Tag Archives: Jeff Halperin

The Warmth and Weirdness of Being a White Guy in India

04 Wednesday Feb 2026

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As a white guy in India, I experienced things that’d never happen to me in Canada, things I’d never dream possible. Some small, some big. Some very nice, others…weird and not so nice.

Let’s start with the fun innocent stuff. My local grocer in Lajpat Nagar II added me on WhatsApp and over the next few weeks and months sent me pictures of textiles and pillows made by his daughter, festive messages on Hindu holidays, and poems written in Sanskrit. I asked a dude in Defence Colony for directions once, and he told me to just hop on his scooter and took the time to drive me all the way there himself.

There’s a warmth and simplicity that’s refreshing and genuinely lovely! People in Toronto, like many big Western cities, cannot be counted on to be so effusive and kind. We’re nice here too, but busy and stressed and sometimes appear cold and distrustful.

But when you look closely under the hood at the favourable treatment I got, it’s not always healthy. I have one such example I still think about a lot, and regard it differently now than I did then.

I visited New Delhi’s Red Fort in 2016, a UNESCO World Heritage Site for being the historic seat of power for about two hundred years when India was ruled under the Mughal Empire, before the Brits. That day was amazing. The architecture was thrilling, you could feel and walk through the history, and it had the same architect as the Taj Mahal, though there’s way fewer tourists, so being there is very chill and relaxing. You have more space and time.

But here’s where it gets weird. While there, for no apparent reason and very much without my asking for it, something incredible happened: a stranger handed to me the most precious thing in his life–his child.

He didn’t speak English, so I’m still not sure what this was all about and I’ll never know.

Weirdest picture I have…the child is not smiling, and I don’t blame him

As I type this in Toronto in 2026, I struggle to believe it really happened. It seems so far fetched. This sort of things just doesn’t happen to me here! I don’t think I’d truly believe it without the picture.

Why did this happen? I have some theories.

Maybe I was the first white person the man ever saw, and a novelty. That’s happened to me before. One time, driving in South Delhi, a hijra asked to touch my face because she had never touched white skin before, so I obliged. When she asked if I’d marry her, I had to let her down easy. (I was in the car with my friend who speaks Hindi and translated all this.)

Anyway, the New Delhi metropolitan area has about 33 million people and its fair share of white ones, but they’re not evenly distributed geographically. As the capital of India, there are posh areas where local politicians, foreign diplomats, tourists, and immigrants (excuse me, “expats”) hang out. It’s not surprising to see white people in places like Paharganj, Hauz Khas, Khan Market, Lutyens, or Connaught Place, and Indians there didn’t usually seem visibly excited to see me, which was fine by me.

Maybe tourist sites like Red Fort were different because they attract rural Indians who haven’t seen many, or any, white people. I did get hit up for rupees more in places like Qutb Minar in Delhi or the Taj Mahal in Agra.

Strangely, even the street kids who swarmed my car window for rupees stopped doing so after a few months in Delhi, as if they somehow knew I was no longer the naïve target most white people are upon arriving in India. (Not only will giving them money attract more kids asking for money, which then becomes a scene, but it was explained to me that the kids don’t keep most of the money; it goes to a handler, who in turn gives a cut to politicians…apparently, this thing goes all the way to the top.)

But to return to the point, what does it mean that a stranger gave me his child?

One thought I’ve had a lot since is, “If this man ever came to Toronto, I know that no white person would ever give their young child to him.” Of course, not handing a stranger your child is perfectly understandable! That this is a one-way street says something though. The thought I had was true in 2016, but it’s even truer in 2026, as Canada has seen a sad, despicable surge in anti-Indian racism and anti-immigrant sentiment in general. But that’s another, larger topic.  

In my mind, I was just a dude walking around seeing the sites no different than anybody else, but let’s be real: I was a white guy walking around India. Of course I was different. It doesn’t matter what was in my head: race and racism reside externally, they’re in the world. There’s no way I could have conceived of my skin colour that would have changed how everybody else did, or how they responded to me.

The attention, the reactions I’d get in tourist spots and elsewhere in India from total strangers could be so bonkers that pretending whiteness didn’t matter wouldn’t just be wrong, it’d be silly. The very idea is laughable. It’s just so in your face and inescapable.

Maybe you’re wondering, what’s so wrong about showing kindness to a stranger, even if in an extremely mind-boggling way? In a vacuum, nothing. I joke, or half-joke, that to understand what it’s like to be a white guy walking around certain places in Delhi, you need to walk around anywhere in Toronto with a dog. Strangers fete and praise you, speaking to you in that excited high-pitched voice people speak to dogs in. They trust you automatically and assume you’re wonderful. In New Delhi, as a white dude, you don’t need the dog. In a way, I was the dog.

At first I thought my whiteness merely signalled to Indians that I was a foreigner, which activated people’s innate sense of hospitality. Maybe! Indeed, strangers I met were extremely nice, and no doubt they could tell I wasn’t from there. I’m sure many were just lovely, warm people.

So at first I was baffled and amused. But I’ve come to see this child-posing as a kind of darker thing a, negative image and reversal of the cruelty non-white people may receive in India and elsewhere.

Attributing the excessive, effusive warmth I enjoyed to people’s hospitality is a much less weird and more pleasant thing to believe in. Maybe that’s why I instinctively reached for that explanation, though I genuinely didn’t understand how rampant racism was in India, nevermind how caste worked.

I played with it in my obliviousness.

Sometimes just to mess with people for fun, when an Indian (usually a cab or rickshaw driver who spoke some English, much better English than I spoke Hindi) asked me where I was from, I’d reply nonchalantly, “Tamil Nadu.” At the time I just meant to name a different Indian state, as if despite all appearances I was from India, not Canada or The West. In my innocence I didn’t realize the implication, that Tamil Nadu is a Southern state where people generally have darker skin.

What’s confusing about all of this is that of course you get a sense that something’s off, that things are different, but that doesn’t mean you really understand what’s going on. On one hand, you’re a white person new to India—the smells and sights and sounds are all extremely different and impossibly stimulating, and you’re constantly bombarded by, among other things, a palpable sense of privilege because people beg you for money and sometimes even hand you their children. But on the other hand, you also genuinely don’t really get how things work.

As a visitor, you’re instantly wowed and sometimes disturbed by things you see, but it takes months to begin to grasp the dynamics at play. Your heart feels a lot of things before your head gets it. Much of it I still don’t get!

Maybe that guy had a different reason altogether for handing me his child, some plausible sensible reason I haven’t considered. I can’t imagine what it would be.

Over time, I’d file stories for WION about Nigerians being chased and beaten by Hindu mobs in a Greater Noida mall, I believe only kilometres away from our Uttar Pradesh newsroom. White and dark skin may both signal that a person is from out of town, but the treatment couldn’t be more different.

This is only one example, but it’s illustrative. For one thing, millions of Indians pay good money to literally look whiter. In a society characterized by caste, having light skin can practically determine your destiny. No wonder skin whitening cream is not just a product but a multi-billion-dollar industry.

There is no skin darkening cream, for obvious reasons.

The same force, or a similar one, that encouraged a man to briefly hand me his child also encouraged a mob to assault innocent Nigerian men. Thankfully I was never beaten, and while it’s a weird thing to do or have happen, I doubt Indian locals ever give their children to Nigerian tourists for any reason, however briefly.

That so much wonderful warmth and friendship I experienced among people in India is sullied by this dynamic sucks, but of course the racism sucks more. So much easygoing kindness I encoutnered genuinely filled my heart and 10 years later I still feel and cherish it! It’s not always possible to distinguish between nice-niceness and weird-niceness. India has so much to be proud of, it’s an impossibly rich culture, more like a continent than a country. And while racial dynamics can often be less subtle there, we’re anything but free of them here.

Anyway, while I seriously doubt he’ll ever read this, I hope that child I very briefly held is doing well today.

Parallax For Time, or Measuring Infinity

08 Thursday Jan 2026

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When I was young my father explained the “error of parallax” to me and today, though my memory is total garbage, that stuck with me for some reason. The error of parallax occurs when you observe something from a skewed angle and misread it accordingly. The simplest example is to imagine yourself in the passenger seat of a car, unable to gauge the speedometer accurately because you’re looking at it from an angle, not from the driver’s seat.

So that’s how parallax works in terms of physical space. I’ve been intrigued lately about how this same bias works in terms of time. When are you really looking at a moment, square and dead on? During it, or some time after?

Adults know how weird it is returning to places you spent time as a kid which seem much smaller than they used to. Physically, you were smaller too. These places were bigger, relative to your size then. I think as a person grows physically, maybe the world around them shrinks.

But also things take on mythical proportions when you’re young, and the passage of time evens this out. That’s why pro athletes seem not just like adults when you’re a kid, but giants. Men. When I was 13, nobody could have been older or more of an adult than Mats Sundin. He was 26. Now, I’m 41.

This is one way I think parallax works in terms of time. But there are other similar distortions too on different scales.

It’s common for every generation to think they had it hard, they were hardcore, and today’s contemporary whippersnappers are soft. We used to walk five kilometres to school in snow this high. There’s always some reason why adults had it rough and kids today are soft. Today’s soft kids will have had it hard as youth, but only once they grow up and see a new crop of young indulged kids.

There’s always some problem society gets fixated on solving, and people are soft because back in my day nobody cared about it. Today we have mental health diagnoses for problems nobody knew existed. This language gives us a framework for understanding behaviour previous generations lacked. Frankly, sometimes I think pseudo-psychology gets tossed around casually, and people sling therapy language around willy nilly, but by and large we understand that conditions people have can sometimes account for behaviour that would otherwise be difficult to us to understand.

This affects how people see a past time and their own. Everybody in their 40s today lived through the 80s, but not as adults. Their perception about what the 80s or 90s were like is no doubt shaped by their age. Is their sense of time skewed by their age? What exactly is the right age to perceive an era?

Today’s adults don’t know what it’s like to live in 2026 as a child. That’s how parallax works in terms of time. It’s unavoidable.  

That’s why all those fiery op-eds about what Millennials or Gen-Z or Gen-X are like seem silly to me. People are always the same. Technology changes, economic conditions change, and people adjust to this matrix of things accordingly.

Baby Boomers shat on social media when it came out, believing you had to be a vapid idiot to use it. Now it’s a cliché that they’re the first to believe the most outlandishly fake crap posted on Facebook. They were never above using social media, it just wasn’t aimed at adults initially. (Originally, you needed to have a university email to use Facebook). People didn’t use a social media platform invented in 2004 back in the 1960s and 70s for obvious reasons.

With physical space, it’s easy to understand what a straight-ahead perspective is and look at something dead on. With time, this is much less clear.

Sometimes, you don’t understand just what you’re looking at until you get a broader context than is immediately apparent. Maybe you need time to process what’s going on. That’s what the phrase “hindsight is 20-20” means. It suggests the moment itself isn’t the best time to accurately grasp what’s going on.

That’s why parallax is different for time. Novelists love thinking about this kind of stuff. This is Proust’s subject, and he called his famous novel, In Search of Lost Time. As Nabokov elegantly describes it, “it’s a treasure hunt where the treasure is time and the hiding place is the past.”

In a way, the idea of involuntary memory, where one sudden whiff of a tea biscuit can summon core memories long thought buried, contradicts the idea of hindsight being 20-20. It’s not hindsight that makes the memories come alive, but olfactory stimulation. ie, a smell. Then again, eye witnesses for crimes often remember things they witnessed very recently very incorrectly. Memory and time and perception are funny things!

People talk about the relativity of time, how it can move quickly or slowly depending on what’s going on. One new theory I semi-believe is that everybody is every age at once. Seniors carry with them many things from childhood, and have carried their childhood with them constantly, every day of their life. On the flipside, the way you treat a child today is something that can stick with them for decades, so in a way, you’re interacting with that future self too.

It’s not that they’re literally every age at once, it’s that time is only alive in memory. Sometimes people make up a memory, or misremember something that they genuinely think is real.

One funny thing people post online about macro time, epochs, is that we currently live closer to Cleopatra’s age than Cleopatra was to the Pharaoh Cheops, of Cairo’s Great Pyramid fame, Cheops. That’s how long the Egyptian dynasty was.

On the flip side of this grander scale, in music, I’ve become a much keener appreciation of rhythm. Time can be measured in millennia or measures, bars. Everything is on the one. Some jazz and hip hop beats have a lazy behind-the-beat feel I just love, a type of drawl. A hiccup. The P Funk album Funkentelechy Versus the Placebo Syndrome takes part of its name from the Greek word, entelechy, which is concerned with a being achieving its fullest potential. The way I understand it, P Funk is trying to ask the listener what the state of their funk is now, in the moment that just elapsed, and the next one, and the one after that. Are you realizing your full funk, now, and in the constant now-ness? That’s where the Funk is. It’s on the one, and it’s now. That’s one micro perspective on music I think is cool.

Some musical ideas I’ve had consider time on a small and larger scale at the same time. There are Sun Ra records where the A and B sides are from completely different sessions, perhaps years apart. Maybe this was done unintentionally, as they pressed their own albums and recorded their own music constantly and could have simply lost track of what session was what. Their discography is notoriously challenging. I prefer to think of it as Ra playing with time in a micro and macro sense. Side A is from 1962, side B from the 70s. Greatest Hits albums arguably do the same thing.

What does it mean to have an “old soul”? Usually it’s when a young precocious person likes older, more cultivated art, or seems philosophical beyond their years. But even the way we understand art is influenced by time in a major way. For one thing, older books, movies, or songs have had years of scrutiny, and if people still love them after decades, that’s a test new art can’t possibly get to take, let alone pass. It might pass that test later, but not today.

It’s not just that grandparents aren’t impressed by the music their grandchildren listen to. Louis Armstrong had nothing great to say about bebop, and today, jazz standards written by Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie are a bedrock part of the jazz Canon.

It’s possible to get swept up by music because it’s current, because it responds to current events or the current moment, but this currentness can also obscure perceptions. Sometimes, topical art speaks to a moment, but isn’t remembered much after that current moment passes. Even that word, current, is great because it invokes water moving in this or that direction, just like the passage of time.  

I saw a post on twitter recently, where someone was lamenting how today’s youth are nostalgic for the 90s, which have passed. Give it up, they’re gone! That was the message. In response, a gentleman I follow posted pictures of 90s albums harkening back to music from the 70s. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill took her cover from Bob Marley’s Burnin’. Marvin Gaye’s 1976 album I Want You was the basis for Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night.

Being nostalgic for a time period you didn’t live in is timeless behaviour, if you will. Musicians have always mined the past for sounds and feels, because what else can a musician know but music they’ve heard before? Norm Macdonald made the joke, that “this is a picture of me when I was younger” should be followed by “every picture of you is a picture of you when you were younger.”

Musicians can’t be influenced by music that hasn’t happened yet, so the past is the only place to look. Novelists, same thing. It’s a question of how far back you go, and in which directions. Any new art has something of the old in it too, and this is how time moves in two directions at once.

Parallax for space rightly assumes that there is one central point from which a perspective is centred, the correct one to look and measure from. This doesn’t exist for time, or if it does, it’s not straightforward. In a sense, we live in every time that has ever occurred, even if the past is buried somewhere and yet to rise, awaiting for whatever will excavate or summon it.

What is Technology For, Exactly?

11 Thursday Dec 2025

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One idea I cannot get out of my head is the notion that our technology-driven society is falling apart and technology gets none of the blame. Instead, the solution posed is always more, more, more technology!

Groceries are unaffordable and the response? Dynamic pricing, where automated technology recognizes who can afford to pay more and charges them more for the same product. This is something to celebrate?

This is one example, and I doubt the creators of this technology would frame dynamic pricing as a response to the soaring price of groceries. But that’s how I see it and don’t really care how the grocery tycoons caught red-handed colluding to raise bread prices for 1.5 decades want people to see it.

From where I’m sitting, digital technology only exists so its creators can become middlemen taking a cut from every purchase. It’s like this in every industry. I don’t see how life has improved from decades ago in any meaningful way.

Obviously we have phones now and before we didn’t. So what? Now you can tap a screen and send an errand boy to courier food to your door. Great. Increasingly, with digital culture and xenophobia on the rise, the food courier’s a young South Asian man who can’t afford city life delivering food to someone who wants them deported. Every digital service pitches itself as modern magic, when really it is just a system for dispatching disposable butlers to your door, making them deal with the horrors of traffic so you don’t have to. It’s so hard to find good help. That’s the problem digital technology answers.

Of course digital technology is interwoven through every industry, not just groceries and restaurants. There are a million digital apps for banking and commerce, and what’s the result? Service deteriorates and executives pocket money laid off employees once got. Maybe it goes to shareholders, or it’s used for stock buybacks.   

Put another way, given how everybody technology famously drives our society, and how much people love technology, you’d think that society was going well! It’s broken. Totally broken.

Everyone’s miserable and many are poor. The left know this is true because they’re the ones who are poor, and the right and far right know this too because the wealth is mostly transferring from everybody else to them. Frankly, they’re miserable too. Everyone is. The mood is very bad right now, everywhere.

The fascist right definitely knows society is hopelessly broken, they campaigned on it. Even back in 2015, Trump ran on “Make America Great Again,” the again screaming the US was no longer great. US presidential hopefuls traditionally wrap the flag as tightly around themselves as possible and campaign on three things: U-S-A, U-S-A, and U-S-A. Running on “America is not great!” is a euphemism for “America is fucked.”

Which is true, but sounds like bullshit coming from a mega-corrupt oligarch who as much as anyone else on earth represents what broke America and works everyday to break it further.

It feels like technology once served a clear cut purpose. Phones let us speak to people, they were undeniably, plainly good. Planes make travel easier, or possible. That’s good. What is all this for?

There’s a circularity to it. Technology creates jobs! OK, but what is it all for? All people want is their basics met and some time to relax with friends and loved ones without feeling like making ends meet is hopeless.

Phones make people miserable, depressed, anxious, and for this, people pay out of their own pocket! If digital technology keeps us so connected, as people assume, why are we all so disconnected? Technology is the force atomizing people, keeping us sequestered and separated. It feels to me like people are subsidizing the tech industry, keeping it afloat, with their money and misery, all to keep the economy churning without no other real benefit. The costs are numerous and enormous, the perks are mostly, at best, vulgar distractions. At worse, horrors.

I don’t see how technology helps people.

For what it’s worth, there are certain forms of technology I love. Sun Ra experimented with every new synth and keyboard he could get his hands on. He played with all kinds of strange recording techniques.

I resent that broadly criticizing Silicon Valley can be construed as being opposed to the very idea of innovation. If you want innovation, read James Joyce! Listen to John Coltrane! Those gentlemen innovated. These modern digital putzers are all looking to make money and invent pretexts pitched with elaborate marketing budgets for why their useless creations are not only useful, but essential, revolutionary. The glowing terms they use for this crap are in proportion to how useless it all is.

There’s another cycle worth describing here too. In the way that laundry machines are an unbelievable technology that save people time…OK, but where exactly does that time go? I struggle to reconcile this. It feels like anything that really does save a person time, the person never gets to keep that time. It gets allocated elsewhere before they can blink. Given all the technology surrounding us, you’d think people have nothing but spare time! They don’t.

If technology was merely useless, I could cheerily laugh at it from a distance and go on with my life. But we’re invading countries to take their minerals to keep building this stuff. The labour exploitation, the climate and ecological destruction…all of that is horrible. And on a basic level, it all strikes me as useless and profoundly boring. On a purely aesthetic sense, it’s all dogshit.

Things were fine before digital technology took over. Better! Now every company is looking to be the Uber of whatever, when really the best way to get around a city is walk or take transit or bike, and Uber’s model was only sustainable because it coasted on vast private funding from Saudi Arabia, and operated with impunity facilitated by ultra-elite lobbying (within like three days of living in New Delhi, I met ex-Obama aide David Plouffe at the Habitat Centre at a talk he was giving about Uber in his capacity as a lobbyist…he didn’t answer my question about Uber operating in legal grey zones to my satisfaction, but tried to), and for years never turned a profit.

I just want to play guitar and read some books and listen to music with people. Watch some movies. Digital technology brings nothing to my life. There are some excellent YouTube breakdowns of music and stuff like that. Of course these platforms support cool cultures: anythign that connects people is cool, because people are cool. But overall, the costs greatly outweigh the benefits. I really think it’s healthier for people to get their life’s satisfaction from artists, not the self-interested leaders of boring exploitative corporate junk. Check out Tolstoy and Gogol, not Mark fucking Zuckerberg, Peter fucking Thiel, or any of those titans of dorkdom.

I don’t care which streaming platform offer movies someone else made years ago, before Netflix even existed. For people to act like these platforms created the art, when really they’re just digital middlemen, strikes me as sad and even pathetic. Worshipping Netflix instead of people like Scorsese is like loving Fender, not Jimi Hendrix. (Actually to be fair, Fender contributed much more to Hendrix’s music than Netflix does for cinema, and I do respect and love that company. But it’s not Jimi!).

Maybe some cultural snobbery is bleeding into this, but if so, it’s because the digital world only has room to promote itself and leaves little space for others. The digital kingpins like ruling the roost, they make the country’s policies. They believe, with justification, that presidents and prime ministers work for them, and a world where people are fulfilled by something they have nothing to do with is not a world they want us to live in. And sure enough, we don’t.

So it’s hard for me to get behind digital technology. There isn’t a perspective where I care about it or respect it even a little. Nobody needs a fucking smart fridge! It’s all just excuses to increase our exposure to advertising and mine our data. Frankly somebody needs to put these fuckers in their place. If anything, I think Rogers should pay us to suffer the burdens of phone ownership, though if the Blues Jays sign Bo Bichette and Kyle Tucker I could change my view on this.

Doug Ford Scandals: Skills Development Fund, the Family Dentist

02 Tuesday Dec 2025

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Last week I wrote about Doug Ford’s Development Skills Fund scandal, mostly a brief outline. To quickly recap, Doug Ford’s $2.5-billion “Skills Development Fund” is ostensibly meant to help Ontario residents get and retain jobs by boosting their skills and training. Nobody denies that’s a good goal, not even partisan critics.

Except it’s gradually being revealed how many recipients were Doug Ford’s friends and donors, and whose applications were low enough to be disqualified, but were approved nonetheless by a hand-picked minister citing “minister authorization”, David Piccini. In October, Ontario’s Auditor General found that Ford’s political staff chose recipients in a way that wasn’t “transparent, fair, or accountable” more than half the time, concerning grants worth more than $750-million.

The latest scandal is a doozy: Ford’s family dentist received $2 million from the Skills Development Fund fund.

The relationship here is unusually close. A November 29 CP24 article noted that Ford’s dentist boasts of being the Ford’s dentist on his website. “We want you to feel as comfortable and relaxed as the Ford family has during their visits with us.”

While the wording didn’t mention Doug Ford by name, there are multiple direct connections between Doug and the primary dentist at the practice that received $2 million, Dr. John Maggirias:

  • The Conservative party posted a photo of Doug Ford and Dr. John together at an event in 2023
  • Dr. John donated just over $20,000 to Doug Ford and his candidates
  • CP24 reported that Dr. John posted photos of Rob Ford on his website (Note: it’s Dec 2, I can’t find any photos of Rob on the site)

Actually, to write this post, I clicked the link inside the CP24 article to find the dentist’s website itself, and noticed the sentence directly mentioning the Ford family had been removed, which was confirmed by Jon Woodward from CTV, the reporter who wrote the original article:

Here is how Dr. John’s website looked before media reports connected the dentist to Doug Ford, as per the Wayback Machine (which pulls up how websites used to look):

For himself, Doug Ford denies ever being there! He issued a firm denial. As of last Friday, November 29, the premier’s office didn’t say whether any of the Fords had been there. Doug said that he’d ask his family if they had, but he insisted his dentist is in Scarborough. On the opposite end of town. OK.

We have several direct connections between them, and explicit denials. Maybe they don’t know each other, maybe they do. Who can say?

Well, here is a video from a 2022 fundraiser of Doug Ford together with Dr. John, telling the audience, “I have a 1-800 number…my 1-800 number is, 1-800-CALL-DR-JOHN.”

It’s amazing how openly chummy the two were before $2 million in taxpayer money changed hands from Ford to Dr. John, and how, once this $2 million transfer was reported on, suddenly they don’t know each other.

Ford’s government has already had to refer a forensic audit about one of the companies he gave SDF money to over to the OPP, to see if a criminal investigation is warranted. He’s currently being invetigated criminally by the RCMP over the $8-billion Greenbelt scandal. Red flags abound, an MO has been clearly established, and the opposition smell blood, as they’re still calling for David Piccini to resign.

This is not the first Doug Ford friend, donor, or ally to receive millions from the Skills Development Fund, despite several of them submitting mediocre to poor applications. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence and it feels like this will get worse soon.

Doug Ford Caught Giving Your Money to Insiders

18 Tuesday Nov 2025

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Doug Ford’s latest scandal is a doozy! Ford’s government has been caught red-handed giving millions away to unqualified personal friends and relatives of government ministers.

The Skills Development Fund, a pool of $2.5 billion, is ostensibly meant to support worker training in in-demand sectors. Ford is using this lots of this money as a slush fund, handing out millions to people only because they have personal connections to the party.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies submit applications for funding, then the government ranks these applications internally according to formalized criteria, and funding is doled out based on these scores, which the companies never see. The higher the ranking, the higher and likelier the funding. Not complicated.

Except the Toronto Star acquired the government’s own data they meant to keep secret, covering the first four months of the SDF, and the picture is ugly. 26 recipients who scored 50% or lower on their application received over $36 million. Any grant over $5-million needs to be personally signed off by the Labour Minister, David Piccini, who the NDP is pushing to get fired for his role in this. When a dubious application got funding, the reasoning provided was “minister rationale,” so in their mind, Piccini owns this.

Sometimes the applications weren’t even submitted with detailed plans or budgets, but Ford’s government still approved their funding requests anyway. Let’s look at some of the dodgiest applications to get a sense of why this seems like pure, outright corruption scandal:

The church that married a Doug Ford cabinet minister received more than $2.8 million from the government, including two SDF grants.

The gurdwara that endorsed Ford in the election received $950,000. Three high-ranking members of the gurdwara supported a PC fundraiser months before the election.

Postmedia, the parent company of the National Post and Toronto Sun owned by a US-hedge fund, received over $1 million, supposedly to train staff in Artificial Intelligence

A Brampton e-scooter company, Scooty, whose application received a failing grade of 42, also received $1 million to teach 100 workers about the “transformative impact of AI in fintech.” Scooty hired David DiPaul, a former Ford staffer, as a lobbyist to “identify and assist Scooty in navigating various grant and funding opportunities that may be available for a growing Ontario business.” Sure enough, even though ministry staff said the company has “no prior experience,” a budget that “needs to be reexamined,” and that their application has “more risks than strengths,” the government still approved the funding.

The Carpenters’ Council of Ontario supported Doug Ford last election, and they received $14 million though their proposal score was only 52%.

The International Union of Operating Engineers also openly supported Doug Ford last election, and they received about $7.5 million, though their score was 43. The union denies there was any quid pro quo, and said they received the funding before endorsing Ford.

Ontario’s auditor general has called this process “troubling,” noting that as many as 64 projects ranked low or medium that the government chose to fund had hired lobbyists, creating the appearance of “real or preferential treatment.” No kidding.

Ontario used to leave impartial civil servants to allocate this funding, not a hand-picked MPP who has “minister’s rationale” authority. This very much creates the impression of a system where Ford’s government is giving money to friends and relatives and those with inside connections. It’s the same MO as the greenbelt scandal and Ontario Place.

The SDF scandal started weeks ago after a couple of high-profile incidents. One Ford-connected lobbyist for Keel Digital Solutions, which has received SDF funding twice, had a very expensive wedding in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe attended by Labour Minister David Piccini, the same duo pictured together sitting front row at a 2023 Leaf game (Willy Nylander scored a beauty in OT to help the Buds win 6-5 over Florida).

Doug Ford’s Skills Development Fund Giveaway and ‘Minister’s Rationale’

Doug Ford’s latest scandal is a doozy! Ford’s government has been caught red-handed giving millions away to unqualified personal friends and relatives of government ministers.

The Skills Development Fund, a pool of $2.5 billion, is ostensibly meant to support worker training in in-demand sectors. It appears that Ford is using this lots of this money as a slush fund, handing millions out to people only because they have personal connections to the party.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work. Companies submit applications for funding, then the government ranks these applications internally according to formalized criteria, and funding is doled out based on these scores, which the companies never see. The higher the ranking, the higher and the likelier the funding. Not complicated.

Except the Toronto Star acquired the government’s own data they meant to keep secret, covering the first four months of the SDF, and the picture described here is ugly. 26 recipients who scored 50% or lower on their application received over $36 million. Any grant over $5-million needs to be personally signed off by the Labour Minister, David Piccini, who the NDP is pushing to get fired for his role in this. When a dubious application got funding, the reasoning provided was “minister rationale,” so in their mind, Piccini owns this.

Sometimes the applications weren’t even submitted with detailed plans or budgets, but Ford’s government approved their funding requests anyway. Let’s look at some of the dodgiest applications to get a sense of why this seems like pure, outright corruption scandal.

The church that married a Doug Ford cabinet minister received more than $2.8 million from the government, including two SDF grants.

The gurdwara that endorsed Ford in the election received $950,000. Three high-ranking members of the gurdwara supported a PC fundraiser months before the election.

Postmedia, the parent company of the National Post and Toronto Sun owned by a US-hedge fund, received over $1 million to train staff in AI.

A Brampton e-scooter company, Scooty, whose application received a failing grade of 42 also received $1 million to teach 100 workers about the “transformative impact of AI in fintech.” Scooty hired David DiPaul, a former Ford staffer, as a lobbyist to “identify and assist Scooty in navigating various grant and funding opportunities that may be available for a growing Ontario business.” Sure enough, even though ministry staff said the company has “no prior experience,” a budget that “needs to be reexamined,” and said their application has “more risks than strengths,” the government approved the funding.

The Carpenters’ Council of Ontario supported Doug Ford last election, and they received $14 million though their proposal score was only 52%.

The International Union of Operating Engineers also openly supported Doug Ford last election, and they received about $7.5 million, though their score was 43. The union denies there was any quid pro quo, and they say they received the funding before endorsing Ford.

Ontario’s auditor general has called this process “troubling,” noting that as many as 64 projects ranked low or medium that the government chose to fund had hired lobbyists, creating the appearance of “real or preferential treatment.” No kidding.

Ontario used to leave it to impartial civil servants to allocate this funding, not a hand-picked MPP who has “minister’s rationale” authority. This very much creates the impression of a system where Ford’s government is giving money to friends and relatives and those with inside connections. It’s the same MO as the greenbelt scandal and Ontario Place.

This started weeks ago after a couple of high-profile incidents. One Ford-connected lobbyist for Keel Digital Solutions, which has received SDF funding twice, had a very expensive wedding in Paris near the Arc de Triomphe David Piccini attended, the same duo pictured together sitting front row at a 2023 Leaf game (Willy Nylander scored a beauty in OT to help the Buds win 6-5 over Florida).

The NDP is adamant that they believe in the idea of the program, which is meant to help retrain, retain, and generally help businesses grow. The NDP have called Piccini a “dark cloud hanging over the Doug Ford government.” True, but Doug Ford is the weather system. I’m not sure why they’d target Piccini, not Ford, especially considering that Piccini’s predecessor Monte McNaughton also doled out millions in Skills Development Funds to dubious people close to him, including his wife’s colleague, before ducking out of politics.

David Piccini isn’t the mastermind behind this.

Even this Skills Development Funds scandal comes amid the wake of another possibly larger scandal. Doug Ford’s office referred a forensic audit to the OPP over concerns that a company, Keel Digital Solutions, received millions in public dollars from more than one ministry.

The OPP Anti-Rackets Branch is assessing it now to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. Note, the OPP recused itself from the ongoing criminal investigation into Doug Ford’s handling of the Greenbelt scandal, passing it onto the RCMP instead.

Doug Ford has been caught giving government money to weak applicants with inside connections. That’s not in dispute. Whether Ford can outrun these scandals, and whether these scandals are actually crimes, are the only things left to determine.

David Piccini isn’t the mastermind behind this.

Even this Skills Development Funds scandal comes amid the wake of another possibly larger scandal. Doug Ford’s office referred a forensic audit to the OPP over concerns that a company, Keel Digital Solutions, received millions in public dollars from more than one ministry.

The OPP Anti-Rackets Branch is assessing it now to determine whether a criminal investigation is warranted. Note, the OPP recused itself from the ongoing criminal investigation into Doug Ford’s handling of the Greenbelt scandal, passing it onto the RCMP instead.

Doug Ford has been caught giving government money to weak applicants with inside connections. That’s not in dispute. Whether Ford can outrun these scandals, and whether these scandals are actually crimes, are the only things left to determine.

You Have a Sacred Responsibility to Blow Your Own Mind

14 Friday Nov 2025

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How do you know that there aren’t artists out there who you’d love more than the artists you currently love the most? This is a very important question people need to take seriously!

People have a sacred responsibility to blow their own minds. Who else will? Why go through life without encountering the best, coolest, most challenging stuff out there? Not what some insufferable dork at a party describes this way, but what you think. What epiphanies and revelations are you leaving on the table?

This question should frighten you into action!

One thing I keep coming back to is: how do I know when my obligations to myself are over? How does a person know when to say, “That’s enough, nothing still out there is worth seeking out!”? I get FOMO from this.

Life is largely mental; we all live inside our own heads 24/7. Literature and music are centuries old. Film is newer but what a vast rich fun world. There’s a lot out there! It feels like looking out at an endless ocean vista, only to remember the real ocean is under the water’s surface.

Obviously personal relationships are the fundamentals of life, not just this art stuff, and travel is another surefire way to blow your mind. But personal relationships are unique and complex, while travel costs time and money. In the streaming era, many great works of art have never been more accessible.

If you don’t make a genuine attempt to explore and wrestle with the deeper ends of this stuff, as far as you’re concerned, it may as well not exist. That’s sad to think of, in a way. But it’s also amazing to think that there’s such a wealth of beautiful priceless culture surrounding you, you could spend your whole life exploring it and not get to everything.

But imagine what life would be like if you had never encountered your favourite artist. Emptier. It’s like being without a best friend. Maybe you can’t really imagine never having heard of Bob Dylan because he’s just so famous, but there are artists out there just as talented and visionary whose name you don’t know. Me too! It’s true for everybody.

In my experience, blowing your mind with art comes in cycles and waves because you keep thinking, this is the best, surely it’s over now, this is as good as it’ll get, but then there’s more! It’s always in flux.

But let’s be practical here too though. Life is busy and expensive and who has time for all this? On the other hand, why even be alive only to miss so much joyful and inspiring human activity, especially when it’s potentially only a click away?

If you’re grinding and tired and saddled with major responsibilities like a demanding job and/or kids, it can be difficult to hear from somebody with spare hours to prattle on about their precious art! I get it.

The subtext of this conversation may sound like, “listen to how much free time I have!” or “look how much deep shit I know, and how cultured I am!” It may seem like the person preaching about this stuff is trying to make an exhibition of their brain or their lofty soul, rather than being driven by pure high-minded motives like love of beauty and a desire to spread it.

I urge people not to think of it this way! It’s better to endure several pompous weenies than risk not paying attention to the one person who gets it, whose tip or insight could change your life. It’s about you not them.

Of course, I have my own personal agenda here too, and I’ve yelled at friends, acquaintances, and strangers on the street to familiarize themselves with different artists I love. Personally, I really do love these writers and musicians, they mean so much to me!

I just want more people to be on that level, where they’re happy and excited and surprised by what’s out there. I can only advocate for the artists who’ve made me feel that way. (Music: Sun Ra Arkestra, Parliament Funkadelic, Miles; Literature: Bolano, Gogol). But really what I’m pushing here is not these specific artists, it’s the idea of people pushing themselves to get the most from culture.

I get why sometimes you just want to turn your brain off after a long day, rather than wrestle with Deep Shit, but to bring it back to the beginning, the obligation is to yourself. Enthusiasts like me might push this or that on you, sometimes obnoxiously and with a crazed glint in our eyes, and god knows algorithms will push their agenda on your under the guise of neutrality or serving you personally, but ultimately this is entirely in your own hands.

When you’re on your deathbed one day hopefully many years from now, talking to yourself in your final moments about the meaning of life and all that, you’ll need to be at peace with your relationships, what you’ve accomplished and left behind, but also what it was all for. You may not mentally rifle through all the highbrow art stuff you investigated in life and say to yourself, “thank god I listened to the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Volume 2!” But the artists we love are life companions that help us find meaning and joy, bliss and purpose and inspiration. If you look around now at how depressed, angry, anxious and sad people are, surely we could use more of that. I don’t trust algorithms. You must take it into your own hands and take it seriously, you have a responsibility to yourself.

Assessing “Socialism’s 0% Success Rate”

05 Wednesday Nov 2025

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Congrats, Zohran Mamdani! A 34-year-old Muslim socialist is now mayor of New York City, and, while they have a lot to say, one of his critic’s throwaway lines is that socialism has a 0% success rate. It’s never worked anywhere, apparently.

Forget for now that the US, capitalism’s heartland, has never been more completely and utterly broken, sold off for parts by a mafia-connected reality TV actor. I’m not even looking now at Mamdani’s platform or promised policies.

Forget all this for a moment. I want to pull back and assess the idea that socialism has never worked and that capitalism always has using a metaphor that for me explains why this criticism is not just untrue, but childish and simple.

To hear people tell it, perceived quality of life alone determines whether or not socialism/capitalism is good or bad. For many this is self-explanatory, and they don’t have to actually inspect or compare anything, because it’s self-evident that socialist countries are shitholes while capitalist countries aren’t.

I don’t see how this verdict can be reached so automatically in a country like the US, where school shootings and medical bankruptcies are routine everyday occurences, and for the first time in years the life expectancy is dropping.

Capitalism has a higher PR budget and its mythology has a stronger hold on people here, which is natural and unsurprising. Wealthy people love saying that our society is broken, but curiously none of them blame capitalism, even though all our national leaders in power have been capitalists.

But that still doesn’t get to the point. The real point is that capitalism has spread globally mostly because of the CIA, not the CEOs and all the supposed trickle-down wealth that follows in their wake.

In my view, this topic gets discussed like people watching a chess game, trying to determine who’s the stronger player solely by examining the pieces on the board. At first, it seems like a reasonable way to determine who is better at chess, right?

Maybe the observers understand the full depths of the position perfectly. Maybe they’re just middling amateurs. In either case, the pieces alone are what inform their verdict of who is stronger at chess.

In reality, if you pull back and look away from the board for a moment, you’ll see that one of the chess players is holding a loaded gun to the other’s head. Is the player holding the gun really winning the chess game because they have better tactics and skill? Or is their opponent throwing the game trying not to get killed?

Any chess analysis that ignores the gun is irrelevant, no matter how strong the chess analysis is. The observer could be Magnus Carlsen, but if he doesn’t know there’s a gun to one player’s head, his chess analysis will be missing the point.

When the US says their military exists to protect “America and her interests” they are talking about a system of global military reach that extorts or forcefully replaces duly-elected foreign governments on behalf of US tycoons across industries.

Nobody can accurately say how many foreign governments the US has undermined or replaced. The left doesn’t have the final tally because the number is very high, many coups are still secret or denied, and it’s easy to lose track of them all, while the right also doesn’t know because they seem to genuinely have no idea this is how the world actually works, and they’re very emotionally invested in believing that Western wealth is driven by the ambition and intelligence of its industrialists, not international military fuckery and subterfuge.

Capitalists act like capitalism has spread naturally because it’s so mutually beneficial, not because it was forced at gunpoint. If they were being honest and thoughtful, anybody stating that “socialism has never succeeded” would ask, “If capitalism is so wonderful, why can’t it spread without the US military forcefully intervening to spread it?”

Even economists seem to me now like grandmasters doing expert chess analysis while ignoring the guns over the board that really lead to checkmate.

So even if we allow that quality of life is better in capitalist countries like the US and Canada (which could very well be true, even if right-wing people in both places never tire of saying they’re hopelessly broken; trump ran on the US no longer being great anymore back in 2015, while Canada’s decline is assumed in political ads across parties), it’s not for the reasons most people say it is.

We’ll see if Mamdani remains committed to curbing the establishment’s influence once he’s in office. If he was a national leader in a faraway country that, say, discovered mines with valuable rare minerals Silicon Valley needed, US reps would fly over and pay him a visit, offering wealth and protection for him and his family in exchange for control of the mines. And if he refused, they’d replace him with someone who would sell out his people and cooperate with the US. But because he’s mayor of New York, the establishment will probably just undermine him at every turn and spend untold millions to smear him. Then, whether he succeeds or fails in office, they’ll say he failed very badly and deny their involvement entirely, as if his performance and not their actions are the only thing they’re assessing.

I wish him luck because he has a serious fight ahead.

In Too Deep: When Canadian Punks Took Over the World, by Matt Bobkin and Adam Feibel; Book Review

17 Wednesday Sep 2025

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In Too Deep was a pleasure to read and made me rethink music I didn’t care for much when it came out. I was 16 in 2000, listening almost exclusively to the Grateful Dead, then had a years-long hip hop phase. Billy Talent, Sum 41, Avril Lavigne, Alexisonfire…I remember not thinking very much about any of them at the time, but I guess I was glad they were there. At least skaters and punks had something unique and cool they were into and stirred up public culture, even if I wasn’t drawn to this music.

In Too Deep has a very local sense of place involving cities not just outside the US, but outside Toronto. The authors do a wonderful job conveying what GTA cities were like for young, ambitious musicians trying not just to make it big, but just play their music for people. There’s a really sweet purity here. Before they wanted to ascend the charts, they just wanted to perform.

Bobkin and Feibel zoomed out on the scene but zoomed in quite closely on the different cities in question. There’s a real keen sense of how each group managed to find their secret sauce, balancing the sound and musicianship on one hand, and attitude and energy on the other. Creating a band isn’t just about writing original songs. There’s also practical questions of finding money for gear, postering for upcoming concerts, finding somewhere in town to play.

Reading about 9 punk Canadian bands from the 2000s was surprisingly cool because, when you get into their origin stories, their success feels far-fetched, even sitting here now in 2025, knowing that they succeeded. Even record company scouts become recurring story characters, which I didn’t expect. You can feel the authors’ appreciation for the artists and different punk scenes in the writing that struck me as surprisingly earnest. I didn’t know what screamo was.

From a musical standpoint, these bands translated something about their life, an attitude they held at a young age, into a sound. It’s less about taking music theory forward or redefining what has been done before and more about finding the right sounds of a vibe, in a way. I don’t mean to sound patronizing or belittling, I think finding the sounds of an energy is a wonderful achievement! Teenage angst, anti-authoritarianism, or the adolescent urge to just fuck around and cause a little mayhem…what do these sound like? The answer, or one of them, is Sum 41.   

Music is never just about music. Fans of commercially successful music tend to get uncomfortable with the idea that something other than music is driving their favourite band’s commercial success. Even musicians themselves think along these lines. Are certain musicians really punk, or are they just contrived industry plants? Are the musicians play-acting punk musicians, or are they the real deal? That sort of thing.

Every genre faces this dilemma of street cred. Musicians get accused of imitating a type of lifestyle on stage or in the studio versus living it day in, day out. Producing sounds or music isn’t enough. Musicians are often expected to be something. Drake faces this in hip hop. Country has it, too, from what I understand.

When the musician in question is an industry plant, when their music genuinely is reverse-engineered by focus groups and executives, the question of authenticity feels essential—it protects the music and the culture. When an artist is sincerely grappling with their own feelings and instincts, and reconciling these with the conventions of the music and the culture they love, having to prove and demonstrate “authenticity” feels unfair and even silly. This books tackles these tensions in a punk context with a deft touch. It’s about the genuine sensitivities of these artists, who they are, and how they fit into a growing and changing punk world dealing for the first time with commercial success and all that comes with it.

Co-authors Bobkin and Feibel address these questions head on without dismissing the very idea of them, which I found refreshing. Questions of authenticity don’t tend to arise unless there’s big money around, and for years, punk wasn’t commercially popular. In Too Deep is also a story about a relatively new type of music coming into its own. If some new popular and successful artists like Avril Lavigne had their punk bonafides questioned unfairly, punk fans of course come from a genuine place. Feibel told me about what these bands meant to him when he was a teenager:

“Several of these were among my earliest favourite bands that got me into playing. I can distinctly remember writing songs at age 13 or 14 that were blatant ripoffs of Sum 41 or Alexisonfire.”

Hearing tales of very young people so determined to do their thing and be themselves, and have this new commercial space open up for them just at the right time…it was a nice story that played out similarly but differently for each artist. The older punks who made it and the younger punks inspired to make noise in their garage feel extremely connected to each other, as do the musicians in the book and the authors, who are also punk musicians. I found this to be very touching and even hopeful. Music is so vital in so many ways! As therapy, to help people understand who they are, whether musician or listener.

Hardcore fans of these bands will enjoy the authors’ in-depth research, expanding on known lore. Feibel told me that was what excited him, too.

“We knew a lot of their stories pretty well, but the level of previously uncovered detail that we were able to dig up from our research and interviews was fun and validating. There was lots of behind-the-scenes stuff that had only previously been summarized in, like, a paragraph on Wikipedia. Telling these stories in full like this had never really been done before, and we were thrilled to do it.”

I see these bands very differently now than I did at the time. The macro perspective you get looking back at things is a trippy concept. I’m 41 now, these people were teenagers when they broke out, but I’m also more or less the same age as the musicians. Avril Lavigne is a few months younger than I am. Am I reading about kids or adults? Both.

The section on Fefe Dobson I found sad and stirring! I didn’t understand how she was held back at the time, typecast, and am glad she’s enjoying a resurgence. I hope that’s consolation for her.

I learned a lot about punk. In Too Deep also made me appreciate how different groups of my youth, all from within like 100 kilometres or so, weren’t isolated acts but formed a musical continuum I didn’t know about despite living through. Who knew that while I was listening to Jerry and De La Soul, Canadian punks took over the world.

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.

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.