demand” is the bedrock of urban planning because the phenomenon has been proven real over and over again. Basically, if you try to ease gridlock or congestion by widening the road by a lane, it will only work very briefly, until additional drivers incentivized or “induced” by the newly-built road space erase any gains made in congestion improvement, and soon you’re back where you started. This is captured by another common and funny refrain, “just one more lane, bro!”

We’ve known this for decades! Any urban planning that still ignores induced demand is fireable, shameful negligence and on a basic level doomed to fail.

Improving non-car travel options is the best way to “fix” traffic because it lets people who don’t want to drive leave their cars at home. Some people currently attached to their cars in our car-centric world may also decide to stop driving once presented with safe and attractive alternatives.

It’s a chicken and egg thing. Saying “nobody bikes in Toronto!” misses the point. Bike infrastructure here is abysmal, why would they? It’d kind of be like pointing at a forest with no roads in it, and therefore no cars, to prove that nobody likes driving. People adapt to what’s in front of them.

Want traffic to get worse? Here are some sure ways to do it. First, build a mega parking lot for 2,000+ cars beside a congested waterfront highway commuters use daily that’s also prone to flooding. Then, pour untold billions into building an underground mega highway underneath North America’s widest highway, Highway 401. Next, invest millions into destroying newly built cycling infrastructure, while also refusing to adequately fund what actually relieves traffic because it represents competition for the auto industry, public transportation.

Naturally, Doug Ford is committed to worsening car traffic in all these ways that will cost us billions of dollars and who knows how many lives. Streets will be more congested and dangerous instead of safe and vibrant. When Ford’s plans do absolutely nothing to relieve congestoin, his supporters will use Bike lanes as a scapegoat.

The Bloor bike lane was selected specifically to connect local cyclists to Canada’s busiest subway line. Ensuring safe and seamless connectivity between public transit and active transportation is sensible urban planning 101. Why wouldn’t Canada’s busiest subway line be connected to bike lanes?

The opponents of bike lanes feel no reason to read about this at a planning level at all because this bungling incompetent and corrupt premier acts on all their assumptions and desires before they can even write him a strongly-worded email. There’s no guarantee that urban planners will get all or even any of the details right and I’m not saying every recommendation they make in Toronto is automatically the right decision, but the anti-bike lane people are objectively wrong, yet feel very above needing to hear or read about any other opinion.

Maybe I’m just another crazed downtown yahoo in the war against the car! But let me ask: if we all agree planning shouldn’t be emotional and we all support following the data wherever it leads, what data justifies ripping up bike lanes? What data suggests that bike lanes worsen traffic?

When they produce real studies with real citations and not torqued, cooked numbers to merely give the appearance of relying impartially on data, I’ll shut up. I suspect I’ll be waiting forever.

Jazz On Vinyl

21 Wednesday May 2025

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For people who stream music and don’t understand all the hoopla and money spent on collecting records, few things can make you sound like a bigger douchebag faster than saying “jazz on vinyl.” It’s not a new trope. Jerry Maguire (1996) nailed it with that jazz keener babysitter character, and the phrase “hipster doofus” goes back to the days of Charlie Parker.

The way I see it, anything cool gets mocked if it’s too cool, and sometimes people lay cool things on a little heavy. I get that the trappings of a record collection are ripe for mockery, but put on a great copy of a killer album on a system with good speakers, and tell me you’re having a bad time!

If there’s one key way music sounds better on vinyl than on digital formats, it’s that the high and the low ends have more room to breathe. Those sounds are clearer. When you hear it, you notice, even if you didn’t think you would. I suspect if you were to do a test, most people would hear the difference. That’s how palpably different it is. The audio quality depends on a few things, like your speakers, the receiver or pre-amp, the album pressing, and the way the album was engineered. When all these things align, the results are magic.

I’m not sure I’d recommend anybody to start a record collection today. Records are prohibitively expensive. When I started years ago, I worked at a music store that sold used records. They were inexpensive to start with and I got 50% off.

Even a few years ago, a new reissue of an old album might cost $20-25 or so. Today, it’s more common to find them at $35-40 or more. Some brand new albums are $50. Meanwhile, vintage jazz records can be very expensive. You’re lucky to find an old Blue Note album for $80, depending on the condition.

A few years ago when I was really buying albums, I didn’t much care for whether it was an original from the period or a reissue. I didn’t have a streaming platform and the only way I could hear the album was on record, or with commercials on YouTube.

I maintain that records do sound better, but that’s not the only reason they’re worthwhile. Holding such a large thing in your hands, looking at the album cover, makes it an artifact. The tangible experience of playing the record, even flipping it half way through, adds to the ritual enjoyment. Some records really are one of a kind. Sun Ra Saturn records were individually painted by band members around their kitchen table, so if you have one of these records, it’s not just that the physical record itself is like an artifact or a part of a ritual; it very much is a piece of history.

The point isn’t to be a snob about collecting records and look down on anybody for however they listen to music, it’s just to spread some joy and maybe musical understanding.

Personally, bass was the thing I heard least in music growing up. McCoy Tyner, Elvin Jones, and of course John Coltrane were recorded very prominently, but Jimmy Garrison was lower in the mix. I don’t know if this was just my ear, if I honed in on what I wanted to hear most, or if the technology itself was slanted this way.

Imagine watching a movie without seeing 20% of what should be on the screen, but without knowing you’re missing anything. This might be an oversimplification, but what digital music does is compress the high and low sounds: the less music there is, the more it can store on a file. MP4s, the common music file, are different this way than FLAC files, which are larger and truer but therefore a larger storage burden. The point isn’t that digital music can’t also be great, just that the way almost everybody listens to it isn’t.

Listen to Art Blakey on record! I really can’t emphasize how different it can be. When the different factors align, it feels like the musicians are in your living room.

Where does this leave us? If money is no issue, collect away. If you really love music, and you can’t stop yourself from getting the best version of the music you love most, do that.

It’s difficult to express how important and unimportant this conversation is! A few records I have are cherished, treasured belongings, sacred relics for a part of my life so spiritually important that owning a portion of the divine feels like a heretical lapse into idolatry. At the same time, just loving music is enough, and the difference between having an album on vinyl and streaming it is isn’t worth the money.

I don’t have all my favourite albums on vinyl (Discipline 27-ii is very rare and costs $1,200), I just stream them and don’t love that music any less. There isn’t a hobby on Earth that’s immune to being misunderstood, with people laughing at what they think it’s all about. Books aren’t for reading, they’re just rarified status symbols! Sports are just braindead macho crap for bros! Stuff in this vein.

I know the stereotypes surrounding record collecting, especially jazz. It’s funny, but now that records are popular again and sold in places like Indigo, we’re developing new stereotypes, like the vinyl nube paying $40 for a 2025 reissue of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours.

There’s nothing wrong with jazz and there’s nothing wrong with Fleetwood Mac! I don’t want to be a gatekeeper: come on in, everybody! Chill, listen to some music. Just cost it out before buying a system is all.

Secular Spirituality and Music

31 Monday Mar 2025

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To some people “secular spirituality” is an oxymoron. To them, spirituality involves the divine by definition. How can anything be said to be “spiritual” if God has no part in it?

But then to secular people like myself, none of the gods posed by various religions exist. There’s no “guy in the sky,” and any spiritual urge anybody has or ever had is by definition secular, even if it’s explicitly about God or gods.

It’s hard to talk about this important subject because it feels like just describing my spiritual views insults other people’s core religious beliefs. Maybe it seems sacrilegious. To be fair, I can see how this is so. In India, “hurting religious sentiments” is a crime enshrined in the penal code, so the phrase carries more weight than just “hurting people’s feelings,” even if it means the exact same thing. What I’m saying may sound provocative or inflammatory, but I really don’t mean it to!

I don’t know how else to describe my views aside from calmly and peacefully laying forth what I think. Not everybody is calm and measured when it comes to the topic of god or religion.

The New Atheists—writers like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins—loved to attack religion and pull the rug out from under the feet of believers. I don’t. Not exactly. Part of me thinks the New Atheists were understandably combative because they got tired of the custom of sitting back and laying off beliefs they thought were pure junk, buncombe that evil charlatans use to exploit vulnerable people and gain control in and over society.   

I’m a little torn in how to write about this topic gently, bearing in mind that, in practice, religion is both a violent international horror and the source of people’s fundamental views that give them precious comfort and strength in daily life.

I’ve started writing on a defensive note in a way people speaking about their religious views would never do for atheists. Even if they were a considerate person, would a religious person ever suppose that describing their belief in God would offend the sensibilities of atheists? In a religious world like ours, atheists defer to believers, never the reverse.  

Yet I do think it’s worth stating my intentions and reasoning explicitly about my lack of belief, even if it means making an overture that would never be reciprocated. It’s a very strange, sad, and helpless feeling to look at the world and know that many of the forces separating people are fictions only existing entirely in their own heads. On a smaller more local level, it’s also upsetting to know that even in a so-called secular society, religious people are often assumed to be on a higher spiritual plane and even morally superior too.

An atheist’s lack of belief in God is taken as a negative or a void; people assume that because we don’t believe in organized religion or the gods they’re founded on that we have no spiritual beliefs of any kind or even any system of morals!

To understand how a secular person feels culturally in a world that is only technically or legally secular but in practice isn’t, just imagine an atheist claiming they’re entitled to a paid-day off work to celebrate something spiritual. It’d seem like a student not just flagrantly skipping school, but asking their teacher for money to see a movie while they play hooky.

Of course, to an atheist, all religious belief is rooted in secularism, the world without god or gods is the one we all live in. From where I’m sitting, everybody’s religious beliefs are essentially secular since there very much is no god, God, or Gods for you, me, or anyone else. It’s all just us here! Religious and secular people all live equally under this reality, except secular people aren’t in denial about it.

Spirituality and Music

There’s a phrase which some people use lightly or half-jokingly that to me really resonates lately. “Music is my religion.” I’ve always loved music, both listening and playing it. But I’ve got to thinking lately about the role of my religion, music, in other conventional religions.

Frankly, I’m not sure any religion would have survived without music. Music is the essential component that popularized religion and made people really believe in God.

If you want to convince people to believe in God, you can’t just speak to them. You need to preach, and that takes rhythm, singing. Prayers are sung. Even better, get a choir to sing harmonies in a giant room designed to have unbelievable acoustics. Get Bach to compose organ music. What they’re hearing then, that is God. Even if Bach would often write at the end of his compositions, Soli Deo Gloria–to the glory of God alone.

Religious people couldn’t just state that they didn’t like the blues; it was the devil’s music. The drum has always had a prominent role in religious ceremonies in too many places to name. “Music is my religion” may sound like something written on a graphic t-shirt the wearer doesn’t believe in too seriously, but it’s no accident that music played an enormous role in the origins of many religions. Maybe music isn’t just my religion, but yours, too.

I just finished reading a novel by William Gaddis called The Recognitions, an extended meditation on art and religion, creative originality and imitation, and [spoiler alert] at the very end, Stanley finally gets to play the music he’s been composing, but it includes the “devil’s interval,” and when he pulls out all the organ’s stops, the bass is so overwhelming that it collapses the dilapidated church he’s inside and he dies.

God speaks the world into existence. It’s sound that creates. In Ancient Greece and Rome, the bards play and the muses sing the epic mythologies. Scientists describe the universe’s origins as a “big bang.” Sound is essential at the very start of things. That’s why it’s still so fundamental today.

It’s no accident that today music is still the main driver of many rituals that make people feel a heightened sense of togetherness. Concerts, raves, and religious ceremonies all encourage elation, euphoria. When people hear music in a room together, they feel so elevated that they’re all but compelled to move their bodies in accordance with the sounds, otherwise known as “dancing.” The trembling in your soul is from notes, soundwaves displacing the otherwise still air, not a literal god. But to me it all amounts to the same thing. Music is god.

I’ve been listening intensely to Sun Ra lately and wonder if he’d hate this essay and pity me! When asked about his early influences in music, whereas most musicians might say “Jimi Hendrix” or maybe “Duke Ellington,” Sun Ra responded, “the planets, the creator, mythical gods, real ones, people, flowers. Everything in nature…musicians get their inspiration from environmental things, and all musicians are inspiration to me, no matter what style they play in.”

This is a very beautiful answer! I never know how literally to take Sun Ra. He was an extremely mysterious, profound man. But I can’t help feel like his eccentric spirituality and my seemingly cold secular one overlap considerably, even if on the surface they’re at odds. I’m sure every Sun Ra fan who feels his music also feels like they have a shared philosophy. Who knows.

In any case, as religious fundamentalism is on the rise in North America, people talk about godlessness as if secular people are missing some vital part. I can’t speak for other secular people in general, but as far as I’m concerned, everybody has an instinct and urge for something higher.

Religious people may imagine the godless spiritual world to be empty and nonsensical. Really, again, our secular spiritual world is the exact same as theirs—everything religious people believe in religiously is believed in a godless world, the only world there is and ever will be.

The romantic poet and early atheist Percy Bysshe Shelley writes very well about the sublime, the overwhelming response people feel when they behold something in nature too grand to process or even see at once, like a mountain chain, specifically Mont Blanc. There’s God in that nature, that shiver that is felt but can’t be communicated.

There’s nothing new here exactly about the attitudes I’m describing, but I wish non-believers weren’t so badly misunderstood and even despised, or at least distrusted.

It’s a hard conversation to have because it touches on a very live wire. I don’t mean to attack what people think of as their sacred beliefs! I resent that attitude some atheists have where they seem to derive joy or meaning from mocking religious belief. The beloved comedian and noted Tolstoy reader Norm Macdonald despised this attitude too, and even if I get why atheists are tired of being disrespected, that isn’t the right approach either.

The world can be a bleak and hard place, and belief helps people get by. Atheists aren’t necessarily more rational or intelligent people, even if we tell ourselves that we are. Lots of religious people are way smarter than I am! But my beliefs about spirituality and music are my own, I think they’re correct and I believe in them, and they make me happy to think about.  

Blowing your own mind with art: a solemn responsibility

20 Thursday Mar 2025

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Whose art recommendations do you trust and follow up on? What informs what you read, watch, listen to? Not every influence has your best interests at heart.

People love recommending TV shows you just have to watch, and algorithms serve up songs and movies to keep us hooked, whatever their quality. People only have so much time and mental energy to devote to art after work or family obligations or whatever. Still, it’s precious and shouldn’t be wasted: the hours and days that go by are our lives going by.

Tired people need to chill, but we all need to be stimulated, challenged, and excited by art. These things can be hard to reconcile.

I get why people just want to relax and not think too hard after a long work day. Watching, listening, or reading really good stuff can take a certain amount of energy, and if you don’t have it, you don’t have it. But we only get one life and there are some invaluable treasures in art you’ll never discover if you don’t actively seek them out, because you can’t trust the algorithm or even beloved friends to put them in front of you.

So assuming there’s sufficient time and mental energy, what are you trying to get out of the art you consume? To push your own boundaries and find something cool you didn’t know about? To learn? Finally understand the popular thing or social phenomenon everyone’s talking about? Read that Canon work to see if it lives up to its reputation? Something else? So long as you’re asking the question, there are no wrong answers.

This to me is such an important but also personal and private conversation. But in a certain way it can seem hollow and artificial the more public it is. Sometimes when people talk about art, the subtext has a high-schooley feel–people say they love certain art for prestige or to signal that they’re sophisticated or cool or whatever. In this way, art isn’t something personally enjoyed or even consumed, it’s merely a flag you wave so other people can you waving it.

OK, this does happen sometimes, where the trappings of art become more important than its substance. But let’s put that aside. I’ll write this now with hope, trusting that we’re all above this kind of silly thing.

The question that interests me is: what responsibility does a person have to themselves to ensure that their own inner life is cool, fun, stimulating? For a person to ignore or neglect their inner life, or not make of it what they could…it’s sad. You never know what you’re missing out on until you find it. Lots of the stuff you need for a rousing inner life is free or close to free. The barriers aren’t financial. What are the barriers?

We’re in an attention economy where companies compete for your time. Touchscreens are designed to attach people to their devices and keep scrolling, even if the “content” sucks. Every streaming platform recommends whatever art they spent the most money to produce or acquire, as if your aesthetic sensibilities and their profit motive are aligned.

Let’s be clear: there’s no connection whatsoever between artistic worth and money. None. I’ll even allow that some expensive Netflix or MCU schlock can be OK to watch. It’s fun, mindless entertaining shit that sometimes you’re just in the mood for. Fine, but that can’t be the ceiling. It’s just too narrow.

Who knows how many billions or trillions the advertising industry is worth, and this influence machine normalizes mediocre art and obviously ads to the point some people watch advertising voluntarily, as if it’s art. Commercials often try to camouflage themselves as art.

I saw the other day on social media, a one-minute Pedro Pascal commercial was called a “short film.” This is typical. The point is to make people give up their own free time voluntarily, a trap made by people who don’t care about you. If you added up all the time you’ve spent watching ads versus, say, reading novels, or consuming whatever other form of art you like…would you like the results?

We are all exposed to countless ads a day, yet nobody really likes them. If you asked anybody “what’s better, art or advertising?,” everybody would say art. While there’s no definitive way to measure this, I suspect many people spend more time consuming ads than art.

The dominant forms of technology ram commercials down your throat. TV has commercials, the internet has pop up ads. Google is beyond broken; years ago, when you typed in a word, the dictionary definition and Wikipedia used to be the first results. Now, it’ll show you a local business with that word in it. People think of Google as a pure, uncorrupted way to get reliable unbiased information, when really companies pay to influence you. This foggy force is the kind of thing people need to cut through to find art that they’ll actually like, instead of what someone is trying to sell to them.

People who preemptively and actively avoid ads by not having screens are thought to be weirdos and freaks. We hate the guy who makes it a point to say they don’t even own a TV!

I’m not here to take a highbrow shit on people for trying to get by and enjoy what spare time they have however they want. I just hope people take agency over their own inner life and treat this responsibility seriously. You only get one life! I encourage anybody to muster up the energy and the will to explore and roam freely and deeply is all.

High brow, low brow, whatever. Follow critics or people you respect, but as you get off the beaten path you’ll also come to trust your own inclinations and tastes as a compass and follow it where it takes you. Yes, practically speaking, you can talk about popular art with other people since they’re likely to consume it too. The more personal or off the beaten path something is, the less likely you’ll be able to share it.

The flip side of this is that popular art is like buying off the rack, whereas weirdo stuff that suits your tastes more closely feels more tailor made. This is about who you are in private moments, when you’re lying in bed at night, when the world is still and you’re just thinking about stuff. When your mind is wandering when it doesn’t have anywhere to be. Lest this sound too grand, frankly, I often fall asleep watching YouTube videos, mostly people building log cabins or analyzing chess games. Last night it was incredible videos about sound waves. Just find your thing.

The internet can be an infinite, invaluable resource that connects you to other people with precisely your niche interests, but before finding that, you’ll need to actively sidestep its traps and avoid what it’s trying to sell. You can’t just choose to have a luxurious mansion then have it appear, but the decision to avoid the mediocrity shoved your way and get into some cool weirdo art that enriches your life is fully in your hands.

Amid the Outburst of Patriotism, Who is Really on Team Canada?

07 Friday Mar 2025

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Trump’s attacks against Canada have united the country in a way which hasn’t been felt in years. There have been divisions, lately! I’m sure you know what I mean.

Trump’s threats to annex Canada, “joking” about making it the 51st US state, and arbitrarily charging 25% tariffs on Canadian goods imported to the US have forced many Canadians to put aside smaller differences and come together. Quite an achievement and it’s been nice to see. And it’s needed: today, it was reported that in a phone conversation with PM Trudeau last month, Trump wants to “revise” the border between our countries.

The Molson Canadian guy is back and doing the rounds. Stores proudly display Canadian flags on products. Just like Bush said right after 9/11 when urging US citizens to keep shopping, consumerism is apparently the frontlines of patriotism. Shopping is the best way people can defend their country, the most useful expression of patriotism.

Commercially speaking, I’ve seen two significant responses from sellers, both public. The LCBO pulled US bourbon off their shelves. They had already purchased the booze, to be sure, but they only pay for it after it’s been sold [EDIT: No, turns out it is in fact fully paid for already! Richard Southern from City News reported today, ]. This isn’t a hollow gesture and, for what it’s worth, the CEO of Jack Daniels is very angry, calling removing a few of their products “worse” than Trump’s threats to our national sovereignty.

The City of Toronto also banned US companies from bidding on public contracts valued at under $353,000, an odd number to settle at. Lest anyone attribute this to left-wing/communist tendencies from Olivia Chow to Limit Freedom or something weird like that, in keeping with Canada’s newly unified front, Brampton’s mayor, the former conservative party leader Patrick Brown, also launched a Made in Canada policy. Provincially speaking, Doug Ford has also banned US companies from bidding on public contracts.

Will the private sector make any similar response, or just the public? For example, has Loblaws, Metro, or Sobey’s stopped selling California wine or US beer or coolers?

Doug Ford is grandstanding about Canadian pride and resisting Trump, which people across parties find reassuring, but he already handed millions of public dollars to Staples when he decided to close down Service Ontario locations and relocate them inside the US giant. Will he undo that deal? Doubtful.

Doug Ford has pledged, twice, to end the $100-million SpaceX contract signed in 2024, which was extremely suspicious in the first place; at this price, each rural Starlink internet connection costs $15,000. The suspicions was Doug Ford wanted to curry favour with Elon Musk, the Trump “advisor” so influential many call him the “real” president, by putting millions of tax dollars into his pockets.

I wish I could rejoice in our new unity and believe in it. To be sure, this is a genuinely chaotic time and there’s no clear blueprint for what to do now. Seeing the public sector make sacrifices while private conglomerates in Canada like Loblaws put misleading “made in Canada” stickers on US food is discouraging. If private companies here are taking a hit to their bottom line to stand up for the country, it’d be welcome, but I haven’t seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not happening! But it feels like no accident to me that the most visible response has come from the public side of things.

Doug Ford has always been a hardcore Trump supporter, like his entire family. The family business Deco Labels that his father (Doug Ford Sr.) founded has branch facilities in Chicago, Florida, and Ohio. Doug Ford owned the Chicago division until 2022, selling it to a US investment manager, Ares Management Corporation.

Cancelling Starlink was welcome, but then Ford uncancelled it, before re-cancelling it. As of March 5, 2025, Ford says it won’t be reversed, even if there ultimately are no Trump tariffs. Ford said on Tuesday, March 4, “I want to inflict as much pain as we possibly can until we get to a deal.”

Wait…who is making a deal here, exactly?! Ontario and Trump? Ford and Musk? What deal? A deal for what? How can he say the Starlink deal is cancelled permanently if a hypothetical future deal will open it back up once again?

I have watched Makar ring the puck around the boards to Marner in OT, who played it off his foot and put it into the slot perfectly for McDavid to beat the US, hundreds if not thousands of times. I’m on Team Canada, baby. I loved cheering for Bruins super rat Marchand way more than I thought I would, and I even loved cheering for Florida Panthers Sam Bennett, previously a gutless thug who injured a surging Matthew Knies in game 2 of our 2023 second-round playoff series without even getting a minor roughing penalty.

Honorary Team Canada captain Wayne Gretzky’s patriotism is under suspicion, justifiably, amid all his historical Trump ties and more recent overt gestures to support Team USA before and after the gold medal game. (Gretzky entered the ice from the US bench without wearing a Team Canada jersey or even a pin, unlike his counterpart, Miracle on Ice legend Mike Eruzione, who proudly wore a US jersey. Then, 99 gave a thumbs up only to the US players. After the game, 99 gave Team Canada players MAGA-red hats with the word “Great” on them, and, in case there was any doubt, “47” stitched on the side, Trump being the 47th president.)

I put my considerable difference aside for Sam Bennett because that guy went hard for Team Canada. I welcome how Trump’s threats to our sovereignty have at least united Canadians across the political spectrum. But unlike Gretzky, amid this outburst of patriotism, some in Canada siding with Trump will be wrapped in a Canadian flag head to toe.

Doug Ford…I still don’t trust him.

Doug Ford’s Worst Mistakes, A Summary

26 Wednesday Feb 2025

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The provincial election is tomorrow, February 27, so let’s review some reasons why Doug Ford deserves to be voted out. I don’t want to speak in hyperbole, but he has a long list of mistakes and scandals that all deserve attention. This is more of a list or summary than a detailed description, but I encourage you to read up on any of these stories if you’d like to go deeper.

The list is incomplete and in no particular order. Whichever one I’m currently thinking about seems like the worst policy, until I think of another.

1. Greenbelt Scandal: This Ford scandal is the most notorious because it was so flagrantly corrupt and illegal he actually reversed the policy, but here’s the gist. During the 2018 election, he promised not to open up any Greenbelt land to developers to build housing. Secretly, in 2023, friendly developers told his ministers which plots they were buying, so he could secretly undo environmental protections for these plots. The timing is everything: developers paid an ultra-low price for the Greenbelt property because the land wasn’t zoned for development at the time. After Ford’s reversal, the developers’ land soared in value by more than $8-billion.

The RCMP SII unit’s criminal investigation into the Doug Ford government, referred by the OPP, in relation to the Greenbelt scandal is still underway.

2. Soaring Homelessness: Homelessness was dire when Ford took office in 2018, and has only soared since. Estimates put the number of homelessness at 80,000, a 25% rise since 2022.

The growth in homelessness is caused by many different factors, several of Doug Ford caused or worsened. Ford ended rent control for new builds, failed to build even close to enough new housing, underfunded mental health…the list goes on. Ford is even using legal shenanigans to empower police to to in effect criminalize homelessness by giving cops tools to dismantle homeless encampments and jail or fine people for drug use.

3. Therme Spa at Ontario Place: I can’t think of anything obviously less important during a housing and healthcare crisis than building a private luxury spa on A1 public land, but Doug Ford is spending a shocking amount of political capital and public money on letting a private foreign company build exactly this. The mega parking lot on the waterfront alone will cost roughly half a billion dollars. It’s a giveaway.

The government’s procurement process for redeveloping Ontario Place was secret and shady. The government bulldozed 800 mature trees in the dead of night, when nobody was around to witness it, and only the next day, when it was too late to undo the damage, made the unfavourable terms of the 95-year lease public.

A public jewel, Ontario Place, will be greatly reduced. Every person in Ontario will chip in $400 to build this private luxury mega spa.

4. Destroying the Science Centre: We’ve all been to the Ontario Science Centre on school trips or birthdays or something. It’s an iconic building not just for the nostalgia or how it makes science exciting and fun for kids, but it’s also a one-of-a-kind architectural marvel that inspired copies elsewhere.

Doug Ford is shutting it down, claiming the roof is compromised and fixing it is too expensive, even though the roof has years left in its lifetime and a private citizen offered to pay for the roof repairs himself. Ford wants to build a new, much smaller Science Centre by the waterfront…suspicions the Science Centre is only moving there to share the luxury spa’s parking lot and justify its enormity feel warranted—Therme’s estimate for how many people will visit the spa daily are absurdly high, but the lease requires a shockingly high minimum of parking spots, 2,500. If you think gridlock on the Lakeshore is bad now, just wait.

Making this shadier, a Ford-friendly developer owns 60 acres of land adjacent to the original Science Centre. Ford’s pet transit project, The Ontario Line, has a dedicated subway stop for the Science Centre that no longer services the Science Centre, since it’s being demolished, but does conveniently stop right at the door of the developer’s site.

5. Healthcare’s Collapse: This could easily be the #1 scandal, except Doug Ford isn’t the only one responsible for this. Previous Liberal governments began defunding healthcare, if not leaving the door open for privatization. 

However, under his tenure, Ontario spends the least on healthcare per resident of any Canadian province, and the number of ERs that have closed in rural areas is shocking. In a typical example of Ford’s approach to governing, the government provided twice or three times as much money to agency nurses, fueling complaints that he is deliberately funneling public money to friendly private businesses. This is his MO and is far from an isolated example.

A shocking amount of people in Ontario can’t find a family doctor. Meanwhile, private healthcare companies are on the rise.

6. Ludicrous Underground Mega Highway: In what feels like satire but is real, Doug Ford is proposing to build a tunnel underneath highway 401, a subterranean superhighway under what is literally North America’s widest highway.

He has given no costs yet but speculation pegs it in the tens of billions, possibly $100-billion. Estimates say it may be ready in the 2040s, though nobody could say for sure if it’ll ever even happen. Ontario tends to be incredibly slow when it comes to building transit, and go overbudget, and the engineering challenges in this project will be way more severe. Of all Ford’s policies, to me, this feels the most outlandish.

7. Highway 413: Doug Ford’s policies are so unjustifiable and expensive, they’re almost as disqualifying as his scandals. One bedrock principle of urban planning, demonstrated in cities worldwide, is “induced demand,” the phenomenon where when you build new roads, they moderately relieve traffic for a short time, but they also encourage more cars to drive, and soon the gains are wiped out and you have the same level of traffic you initially had. In other words, building more roads never “fixes” traffic.

Squandering billions on new highways in pristine farmland is an obscene waste of money. In my view, to reduce traffic and Co2 emissions requires improved regional and local public transit; mega car-centric infrastructure projects like this only help the auto industry by locking in the usage of private cars long-term. Along the same backward lines, Ford is investing more than $40-million to eliminate public infrastructure to make cycling safe along Toronto’s major thoroughfares, even after the bike lanes were subject to years of intense studies, approval processes, and already exist.

As always, ford donors own enormous swathes of land adjacent to the proposed 413 highway, which will soar in value if the highway gets built. So many of his policies utterly fail in the given reason for building it, yet always seem to accidentally make his donors richer.

8. Housing Crisis: Despite Doug Ford’s cozy relationships with developers, he isn’t building much new housing. Affordable housing projects are at risk of falling apart before they get built. New housing starts are down since last year.

Ford’s favours greenfield developments, ie new housing on previously undeveloped land, typically on the outside of existing suburbs. This is the least affordable way to build housing because the infrastructure needs to start from square one, driving up costs. Plumbing, electrical, roads, things like that.

Ford isn’t the only obstacle to affordable housing. The government stopped building public housing in the 90s, and anytime a proposal for a new development inside existing communities arises, there’s usually pushback from local residents worried that more people will worsen traffic or “change the neighbourhood character.” In short, NIMBYism. However, Ford’s proposed solutions are all doomed to fail by design.

9. Education in Crisis: Public education in Ontario is in a dire state. It’s not exactly new, but it’s worsened under Ford.

According to the Elementary Teachers Federation of Ontario, Students in public school receive on average $1,500 less than they did in 2018, when Ford’s tenure began, akin to a $3.2 billion cut. The playbook is this: gut public education so your friends can sell the replacement.

Doug Ford has used the notwithstanding clause to try to force striking high school teachers into accepting unfavourable terms for the first and second time in Ontario’s history, in 2021 and 2022, respectively.

10. Booze Deal: Doug Ford has spent a shocking amount of political capital and public money to make booze more accessible to the public at a time when wine and beer were already newly available in grocery stores and could even be delivered to your door. Getting out of the Beer Store contract one year early cost the public $200-million…even if you support the policy, and many people are understandably not in love with the Beer Store’s monopoly, why the urgency and expense?

During the election, Ford pledged to remove the legal minimum the LCBO had to charge for alcohol, saying this was akin to a tax cut. It’s not. But it also won’t happen, just like Ontario never got $1-beers, something Ford campaigned on in 2018. When you consider the rise of alcohol and online gambling and sports gambling in Ontario since Ford took office, the view is extremely dystopian.

Final Thoughts:

I didn’t go into very much detail about any of the above scandals, but I’m confident that if you research them more, the thrusts will hold and they’ll only look worse. The idea he called for an ultra-short election while his maga peer in the US threatens Canada with tariffs to obtain a “strong mandate” is ludicrous; so far, advanced voting is the second lowest ever in Ontario, the election period is extremely short, and he’s been out of the country for much of it. Voter turnout was very low in the last election he won, and he’s counting on a February election to receive the same benefit. He had a majority government and was free to respond to Trump’s threats however he pleased.

There are many other excellent reasons to vote Doug Ford out and I swear, I can’t find a single reason to vote for him, even though his poll numbers are very high. Please vote in tomorrow’s election, February 27, and encourage other people to vote as well.

Forcing Music and Novels on People Is My Love Language

27 Monday Jan 2025

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I have a recurring tendency to force art I love on people who didn’t ask for it and don’t love it…yet. Imagine from my perspective, having an epiphany about something, deriving from it joy and awe, love and genuine wonder. How could you hoard it and keep it to yourself?

The only answer I can find to this question is: I couldn’t, so I don’t.

In a world of soaring prices, the art I love doesn’t cost very much. You can probably access all the music I love on the streaming platform you pay for already. Novels you can get from a library or buy cheaply second-hand. People today commonly recommend way more expensive forms of entertainment without reservations. Even though what I enjoy is more accessible, I face resistance.

Some of the novels I like are large and maybe dense. They take time to read, not money, and time isn’t free. People are burned out from their jobs or raising families or just trying to feel OK in 2025. When they imagine reading the novels I hand them, they imagine the hours it’ll take to read them. My schedule is probably lighter than theirs, so it’s easier for me to conceive of time more broadly and abstract–not as hours it takes to read, but time as in lifetime. I can’t imagine going through life without encountering this or that novel or music.

We’re both right! Nobody’s wrong here. They can’t imagine juggling parenting and their professional lives with the time it takes to listen to avant garde jazz albums by Sun Ra or read a 900-page novel. People have precious little spare time, so why wrestle with art that seems strange or doesn’t suck them in right away?

I get it! When I try to push my longer, more challenging beloveds on my people, my secular proselytizing, I often sense people looking for the politest way to refuse. Sometimes when people say no to a critically-regarded work, they jokingly say something like, “I’m too dumb for it!” No! I don’t think they really mean it, but anybody can consume any art. Creating it is a different story! But consuming? It’s a question of patience and desire, not raw intelligence. Liking highbrow art is not a marker of intelligence, it’s just a question of character and personal temperament.

The way I’d frame the question people should ask themselves is: what responsibility do you have towards yourself to ensure you go through life and find really, really cool art? Are you doing right by yourself? Pushing yourself enough? People need to take this seriously! Don’t shortchange yourself! There are all kinds of BFFs in art you’ll never meet unless you look hard enough.

The algorithm is not your true friend and you shouldn’t outsource art discovery to Big Tech. Fine, if the algorithm serves up good music or whatever, don’t reject it. Enjoy! But it’s only a tool. You owe it to yourself to sample stuff that many serious people love a lot, or dig into some weird dank shit you never imagined yourself ever liking and come out on the other side, changed. Even if you don’t love it, the journey will be a trip. Maybe you will love it later, in time. It’s growth either way. You learn what you don’t like.

“Let people like what they like” is circular because people don’t know until they’ve tried it and really wrestled with it a bit. You might dislike it at first then warm up to it after understanding it better. Hate can become like, like may become love. Dense art is seldom understood right away and yields more and more each time you encounter it.

Reading Great Books is very obviously a good thing to do in life, but it’s also very obviously something people scoff and roll their eyes at. When someone is looking for a good read, what are you gonna do, recommend Proust’s In Search of Lost Time? In a way, no. But in a way, yes!

Art today is often a diversion, something to help people chill and wind down. I don’t say this sneeringly. Art is on different levels and people need to relax. I love chilling. That’s what I’m built for. People struggle to find the mental bandwidth to concentrate.

The trappings of highbrow art are also a barrier—people’s ideas about, say, Kafka are usually very different than what his writing is like. Many Canon novels are funny, including Franz’s! But people brace themselves for “heavy” art and enter a solemn, dusty headspace before opening the first page, misaligning their mood and the works’.

Recommending art that art critics or dirty hippies love draws suspicion because people don’t think of themselves as art critics or dirty hippies, and this conscious self-perception stops them from actually encountering some art.

On a logical level, you’d think everybody would prefer their art to be as “good” as possible, that we’re all on the same page, but that’s seldom how it happens. My view is people should try things in life, they may as well be good things, and having an adventurous spirit about finding it can only be good.

Personally, I can measure my life in terms of the musical phases I’ve been in. This art really means a lot to me! I’d be in my bedroom as a teenager, alone, listening to the Grateful Dead or Django Reinhardt or Robert Johnson or Lenny Breau or Charlie Parker, astonished and ecstatic. Of course I have to tell people about this stuff! I’ve never loved music more than I do now, at 40. Literature, too.

So yes I’ll tell you about what I’m into because I don’t know how not to be like that. I don’t mean to pester, just share my life and my loves. I can’t tell you what art to love, but you owe it to yourself to go into the deep end and don’t come back until you’ve caught something serious, cool and probably unexpected. When you have, you’ll know.

Music is Good or Bad, Not Simple or Hard

20 Monday Jan 2025

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I used to be very drawn to guitarists playing music that I, a guitar player, couldn’t imagine myself ever being able to play. Look what Django can do! It was a physical feat, a triumph of dexterity. Of course the physical feat was very much connected to the sound: Watching somebody move their fingers how their solos required but without a guitar in their hands—essentially, air guitar—would have meant nothing to me. I’ve been wrestling lately with the relationship between the physical part of music, what’s required to play it, and how music actually sounds, how they’re connected and how to feel about it.

I think the best way to think about it is to create categories along these lines. Simple-great and hard-great on one hand, simple-sucks and hard-sucks on the other.

In simple-great I’d put Neil Young and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. Neil gets the most out of GCD songs imaginable. He does use some odd tunings and unusual chords, too, and his voice and songs are just so beautiful and singular. He’s a musical god! I’ve spent years playing his songs on guitar and really love him, but there are much more complicated players out there. Neil has feel. Priceless feel. If you practice, you can sound a bit like Neil. Maybe get 80-90% of the way there. But the voice, the guitar sound…Neil is alone. David Gilmour’s solos are mostly pentatonic stuff, but they’re just so, so perfect. There’s a logic to them and you recognize his sound right away. They’re both very accomplished musicians and I don’t mean to give them a back-handed compliment! But to me, they’re both simple-excellent players. Emphasis on the excellent, more than the simple.

In complex-great I’d put Jerry Garcia, Sun Ra, Charlie Parker, John Coltrane. Musicians like that who use various scales and modes over fast, sophisticated chord changes. You need to know your instrument inside-out to play like them, not just have dexterity or a great ear. Improvisers have a very different relationship to their instruments than people who compose music and play written music at their concerts or in the studio.

Playing like Charlie Parker is like solving a Rubix cube while dancing. He was bouncing in impossibly new, daring, inventive ways within his music’s tight constraints. His feel and technique are both top notch. All these guys have endless technique and feel.

The point isn’t to put one type of player over another; if you’re excellent, it doesn’t matter whether it’s “simple” or “hard.” More a question of what mood you’re in, as a listener. But I’ve asked myself, what happens when a musician has been a virtuoso for decades and for them a “difficult” musical passage is just as easy to play as an easy one? How does their proficiency on the instrument affect what they want to play, and how we hear their music?

To help understand the kind of dynamic I’m talking about, imagine listening to music inputted into a computer, rather than played manually by musicians: would you find the faster, “harder” passages more enjoyable than the slower, “easier” ones? When the physicality of playing music is removed from the equation, does our judgement and appreciation for its sound change?

On some level, we don’t trust an artist’s authority unless they dazzle us by doing something we can’t. In musical terms, this means playing fast, complicated passages. People wouldn’t have taken Picasso’s abstract stuff as seriously if he hadn’t demonstrated he could paint like the Renaissance masters.

Along the same lines, free jazz players squawking on their horns would be dismissed outright by many as charlatans or lunatics if they hadn’t demonstrated that they could play conventional jazz too. Many still are.

For years I was floored by the harmonic knowledge and manual dexterity required to play guitar like Lenny Breau and Joe Pass, guys who simultaneously play chords, basslines and melody as a solo act. Sometimes they play all three at once, or two, or one, alternating between these roles smoothly. It’s incredible to do! You need a commanding knowledge of music theory and probably no amount of practicing will let me play like this.

But who cares? Today I listen to it and think to myself, yes it’s still beautiful and impressive, but get some friends! Find buddies to play instruments so you don’t need to do the bass, chords, and melody all alone! Joe Pass sounded better on For Django where he had accompaniment and could just solo and leave the rhythm to his band. Breau to me sounds better with less on his plate, too. They’re freed up.

Was I listening to just the sounds they were playing, or were their physical accomplishments (and theoretical knowledge the playing rested on) seeping into what I heard, influencing it?

You can have total command of your instrument and know all there is to know about music theory, but that doesn’t make your music great. Some players play a million notes a second and don’t really say anthing.

On the flip side, the Beatles couldn’t read music. Neither could Jimi Hendrix. The Band relied on Garth Hudson for deep music theory stuff, just like P Funk relied on Bernie Worrell. But music is a results-based medium: if it sounds good, it’s good.

Proficiency and knowledge are just tools. Not knowing theory, or lacking notable skill on your instrument, can be major a limitation, but not always! Some musicians take power chords really, really far. Punk can be about raw visceral power and attitude on stage or on record, more than elaborate solos. Just like bad music isn’t made better because the musician playing it knows all the scales and plays proficiently, good music isn’t bad because the musician playing it doesn’t know about the cycle of fifths.

There’s a difference between how sophisticated music is and how good it is. I’ve stopped thinking about it this way and feel better for it. It may sound odd, but sometimes complexity and simplicity are fused together. Sun Ra would ask Arkestra musicians to remember what it felt like when they first picked up their instrument, to play with some of that freshness, simplicity. The point is to transcend musical knowledge for self-expression.

I try to think critically now about music only to widen and deepen my appreciation for as much music as I can, whatever I happen to be listening to. The point isn’t to build up theories that proclaim a musician good or bad based on how hard it is to play or grasp.

Some players who shred have nothing to say. It’s not even clear that “hard” passages are actually harder to play. Playing slowly can be harder than playing quickly, actually. There’s less room to hide mistakes and every little movement of your finger affects the tone. Every bend, every shake and vibrato. The phrasing really stands out more when there’s more space for the sound to breathe.

The binary between simple-hard isn’t really a good criteria for evaluating music. When musicians are spiritually deep and have total command of their instrument and music theory, you’re probably in very good hands! But these are just tools.

Sometimes very good musicians who lack formal training are insecure about their gaps in knowledge. They shouldn’t be! If you can play, you can play. If it sounds good, it’s good. I hope conceiving of music as good/bad not simple/hard frees up musicians and anyone listening to music from the burden of needing to prove themselves or justify their preferences and musical tastes.

I’m not exactly saying “let people like stuff”! I’m describing how I listen and evaluate music for myself. I’m not here to scold or praise anybody for what they like; the point is for each person to widen and deepen their own musical appreciation by spending more time to consider music they may have dismissed at first glance as being too simple or, on the flip side, too weird or hard or out there.

There’s a world of difference between the Sun Ra Arkestra and Britney Spears, musically speaking, but they’re both valid and cool, even if I can tell you which of the two I listen to more.

What I Love in Sun Ra’s Music

14 Tuesday Jan 2025

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Most people don’t love jazz but those who do probably have a similar progression. On the spectrum of “in” and “out,” people start in and gradually get further “out.” At first, you need splashy cymbals and a tight walking bass to give a sense of coherence, pulse, and beat to the sound. Gradually, you need to rely on these things less and less. Put another way, after you get used to what you’re hearing you’re eager for what’s next, how things stretch from there.

Musicians go through this same progression. John Coltrane is a great example. He played big band jazz, then looser but highly constructed, structured stuff with Monk, then played with Miles and his own quartet in ways that would have seemed very loose and free-form compared to his big band era, but restricted compared to later albums like Ascension. Maybe the simplest way to think about it is that after both musicians and listeners hear the same thing for a while, they get bored and need a change. There’s only so many ways to solo within the changes before something else needs to change.

If I’ve talked to you in the last year or two, you know I am currently very, very in love with the Sun Ra Arkestra. Why? What is its appeal? I’d like to describe it in musical terms but spiritual ones too because that group cannot be explained fully via notes.

I’ve said that the Arkestra represents for me the height of discipline and freedom. This sounds like a cliche so let’s look at this to see precisely what I mean. When the Arkestra wants to be tight, nobody is tighter. With the snap of a finger they can reel off Fletcher Henderson’s big band charts so accurate they include the mistakes musicians made during a live performance. The Arkestra was a huge group, a fixed core with a revolving door of musicians stopping in for days, weeks, months at a time to play with the band, but it was tight.

At the same time, their structure required a certain type of looseness and individual freedom to be what it was. When Arkestra mainstay Marshall Allen first played for Sun Ra, Ra asked him to just play, to test his spirit. There was no music in front of him and he wasn’t playing any song. Anyone who has ever heard one of Allen’s remarkable alto solos knows this spirit. You can’t transcibe what he plays. It’s grunts and high-pitched squeeks and squaks that seem impossible to produce from an alto saxophone, even though overblowing a horn was a technique Coltrane used too, which he heard from 50s RnB players. Allen’s playing took me a while to appreciate, and seeing him play makes it make a lot more sense than just hearing it would have. I wasn’t sure it was even “music,” but part of Ra’s freedom is being in the realm of sound, not notes deriving from a scale.

Sun Ra’s music doesn’t just span the entire musical spectrum; it expands it, making me realize just how varied, rich, wonderful music can be. He’s like the Shakespeare of music, encompassing every mood and character with unmatched technique.

When I listen now to the groups who were my favourite a few years ago–70s Miles fusion and Parliament Funkadelic–they seem almost limited, staid, and small. I still love them dearly! It’s not their fault, everyone seems small compared to the Arkestra. They’re a force that goes deeper and started what everyone else is doing.

Miles got rid of the European-tailored suits because his girlfriend, a beautiful model and killer musician (whose music I also love) Betty Davis told him it wasn’t hip. P Funk bought a lot of their stage wardrobe on Toronto’s Yonge Street, but only after Ra spent years talking about space and looking otherworldly on stage with homemade wardrobes that looked absolutely beautiful.

Ra had multiple dancers at his shows, half-hour long percussion solos, an impossible range of horns and percussion instruments and synths and other keyboard instruments. It’s like his engine never stopped or slowed. His music in the 50s is different than the 80s and 90s, but no less inspired. You can listen or even watch his band play and ask yourself, “what is that instrument?”

His freedom is multi-dimensional. There’s the space concept, the wardrobe, and motion on stage, the way his musicians will walk off stage and break the barrier between audience and musician, or even walk off stage at the end of the show, still playing their instruments. His freedom is also embodied by his just off kilter harmonies, the instrumentation, the time signatures and the shifts, the way instruments can shift ahead and behind the beat, sometimes within the same songs. The chanty songs have a type of tight drawl yet also a kind of upbeat or off-beat quality at the same time that I just love. To Nature’s God comes to mind, a beautiful song praising elements of nature.

It sounds sometimes like all the musicians are playing a different song all at once, but that’s just because they’re playing melodically at the same time, rather than a few people doing chords or vamping to support one soloist at a time. If chords are frozen arpeggios and arpeggios are melted chords, then their solos imply a world of chords or tone. They live within the in-between worlds. It’s kind of a game, to playfully mask or hide the structure, or whatever the key is that opens up the song’s hidden core, and delight in finding it, or feeling it. You don’t need to think about all this music, sometimes it just makes you feel instinctively very good! It can really swing and have a strong sense of melody. But other times it can be extremely dark, dissonant, and you wonder just what this cacophony even is. I’m shocking myself lately by liking this latter mode more than I ever thought I would.

Many of the Arkestra’s musicians lived together, a communal existence that let them rehearse and play 24 hours a day. It kept them out of trouble and simplified meals. Despite being leaders in American jazz who got a wonderful reception in European cities, they never made a ton of money. They needed cash. Yet they were incredibly prolific, putting out over 200 albums, some on Ra’s own record label, Saturn Records.

When publishing a new Saturn album, Ra would hand each band member a few copies, and together they’d do crafts around the kitchen table, drawing on the covers in markers and taping photocopied type-written notes about what songs were on each recording. It was incredibly DIY and resourceful! For laminate, they’d use transparent shower curtains. These hand-decorated, one-of-a-kind records were sold at concerts for cheap and are now some of the most prized collectibles in the world of vinyl. A VG copy of Lanquidity goes for $1,500 cdn. Discipline 27-II went for $1,200 at a store near me.

I’d love to own such a collector’s item not for the monetary value (I’d never, never sell it), but to know that exact album passed through the band’s hands. It’s impossible to imagine a group of artists more commited to their vision. These guys lived the life day in and day out for years. The band started in the 1950s and, while Ra left the planet in 1993, the Arkestra still plays today under the leadership of 100-year-old Marshall Allen.

The spirituality and vision underpinning the music comes from Ra’s imagination and his readings into mythology, the occult, history, numerology, and lots else. For all the out-there strange ideas, it’s also filled with humour, playfulness, and it’s extremely sweet. Ra might have insisted he was from the angel race from Saturn and not a human being, but his music is extremely concerned with people, or maybe as he’d put it, Earthlings. It’s Black music, 100%, but it’s for everyone, too. I read somewhere it’s like Count Basie meets Thelonious Monk and this feels true, but maybe inadequate.

I’m totally floored by the Arkestra’s talent, vision, their raw force, their commitment, their range. It’s exquisite art on many dimensions that’s inspiring and very calming. There are initial barriers to accessing some of their music that once overcome will change the way you appreciate music forever and even your life.

I’ve been obsessed with music from a young age but, in a way, feel like I’m hearing music now for the first time. I hope this isn’t my final musical epiphany in my life and don’t see how it won’t be, yet this band has shown me that musical possibilities are as endless and vast as the cosmos themselves. I feel like I could write more words about each particular album of theirs I love, even each song–it’s extremely difficult to write concretely about such an ever-shifting musical behemoth. Suffice it to say, for me, the Sun Ra Arkestra is more like a miracle than just music.

New Technology in Music and AI

13 Monday Jan 2025

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The tech world has a way of promoting what business wants in ways they make sound like you want it. For years it’s felt like everyone pushes you to download their app in what I suspect is a move to get your data, which is then leveraged for marketing or other commercial purposes. Everybody kind of knows this, the suspicion is old. Yet the world carries on as if apps exist for the customers’ sake, to improve their experience, not the company’s. Same with AI.

It feels very much now like people deeply invested in AI need mass buy-in to cash out, and a technology with no real usefulness is being promoted by people who know it’s obviously garbage. I know people have found a range of useful applications, like help in coding or planning an itinerary, but the gap between AI’s alleged usefulness and its hype is so enormous, I’m comfortable saying it’s useless.

Nowhere is it more useless than in making music. One comment from an interview doing the rounds on twitter made my stomach sick, and I’m far from alone. Mikey Shulman an executive from suno AI, said this about making music:

“It’s not really enjoyable to make music now… it takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you have to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of time they spend making music.”

What is said here that isn’t true about everything? There isn’t a discipline on Earth that doesn’t take time to get good if you want to do it well.

Anybody who has really wanted to play an instrument can’t take their hands off it. It’s not a slog! It’s anything but! It’s not work! Maybe I’m wrong, but I can feel this CEO and others dying to insert in this conversation the idea that limiting music to musicians, or people playing instruments, is elitist, that anybody should be able to play music.

But the thing is, anyone can play music! A decent guitar costs a small fraction of one month’s rent. At some point, making music involves doing something, and so long as you can do that, you can make it.

I’ve thought a lot about how music incorporates new technology, and how there’s always a pushback from old fogeys who resist modern change. Am I doing that? I don’t think so, but here’s what I mean…

When the piano first came out, people thought it was a form of cheating because the player only has to hit a colour-coded button (white for natural notes, black for sharps/flats) to pluck the string. With piano, the keys activate a hammer which strikes the strings, there’s no contact between the strings and the fingers.

When hip hop started sampling music, people wrongly thought that was just plagiarism. Let’s be clear about something every knows: rock stole blues, or grew out of it, or whatever you want to call it. There’s nothing new about taking older forms of music into your own; sampling just made it more direct. From an artistic standpoint, there’s no difference between copying someone’s guitar riffs and stitching a bar of their music into your song. These only differ on a technical level. The copying is automatic instead of manual. There’s an old joke about jazz I like that goes like this:

“Maaan, that sax player is just stealing Charlie Parker riffs.”

*Sax player walks over, hands him the horn*

“You try it.”

If anything, sampling is more honest because it’s more direct and there’s no cover-up or masking going on. People thought Led Zeppelin or whoever wrote those Robert Johnson songs, but De La Soul never claimed to have invented P-Funk, even if many people didn’t recognize, say, the Knee Deep sample on Me Myself and I.

My favourite musicians eagerly incorporated new technology right away. Jerry Garcia had an ultra-sophisticated custom guitar with crazy built-in mods in the 80s and 90s, Tiger. Sun Ra jumped at the chance to play any new keyboard instrument (rocksichord, wurlitzer, clavinet, minimoog, farfisa, the list goes on…) and like many he used odd ball recording techniques on albums in places.

Music is about making sounds, not labouring on the rudiments and working on an instrument until you advance and pass a test and get sanctioned to play. You don’t need to log 10,000 hours to play punk or even rock. So I can’t help think that this AI music movement is designed to produce lots of place-holder “content” music so companies can use it in videos or ads or whatever without paying for the rights. They’re not promoting AI in music for musical reasons, just self-interested commercial reasons.

I can’t help but notice that the people pushing AI in music aren’t musicians, but executives and investors. Maybe Brian Eno can find a cool way to make music using AI and I’m not really saying AI is totally useless, but even if you ignore all the absurd amounts of energy and water AI consumes, I am an enormous skeptic that AI will make music sound better and bet it will only make life for real musicians even harder, not easier.