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.

The Other Parts About the Crimes

21 Saturday Sep 2024

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2666 is known mostly for Part 4 because it’s so long and repetitive in its disturbingness. It’s 280 pages, largely about the missing women found brutally murdered. There are 100+ accounts of bodies turning up with clinical, cold descriptions of the horrible end they faced. Femicide is as important a subject as it is hard to talk and read about, and nobody can accuse Bolaño of running away from the worst of it.

My friend is friends with the wonderful contemporary novelist, Noor Naga, and he told me of an interesting remark she made that completely makes sense to me, along the lines of, “no woman has ever recommended I read 2666.” No doubt she had in mind Part 4, about the Crimes.

With this in mind, and because almost everybody who writes about 2666 focuses on this aspect of the novel, I’d like to look at the other parts of Part 4 that I think play a key role in the novel. I wish I wrote this piece right after reading it, so it was fresher, but I made some notes mid-read. Excuse me if this piece is a little loose, but it’s a big, hard, complex section of the novel!

One track I didn’t notice before was the story about the narco ratting out the other smaller narco rival to the cops to take out a competitor. That happens again.

After women’s bodies are found in an area of town where upper class people own property, there’s a meeting between the mayor, the powerful narco Pedro Rengifo, and the police chief, Pedro Negrete. Head honchos. Later, Haas will say that “it’s all being taken care of.”

Then, Haas holds a press conference where he accuses people named the Uribe brothers, who own a trucking company, of being the serial killers, 30 murders, in and just outside Santa Teresa. Haas is never exonnerated, despite what he claims, but after his semi-secret phone calls in jail, and his connection to a powerful narco on the inside, he appears to be trying to associate the narco’s rivals with the murderers.

Just like neither narco bosses are innocent but one gives up the other to advance in their crimes, maybe the Uribe brothers are genuinely killers. They could be.

You never get an answer about who did it, you just get partial, foggy glimpses of the interworkings of a complex machine that is responsible for the deaths and for obscuring the guilty. It’s not a whodunit novel. It’s a what-dunnit.

There’s also a snuff film industry and drug trade that Haas seems to be involved in using computer dealing as a cover, and it goes to the top. The narcos are in on it. When Haas and his men kill and rape the caciques gang in jail in extremely brutal fashion, the cops watch. They supervise it. The cops didn’t merely turn a blind eye; “one had a camera [page 522]. Was that turned into a film?

Haas is protected by the narco Enrique Hernandzez, who is in cahoots with the cops and the politicians. That there’s corruption throughout the system isn’t exactly a new or novel observation, but if you read this part of Part 4 carefully, you’ll find an impressive level of care and details Bolaño invested in both showing and not showing the particulars. Everyone knows there’s mega corruption, but pinning the particulars down is trickier.

Kessler is followed by Negrete, probably, not the cops he’s touring with, as they fluff him up whereas Pedro Negrete doesn’t meet him at all, despite being police chief. This is for me a clue about who is on what side of the rival factions.

It’s amazing and revealing comparing the way Kessler and even the critics travel versus the poor migrants. Kessler has a mariachi band greet him and the mayor personally stamps his passport after waving immigration away. The Critics fly to this city and that for a conference or to have sex with each other and eat fancy dinners and drink cocktails. The migrants struggle to make it to Santa Teresa to find work, and many end up dead in a particularly nightmarish hell.

This comparison is silently implied, but once you think about it, it’s hard not to notice. It’s not just the contrast between luxury and squalor. The point is that the people travelling in luxury don’t really experience a border at all, whereas the poor working-class very much do.

The story of the guy on TV who tried to get into the US 345 times, once every four days, for the span of a year. What did he do for money? Because polleros are not cheap. He paid for the first few, then they gave him a discount, then they brought him as a talisman, as other migrants were hopeful that if anyone got caught by border guards, it would be him, not them.

One dark point. Yolanda Palacio talks so Sergio in El Rey del Taco [page 568] about the bright side, but in trying to frame things positively, she only reinforces the connection between the dark side of global capitalism and the murders: “Do you know which city Mexican city has the lowest female unemployment?” Of course, it’s Santa Teresa.

The desert and the sea are somehow the same thing in this novel. Recall Baudelaire’s epigraph, “An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” The image of the border crossings being desert islands and cities being ships is apt. This contrasts with Archimboldi’s love of coral and being underwater. Even the night sky comes up again and again. National borders are not the only borders in this novel that can be either concrete or porous. People’s dreams merge. Mirrors are a recurring motif in every section.

The police are misogynistic in their spare time and in their professional duty. The way these bear on each other is key. But even Sergio, the credible and dogged reporter who writes admirably about the murders, had an epiphany when, during a post-coital conversation with a sex worker, he realizes that the missing women aren’t sex workers; they work at the maquilladoras. Misogyny is in the air and nobody is immune, even the people who like to think they mean well, and do in fact work to achieve something positive.

Azucena Exquivel Plata, a very powerful Mexican congresswoman, has a friend Kelly who goes missing after working at what turn out to be high-class orgies with the narco Campuzano’s men, a narco banker (who maybe or maybe wasn’t there) and other high ups…one of the competing factions. For a second she feels bad that only her personal connection to all the murders is what pushed her to do something about them, but then she’s over it, saying that’s life. “No snuff films were made there” the private investigator on Kelly’s case says. This negation only opens up more questions. I’m not sure to what extent snuff films drive the seedy underworld of Santa Teresa. The drug trade and business in general seem very wrapped up in politics and are surely more lucrative?

But there’s a lot of talk about films, on different levels. Kessler, the big shot US detective, advises on Hollywood films. The congresswoman mentions films. Charlie Cruz (in Part 3) owns a video store and his house has the living room with no windows where they watch a porno. Movies come up all the time in Part 4. Is it because this is an entertainment society where media shapes public perception of what police do? Maybe it influences the police themselves? Or is the snuff film industry itself a driving force in things? Films are spoken of innocently, in artistic terms. In the way that global capitalism rests on poor laborers working in extremely precarious, dangerous conditions (Santa Teresa’s maquiladoras) to create products everyday people consume in North America or Europe, there’s a connection between the horrorific implications film have in Santa Teresa and the cache films have elsewhere. Ultimately, we all participate in the system and are complicit whether we mean to be or not.

Note, the bodies turn up in a maquilladora where laborers make TVs.

Part 4 is disturbing, and for extremely understandable reasons that aspect is usually what receives people’s focus. The novel revolves around the murders, panning in and out from different perspectives. If you read Part 4 carefully and can stomach description after description of corpses killed in gruesome ways, it’s the closest zoom Bolaño provides, the closest you get to seeing heart of darkness. But you never do and there’s no closure. It wouldn’t be solved by locking up one or two people, that’s the real point.

In the second last part of Part 4, the congresswoman is determined to get to the bottom of things. “I’ll be with you always, though you can’t see me, helping you every step of the way,” she says to Sergio. If Santa Teresa’s murders are shrouded, so to is a notable effort to solve them.

Part 1 opens on Christmas, Pelletier’s birthday, and Part 4 closes on Christmas. I think that’s a dark joke, if anything. The fictional town is called “Santa Teresa.” I have no idea if I’m reading too much into this, or if Bolaño is trying to subtly bury a little lightheartedness or maybe some balance into the darkest section of a very dark book, which ends with laugher coming from streets like black holes, “the only beacon that kept residents and strangers from getting lost.”

Mad, Haunted Amalfitano

30 Friday Aug 2024

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The second part of 2666 begins with Amalfitano, the academic the Critics meet at the end of Part 1. He’s from Chile, lived in Spain, but moved to Santa Teresa. Actually it begins really with Lola, his daughter’s mother.

After Amalfitano establishes he’s going crazy in Santa Teresa, paranoid of the violence, the narrative moves to Lola abandoning the family, running around Europe (Barcelona, San Sebastian, elsewhere), pursuing a mad poet before and after he was committed to an asylum. It’s clear she loves him, but it’s unclear if they ever had sex, despite what Lola says about that party, and the poet appears to be gay.

Before 2666 hits you with a gauntlet of grisly murders, it offers us this, a free woman empowered to roam and make mistakes that harm her family, emotionally, but not physically. The damage is mostly left unsaid, but in her years of absensce, Amalfitano goes mad, though you can’t really call it madness when the thing he’s paranoid about is very real. “Madness really is contagious…”

He does talk to himself, hearing the voice of his overtly homophobic grandfather. Amalfitano has the idea, maybe from a science fiction novel he read, he can’t remember, but he believes “(or likes to think he believed)” that people in other cities don’t exist until you get there, and that the effort it takes for them to put themselves together was the result of the phenomenon known as jet lag, “which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the poeple who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled.”

Is it madness if what’s making you lose your grip on reality very much exists, or is at least threatening and constantly lurking, all around you? The idea about jet lag here assumes other people get tired based on what you do, so while it’s speculative sci-fi and absurd to really believe, it inverts what Amalfitano really experiences. “They turned the pain of others into memories of one’s own.” Instead of other people making him feel scared, his travel makes other people tired (jet lag). So the theory goes.

But more than that, it doesn’t need to be real. It’s consoling. Amalfitano’s remarks could describe the novel 2666 itself:

“They turned pain, which is natural, enduring, and eternally triumphant, into personal memory, which is human, brief, and eternally elusive. They turned a brutal story of injustice and abuse, an incoherent howl with no beginning or end, into a neatly structured story in which suicide was always held out as a possibility. They turned flight into freedom, even if freedom meant no more than the perpetuation of flight. They turned chaos into order, even if it was at the cost of what is commonly known as sanity. [page 189].”

One of the novel’s most prominent and recurring images is the geometry textbook Amalfitano pins on his clothesline. A description of the geometry textbook’s separate parts could just as easily describe 2666: “each independent, but functionally correlated by the sweep of the whole.”

Amalfitano’s jet lag idea only came up because he couldn’t remember where the geometry textbook, Testamento geometrico, materialized from. Hanging it was Marcel Duchamp’s idea, “leaving a geometry book hanging exposed to the elements to see if it learns something about real life.”

“You’re going to destroy it,” said Rosa.

“Not me, nature.”

Amalfitano asks himself, “What made me come here? Why did I bring my daughter to this cursed city?” He watches the book hang “impassively” and resists the urge to take it down.

Later this let-it-be attitude will be in stark contrast to a sadistic prison inmate Klaus Haas, with long arms and iron hands, who believes “every individual controls his own fate.”

Agency is a recurring theme in 2666. Do the poor innocent victims have any? Do the journalists or even detectives? The few people interested in actually helping get to the root of the crimes face enormous obstacles, as they run up against powerful, deeply-entrenched institutions and the violently or violently apathetic attitudes they perpetuate. All Amalfitano knows is that he’d like to get his daughter away to Spain, where she’ll be safe. Though Lola wasn’t always very safe in Spain, and there was a fair amount of madness there, too.

Telepathy themes continue in Part 2. Not only does his grandfather speak to him, not only does Lola imaging she establishes telepathic contact with the poet [page 175], but “he thought about the telepathic Mapuches or Araucanians [page 216”], and recalls a short academic book examining the early history of the independence of Chile. This section touches on the a book about the secret history of the Aracunians, a group of Indigenous from Chile, whose state was “politically identical to the Greek state,” along with Chilean migrants who lived in Northern India and kept in permanent touch via telepathy.

Once the Spanish invaders learn that some Aracunians are telepaths, they cut their power by killing them, so the Aracunians develop another secret mode of communication, “Adkintuwe”: the power to send messages by the moving of tree branches. The world of Santa Teresa is dark and violent, but so is the broader interconnected world itself. If reality is so grim, why not look to the supernatural for help?

2666 is permeated by ghostly images, nightmares, and messages that seem to come from beyond. There are echoes within the novel’s sections that reinforce the theme that everything in the world itself is connected. The seer Florita Almada continues this in Part 4, and she’s alluded to briefly in the Amalfitano section. He sees her on TV [page 212].

It feels like the night sky, the stars, are the symbolic landmark that speak to characters in every section. They’re real, of course, but they don’t really say anything. They’re just there, visible to everybody in every section, in every part of the world. But there are beautiful extended passages about the stars, different kinds of stars (Hollywood stars, star athletes, dead stars we see as brilliant light in the sky), from a sweep of characters.

Many novels do this, of course! But stars hold a special significance in 2666 as the medium providing ballast in a topsy-tuvy world, a landmark hanging over the insane-real-dream world characters really live in. It’s like they gaze at them, hoping to see beyond Santa Teresa, hoping the dreamy-mythological thing stars represent manifests in their life instead of the cold haunting darkness cursing life in their city.

The Amalfitano section closes with a dream, fittingly, in which Boris Yeltsin, who looks as if Amalfitano invaded his dream and not the other way around, gives him a formula: “Life is demand and supply, or supply and demand, that’s what it all boils down to. But that’s no way to live. A third leg is needed to keep the table from collapsing into the garbage pit of the void. So take note. This is the equation: supply + demand + magic.” Magic is defined as “epic and it’s also sex and Dionysian mists and play.” Maybe it’s also madness and telepathy.

At the end of the dream, Amalfitano, the mad seeker of supernatural consolation who pins a book to a clothesline where it hangs impassively to its fate, “had no choice but to awake.”

Tone and Ambiguity in Bolano’s 2666

19 Monday Aug 2024

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You can’t talk about the core subject of 2666 unemotionally, the mystery of missing and murdered porr women in Mexico. How exactly, as a writer, do you approach this topic, then?

In section four, about the killings, Bolaño is as detached and cold as a newspaper headline writer. This part of the novel itself is often newspaper clippings. They leave you wanting to know more, they’re open-ended.

Elswhere, throughout the novel, Bolaño’s tone is usually blunt and declarative, but is often full of contradictions and second-guessings. A character will say something matter of factly and then just as quickly backtrack, saying they aren’t sure, it could just as easily be the exact opposite.

2666 is told from the perspective of people whose job it is to know things–critics, professors, journalists, detectives–and they very seldom do. The closer they get, the less they know, and this theme is declared hundreds of times in sentences that pronounce one thing and then reverse course. The reversals are small and large, on different scales. But they encourage the reader to believe something before pulling the rug out a bit.

Here are a few examples from the text to illustrate this point:

“One day, when more than three months had gone by since their visit to Norton, one of them called the other and suggested a weekend in London. It’s unclear whether Pelletier or Espinoza made the call. In theory, it must have been the one with the strongest sense of loyalty, or of friendship, which amounts to the same thing, but in truth neither Pelletier nor Espinoza had a strong sense of any such virtue.” [pg. 64]

“And Norton told them no. And then she said maybe she did, it was hard to give a conclusive answer in that regard.” [pg. 72]

“It was Morini’s idea, because Morini had somehow learned that a man he considered to be one of the most disturbing painters of the twentieth century was living there. Or not. Maybe Morini hadn’t said that.” [pg. 87]

“He had the eyes of a blind man. I don’t mean he couldn’t see, but his eyes were just like the eyes of the blind, though I could be wrong about that.” [pg. 127]

There are lots of other examples, these are obviously all from The Part About the Critics, the first section. Ambiguity is one of the novel’s major themes. People are trying to figure something out all novel, then don’t, or can’t, for one reason or another. They might get very close, but even when they do, all they can pronounce with certainty is that they’ll never truly get all the way there: “Archimboldi is here,” said Pelletier, “and we’re here, and this is the closest we’ll ever be to him.” [pg. 159]

Indeed, the nearer they get to the mysterious writer, the more they “reread novels by Archimboldi that suddenly they didn’t understand.” [pg. 130]

Sometimes the characters [Harry Magana] have an outsider’s perspective, they don’t understand Mexico or Santa Teresa, but try hard to solve it and come up short. Sometimes it’s the opposite, that they’re insiders too close to Santa Teresa to even pursue answers about the killers, knowing its danger and futility. But Bolaño toys with us all along in regards to much smaller questions, not just the bigger ones.

Bolaño does this sentence by sentence, but also on a macro scale, in the novel’s structure. The opening of the novel is about trying to somehow locate the elusive novelist Archimboldi, while the fifth and final section is told from Archimboldi’s perspective and we’re with him the whole time.

This trick of conditioning the reader to both know and not know things all while continuing the search for truth makes the novel disorienting while luring you in deeper. You get accustomed to ambiguity, uncertainty, even while determined to forge ahead to pursue the answers. Whatever uncertainties lay ahead in the novel, you can’t trust what you think you already know, either.

Bolaño said that 2666 has a “hidden centre” in addition to the physical one, Santa Teresa, and there’s lots of speculation about what exactly this means. Given that the novel’s name 2666 comes from a different Bolaño story, the answer to the “hidden centre” might very well be contained outside this novel, too. There’s no end to the speculation and guesses. It makes the reading fun and engaging, like a puzzle that both has multiple answers and no answers but is somehow rich and not futile because that’s how reality is. It’s like playing hide and go seek with someone who may be hiding outside the boundaries of the game, and who may not even exist. The game is as fun as the search because that’s all there ever is.

Like the characters in the novel, readers need to content themselves to both knowing and not knowing. To the main question, who is responsible for the killings, is there even one specific answer? Is it a single person or group? Are the killings related? Are some things unknowable? It feels typical of the world of this novel to not even know that. Lurking threats are not the same thing as really knowing, even if the feeling of fear is real.

This is a discussion about the larger themes, but on rereading this novel I’ve felt intrigued by how often characters and the narrator cast a dubious light on things they’ve just said, and the dynamic of such sentences feels like it parallels the larger search for answers in the novel’s biggest question.

…”Not a cemetery in 1974 or in 1968, or 1975, but a cemetery in the year 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else.” [excerpt from Bolaño’s 1999 short story “Amulet.”]

In this type of dark and foggy world, very much the world of 2666, certainty is anything but assured.

Sun Ra: The Dawn of My New Musical Life

06 Tuesday Feb 2024

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It’s very hard to write about such a vast, deep musician because where exactly do you begin? Sun Ra insisted he was from the planet Saturn, and all musical evidence suggests this is true. I’ll start with my own personal introduction to his music, since for years I was intimidated by it.

I had heard Sun Ra was some of the wildest music out there and that his catalogue was immense. What to listen to first? For years I didn’t know, so I didn’t listen to any of it. I stumbled on a used record in 2022, a reissue of Jazz in Silhouette for $15, and knew I had to buy it because few records are that cheap, let alone a Sun Ra. It was a surprisingly “in” album, but gorgeous, melodies and big band swing galore. I didn’t go beyond it.

On June 27, 2023, while minding my own business one day I came upon a tweet saying the Sun Ra Arkestra was doing a free workshop in Regent Park. Holy! To be honest, I had been feeling quite down and depressed and leaving the apartment was hard, but I live on Dundas and the show was on Dundas, just a streetcar ride away. If such a killer free show was happening down the street and I didn’t bother to see it, what exactly was I doing?

I didn’t know what a “free workshop” constituted exactly, but it turned out that the band basically played a free concert. There were some kids and adult musicians, a community band, on stage too, albeit not really plugged in or mic’d up. The Arkestra’s music was unbelievable. I went with a buddy and we still laugh about what I told him before the show started. I did say I was no expert on the band, but I knew that they were considered absolutely top tier musicians, comparable to Coltrane, Ellington, all the legendary household names, and the group formed in 1958. “Which one is Sun Ra?” Cian asked. “Hmmm, that one?” I said, pointing to the oldest-looking gentleman. Well, Sun Ra died in 1993. That’s how uninitiated I was then. (Cian plays bass for a band called Swiims, and they’re really cool too, though quite different than the Arkestra!)

The “workshop” consisted of the band, only half of them wearing their elaborate stage costumes, playing some of their well-known tunes (new to me then), talking to the audience between songs about the history of the band and jazz itself, very interwoven things, and encouraging the audience to listen and play music. My mouth hung open. It still hasn’t closed. I couldn’t believe this was happening in my city and to me. I really still can’t! The band was still playing when they walked off the stage over an hour later, mid-song.

Then, in the atrium we all feasted together. Band members and audience were welcome to eat samosas and some other delicious food together, all free. What world was I living in? Toronto is outrageously expensive and so are concerts, so I was truly astonished by the whole thing.

I spoke briefly to Dave Hotep, the band’s guitarist, who said he heard there was a municipal election and that the right person won. Suddenly I was living in a world where Olivia Chow was mayor, the Sun Ra Arkestra plays free shows in my city, and you could just casually eat free samosas and talk to jazz legends.

It did a lot for my mood. It’s hard to be depressed when your mind is blown and your soul is soaring.

The next night I lined up early for their concert at Great Hall because I didn’t have a ticket but absolutely had to see them. This was no ticketmaster/live nation scam, with prices in the hundreds or thousands of dollars. This was $50, cash. The lack of any online reselling scams was so refreshing, in keeping with everything the band does. No gimmicks, no bullshit. Just music.

Outside in the line, the legendary Arkestra member Knoel Scott asked me if I knew where to get a bottle and we (I made some friends in line; Ra is higher conscious music and the whole audience felt palpably friendly, happy and cool) told him where the nearest LCBO was. I was dead sober, excited as hell, and the two-plus hours of music that night changed my life. I was astonished and buzzing and still can’t believe how good it was. I really can’t. I’ve seen Phil and Bobby, Phish, Santana, Dr John…countless killer musicians. I doubt I’ll ever hear or see better music than I heard that night unless I see the Arkestra again.

After the show I went on Twitter to find other fans and pictures from the night and ended up going back and forth a bit with Ra trombonist Dave Davis for a while. My buddy Grasshopper was at the show and ended up hanging with one of the band members until 5am at his place, looking at Sun Ra records.

It’s been months, but I pretty much just listen to Sun Ra now. I just counted and have 13 of their albums on vinyl. The band has probably 250, I don’t think anybody’s sure exactly. Pressings from the 70s or older on Sun Ra’s own Saturn label are among the rarest albums you can find, costing over $1,000 Cdn usually. Some have original one-of-a-kind art work band members devised to help sell the albums because it was their own record label and I don’t think they made official covers, never mind having a corporate behemoth helping with marketing. They painted the covers themselves, sometimes. I’ve seen an original copy of Horizons and Lanquidity, the latter being probably my favourite.

I have two box sets of music from 1978 and 1984 reissued, respectively, in 2011 and 2014, splurges I absolutely love. One I bought from Grasshopper Records, with my now father-in-law the weekend before my wedding. Grasshopper recommended his friend to DJ my wedding, and they gave me a friend discount, and I was more than happy to use some of that to buy a serious Ra record. When I heard they were playing a free workshop, I told Grasshopper, but sadly he got caught in traffic and showed up just for samosas.

I have a few original Ra records that were surprisingly inexpensive, I guess because they’re the least rare albums, not from the Saturn label. $30-40 range. Nothing crazy. Some of the band’s music is too out there for me still, but I consider this something I probably need to work through or advance towards. If anything, the shortcoming is mine, not theirs! The Arkestra can swing with the absolute best of them. They play every type of jazz and blues, fit any mood. It feels like it’s in their bones. The history of the band aligns with the ear test–you hear them and know they go way, way back. They’re not playing jazz, they are jazz. Sun Ra wrote charts for Fletcher Henderson, a big band jazz legend who died in 1952. Marshall Allen, the band’s current musical director, is 100 years old. He wasn’t there in Toronto, but still plays on special occasions in Brooklyn, his home, including I understand his 100th birthday party.  

When generations of elite musicians devote their entire lives to music, not just their careers but their spiritual lives too, the result is the Sun Ra Arkestra. My understanding is all or most of the band lived in the same house, a row house in their Philadelphia period, and would play daily for upwards of 10-15 hours. Imagine…you play a 3-hour concert, but that’s only 20% of the music you played that day. Now imagine that dedication and hours logged over decades. That’s how good the Sun Ra Arkestra is. To me they embody the polarities between ultimate freedom and ultimate discipline. They know all the jazz there is on Earth, and lots of Saturn music, too.

Next time I write about them, I’ll focus on an album because it’s crazy to write this much and barely talk about their actual music, one of my favourite things in life, currently.

One final note. In 1999, I saw a show by a group called the Cosmic Krewe at the Comfort Zone because I heard their band leader, a trumpet player named Michael Ray, jam live with Phish on a tape from ’94. I knew then that Ray also played with Kool and the Gang, but had no idea until 2023 he was also a member of the Sun Ra Arkestra since 1979. I listened to the bootleg Comfort Zone Krewe show I went to a lot. There were melodies I’ve been humming for over 20 years, not knowing how to find these songs. How do you google a melody, exactly? So I was shocked yet somehow unsurprised when it turned out these Cosmic Krewe songs were in fact Sun Ra Arkestra songs. Enlightenment I had heard on Jazz in Silhouette, but Live in Nickelsdorf has another tune I knew since 1999. It blew my mind.

I’m only half-joking when I say that despite playing guitar for 30 years, I really didn’t know anything about music until June 27, 2023, the first time I heard and saw the Sun Ra Arkestra. (Half-joking because that’s also what I said in 2021, when I got deep into Parliament Funkadelic, but that’s another post.) I’m still buzzing from those concerts and I doubt I’ll ever stop. Music really is a life-long journey, and I’ve been very grateful, humbled, and appreciative to find musicians so out there and this deep.

Toronto Election 101: Chow, Brown, or Matlow?

20 Tuesday Jun 2023

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Who are you voting for, Olivia Chow, Chloe Brown, or Josh Matlow? That’s the question on the docket. Technically there are 102 mayoral candidates. They are not exactly viable.

In these three candidates, we have a centrist (Matlow), centre-left (Chow), and a leftist (Chloe Brown). I’ll just describe my sense of these candidates and do some basic background stuff.

Matlow was a first-time councilor in the Rob Ford era. His ward covers Yonge-Eglinton. He was a thorn in John Tory’s side, and seems to have evolved from a milquetoast TO councilor serving the status quo to a man who can change his mind on positions. It’s a rare case of a popular Toronto politician moving leftwards. His tendency to go a bit rogue can be refreshing and, sometimes, alienate people he needs to work with.

Olivia Chow was a city councilor too, albeit longer ago, and was married to NDP leader Jack Layton (RIP). By far the most high-profile candidate, she has been leading the polls by a wide margin all along, which has conservatives voters, and especially lobbyists and strategists, freaking out. They’ve become accustom to being pampered by city hall under rob ford and john tory, and can’t bear the the idea of a Toronto leader outside the Conservative Machine. Chow was on the budget committee for a decade and has a solid grasp of the city’s nuts and bolts.

Chloe Brown finished third last election behind second place Gil Penalosa and Tory. She is a policy analyst who graduated from Toronto Metropolitan University and has worked for different levels of government. Unlike every other major political candidate, she doesn’t have a war room of party professionals and lobbyists backing her.

Her performance last election turned heads and got attention, rightfully so. She got 10% of Tory’s votes on a shoestring budget and no corporate backing. Her supporters insist she is being excluded from high-profile debates by the establishment who let three separate john tory clones (bailao, saunders, bradford) debate, but not Brown, who, again, finished third last election. The criteria for getting on stage shifts in such a way as to juuuuust include brad bradford but juuuust exclude Chloe Brown.

Her goal of poverty reduction is not exactly a historic priority in the cold, austerity city Toronto has become.

John Tory absolutely decimated Toronto by refusing to modernize the city. He took over from Rob Ford’s backwards approach to taxation, which determined the rate of property taxation before deciding what services to fund. Historically, Toronto did the reverse, assessing what services we needed to fund, and then setting property taxes accordingly.

Today, we have an absurd situation where Toronto property costs more than any city in Canada, except maybe Vancouver, but our property taxes are the lowest of any city in Ontario. You read that right! If you live in any other Ontario city, you pay a higher rate.

It’s funny and illustrative to me that “high demand” only applies to private sector prices rising, but is completely divorced from taxation rates. Put another way, conservatives expect the government to forcefully intervene and lower their property taxes by arbitrarily tying it to inflation, not the Free Market. And no wonder they expect it, that’s what Toronto has done for them for over ten years.

As a direct result of this approach, we have a situation where rent has basically doubled in the past decade, but property taxes have, to put it lightly, not. Yes, home prices have surged, but the idea that half of Toronto is subjected to shocking rents coupled with the decimation of rent control while homeowners invoke “affordability” to have government forcefully intervene on their behalf simply doesn’t make any logical sense.

A person can decide they want to vote for whoever will keep their taxes lowest, that’s their prerogative. But they can’t say subjecting the poorer half of Toronto to skyrocketing housing costs while homeowners watch their asset grow and taxation stays relatively flat makes sense.

The three candidates I named seem to understand this is what’s going on and are trying to address it in differently. The tory clones are absolute hacks using PR firms and polls to copy/paste platitudes into power for the backroom sharks who were the beneficiaries and architects of Toronto’s destruction. I know this sounds overblown and melodramatic, but it’s true!

I live downtown, and when people say garbage is overflowing onto streets, it’s not exaggeration. City garbages regularly spill onto sidewalks. I saw a bus shelter smashed by a car months ago, shattered glass all over the street and sidewalk. Months later, there’s just “caution” tape where the glass panel should be. I’ve seen literal duct tape on a TTC sign telling people when to expect the streetcar, which is coming increasingly late and is increasingly packed and potentially violent.

My specific view of the city crumbling is relatively privileged. People can’t afford groceries or housing. The city is rejecting more people from shelters and providing no alternatives for them to live, despite the city’s PR flaks.

It’d be easy to assume critics are overstating the extent of the damage. They’re not! The city’s basics are in pathetic shape and we’re in a $1-billion hole, and the previous mayor/Rogers adviser was more focused on spending $300 million to host a few World Cup games.

The Ontario premier has an astonishingly heinous and palpably corrupt plan to spend over half a billion dollars on a lakefront underground mega parking lot for a luxury spa that has more than a few conservative insiders on the board. Even a bullet list of his mega scandals would take up too much room here.

Doug Ford is a vulture picking off Toronto’s bones, yet he got re-elected. This is the first Toronto mayoral election in years where a staunch conservative isn’t the front-runner, and progressives have a few viable candidates. (Right-leaning Soknacki had good, original ideas in 2014 but, reading the polls, backed out before election day and Keesmaat in 2018 didn’t live up to expectations.)

The question is: will we elect someone who will fight Ford or cave? The establishment right ran on Toronto needing steady leadership only months ago when Tory won his third election. Now, jarringly, every mayoral candidate is running on the correct assumption that the city is on the cusp of collapse. The right wants to pin the blame on, you guessed it, someone else! This is their mess and voters seem to get that. Their usual PR feels transparently cheap this time around.

Olivia Chow is well ahead and, barring something wild last-minute, seems poised to win. Chloe Brown has worked hard to increase her profile and brought substance to the few debates and appearances that welcomed her. The establishment should be scared of her. It feels odd to have any viable candidate in an election, let alone three. I’ve been grateful for Matlow’s voice and position on high profile issues like the Gardiner.

I hope the next mayor, unlike our previous two, is open to sensible ideas that were modern in the late 20th century, like not sacrificing every single square inch of public space to cars. I don’t mean to jinx it, but I feel like conservative strategists anticipate losing their privileged place at the trough after dominating it uncontested for over a decade and are frantically making private post-trough arrangements. I hope the shady, uber-connected backroom hustlers suffer as the city thrives.

For this to happen, Chow will need substantial plans to build housing and realize her promises. That would be hard enough in neutral circumstances, but ford conservatives will stymie her ruthlessly and Postmedia will blame her, especially if she does a wonderful job. Hopefully she has enough energy to keep fighting after the election is over, because not being connected to Tory or Ford is enough for now, but the real war hasn’t begun yet.

Fawn Parker: What We Both Know…Some Thoughts

15 Wednesday Mar 2023

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I couldn’t read this wonderful novel without thinking of Barney’s Version. There are real parallels. I’m not saying Parker had Richler’s modern classic novel in mind, but I felt the parallels throughout.

Parker’s protagonist Hillary Greene is writing her father’s memoir, a famous and celebrated novelist, because he is losing his memory and ability to write due to ailing health in old age. In BV, Barney Panofsky tries to make sense of his own life in hindsight. He made a lot of money over the years but, surrounded by artists in youth who became not just successful but iconic, he is finally trying to give writing, art, a shot. He himself is suffering from Alzheimer’s.

Richler lets the reader judge whether Panofsky serves up his memories self-servingly or if he genuinely can’t remember. Is he misremembering old stories to paint a flattering portrait, is he actually losing his memory, or both? Panofsky was found not guilty of a murder in court, but public opinion isn’t so sure. He’s been such a shit for years, murder is not out of the question.

Hillary Greene is also an aspiring writer trying to grapple with Alzheimer’s (albeit not hers, her father’s), but it’s a woman in charge of controlling a man’s legacy. She will have the last say. Will she, though? She’s set to write Baby’s memoir in his name, not her own.

Baby looms over her, dominating her with his Big Writer energy. Family drama also weighs on her, to put it lightly. Even when she gets the power, she doesn’t totally have it because, and this is one of Parker’s themes, power needs to be claimed, not just handed. Greene might have the power to write how she pleases, but it’s not clear she will, or can. In life, there are complicated forces which interfere, and serve to prevent the full truth from coming out. These forces should be specified, since together they form a main theme of Parker’s novel.

a) Greene can’t fully trust what her father says–maybe he misremembers, or is lying, or is honest but isn’t divulging everything

b) Greene can’t fully remember her own memories, even recent ones. Memory plays tricks on her

c) The collision of a) and b) create a third anxiety about uncovering the past accurately; even when you get things right, you second-guess yourself

d) Her father’s agent and devoted fans–the world of The Writer–have a hold on Hillary, and undermine her mental independence. Charlie Rose shaped how people see him, now she will? She feels so marginal as a writer and daughter, the newfound power is daunting and she’s unsure she can answer it.

Panofsky writes his memoirs to clear his reputation, whereas Baby’s (Greene’s novelist father) public reputation is still in tact, despite threatening rumours of relationships with young women students that caused small-scale backlash in certain spheres of their lives. That’s the public darkness. In private, Hillary’s sister Pauline committed suicide, and Hillary learns about some dark family secrets while writing her father’s memoir. Modern DNA tests are a convenient plot device for drudging up old the unsavoury past.

The reader would love for Hillary to be hellbent on istina, an inner-light of truth truth-quest where only full honesty matters in the public and private reckoning. But in real life things are messy, and she needs to contend with how her family and other people will react to ugly truths becoming public. She needs to contend with herself processing it. There are levels to it.

Baby is her dad. As a Major Writer with a Calling, being in his presence in youth shaped and influenced her and her world-view (famous people growing up in her household were Jesus and Kafka). Literary readings were a natural part of her life in youth.

Despite the promise of the novel’s title, it feels like her father’s beastliness is not fully described, left unsaid. There’s abuse that feels like it occurred, but isn’t explicitly stated. At first I thought maybe I missed something. Did Parker describe Baby’s worst sin, and I didn’t pick up on it? I’d like to avoid spoilers here, but it’s interesting how a novel called “What We Both Know” leaves a fair amount, perhaps even the main thing, ambiguous.

Traumatized people seldom remember everything perfectly, in fact they often totally forget. Their memory blocks things out, as if to mercifully shield them from the traumatic experience.

WWBK posits some disturbing thoughts: In the Me Too era where we’re trying to reconcile and heal from past, what if the full truth can’t always emerge, despite the teller’s best attempts? What if knowing about the dark deed and not knowing about it are equally futile? The knowledge that doomed or at least damaged Pauline isn’t helping Hillary, either. By the time it can be known, it’s too late to prevent.

Also, the obstacles in the way of reconciliation aren’t put there solely by the guilty to conceal their guilt. Hillary has self-interested reasons not to divulge everything about her dad ranging from career, family, and deeper psychological ones.

It may seem thoughtless to begin a review about a book about a woman newly taking agency over her life and life story by comparing it to a different novel about a man describing his life, except male intrusion is very much a theme of What We Both Know. Barney’s memoir has three sections, each named for one of his ex-wives. The ghostly, haunting figure of “boogie” looms over Barney as a kind of father-figure. While Barney made a fortune distributing schlock on Canadian TV, boogie read Tolstoy in the original Russian and shocked and shrugged at the bourgeoisie rather than lowered himself by catering to their tastes.

Whatever conflict Hillary has with her father, and there’s conflict alright!, he’s still inextricably linked to her ideas about life and art. There’s no world for Hillary where a man isn’t centrally located in her life. That’s what she’s trying to build.

Ultimately, working on herself (her career, her friends, her sex life, her romantic life) and working on her writing project involves overcoming the same type of male influence. The public and private struggle is tied together.

I don’t want to generalize too much: the real Mordecai Richler by all accounts was a lovely man who raised five kids and loved Florence faithfully (the Charles Foran bio is excellent). The character Baby feels like a representative of one common and crusty species of The Male Writer, celebrated for prioritizing art above family, whose home smells like leather-bound books and the expensive scotch they drink, and whose inevitable sexual hijinks/misconduct adds to their public and professional persona and their mythological aura.

Richler wasn’t Panofsky, and it’d be wrong to reduce Parker’s novel to merely a social novel, or an essay in novel form. I hope I didn’t minimize it by discussing it largely in terms of its overarching themes. It’s a psychological novel which confronts a lot of underlying forces deftly and with considerable nuance.

If anything, the novel does a good job of showing how an apparently simmering Me Too scandal is connected on lower frequencies to various aspects of everyday life involving innocent people. Just like the genders are inverted, WWBK ends where Barney’s Version begins, with a writer’s promise to tell their own story.

Barney’s Version is Barney Panofsky recounting his own life his own way. Women are the landmarks along his journey. He was a shit, even if he only blames himself. He lived his life, and now he’s trying to find meaning in that life.

It’s no accident Hillary needs to get the first story about Baby out of the way before she can begin to tell “her own” story. She needs to work through this crap before beginning to live, even if she’s approaching middle-age.

Put another way, the focus on Me Too stories is often about their most salacious aspects–how the clearly guilty at their worst abuse the clearly innocent at their most innocent. But the daily grind of having someone like Baby rule over you for years is enough to cause lasting damage, even if the thing they’re in the public crosshairs for happened to someone else. Untangling it is messy, privately and publicly.

There are also some great philosophical discussions about how time moves, if it’s real, how relative time and perception are. Things like that. It’s a serious look at various dimensions of a social phenomena that, while it’s gone mainstream, is still not fully explored or understood. Even if you wanted to look at it fully, doing so is hard. It involves threading together several people’s stories, and zooming in and out to harmonize the macro and micro perspectives.

Such public reckonings are probably thought to be a binary choice of privately telling or hiding the truth, but aspects of Me Too stories can be so deeply personal, psychological, complicated, and multi-layered that a person may genuinely struggle to track down and understand their own story and get it out, even if they were determined to. That’s what this is about.

I’m reluctant to imagine the life fictional characters lead after their story ends. Like Nabokov says, fictional characters are just their writer’s galley slaves and have no independent existence. But Barney’s mind is gone before he learns of the exonerating evidence of what happened to Boogie’s body. He was decades older than Parker’s character Hillary Greene but never got to enjoy the public accepting his total innocence. I wish Greene finds mental peace to move forward with her life and story in healthy ways, that she can transcend the Baby-man bullshit dragging her down while she still has lots of years to enjoy it.

The novel is less about her doing this and more about the levels of struggle involved in the attempt.

TTC “Fare Enforcers” Are Absurd and Backwards

01 Wednesday Mar 2023

Posted by in Politics

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Toronto faces multiple crises at the same time. In the immediate term, gridlock-traffic is agonizing and drivers pose lethal risks. It’s infuriating day to day, the city loses billions in productivity, and people get injured or killed. Housing is also obscenely overpriced and hard to find. In the middle distance, the pandemic continues and climate change looms.

The reasonable response to this is vastly improving public transit to reduce congestion, the parking burden, and air pollution. For every $1 the government spends on transit, it spends $9 on the infrastructure private cars require. That means that even if a TTC passenger doesn’t pay a fare, they cost the city less than private cars do.

Yet the city is poised to send “fare enforcers” back throughout its transit system in late March 2023 to give tickets as high as $425 to people sidestepping $3.25 fares, fares which are set to increase yet again, even as service is cut. The TTC is eliminating some bus routes and there will be longer waits for existing buses, and even subways.

These TTC cuts come at the worst time possible: violence has increased, ridership is significantly down. TTC Board Chair Jon Burnside’s views are so upside down, he may as well be an executive for Uber or a car company rather than work for the TTC.

So how does the TTC have money to circulate over 100 fare enforcers to inspect its own riders when facing a $336 million-dollar shortfall? The TTC boasts that fare enforcers will wear body cameras, as if equipping these less-than-useless patrols with expensive gear is good! If fare enforcers require body cameras because they pose that level of risk, they shouldn’t exist.

The point is to end racist enforcement in public space, not videotape it. We already have 2018 footage of three TTC fare enforcers physically assaulting a Black teenager on a streetcar at St. Clair and Bathurst, just outside my old apartment while I lived there. It’s a well-established pattern that doesn’t need to be confirmed yet again. The inspectors were suspended, with pay.

The way this conversation is framed, even people sympathetic to TTC passengers think “fare evaders” deprive the public transit system of money. People on both sides see it that way, wrongly.

And OK, in an obvious and basic sense, people who don’t pay a TTC fare clearly don’t contribute that money to the TTC. But almost nobody accuses drivers of personal cars of getting a free ride, even though they also don’t pay to access public roads that cost vastly more tax dollars to maintain than public transit does.

Let me repeat this because car-brain has hopelessly warped this public conversation. Every private car on Toronto streets is a considerably larger burden on the city than TTC “fare evaders.” Private cars create financial problems, the space they take up cause bottlenecks, we breathe poisoned air that creates trickle-down health problems, which we pay for too.

A modern, sensible city would encourage people to take public transit, and nothing is less welcoming or pleasant than “fare enforcers”! They have a tendency to grill marginalized people and their entire job description is absurd. They shouldn’t exist on the TTC even if their very generous salaries cost us nothing. That we pay for this “service” is fiscal nonsense.

One reason I think the motivation behind “fare enforcement” is motivated purely by cruel and punitive punishment and not any actual philosophical or economic principle is the difference in how people perceive safety enforcement for drivers.

Enough people think speed cameras are just a “cash-grab,” even if they really do catch people breaking the law and posing danger to the public. Let’s be real, cars injure, maim, and kill people every day despite “Vision Zero,” and measures to enforce safety are widely publicly rejected, rather than embraced the way “fare enforcers” are.

Unlike speeding cars, TTC “fare evaders” pose no physical danger to anybody! Toronto drivers transcend stupid or even dangerous; drivers here regularly crash into houses, condominiums, telephone poles, fences, laundromats, bus shelters, and, of course, other cars and people on the road. This is a much bigger problem than people moving efficiently, affordably, and cleanly through the city. In fact, far from a problem, the latter is the goal! It’s what we hope to achieve and we are investing money in punishing it!

The alternative to the person not paying a TTC fare (among North America’s most expensive transit fare) is them not riding, which also doesn’t add money to TTC coffers. If someone doesn’t have the money to pay, then they can’t go to appointments, see people, get groceries.

Anyone saving money by riding the TTC isn’t the type of person this city should depend on to keep the system afloat. Anyone saving money by not paying a TTC fare is even less suitable. If someone who doesn’t pay transit fares chooses to drive their car to get somewhere instead, how is that a better result for the city?

Let’s be clear again: the TTC isn’t short of funds because riders aren’t paying enough–it’s the exact opposite. TTC riders put vastly more money into our transit system than riders from other cities, which enjoy more public subsidies. Toronto riders fund roughly 2/3rds of our transit system. No other North American city this size depends on fares to fund its system, but Toronto does. That is the wellspring of our financial difficulties, not riders cheating the city. If anything, the city is cheating TTC riders, then giving itself a moral pat on the back for harassing the people they do wrong by.

That’s the reason it’s broke, which obviously predates the pandemic. 10 years ago, a TTC token cost I believe $2.25. Now, tapping Presto costs $3.25. Prices have risen roughly 50%. Overreliance on TTC passengers, using their wallets as a crutch while austerity politicians like John Tory defied experts to pour billions he didn’t have into the crumbling Gardiner Expressway is, frankly, stupid.

To hear these officious and ignorant arguments portraying the backwards and barbaric “fare enforcement” of poor people as if it’s moral, rational, and fiscally sensible is maddening and sad.

John Tory spent millions of dollars on police to violently push homeless people out of public parks. Those people have nowhere to go, so some may try to survive the Canadian winter by riding TTC vehicles overnight. Now we’re paying another tier of patrol to harass them there, too.

Letting drivers access public streets for free while subjecting TTC passengers to rising fares, reduced service, and increased enforcement is ignorant and hypocritical, and is a flagrantly irrational response to the multiple crises we face. More than that: the crises we face exist mostly because this city asks people with less to spend more and vice versa.

It’s unsustainable, which is why things feel like they’re breaking more fundamentally, not just worsening at their usual rate. We need to look at this conversation holistically and ask what the goal of the TTC really is, and how we accomplish that goal by actively investing sorely-needed money into creating new barriers that make the riding experience a lot worse for many people.

“Fare enforcers” are a puritanical vestige of Toronto the Good who have absolutely no place in a safe, functional, modern and fiscally responsible public transit system everyone can ride.

Solve the problem by addressing root causes: redirect a lot of the billions we’re wasting on private car infrastructure (widening old highways, building new ones, paving farmland) and invest it in public transit at the rate normal North American cities do, and the problem the city created will gradually vanish. Blaming and stigmatizing innocent poor people, and investing in their increased harassment, is self-defeating, intellectually indefensible, and morally unconscionable.