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

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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.

What Exactly Do You Mean By “Woke” ?

23 Thursday Feb 2023

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I’m probably making a huge mistake weighing on a fraught term people use and understand differently. Well, let’s make a huge mistake then!

“Woke” was originally a term some Black people used to describe the need to be vigilant about the dangers of racism they face in our deeply racist society. It still means this, but it also means so many other things that whoever once used its original definition must know it’s been obscured. Often deliberately so.

Today, depending on the person, “woke” means quite different things. Some well-meaning centrists say it to disparage those on their left they feel lay on the anti-racism a little too thick. In their minds, Western society isn’t particularly racist, it’s just as racist as any other place because (as they’ll say begrudgingly, but with a shrug) nowhere is perfect, so anybody speaking to the need to transform society instead of reform or tinker with it is by definition going too far. The self-satisfaction this person advocating for transformative change seems to feel, the pat you can feel them giving themselves on the back, is summed up in the word “woke.” This is a confused position but a relatively innocent one that makes space for one more vile and willfully-deranged.

Basically, today’s most slobbering racists use “woke” as a euphemism for the n-word. When Marjorie Taylor Greene and that ilk say “woke,” the sentence would read the same if you replaced that word with the slur. When MTG praises Chris Stapleton’s rendition of the national anthem before the Super Bowl but says, “we could have done without the rest of the wokeness,” you can feel the word she really wants to say. She all but said it.

While some confusion around the word “woke” arises naturally, organically, and innocently, the word itself is also under attack by racists using it to obscure things and advance racism. Once they start using it in many different ways, by the time you add the new context to the old one, the old one feels outdated. It’s impossible to say “woke” now without associating the term with the far-right who co-opted it.

That’s what’s tough when talking about this word: the casual political people will roll their eyes at being lumped in with the slobbering racists, while the slobbering racists are violently irrational and act in terrible faith no matter what you say or how you act. The rabid right appeals to centrists and anybody who isn’t steadfastly opposed to them by insinuating “we might be crazy fucks, I mean look at us, but the alt-left and Antifa are crazy too, and you and I have fundamental things in common.”

The liberal who means well but doesn’t grasp how intertwined racism and our social institutions are may find common cause with the rabid racist, even if it’s to their private dismay and embarrassment. The centrist will often be rightly disgusted by MAGA’s violent demented freaks, but they can’t totally disagree with them altogether, either. The far-right doesn’t threaten the centrist’s national mythology, whereas the so-called alt-left does. Centrists enjoy being reassured this country isn’t on stolen land and doesn’t owe its foundational wealth to crimes, and the far-right are more than happy to give them this reassurance, one the left is adamantly opposed to giving them.

One pernicious trick the right does is spread these comforting illusions in the name of being critical, hard-eyed realists! They get to believe the most self-serving explanations for their comforts possible for supposedly impartial intellectual reasons. It’s kind of like children claiming they read Will to Power and Nietzsche clearly states they can have all the cookies and juice they want before bed time.

Did you really do the reading? Is this just what you want to believe, or what the text actually says?

The far-right’s “Free Market” beliefs also have more in common with liberalism/centrism than with any leftist view.

So on one hand, liberals and centrists are hugely embarrassed by the far-right, but not by their underlying beliefs. It’s mostly the illiterate clown show antics of the Ford brothers and Donald Trump. John Tory was a fiscal conservative austerity mayor whose economic and cultural views line up with the Ford and Trumps of this world, but he was polished enough to conceal this similarity, or even housebroken enough. On a basic level, Tory, unlike Trump and sometimes the Fords, could talk to the media without causing apolitical people around the world to simultaneously laugh and shudder.

The far-right can’t be denounced enough.

MAGA freaks in Florida are banning Toni Morrison novels, which is akin to a modern book burning. What could be a more hostile act of war against Western Culture than banning the best Western literature? I won’t defend Toni Morrison, the author of Sula, Beloved, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and other masterpieces, because that would suggest her status as a writer could be in doubt.

But that’s what so confusing about the “Culture War”…it’s a war against culture led by people using culture as a mask for racism. The word “woke” is wrapped up in this.

Years after police murdered George Floyd, “defund the police” might be a mainstream position with lots of support across society, but the mayor of New York is currently a cop. John Tory defunded everything in Toronto except police, and now that he has resigned, the new race for mayor has not one but two cops.

Don’t make the mistake of assuming that because the backlash to racism is louder than usual that it means racism is over. If this wasn’t such a deeply racist society, I’d be making fun of the do-gooders too! I think that’s why people are so eager to use the term “woke” as a casual, jocular insult: it comforts them, because they don’t want to confront the fact that racism is real and rampant. They get to be in denial while enjoying the satisfaction of feeling like they are boldly, critically looking truth eyeball to eyeball.

There’s a circular, self-perpetuating kind of logic: they don’t identify as racists (they genuinely do oppose flagrant racism!), so how can society be racist if they are joking about the racism? If racism was a real problem, they wouldn’t be joking about it, so their jokes are in a way held as proof that everything is fine.

In my experience, this conversation is way more likely to examine the intentions of the person saying “woke” than any academic or critical work about racism or society. The white person saying “woke” is more likely to focus on their innocence rather than society’s guilt. Because again, in a way, if they are innocent, so is society.

“Woke” is a very reasonable thing to be in a racist society, so it’s only used pejoratively under the assumption racism doesn’t exist or barely exists, and do-gooders say it to appear superhumanly good, by overcompensating and demanding excessive justice.

This is not what’s happening! I promise you, the harder and more carefully you look at society, the more racism you’ll find. That racism exists in Canada but not that much is the dreamy and naïve position, not the cynical and critical one!

At this point it’s much easier to just avoid saying the word altogether because either you’re preaching to the choir or people’s understandings of it are likely caught somewhere in the middle of all this. The point isn’t to go out and use “woke” correctly. I just think it’s worth reflecting on what other people really mean by it.

I don’t want to tell anyone how to live, but if you only used the word “woke” innocently enough to give liberal do-gooders a hard time, you should probably stop using it too. I’m sure the alt-right will repeat the cycle by co-opting more Black lingo. If you aren’t using the term to race-bait (and why would you be?), there are lots of other words you can use. Write around it.

One ironic, sorry thing about modern life is that it’s sometimes necessary to give this much time and thought to a single word in the context of the alt-right, people who don’t exactly have a literary love of language.

Bye Tory! Actually, Let the Door Hit You on the Way Out

17 Friday Feb 2023

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For years, Tory was known as a total political loser. Why recount all his losses? There were many. Today he is a loser again despite eking out a W against the crack mayor’s bro in 2014 and sleep walking to two more victories in quiet elections against low-profile candidates, the last of which in 2022 had the lowest voter turnout in any election since the 1996 Megacity amalgamation.

His out-of-nowhere resignation mere months after being handed “strong mayor” powers seems unthinkable. Usually, Kouvalis-led Conservatives operate an elaborate digital ratfuckery machine to brainwash and play dirty tricks, then cling to power afterwards at all costs, and even change the laws while in office to increase the likelihood of keeping it later. The idea that someone in 2023 would resign once having this power over an issue so small as “integrity” is astonishing.

Sure enough, Tory didn’t resign right away. No wonder some in his circle advised against resigning after he made the initial announcement. Ford, who privately arranged for Tory’s “strong mayor” power during the mayoral election but said nothing about it until his candidate won, took this occasion to support Tory and insult “leftists,” typical of that corrupt, illiterate and belligerent ape.

Apparently some closest to Tory insisted he step down, which is so incredible to consider that it makes me wonder if there’s more to this they didn’t want known. How can sex, even with a subordinate, be resign-worthy in 2023? People are dying in every direction, ecological collapse is gradually taking hold or worsening, and this ends a political career of a guy who had been pretty squeaky clean?

I knew Tory was a prude and repressed wasp, but is he really more prude than he is hungry for political power? Can anyone be that prude? I guess it’s possible!

The former city staffer he slept with went on to work for Rogers-owned MLSE to help get the city to host five games of the 2026 World Cup tournament, which Toronto will pay $300 million to host. MLSE insists she was hired on a merit basis, that Tory didn’t get her the job. Either way, the optics are not great, and Tory must have worried it’d look unkosher even if it wasn’t.

Tory refused to step down as a Rogers special adviser on the family trust, a position paying $100k annually. Rogers’ tentacles are so long, their involvement in the city so wide and entrenched, it was impossible for Tory to be mayor and work for Rogers without the appearance of many conflicts of interest. When questioned how he could be mayor and still collect a giant cheque for advising a telecom giant, he told a story about honouring the promise he made to old-time family friend Ted Rogers–essentially, he said loyalty to ruling class connections trumped his public obligations, in so many words.

To his supporters, he was the adult in the room who upheld the status quo in a palatable way for media and apolitical people who only follow politics distantly, if at all. Wealthy people loved him because he artificially engineered keeping their property taxes extra low, while making it seem like this sleight of hand was just the natural order of things, like the sun rising and setting every day and night. Plus, if they called 311 to complain about a pothole or anything, someone was dispatched right away to clean it up. The city did work for them, so no wonder they mostly loved him. I suspect they vastly underestimate how dysfunctional the rest of the city is.

Ford and Tory are both the elite of the elite, but Ford is comparably a coarse uncouth street brawler while Tory has always been posh and polished and groomed all along for this work. Ford is the bad cop, Tory the good cop. They may position themselves differently in their own PR, but both ultimately work for the same force and advance mutual interests, even if they have also seriously butted heads over the years. (The Ford family has serious rifts among themselves and with Tory that go beyond the scope of this article.)

Ford took federal money meant for public healthcare and used it to pay down the deficit for political purposes during a pandemic. It’s hard to say how many people in the city Tory presided over died needlessly so the provincial conservatives could torque the numbers and show economic indicators their base loves. Maybe the increased power he gave Tory helped smooth things over between them. I’m genuinely not sure. Just speculating.

Whereas Doug Ford was the Ford brother who lacked the people skills of his racist and misogynistic brother Rob, Tory seemed to be at least a normal person. He seems to embody the modern struggle between the personal and political in that one-on-one, maybe he was a nice guy. That there’s a gap, a chasm, between the goodness of his heart and the misery of his policy is not impossible to believe.

Galen Weston is reportedly a kind and chatty fellow when he encounters employees in the elevators. Maybe Tory is “nice” in this vein. Personally, I ran into John Tory of all places in New Delhi. I was supposed to interview him for TV but, like much at WION, things got botched. I wrote the questions my friend and colleague Daniele asked, and when I met Tory after and he realized he was unprepared to meet a journalist from Toronto that might ask him something, he looked instantly petrified and fled like Homer floating backwards through the bushes GIF. He could fake being normal better on camera and in person, and I think he had more capacity than Ford to be a normal human being. But what is that saying?

Tory adamantly supported police throughout their violent and super expensive crackdowns on homeless people in public parks. Tory spent millions forcing people with nowhere else to go to go elsewhere. The city falsely claimed most “evicted” people got safe shelter indoors elsewhere, but of course they didn’t. Most went to other parks or under bridges, others simply, tragically, and needlessly died. Tory was OK suing Khaleel Seivwright in 2021, a local carpenter who heroically took it upon himself to build tiny shelters for people trying to survive the Canadian winter during a global pandemic.

Tory spent money to ensure homeless people didn’t have somewhere to stay. If Tory was so concerned the “Tiny Shelters” were dangerous, as the city claimed, why was he so supportive of the city’s dangerous and over-crowded shelters?

Tory wasted millions to worsen desperate people’s crises at a time he was also crying poor. He arbitrarily set the property tax rate too low first, then worked backwards to set the budget, an old Rob Ford trick that makes defunding society seem fiscally inevitable, or at least prudent and wise, rather than what it really is, opting to be cruel and withholding.

Ultimately, John Tory governed badly by 1960s standards, but in 2023. If anything good happened in Toronto during his tenure, he resisted it, and it happened largely against his will. CafeTO and ActiveTO would never have been approved without the pandemic occurring, and even with it, the patio application is expensive and lengthy while many “bike lanes” are either car lanes with a bike painted in them, or they have plastic “bollards” designed to prevent cars from getting damaged by the bollards rather than cyclists from getting killed by the cars and their drivers.

Was he really the milquetoast, middle-of-the-road, sensible man he presented himself as? Only if we accept what he said about himself at face value. I don’t. Tory was more ferociously right-wing than people here claimed, but he was more media polished and better able to hide it.

Torontonians watching him resign wondered about his legacy. In 2014, “Smart Track” was the central plank of Tory’s mayoral campaign. Today, it doesn’t exist. No mega, or even minor, projects bear his signature. He paid for artificially low property taxes for homeowners by actively neglecting basic services non-wealthy parts of Toronto rely on, from Scarborough to Etobicoke to throughout the downtown core.

Last election, Tory critics made the incumbent mayor synonymous with uncollected garbage spilling out of city garbage cans. I took a picture of a TTC bus stop duct taped to a pole and countless people found similar forms of urban decay. The crumbling under Tory was that palpable. It’d be funny if it wasn’t depressing and sad. Sure enough, after years of austerity, the TTC is overcrowded and people understandably fear violence. Fares are rising, service is worsening. The city is broke and there’s no plan for improvement apart from asking higher levels of government for money and concealing the extent of the decay with gimmicky but elaborate and expensive PR.

Tory’s final act, to defy his own promise to resign to push through one more austerity budget, is the symbol and substance of everything wrong with him and his politics.

I’m thrilled he’s gone! It happens that after months of not writing here, I happened to write an anti-Tory post only the night before he resigned. The night he initially shocked everyone by announcing his intention to resign, the Leafs had a 3-0 shutout and the vibes in Toronto were, as they say, immaculate. Nights later when he listed the date of his formal resignation, Auston Matthews had an extremely sexy goal and assist in his first game back after three weeks of injury.

There are questions about the circumstances of Tory’s departure, but there’s no doubt he torched his reputation on the way out and I’m glad about that too. He never deserved a good reputation. We could have avoided all this by electing Soknacki in 2014! I love Toronto and hope the city turns around, but I hope Tory is associated with its current demise, and hope that Tory’s few late-era victories don’t obscure the reputation he developed over years as a total loser.

Homelessness: John Tory’s Humanitarian Crisis

09 Thursday Feb 2023

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Toronto’s City Council voted yesterday, February 8, against funding 24-hour warming centres to help people experiencing homelessness survive the winter. Buildings like the Scarborough Civic Centre or Metro Hall only open when the weather drops to -15.

They voted to “study” the issue, which is what they say to avoid sounding cheap when they don’t want to fund something straightforward. In voting against funding the warming centres, council rejected recommendations from the city’s own Board of Health.

What should homeless people do if it’s -14? Wait to see if temperatures drop another degree? There are no spots in shelters. City officials dispute that, but of course they do. The reality is people get denied entry at shelters every single night because there’s no space.

People slip through the cracks in lots of ways, but here is one. Let’s say a nearby shelter has a space for you, but you have a partner, and it’s not co-ed, or a pet they refuse to allow in. What do you? Even if there is a spot at a shelter across town that would fit all your needs, what good is it if you don’t know it’s there? And say you do know there might be such a spot, would you pay the rising TTC fare to trek across the city to check?

That many people feel safer not in a shelter, in their own tent, is a scathing indictment of our shelter system, which after all isn’t supposed to exist! It’s only meant as a last resort. Ideally, shelters should be phased out as people move from the streets into homes. Instead, we’re phasing shelters and even warming centres out while homelessness is rapidly increasing.

I covered Toronto City Hall for a pretty bleh/low-quality online outlet in 2013, Toronto Standard. I didn’t really know fuck-all about politics, but I’ll never forget attending my first city council meeting, when OPAC protesters unfurled a banner accusing city council of having blood on its hands for failing to provide ample shelters. They weren’t just being hyperbolic; they had recently returned from funerals of friends who died.

When people make charged claims like “this council has blood on its hands” or “people are dying,” it’s liable to sound like exaggeration, or like a heavy-handed rhetorical device designed to illicit response in an argument or debate. But it’s a neutral, accurate description of what’s going on. This was in 2013, well before John Tory or the pandemic.

When this city would like money to fund, for example, hosting five World Cup soccer games in 2026, $300 million suddenly appears out of thin air from local, provincial, and federal governments. Magic! Modern, sensible cities everywhere are freeing up real estate, beautifying prominent spaces, improving street safety, reducing pollution, and improving public health and joy by removing obsolete urban highways; instead, John Tory has chosen to pour over $1 billion to repair the crumbling Gardiner Highway. The city had money, but he wasted it.

We’ve seen huge increases in the costs of housing and food, while austerity budgets phase out or severely reduce public services. TTC fares are rising yet again, while bus routes are axed and passengers wait longer for subways. Yes, the pandemic hasn’t improved anybody’s mental health, but the conditions John Tory opted for are not exactly boosting public morale. Unsurprisingly, there’s been a rise in violence. How did Tory respond? By finding $8 million dollars so 80 cops can circulate the TTC system. This comes after giving Toronto cops an additional $50 million.

The self-proclaimed fiscally-responsible Strong Mayor looked astonished when asked point blank by a representative from the organization TTC Riders to justify the increased spending, given the $50 million price tag and the disconnect between the crisis Torontonians face and the police’s total inability to address the problems’ root causes. The squirming, terrified, what-do-I-do-now? look on his face is that of a person unaccustomed to actual questions, who often speaks in public but never without a script, a script they know is total horseshit.

In what felt like mere minutes after the 2022 mayoral election, Doug Ford, the belligerent ex-city councilor, who in vengeance in 2018 cut council in half mid-election, suddenly gave John Tory “strong mayor” powers. In 2018, Toronto city council had 45 members. Now it has 25. A few months ago, a two-thirds majority was required to pass bylaws. Now, it’s 1/3rd. In other words, instead of needing the support of 30 councillors, now it’s merely eight. (Fewer people for Vaughan condo developers to bribe?)

The argument that this would help Tory bypass “red tape” or other hurdles interfering with Getting Things Done doesn’t really make sense, since nobody could point to a major vote he lost in his two prior tenures as mayor. He was never held back, he just wanted more power. The current conservative party leader gave the former conservative party leader more power. Favours. (These two politicians also hate each other considerably, as Ford lost the 2018 mayoral race to Tory, before winning the provincial election Tory lost when he led the party.)

Homelessness predates Tory. In 2019, Nicholas Hune-Brown’s devastating account of Toronto homelessness serves as a reminder that the crisis we’re facing isn’t caused by the pandemic, even if things have worsened enormously since. In 2018, I received a visitor from India stunned by the homelessness she saw in downtown Toronto. As gut-wrenching as homelessness is, when your country has the complicated colonial history of India, and a host of problems we don’t have in Toronto, perhaps people living on the street feels tragic but inevitably. But in a wealthy city like Toronto? What’s the excuse? There was no excuse then and there still isn’t one.

John Tory himself said his “strong mayor” powers would make him more accountable to voters. Let that be the case, then. City council is gradually shrinking to do his bidding, so this is John Tory’s humanitarian crisis.

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

22 Sunday Jan 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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