Doug Ford’s Worst Mistakes, A Summary

26 Wednesday Feb 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Final Thoughts:

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

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

Forcing Music and Novels on People Is My Love Language

27 Monday Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Music is Good or Bad, Not Simple or Hard

20 Monday Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I Love in Sun Ra’s Music

14 Tuesday Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

New Technology in Music and AI

13 Monday Jan 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*Sax player walks over, hands him the horn*

“You try it.”

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

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

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

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

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.