Tag Archives: Jeff Halperin

Jeffrey’s Version—My literary and literal journey with Richler’s beloved novel

19 Thursday Sep 2019

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One day I stumbled on Barney’s Version at a book sale at my local bank for $1, and because I had heard the name Mordecai Richler before I thought, sure. It was 2008 or so. I had just finished doing a literature degree at Dal and thought I knew something about books.

But this one was just so funny, so honest, and seemed in all conceivable senses to be designed for me personally. This is not the place to analyze the novel or discuss anything inside it. I just want to tell a story that has a middle and ending that you won’t see coming, because I certainly didn’t!

Barney’s Version made me want to become a writer. So I started writing, and soon went on to read all Richler’s other books (except, on the written advice of Mordecai himself, his first three novels). Currently on my shelf are 27 Mordy books.

I read his non-fiction, secondary criticisms, the wonderful Foran bio, and even found for $2 a signed hardcover copy of Don’t Stick Your Neck Out. The Incomparable Atuk was released in the US under this alternate title. What I’m saying is, I got big into him!

In 2014 I was writing arts stuff for a TO website with a small but noble readership when I learned Noah Richler was curating the Luminato literary fest. I emailed him some questions, and we went back and forth a bit.

We met at the event, and soon after he graciously and very surprisingly invited me to “his local” to chat more over beer. I was excited! Noah has worked for decades as a journalist around the world, and is a great writer in his own right.

We talked about literature. He asked if I had ever read any of his father’s work, and I responded, “yes.” He asked me if I write fiction and I said “yes” again. He asked what my novel was called, I said it didn’t have a name yet. He asked what it was about. “Love and advertising.” He said that would make a perfect title, and he was right, so I called it that. (This novel is currently unpublished.)

Anyway, in about a year’s time I moved to New Delhi to help launch an international news station, World Is One News. I worked on the web desk, and my editor at WION has since become a dear, dear friend of mine. Tathagata Bhattacharya has reported from four continents, and has an astounding depth of knowledg on topics ranging from dog breeds, world history, military armaments, finance, to Dead/Band/Dylan. He also knows literature in his bones.

His grandmother, who died in 2016, was Mahasweta Devi, one of India’s most revered authors and social activists, and I understand was a runner up for the Noble Prize in literature, having published over 80 works. T’s father, who died in 2014, was Nabarun Bhattacharya, a radical Bengali novelist who transformed that language’s literature.

T leant me a copy of Vasily Grossman’s epic Life and Fate, inscribed by his father Nabarun. “Dear Bao, For a Brave Life & a Bravely Faced Fate.” I loved that novel, and it was good to get my head out of news for a bit and back into literature.

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After a visit home to Toronto, I gifted to him an inscribed copy of Barney’s Version. He read and really liked it, saying it was funny and so readable, but its weave and structure was deceptively complex. Precisely.

Anyway, witnessing Tathagata proudly handle his father and grandmother’s legacy–ie corresponding with publishers, fans, news agencies, posting pictures and anecdotes on Facebook–inspired me to contact Noah again. Why not just be straight up and share a story he’d probably like, rather than be self conscious and do nothing?

I emailed Noah, reminded him who I was, and told him that I didn’t want to be a Fan Boy back when we met, but actually I had read all his father’s books. I told him that BV is what made me want to write, and how I gifted BV to Tathagata and he enjoyed it, and I explained who Tathagata was and that seeing him honour Mahasweta and Nabarun’s works is what made me want to reach out to him. I also sent him a picture of a copy of Barney’s Version sold in India, with a cover I had never seen before.

I got back a very long and warm email! And to my total amazement, actually, Noah had interviewed Mahasweta Devi for the BBC. Jewish Montreal, Toronto, Calcutta, London — small little world! Noah’s email was extremely gracious and friendly. In it he politely asked if I could do a favour and buy and ship to him a copy of Barney’s Version with the cover he had never seen before either for his mother’s archive (the Florence, ie Mordecai’s wife, the model of Miriam in BV no doubt). He’d reimburse me, of course.

Back in Toronto we met and had a very nice talk. After our initial meeting but before I had gone to India, he had been a high-profile federal candidate for the NDP, and had written a fun, candid and very well received book about the experience, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

I gave him the copy of Barney’s Version with the Indian cover, and of course refused his money—I was very honoured and frankly tickled to contribute my favourite novel to Florence Richler’s own archive.

Over the years I’ve bought probably 10-15 copies of that novel for people. I left 3 or 4 in India. In addition to my reading copy I have the Uncorrected Proofs too, still with the handwritten notes from the reviewer and a letter from Knopf Canada outlining/boosting the novel, and advertising Mordecai’s availability for interviews.

I’m only telling this story because the other day on Twitter I saw someone with the handle “Barney Panofsky’s Best Intentions,” and told him that I followed him solely on the basis of his most excellent name. I couldn’t tweet this story to him, too long, so I wrote this. Why didn’t I tell this story earlier? Maybe I’m uncomfortable name-dropping and it’s impossible to tell this story without doing that. But really, who gives a shit.

I’m happy to celebrate Mordecai! My darling Mordecai! I say that while there are “Greater” novels, BV remains my comfort food, my bagel lox and cream cheese, and my death-bed meal.

And actually a documentary came out literally just two days ago entitled “Nabarun,” about the literature of Nabarun Bhattacharya. I had heard so much about him from T, and praise for his writing from other Bengalis, but until watching this documentary I had never seen him on video or heard him speak, either in Bengali or in English. The raw footage of him was excellent, and very inspiring even! Plus my dear bud Tathagata is in the documentary too, and I haven’t seen him since 2017. Pranati Bhattacharya, Nabarun’s wife and T’s mom, is also in it, a force to be reckoned with who I met briefly shortly before she died.

Looking back, that $1 I spent for my original copy of Barney’s Version was my best investment ever…I wish I could stretch every buck this far!

Love and Advertising — Prologue: Dean Galbraith’s Scorn

16 Saturday Feb 2019

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Dean Galbraith, up in his office in the tall tower of the Henry Hicks building, was giddy at the start of another academic season. But this year some hideous fear began to creep in and fester, threatening the pleasure he took seeing young students come into their own, maturing as thinkers and people. Schmoozing and balancing the departments’ budgets was always to him a sordid business way beneath the academic and interpersonal development he lived to foster in students. Nowhere did the Greeks or Romans extol the virtues of glad handing. Yes, the Romans were administrative pioneers, but it was their dullest achievement. Muses don’t sing about efficient, thorough public records.

A professor could affect too few students and Galbraith had no hunger to research, but he considered it a shame to spend time away from getting to know the students—challenging them, busting their balls, showing them that academia was rigorous and difficult but rewarding, civilizing and exciting but never stuffy or pretentious.

Of course he accepted that his job contained some unavoidable bullshit, but lately administration wasn’t just a banal chore. He saw himself as overseeing the death blow to the classical notion of university: business, management, and the ever-expanding rackets of marketing and sociology were choking real academics to death, enrollment and expansion in these departments slated to be higher than ever with no end in sight. The humanities, literature, history, classics, philosophy shrunk every year. Galbraith felt complicit, guilty. But the guilt fell most to another man.

The ultimate academic desecration was a fraud skilled in all ways of pretending: Berringer. As he did daily, Galbraith decided to recharge his animus by opening up Dr. Stephen Berringer’s latest work, reading from whatever page he happened to open (such a random disordered entry into the book jived with such an incoherent disordered text):

A scholarly Reflection:

Dr. Stephen Berringer

By applying a neo-Foucouldian lens to a systems discourse it’s easy to trace the setbacks caused by neo-cons and other critical analysts of their ilk. It can be seen, therefore, that more investigation is wanting, but, on the other hand, its corollary is true too, namely that the talk and feedback loop has increased the vivacity of grassroots initiatives, and plans are coming steadily along to bring about the fundamental change up from the ground. Fruit is bound for harvest as indispensable momentum has been gained in this and in other related and interrelated fields. Incidentally, a retrospective glance at historically bypassed alternatives to the accepted narratives and viewpoints isn’t just a vital reconstruction that adds definitively to the wider scope, as mitigating and transcending the accepted biases is required or we are hopelessly lacking completion, but often is a mirror of the real thing itself. The truth is the narrative as told for decades, flipped upside down and inverted. It is necessary, therefore, to bring up the rear, as it were, and ensure that this crucial aspect doesn’t dwindle. The strength of current bonds, agreements, and cross lateral academic joint suppositions depends upon the intrinsic strength of this arrived at result of reflexive academia. We ignore these findings at our collective peril: we cannot possibly move forward until we accept these findings and resolve to pledge solidarity.

Galbraith burst out laughing at this last preposterous bit, but checked himself, thinking mirth an inappropriate reaction to something already debauching a generation. Galbraith laughed hard and often, and that the suppression of joy was the proper response to Berringer’s writing proved that the prose was deplorable. He had to restrain two rumblings in his belly, laughter and the first stages of puke. Either to make spiritual amends for laughing or to physically expunge what was mentally ingested, he reached the toilet before getting sick then gargled mouthwash, specifically stored in his office to freshen his breath after Berringer readings.

Berringer was the spiritual guide, the chief fiend of the political radicals on tenure that infested Dalhousie, the “academic deadwood” pileup from which no university is immune. They weren’t new to Dal but could no longer be safely laughed away. They were gaining ground. But who could read this shit? You’d have to be a madman to find any meaning in it! The undecipherable, destructive and manifestly absurd claims cloaked in the populist underdog language wooed the innocent lesser lights of campus, students only guilty of signing up for education, not abuse. Of course this was a scandalous disgrace even if annual tradition, but resigning in protest would only replace him with a different overseer, one who would no doubt applaud and encourage the atrocity.

These blank-slate sociologists, tabula rasa Marxists, wilfully blind or shamefully ignorant of congenital inheritance’s impact on human nature, were here under his watch, safe and handsomely paid instead of interred and forgotten about in the local asylum. About these professors, cheerfully termed “social construction workers,” Galbraith consulted his lawyer about filing a human rights grievance, suing for obscenity or for loss of enjoyment of life. His lawyer counselled against it. “Besides,” the lawyer said, “you don’t want to create a toxic workplace environment.” “They’re a toxic work environment! Fuck them and fuck you! You’re fired!” So he fired this lawyer, an eminent distinguished professional with a sterling record that shone beyond Halifax to the furthest corners of Nova Scotia. But the next lawyer also advised against Galbraith’s wishes.

“Sorry Jerry, but Berringer’s students don’t meet the accepted legal criteria of ‘child soldiers.’”Anyway, he reasoned, they craved a cause, and even if they should win in court it would only give them another thing to cry about, demonstrate against, boycott, sit-in, lock-out, and spend pleasant afternoons plastering propaganda to telephone poles in solidarity against. These things, of course, not just their favourite pastime but their existential reason for being.

Berringer ingratiated himself to the student base by making radical claims about cultural capital he knew they loved. They loved him for transforming their views, making them see things in a new light, no matter how dim the light. He proudly attached his name to intellectual brands: every kind of Marxism, feminism, reconstructionism, socialism, even if in practice they were mutually conflicting. Say, promoting a UN petition demanding increased First World funding for the Third World while simultaneously supporting an anti-imperialist mandate urging an end to First World financial meddling in the developing world under the phony pretext of promoting economic sustainability. Berringer was a veritable bullshit hydra.

But there were more threats than Berringer. The cynical marketing and advertising professors, sophistry devils reappropriating university’s prestige earned from the bygone days when professors knew Latin and Greek, who taught subjects proudly developed over centuries, not simply invented last Tuesday. Marketing and advertising degrees were proudly framed proof students had not just the willingness but the expertise to swindle society, turning people with hearts and minds into lobotomized consumers. After leaving Dalhousie these uncultured bats from hell could now enter the world and amass a fortune by making everyone around them retarded. Galbraith believed that modern university, his included, was just about society’s largest threat. Not exactly a terrorist training camp, but close.

Galbraith once put out feelers to see if he could abolish the marketing and advertising program on humanitarian grounds, but was unsuccessful. A flabbergasted Kofi Annan wrote him back in a polite yet insistent tone claiming to be busy in Sudan. “I don’t want to take him from his important work,” said Galbraith, “because thanks to the UN Darfur is once again a tourist magnet. That putrid organization. As warlords butcher on industrial scales and blame it on Israel, Annan is busy making sure that, under absolutely no circumstance, does he dislodge his thumb from his ass.” Unsuccessful as it was, the effort caused considerable rumbling against him from professors in these departments. “Do you know that Galbraith voiced objection to our department in the UN? No, literally, the United Nations!”

Galbraith was the de facto leader of his faction, and was very far from the only traditional old-school academic. Higher education no longer favoured learning for its own sake. That anyone would study to simply elevate their soul was beyond naive. Decadent. Privileged. Suggesting university should exist so students could learn something earned you funny looks. It was just social emancipation for historically marginalized people, or an economic investment for the highly unmarginalized. The ancients lasted for centuries, but were disappearing because the economy demanded students learn contemporary garbage. His loathing for everything modern increased in degree and breadth.“Stare into the abyss and laugh,” was the Greeks phrase that best captured the outlook Galbraith cherished, that blend of stoicism and dark humour.

He laughed in the face of what personally and professionally threatened him. He just couldn’t help but giggle. Sometimes guffawed with everything he had. He despised how some profs concealed their radical views, unleashing them only once they were safely tenured, but enjoyed that tenure was an anagram for retune. He liked that the Marxists’ shanty offices crammed with messy book shelves, coffee-encrusted mugs and yellowing plants neighboured the newly constructed Marketing department, a lavish and gleaming steel-and-glass monstrosity.“Two appropriate habitats for two opprobrious rabid rats.” These private unshared quips popped into his mind constantly, making him smile through that thick red-tinged beard, a grin that appeared seemingly for no reason, leading others to think him a madman.

Though Galbraith saw the commoditization of higher learning developing a mile away, for years he pretended it couldn’t grow and swallow everything he stood for. Caring, intelligent, duty-bound professors, of who, again, there were many, constituted an impregnable fortress guarding centuries of noble tradition. But this year he felt something change, the momentum switched. He needed to fight more than ever.

In the official Dalhousie pamphlets welcoming students and parents to the city he inserted quotations from Tolstoy and Orwell. Inspired by a cherished comedy, during frosh week he instituted an academic decathlon featuring subjects like “Rabelais,” “Gogol,” “dog shit and the human response,” “Thucydides,” to take place before the cheers and jeers of packed drunks enjoying life inside the Student Union Building.

He should have known last year that change was coming when inviting students to his home for dinner was made illegal. He and his wife Sally served wonderful food and French wine to select students. These were put to an abrupt halt: Dr. Phyllis Stein’s popular “exploitation of females in society” lectures had a devastating effect upon the campus climate, and the way students regarded him and males in general. Stein, a rousing success, implanted in the students a higher awareness of “everyday sublimations of oppressive patriarchal gender hierarchies,” which eroded the students’ basic sense of trust in half the human population.

Stein’s treatment of Lolita convinced the helpless students that any old, seemingly-nice gentleman was just a cunning pederast, biding his time. The sweeter the appearance, the more elaborate and diabolical the impending debauchery. The calculus was grim: if a man who seemed like a gentleman was a brute and a man who seemed like a brute was a brute, who was left? Nobody was innocent. Galbraith’s formerly celebrated dinners didn’t just end, but that they ever occurred caused a dark fear and suspicion in many hearts. “I’m not some lecherous pervert, I’m the dean of this university!”

“Ya, because history’s never seen a powerful old white man lewdly abuse power.”

“Crusty wench.”

“Exactly.”

All he wanted was to feed kids delicious food! Offer good wine he knew students couldn’t afford! This was civilization to him. Most of all, to demonstrate that education and sharing their deepest thoughts could lead to wonderful laughs and an overflow of warm satisfaction, not just accursed grades or revenue.

And artistically misconstruing Nabokov, this, this was unforgivable. Satanic bitch! Yes Stein was attached to the university as a tenured prof, Galbraith reasoned, but could still be choked to death. No, she didn’t warrant that. Berringer was sociology’s ring leader. And Carrie in advertising—that Hollywood-vacuous, money-chasing philistine—was no slouch either.

The more Galbraith considered this sordid cast, the more assured he became in his belief that the highest form of intellectual honesty, the purest and most effective way to stand up for the enlightened values of Voltaire and his company, was to remain in his post to sabotage the guilty programs and people of Dalhousie.

 

Thoughts On Toronto’s Homelessness Crisis

25 Friday Jan 2019

Posted by in Politics, Statements

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My first time reporting on Toronto City Hall in early 2013, Rob Ford’s council debated on whether to fund more emergency beds for people experiencing homelessness. Unsurprisingly, council put it off, saying more studies needed to be done, etc. Politicians invoke the word “studies” when they don’t want to fund things for poor people, but don’t want to appear heartless.

Immediately after the vote activists rose in the chamber, unfurled a banner and denounced the council for having “blood on [their] hands.” If that sounds dramatic, know the previous day they had attended the funeral of a friend who died on the streets of Toronto. They shouted lucid and undeniable arguments, a silence really did hang in the room, then security escorted them out.

That was six years ago, and Toronto’s problem has grown.

Since this time I lived for over a year in India. For most of it, I lived in a posh sector just outside Delhi, in Uttar Pradesh, near my office in a company guest house, among retired judges and lawyers and military people. In January 2017 I moved to Lajpat Nagar II, where my neighbours included Afghan refugees.

Honestly, I didn’t see many expats in Lajpat II, (when immigrants are white they’re called “expats”), but I had an Italian friend in Lajpat IV. My real estate agent (finding an apartment requires one) lived in an apartment down the street from me with his family, but I regularly saw merchants sleeping on the streets next to their stalls, on charpoys, cots of woven rope. They slept among the homesless dogs.

There was a Gurdwara near me, a Sikh temple of worship that helps feed people. Honestly, I didn’t learn enough Hindi to talk with the poor people around me, and even if I did, I couldn’t have come even close to understanding their world. I grew up in Forest Hill: I can’t understand the life of a homeless person in Toronto, never mind there. One time I gave a legless beggar, wheeling himself on a wooden platform, 100 rupees ($2) and he cried and said nobody has ever given him so much. (My friend translated).

But here? In Toronto? I’ve seen people arrive to downtown Toronto straight from India, and they are appalled by the homelessness. Amid such wealth, in such a clean city? It’s unconscionable. The sight of people dying in slow motion on the street amid such robust prosperity shakes them.

India is notorious for its poverty, for its slums. India used to be the richest country on Earth, and it was plundered, and now amid a booming middle class, as Western Businesses compete for their share of this new money, Indians don’t believe they’re a poor country anymore. This may stun people in Canada, for whom India is synonymous with poverty, but many there don’t.

I was in an editorial meeting the day Snapchat’s CEO reportedly said he didn’t want to invest in poor countries, such as Spain and India. This remark didn’t go over well in India. But wasn’t it…true? Sudhir Chaudhary wondered how the man could say such a thing! And the room agreed. There like here, journalists come from wealthier backgrounds—nobody else could afford to rise in an industry that often pays in “exposure.” (Believe that this affects coverage of money, homelessness, power…)

Anyway, so how exactly does a country measure its wealth?

Forget India for now. Here, things are not OK. According to the 2016 census (the most recent available), the average 2015 income for a Toronto male over 15 was $33,456. If a one-bedroom is $1,500 a month (no roommate, but that’s a good price), subtract $19,200 from that. Toronto has a higher share of high-income earners than the rest of Canada and Ontario, and a higher share of low-income earners in both. People here are generally very rich or very poor.

Anecdotally, the oldish but spacious two-bedroom, two-storey apartment I rented in late 2010 by Trinity Bellwoods cost $1600, plus hydro. Today, the landlord wanted to charge $3,000. We all know this story.

How best to crunch the numbers, which stats are most useful in representing Toronto’s wealth, is interesting to consider and it’s important for framing policy, but the fact is Toronto has slums and people are dying and nobody is talking about it.

Consider all the media attention gun violence is currently getting. In 2018, an especially violent year, we had 95 homicides. This is a crisis too! But over 100 homeless people die each year in Toronto. Contrast the silence in the media regarding the deaths of people experiencing homelessness with that of gun violence. Again, obviously gun violence is a major issue, but more people die in Toronto from…from what? From being poor. Or depressed, or having no support.

As Toronto-born Robbie Robertson wrote: “I’ve just spent 60 days in the jail house, for the crime of having no dough, now here I am back out on the street, for the crime of having nowhere to go.”

This is a time of supposedly divisive politics, but doesn’t everybody care about this? Can anybody hear these stories neglect, of needless human suffering on a shocking scale amid such wealth, of death, and shrug? Does anybody think that Free Markets determine the cost of things, so people should just…die? Do people think this?

Nicholas Hune-Brown wrote an absolutely must-read article in Toronto Life about homelessness in this city. He spoke to people living under the Gardiner Expressway and in Rosedale, he drew up the most relevant stats, and really, the article was as fantastic at capturing the different dimensions of this crisis as the crisis is depressing.

Citing stats, he says the line up to receive subsidized housing in Toronto is 98,000 people long, roughly two full Sky Domes. Toronto builds 500 units of affordable housing each year. There are about 8,000 people experiencing homelessness in Toronto, currently. This number is growing steadily. The article points out that housing a person with mental health needs in Toronto’s housing system costs $59,000, whereas subsidized housing costs $21,089—roughly a third of the cost.

I’m sure there’s a policy solution to this, but whatever it is it’ll takes years and lots more people will die. I don’t know what should be done.

The activists I saw in 2013 were 100% correct. Rob Ford’s council had blood on its hands. So does Tory’s. Rob’s brother Doug is gutting social programs left right and centre and transferring this money, rebranded as “efficiencies,” to Toronto’s wealthiest people. I think our political class are essentially slum landlords.

But again, nobody enjoys the fact that people are homeless, starving, freezing, and dying. Right? I talk with Conservative voters, and right-leaning people who feel politically abandoned because Ford is an obvious illiterate maniac but they don’t like Trudeau, and (through media conditioning, I think) in their bones cannot stomach the thought of voting NDP. Everyone agrees homelessness matters though.

But nobody wants to pay for it. Not really. They say they would, but it never happens.  This is about power, but it’s also about the psychological gulf between wealthy people who just never, never actually have meaningful interactions with these people. It’s out of sight out of mind. “Ohhhhh, you don’t know the shape I’m in.”

Devote tax dollars to this. Please!

During a flash-freeze last year I walked around giving people I saw on the street some gloves and toques and some money. In India, this is a type of jugaad—the Hindi word for a MaGyver, basically—an improvised solution with whatever is at hand. I have an Indian buddy who recently visited Russia, and he made some videos wherein he described to someone that in India, for many people, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is upside, where spiritual needs are addressed first and foremost, then they move towards food and shelter.

Frankly, in Toronto I see a lot of overpriced yuppie ice cream and tacos, Uber Eats charging $35 for a small dinner that arrives cold (delivered by a “driver partner” not an employee, so the US company is conveniently exempt from the Employee Standards Act), people either in despair over the cost of renting and buying a house and ready to seriously leave Toronto, or they’re excited about the cute back splash in their new kitchen…

There’s either a lot of money in this city, or none. But I don’t expect homelessness to get addressed in a meaningful way when this same city is full of people livid at the thought of workers, workers, earning literally only $1 more an hour.

Again, I hope I’m wrong! I do think everyone cares on a basic level about this. But this isn’t quite about morals…everyone feels bad, it’s about money. Hopefully Hune-Brown’s article will galvanize public opinion and politicians will believe there’s actually a will to fuel change. It was just published and is getting air time.

But if the life and death of 100 people a year truly depends on good Samaritans, Toronto is a sad place to live.

Only a couple weeks ago, a woman at Bloor and Dovercourt was trying to get clothes from a donation box. She got stuck inside and died. Days later, a man sleeping on the streets in the Financial District was run over by a garbage truck. He died too. The driver didn’t see him. Stop for a minute: consider the symbolism and visualize the reality of the Financial District’s stupendous wealth, as a human being lies on the street one morning in an alley, and suddenly his life over, run over by a garbage truck.

Please, I hope we can all agree we need comprehensive and well-funded policy right away so people don’t die on our streets. Be mad. Whatever our political differences I refuse to believe people in my city are OK with this.

Empties

19 Monday Nov 2018

Posted by in Literature

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Jeremiah prepared his large open-concept apartment for tonight’s party. To make room for at least ten thousand people, he pushed the sofa against the wall. Yes, yes: he checked again and the numbers were sound — ten thousand people drinking an average of five beers each over three hours would yield $5,000. He could use the dough. That suit from Sydney’s being fitted cost something and the Beamer needed fixing.

Jeremiah had thousands of friends in the city, and not a single one knew what he did for a living. Evading this question wasn’t a high-wire act fraught with danger — he made a game of it, never repeating the same story. His guests, all wanting to appear intimate and familiar with the popular host, raved to each other about Jeremiah’s skill as a carpenter, bagman, lawyer, loan shark, architect, luxury toy maker, grade-four teacher, grade-five teacher, Deep Web hacker, stock trader, arborist, city planner, mob boss, gestalt psychologist, pilot.

When occasionally confronted by two people with conflicting reports of his livelihood they asked him, “Well what is it, are you a chef or a museum curator?” Jeremiah laughed and responded, both and none. “I dabbled in pizza slinging during the Tutankhamen exhibit, but currently I’m writing a long-feature for The Walrus about my time covering Iraq. Please, fellas, drink some more beer!” Everyone readily believed him because his aura of eccentric mystery jived with the outsized parties, and more than that, everybody really wanted to. The key thing was to slyly nudge them to drink more beer.

Jeremiah’s sole source of income, his actual profession, was luring masses of people to his BYOB parties held in his apartment, so he could redeem their empties. To get the rubes in the door, Jeremiah baited them with music and fun. It wasn’t hard. Everybody wanted to be at the huge parties with the city’s best eats and beats. That these DJs and chefs were in fact Toronto’s best was confirmed because Jeremiah had hired them. Even though Jeremiah didn’t actually hire them: in return for launching their career they sponsored the party extravagantly, and would never dream of accepting payment from Jeremiah.

So everybody came.

Before long Jeremiah’s apartment was littered with precious empties, which he secured methodically throughout the party under the guise of tidying up. Once the guests no longer produced empties –once they were done drinking– their function in the ploy was over and their continued presence unnecessary: there was nothing else for them to do in Jeremiah’s apartment but leave it. These people returned each week, so much did they enjoy this scam.

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Tactics were required. What looked on the surface to be merely ways to make parties more fun were really covert profit-boosting stratagems. Everyone loved the 80s and 90s-themed parties, but really they harkened back to youth when getting drunk meant drinking beer, and Jeremiah played on this pretext to quietly direct people towards bringing mostly beer. Hard liquor threatened his business; it got people very drunk but yielded only one returnable bottle. He frowned at it for years but never explicitly stated a ban. Until one night a few months ago.

In thanks for hosting these parties, a guest gave Jeremiah a bottle of Lagavulin single malt as a gift. This Dan, a quiet tactful man, managed to corner Jeremiah so the two could chat.

“Hi, Jeremiah. Nice to meet ya! You don’t know me. My name is Dan. Listen man, thanks for having me here tonight and, you know, like every week. Enjoy this with friends now, or drink it later. Whatever. Just again, thanks.” He proffered the scotch and a modest smile.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” replied Jeremiah. Inspired, he snatched Dan’s gift and stopped the music. Faces turned to Jeremiah in the silence.

“I live for beer! This is a god damn beer party! From now on all my parties are beer parties! Look at Dan over here,” he said, pointing to Dan. “He thought to bring hard liquor to my party. Let me prove how much I love beer by showing you all what I think of liquor. Watch!” Jeremiah took the bottle from its cardboard box, removed the seal and stopper and held it by the neck high above his head.

“What’s inside this bottle took 16 years to produce. Let’s see how quickly I can empty it.” With that he poured the scotch onto the floor (but safely stashed the bottle, to be returned later). As planned, this needless and flagrant waste of great scotch was taken as an authentic demonstration of Jeremiah’s love for beer. The partygoers applauded rapturously and took up the inventive chant, “Beer! Beer! Beer!”

Nobody ever brought hard liquor to another party again.

Things changed for Dan. At first he shuddered watching everybody cheer as the host wasted his expensive gift. He wondered what he did wrong. But this episode raised shy introverted Dan into a celebrity after it his important role in it was properly understood. Jeremiah couldn’t prove how much he really loved beer by spilling merely good scotch. Dan gave him the best. Jeremiah’s sacrifice needed to be valuable for the same reason God didn’t ask Abraham to only sacrifice a cousin.

Women and men congratulated Dan. He met a sweet smiley woman named Matilda and together they drank beer, fell in love, married, honeymooned in Cinque Terra. They would go on to raise three boys—a future track star, a west-end legend in bicycle repair, and a business mogul who, when he learned the details of his company’s exploitative operations, spent his personal money to fix the situation and travelled for three years in Uttarakhand’s Bandarpunch mountains to be mostly alone. Time here healed him, so he returned home to see Dan and Matilda, who rejoiced.

Dan and Matilda owed their life together to Jeremiah’s love for beer, as demonstrated by his legendary sacrifice of Dan’s scotch.

If decades from now you assembled the countless Torontonians who attended these parties and looked backwards to find the definitive moment of their lives, you would inevitably wind up back in Jeremiah’s apartment. His parties launched people in whatever direction they ended up. They weren’t just fun, they were nostalgia incarnate. So let’s return to tonight’s party, with Jeremiah in want of money for that suit from Sydney’s.

Thankfully Jeremiah just had two important breakthroughs. The thought of all the extra profit he missed out on for months by not having these breakthroughs earlier would have angered him, except he was delighted he had these breakthroughs now.

He stopped the music, instinctively and instantly reinserting the party goers into the identical stream of feeling they felt the night of the scotch sacrifice. Jeremiah sold his new demands to the primed crowd.

“Brothers and sisters! I have been struck by revelation: a more sacred form of drinking. Glass beer bottles disgust me, when there is simpler, cheaper packaging available. Let simplicity reign! Who needs fancy glass beer bottles? Long live the beer can!”

The rapt audience somehow knew to remain silent and let Jeremiah continue, avoiding that ugly moment in performances when audiences applaud before they should.

“But not just any beer cans, fellow partiers. The tallboy: the coarse American-style super-size tallboy. Its immodesty an insult against the dignity of regular-sized beer cans, which weren’t too small for our ancestors and certainly aren’t too small for me! Canada’s beer vessel is the regular-sized beer can! Nobody desecrate my home with tallboys, or glass beer bottles, ever again!”

Jeremiah began to hurl every bottle he could see against the wall, smashing them all to pieces. The guests plugged their ears for the roar of exploding glass, but laughed at the hilarious yet profound demonstration. Jeremiah knew he couldn’t redeem these smashed bottles, but justified the smashing as a sensible marketing expense, this loss of income essentially the cost of launching his new can-only campaign.

And it worked. The apartment was as filled with glass shards as the crowd was filled with enthusiasm for adopting these new rules. For them, anything but regular-sized beer cans was unholy. Of course the superficial charm of bottles was an insult against laudable simplicity! Of course tallboys were gaudy! How strange they never perceived this before.

Incidentally, crushed beer cans take up way less trunk space than glass bottles, while tallboy drinkers need fewer returnable cans to get drunk on. These changes to his parties more than quadrupled the Beamer’s trunk-to-profit ratio. Everyone was happy.

One night he overheard guests talking about environmental sustainability, a common enough topic in downtown Toronto. Someone mentioned a town in Southern Ontario, with a new Green government subsidy that offered not ten but fifteen cents per empty. The details were unclear, something about kick-starting a local recycling program. It sounded sketchy, but governments wasting tax dollars was hardly unprecedented, Jeremiah reasoned. 15 cents instead of 10. The thought of getting 50 percent more for each empty drove him wild. He began drawing schematics for the Big Haul that night.

Upon sober inspection, the numbers were surprisingly bleak. The Big Haul required renting a truck. Crushed cans might take up less physical space than intact ones but they weigh the same; carrying this added weight increased fuel costs. There was the time for driving, loading and unloading. Everything conspired to make the Big Haul financially less lucrative than he thought. He crunched the numbers again and again but to no avail. Still, he kept more and more bigger and bigger parties — a truck filled with such lucrative empties was just too alluring a fantasy to ignore.

Actually the fatal flaw was invisible. Jeremiah didn’t understand let alone account for the ire he aroused among his rival empties collectors. If he was asked, he’d say they had no reason to complain—they could still return the city’s discarded liquor bottles, beer bottles and tallboy cans. But they resented only getting the inefficient empties, Jeremiah’s crumbs, that he thought himself above. They couldn’t just watch while he single-handedly dominated their industry forever. Why should Jeremiah have everything? He was just a guy, not a god. And worst of all, they were the only ones not invited to his parties.

Eliminating the entrepreneurial empties collector destroying their livelihoods wasn’t going to be easy — he was surrounded at every party by thousands of loyal strangers. To get Jeremiah off his turf they assigned a couple plants to make sure Jeremiah overheard them talking about a town offering a much greater (but non-existent) rate per return. Of course Jeremiah couldn’t resist.

The day of the Big Haul was sunny with clear skies. Traffic was slight. Jeremiah was giddy. He sang whatever song came on the radio, while enjoying the pleasant breeze through the window. He was proud to transport more empties than he thought a single person could ever amass at one time, but this made him paranoid too. Though he wasn’t violent he carried a knife today. No way would his truck get robbed on its maiden voyage, the odds were too low. But in the unlikely event some highway drifter tried to stick him up he hoped flashing the blade would be enough to scare him away.

But Jeremiah never suspected to be assassinated, so when the ambush went down he got quite panicky. He brandished the knife and shouted wild threats, but the collectors only laughed in his face; Jeremiah’s rapacious empties collecting left his enemies armed with an entire city’s worth of glass beer bottles, each one smashed to become a fatal weapon. The glass he shunned would do him in.

Jeremiah realized his mistake too late. He should have harnessed his vast network to spy on his competition, or converted some rivals to his side by offering them a sufficient monthly supply of empties, or at least brought some damn security on this trip. But like many people he didn’t want anyone to know what he actually did to earn money. He enjoyed people believing his work was important and skilled, fascinating and noble. Mysterious, even. Practically speaking if the public learned his actual profession, people would see him differently and never attend his parties again. He’d lose his only source of money. Inside, Jeremiah was alone.

He offered to split the Big Haul but it was too late. The rabid pack of bottle collectors murdered him brutally. They let his corpse rot, then split the profits after returning by far the most valuable empties collection ever assembled by man. They celebrated together with a huge boozy party, and the next morning returned these bottles. They felt like billionaires living off interest.

When news of Jeremiah’s death returned home, countless friends wept over the fantastic obituary. It read:

“Jeremiah was a great man with a warm genuine soul who freely opened up his own home to the community. Above all he valued smiles and happiness. By all accounts he was an accomplished concert pianist, an unsurpassed literary critic, a wizard sommelier and a fearsome MMA fighter. Jeremiah made valuable contributions to an array of unrelated fields, such as economics, taxidermy, string theory and Lepidoptera. He leaves behind thousands of bereaved friends and colleagues.”

Many blogs covered the funeral, reporting on which taste makers and influencers gave eulogies. Many who attended the parties proclaimed to friends in a type of grief-stricken, melodramatic brag how close they were to the deceased, even if they didn’t really know him. To add a personal touch in the deceased’s honour to a common mourning ritual, many spilled beer on the ground from strictly regular-sized beer cans.

Dan and Matilda were on date four when the ghastly news reached them.

“I don’t understand, who’d want to kill him?” said Dan.

“I have no idea. I also still don’t really get why he poured out your scotch.”

“That was weird. Well, he brought us together. Cheers, then! To Jeremiah, one mysterious man.” They gently clinked glasses.

 

Jeff Halperin — Toronto 2013

On what I currently listen for in music

16 Tuesday Oct 2018

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My musical ear has changed. I always listened to excellent music—my first loves were MC Hammer, Aerosmith, Dance Mix 92-95, Phish and of course Grateful Dead. I don’t regret one note I listened to, but I wasn’t listening to the whole of every song, and gravitated too heavily to the guitar.

It’s begging the question: Did I focus too much on guitar because I was a guitar player, or is that why I became a guitar player in the first place? In either case, I didn’t properly value rhythm sections. I should have listened to everything. This might seem like not really a big deal but actually I think of it now as a sonic sin, akin to watching only 80% of the every screen while watching a movie. Musically, I was crooked.

Rhythm sections were something I responded to, I felt them, but didn’t hear. To be fair, I listened to a lot of bootleg Dead tapes with varying degrees of audio quality. But to listen to the drums without really hearing the bass is to hear the drums without their context. Drums and bass live together, there’s a dialogue between them in the music, and to only hear one is to really miss both.

I have known this for a while now, maybe months, but felt this quite intensely the other day messing around on a bass while my buddy drummed. The bass drum and the bass guitar are a tandem. It’s very possible to like a band because of their rhythm section without quite knowing that’s why you like them. That’s why Dave Byrne of Talking Heads wore that big suit, to make his head look small and his body look big as a reminder that music is fundamentally physical, not intellectual.

Early, the jazz bass player’s role was to support a soloist improvising over the tune’s harmony. They soloed, too, but it was mostly a supportive role. In 1970 Miles gives us Bitches Brew, which isn’t just a killer album title, it provides musical hints about the new direction: the instruments simmer together in a cauldron. Gone is the formula for 50’s jazz and even the freer 60’s stuff, where all instruments play the head of the tune, principle soloist solos first followed by second and third horn, drum solo then close with the song’s opening melody. Rather, there’s one groove that everyone participates in at the same time.

I had one saxophone lesson in 2007, wherein my teacher made an astute observation that astonished me: Coltrane was a hog! He kept soloing forever and forever, with the best rhythm players backing him. There was no melodic exchange. Now, I love Coltrane deeply, but this is more or less what he did.

A nasty alto player who used to run the Dal sax department told me something similarly astonishing: He said Cannonball Adderley was content with his bad ass swing, while tortured Coltrane changed his sound every week because he was just unsatisfied. I had thought Coltrane’s quest to find music’s highest height was a service to humanity. I will never say a bad word about John Coltrane, whose sublime music has genuinely given to me more than what religious people get from religion. Once in a while I’ll play him and have a kind of sacred experience, but generally I need music structured differently.

Miles said he learned from Sly and the Family Stone how to dismantle that old standard jazz formula, and melt his horn into the other instruments, rather than playing one after another in their turn.

The Band is the perfect sound for me now because of its balance. On the surface they don’t appear to have anything in common with Miles, but not only did they play on bills together in the early 70’s, their music is both a cauldron even if the brew is nothing alike.

The Band was a bar band for 10 years before they recorded their first album. This is key to understanding them. They had played loud high-octane Rock in every bar in the American South and Ontario. In the studio, in Big Pink, they wanted to turn the instruments down, hear each other, play songs on which their instruments intertwined. No virtuoso guitar or drum or bass solos. Their music is on a foundation of interdependence.

Most bands only have one or two super talented members whereas everyone in The Band is an all star. So maybe other groups can’t be as balanced as they are because their talent is dispersed lopsidedly—it’s a question of talent, not vision.

Glenn Gould said it’s “anti-democratic” for a pianist to have one dominant hand. Sure, but commitment to democracy isn’t enough, it’s very difficult to have a left hand that plays as deftly as the right. Gould would call The Band democratic. They are perfectly, utterly balanced.

There’s something so tacky to me now, even vulgar, about million-notes-a-minute guitar solos. So guitar-centric. “Play rhythm for me while I shred” is like asking friends for a favour rather than hanging out together on equal terms. This kind of solo is a physical achievement of dexterity, not necessarily a musical one. I can marvel at Steve Vai and G3, even feel envy at their shocking chops, but I don’t really want to listen to it.

Picasso had to prove he could paint in a renaissance style before his more abstract stuff was taken seriously. Why? For many people art can’t be serious unless it passes a certain threshold of technical achievement. This is understandable to an extent—you don’t want to celebrate an artist that produces something an untrained infant can.

Yet complexity does not equal quality. Would his abstract work be any less incredible if Picasso couldn’t also paint in a renaissance style? Does Neil Young need jazz chops to be taken seriously? Of course not, it’s ridiculous. Every artist is their own genre.

Most art presupposes the possession of certain amount of artistic skill, but not all. Judging art purely by the skill required to pull it off, rather than by the vision or soul behind it, is nearly as vulgar as judging paintings by how much money the Art World says it is worth. A solo isn’t good because it’s hard to play, but because it’s musical. Of course it’s OK to be impressed with a tough passage, but only if it’s musical.

Art is a mood, a vibe, a sound, a feel. Art is not ranked along any one ultimate hierarchy. But in music, I think it’s important to give the same weight to all the instruments. Actually I think Western Classical generally privileges melody and harmony over rhythm, the first conditioning of the Western ear. This dynamic trickles down.

The ironic thing is African music was often called “primitive” specifically because the rhythms were literally too sophisticated for Westerners to process. There’s a moment in the Ginger Baker documentary when he’s hanging privately with one of his hero drummers as a teenager, who plays records of some African drumming. Baker is asked to name the time signature, identify where the beat starts. He cannot.

Balance for me in music is along this axis to, between harmony, melody and rhythm. Rhythm should be a feature, not in service to the other two. I listen to a lot of Atlantic Soul records now, where the punch is the groove, not some dazzling soloist.

Music is infinite permutations of tension and release. I want to caution against confusing sophistication in music or art for quality: Like I said, I still love that old Dance Mix stuff, and a lot of old E-A-B blues is basic on paper but sounds like shit unless you play and sing with feel. If you can dance to a tune or you like hearing a song, that song has done its job.

But the music hitting me hardest now has togetherness, it’s communal. The Band sounds like they’re all having a great time hanging out together (and when they stopped enjoying hanging out, their music immediately suffered). It’s not an accident that they all play each other’s instruments, live and on albums. They’ve transcended their particular instrument and are playing music.

A wise friend told me once there are four stages to music. The first is “unconscious-unknowing.” Think of a child who plays air guitar because they feel the music in their bones but have no idea how to play actual music. Second is “conscious-unknowing,” the beginner who labours to follow the basic instructions, but is now playing music. Third is “conscious-knowing,” the accomplished musician who knows what and how to play but still must think about it. The final stage, that almost nobody reaches, is “unconscious-knowing,” where music is simply felt and transferred to the instrument immediately, without thought required.

This fourth category is filled with musicians who have transcended their instrument, or maybe two or more instruments. Their music isn’t a physical phenomenon anymore. It’s not even a cerebral one, because while it takes brains to play, it’s about feeling as much as thoughts. Not just the degree of thoughts and feelings—not how much intelligence and feeling is there–but the nature of these things.

The only pertinent question to musicians in the fourth category is: what are their musical thoughts like? How good are these thoughts/feelings? Charlie Parker’s music is nearly impossible to play, but that isn’t his real achievement. It’s his ideas that are impossible to conceive of. Lots of people mimic Parker today, and they are incredible musicians! It’s very, very hard to do! But they are reproducing his licks, not the mental originality that gave rise to them in the first place.

Musical ideas need not be complex to be good. It’s instructive that when musicians get tired of playing bebop, they mellow out and play grooves. Miles’ Birth of the Cool or even Kind of Blue. Thought of this way, the idea of ranking musicians or bands in sequential order is ridiculous.

I worry that a lot of people hear music on YouTube and it sounds like shit. MP4s, or iTunes, sounds like shit. Non-flac digital files compress music so that a device can store a million songs. Really, the sound waves have a narrower range. It’s a real distortion. Apple, Spotify and YouTube offer immediate access to every song on earth, and in exchange, they don’t sound as good. This may differ from recording to recording, or on your speakers or something, but I suspect there is a generation hearing subpar music. As TVs have improved their picture, our audio quality has gotten worse.

I say this not merely as grumpy man, but from having taught guitar to kids for years and seeing how they listen now, on devices or computers. I suspect the worsening audio quality impacts the way contemporary producers and DJs create and play music. Medium Is The Message kinda thing. But that’s a longer story for another day.

An old proverb I heard is “chess is an ocean in which a gnat may drink and an elephant may bathe.” Same goes for music. Take from it as much or as little as you want. If you like having it on in the background, cool! But listening actively is a life-long activity that evolves, and pleasure really deepens. However far you want to go in listening to music, there are many who have already gone further. That this is true is just such, such a blessing.

To my conservative friends…

29 Wednesday Aug 2018

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Many conservative voters object to overt, extreme forms of racism, then have a hard time reconciling how leftists can accuse them of being racist. They don’t feel racist. They get defensive and accuse the liberal in turn of being over-sensitive, or using “racist” as a smear to dismiss without cause anyone they disagree with. Everyone and everything is racist, these days.

I posted an article to Facebook shortly before the 2018 Ontario election about a white supremacist podcaster hoping Doug Ford would win. There was nothing contentious or up for dispute in the article: the white supremacist was a self-declared white supremacist, cheering on Doug Ford because, in his opinion, Ford was the only candidate who would implement white supremacy.

“Ronny Cameron, a white nationalist blogger who has recently published several pro-Ford posts, suggested that when Ford declared ‘we gotta take of our own before we take care of anybody else,’ every single white nationalist said to themselves: ‘we know what you’re sayin’, Dougie.’”

I didn’t sabotage Ford’s character by connecting him to something odious where there was no real connection. I would never do that. Rather, I sabotaged his character by highlighting a very real connection he has to something odious.

Here is how I introduced the article on FB on June 3: “self-declared white supremacists have a crystal clear favourite in this upcoming Ontario election and if your vote aligns with theirs, have a talk with yourself.

Don’t let trumpism rat fuckery come here, for the love of all that’s holy.”

I said nothing inaccurate, or even contentious. An interesting thing happened next though.

A Conservative insider who worked for Doug Ford’s provincial campaign and once wrote speeches for Stephen Harper, commented: “I’m voting for Ford. Are you calling me racist?”

The conservative’s must have a PR handbook for deflecting attention away from conservative racism. Such a handbook could read, “when a liberal draws attention to our racism, respond with attack by implying that the accusation itself is a grave insult—but, and this is key, never address the actual racism they were correct to highlight, it’s bad branding. Make racism about you, not them.”

A motto for conservatives could be, “Are you the victim of racism, ie did someone call you ‘racist’? Vote conservative!” Conservatives love it when liberals accuse them of racism. They feed off anger, it unites them. That people called “racist” are currently drawn to one party, well, what does that say?

Conservatives, I say to you: racism isn’t a feeling. Whether a person feels racist only matters to that person, but racism happens (at least one form…) when non-white communities receive second- or third-class treatment.

There are reasons a person may vote for Ford that have nothing to do with race, but none of them change the fact that a vote for Ford is a vote for a certified racist.

Ford was elected premier only a couple months ago, and here is a partial list of what he has already done so far:

–Ford cancelled a promised $500,000 grant for at-risk youth to receive musical instruments and instruction.

–Ford pledged to increase police presence in at-risk neighbourhoods, bringing back the cancelled TAVIS, against the wishes of community leaders and experts

–Ford wants to bring back “carding,” a practice the Liberals cancelled because it stigmatizes and hassles racialized people and has absolutely no proven benefit in fighting crime. (Police have been asked repeatedly to provide proof carding helps them fight crime, and have never provided any.) It’s also unclear how the personal data on private and innocent citizens, dubiously acquired by police, is stored and used.

–After a shooting near Jane and Finch, Ford was pictured with three local residents and the anti-racism minister, Michael Tibollo, who wore a bullet proof vest and described the area as, essentially, a war zone. (In contrast, after the Danforth mass shooting local politicians were (correctly!) destigmatizing the Danforth, promoting it as safe family-oriented place, and encouraging Toronto residents to visit, mourn and patronize businesses. While a police spokesperson said Tibollo’s bulletproof vest was given “to err on the side of caution”…it is impossible to imagine this photo op happening in a white neighbourhood. Note, Ford didn’t wear a bullet proof vest.)

If you examine the quotes and gestures in isolation and one at a time it may appear like simple nitpicking from oversensitive libtards keen for another hammer to attack Conservatives with. But if you connect the words and images with where and how Conservatives are choosing to spend money, a picture emerges. Is it really a coincidence that Ford and his people say allegedly racist things, then do in fact de-fund these communities and send in more weaponized police with pre-emptive permission to hassle residents? It’s only been two months.

If Ford and Tibollo and other Conservative politicians merely said but did not do racist things, it’d be less of an actual problem. But make no mistake, the words are followed up with action. People said trump was just all talk, that his racism was for ratings. No, no, no. The Conservatives will harm at-risk communities in real and tangible ways. Lives will be damaged. People may even die in ways that don’t immediately appear directly linked to Ford’s cuts and policy, but are.

Not to be too dramatic, but it’s true. The point isn’t that Doug Ford (or other Conservatives labeled “racist”) is a cartoon embodiment of a racist: I doubt he is restraining an urge to wear KKK sheets or lynch minorities. Racism can be very damaging when it’s more subtle. It often takes the form of white men in suits making policies which favour white communities at the expense of non-white communities. It’s economics. Whether the cancelled investment in Jane/Finch was driven by active hate or “taking care of our own before we take care of anyone else,” it’s racist. It is a distinction without a difference.

I know people who grew up on Talib, Tribe and De La, who today oppose their politics. Conscious hip hoppers were always social justice warriors. The Right Wing Culture War machine would have you believe that SJWs are “virtue signaling” about minorities to be retweeted, or sticking up for women’s rights merely as a tactic to fuck them. They disparage the alleged motive, and do not address the argument itself. Trump and his people like to paint critics as just humourless PC babies…sure, like Eminem and Borat.

I’m sure there are many good and conscientious wealthy Conservative voters who would be appalled if they saw what their vote contributed to up close. But they won’t see this. They may see lower taxes, but never what paid for the reduction, so they’ll never really come to understand the harm Conservatives inflict.

They don’t live in these communities, and have no contact with the people there whatsoever. Like me, they don’t go to Jane and Finch. I “taught” at Emery for one brief and disastrous month. But I grew up in Forest Hill. The closest people there get to Jane/Finch is Oakdale Country Club. To get a sense of how sheltered conservative thinking can be, consider that Federal Conservatives are pitching the idea that the people in crisis in the “Refugee Crisis” are the people safe in their homes inside Canada, not the stateless and traumatized refugees fleeing war and death. I doubt Conservatives actively want to harm non-white communities, they’re just indifferent to them, and this leads to harm. In any case, malice in the motive isn’t required for harm to occur.

In 2010 Rob Ford cancelled the planned LRT that was going to finally connect Jane and Finch with the rest of the city via rapid transit. Doug will continue making cuts, there and elsewhere. I didn’t feel racist when I voted for Rob Ford, but eight years later I still wrestle with the fact that before I was politically formed, I voted for an international disgrace in a mere municipal election.

I felt and feel extremely stupid and ashamed of this. There’s more I can say, but my feelings then and even now are irrelevant. I didn’t feel racist, but I voted for one. Today, my conservative friends, your feelings do not matter. What happens in the world does.

 

Addendum:

I’d like to describe briefly how and why I have come to believe what I do, because the general public probably has a Right Wing Media conception of “social justice warrior,” so people may read things I wrote above through that lens.

Like all smart-ass young writers I was enthusiastic to reject all teams and labels, etc. I still do, but with less of a hard edge, and some laughter. People will call me a leftist, and my views tend to fall that way, but I’m not associated with any organization, I don’t get paid to express certain views, I don’t represent any group—it’s just how I feel is all, and underlying it is:

The god of organized religion doesn’t exist; we’re all going to die one day and there’s no purpose to any of this shit apart from what we make of it; race is a social construct that is in one sense completely arbitrary and made up, but try saying race doesn’t exist, or that oblivious phrase “I don’t see race,” to the descendants of slaves.

The individual’s ability to love people and things and produce fascinating, sublime, beautiful works of art is what’s truly worth the reverence religion receives.

I hear things from conservatives like, “I support equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome,” which is a naïve but surface-smart sounding way of saying, effectively, “It’s OK if generations suffer harmful yet predictable outcomes in life based on their race, gender and class, so long as these social evils are arrived at naturally, not by state coercion.”

You’ll notice, conservatives often criticize “SJWs” for allegedly having some filthy ulterior motive, but they never consider the possibility that, actually, things like fiscal conservatism, often described in lofty universal philosophical terms, nearly always results in whatever benefits that person’s self interest the most.

The theorists who reduce humans to animals are half right—we are animals, obvs, but they often take it one step further, saying we ought to continue our existence in the jungle conditions of other animals. No! The whole point of civilization is to use our intelligence to impose and shape order on our natural impulses for the betterment of society. The notion that it’s wrong to correct for our inherent flaws, such as our innate tendency to break into tribes and then war against neighbouring tribes, opposes the very idea of civilization influencing our civilization.

“Equality of opportunity” is a super important thing to have enshrined in law, and can’t be taken for granted. We need it, it must be celebrated. But we know that in practice things like generational wealth, gender and race undermines the living shit out of “equality of opportunity.” The people dealt the best hand say, “sorry, such are the cards!” And the people dealt the bad hand say, “this isn’t a fucking game, this is life.”

I understand that the ancient Greeks distinguished between two kinds of knowledge. First is understanding a concept abstractly, then there’s first-hand knowledge from experience. You know someone must feel extremely sad when somebody they love dies, but you don’t know the feeling until your loved one is dead. There’s knowing and there’s knowing. 

There’s a kind of argument I see a lot of online that’s so pedantic and theoretical and unconcerned in how life actually is–it’s based on this first kind of knowledge only. I’ll never know what it’s like to grow up poor, black, female, Native. I just won’t. No social discourse can be complete without this second kind of knowledge. Various people must give input, or life is only described in two dimensions, not three, and the world is three dimensional.

It’s in this sense that I’ve learned a lot from listening to people from a wide range of backgrounds, from reading and traveling, but really from listening to people. You don’t know what you don’t know. I’ve been humbled, I‘m more convinced I don’t know a fucking thing on this earth, that the more confident someone sounds the more likely they’re faking it, they’re simply wrong or paid to lie.

So, anyway, to my conservative friends: Zuckerberg and co benefit from people freaking out. The internet is murder. Unwind, unplug. Give it all a think. Listen to different kinds of people. I’m the same pretty chilled dude I always was, but I will definitely write some more angry shit on my facebook about trump, ford or whatever right wing shitlord you voted for. They’re disgusting, and I reserve that right. If you disagree with something I write, feel free to respond in the comment section. I’ll be nice! It’s good to have a group airing. Or DM me. This will avoid that performative urge to appear better informed or too pithy that sometimes comes when private chats are conducted in public. You won’t be piled on or dragged by my ruthless FB friends, either.

Love,

J

Charleston Church Massacre and White Racism

26 Friday Jun 2015

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Nine totally innocent black people in a South Carolina church were murdered by a 21-year-old white man intent on starting a race war. For normal people there can only be one reaction–grief. Publishing this response when there can be no second might seem trite, as in why make a point of saying something when only that one thing can be said. But the only other option is not airing any response and I find that unacceptable.

When white people write about race they literally don’t have skin in the game. It often feels like philosophy play. No matter what conclusion they reach, the white writer’s safety is never in jeopardy. The implications of the article only affect them insofar as they care about the lives of the people who the article is about, ie non-white people. Black people are being killed in the street by citizens, and those ostensibly there to protect them, police.

I have a dual sense of race. In a cosmic or existential sense, there is no god and all people’s lives matter equally because we’re all bumbling about on this planet trying to have a good time living decently. Race is a social construct, skin pigment should be irrelevant. Except of course it isn’t.

I think racism stems from the unfortunate flipside of the drive that makes a mother instinctively love her baby. In evolutionary terms, 10,000 years ago in the Pleistocene, it’s easy to see the advantages of being close with one’s own tribe. Danger was everywhere, trust was necessary, and at a time when we spent life mere kilometres from where we were born we didn’t encounter even a fraction of the diversity we do today.

All humans have an ineluctable, diabolical genius for automatically sussing out people like them. We sort them into various categories based on blood, ethnicity, geographic ties, gender, religion, race, nationality, class. But ultimately these are subdivisions of two largest categories: alike and not alike. How similar is this person to me, and how are they different?

That’s why most people are disproportionately friends with people like themselves, and why the quaint liberal notion that people be judged solely according to the content of their character instead of these factors doesn’t really play out much in reality. It is a lovely notion, but it’s not usually how things go. We surround ourselves with people like us. (Cosmopolitanism has increased due to internet and cheaper flights–we see different people as less different or even as the same as us, but it didn’t start out this way, we had to climb out of our natural state.)

Loving your family because they’re family (or have some other of the above commonalities) can often be a lovely thing, or at least benign. But on a large-scale, a world of people preferring those like themselves inadvertently makes them opposed to those who are different as a byproduct. If you add this dynamic to crowd-think, racism is easier to understand.

It’s a fact that people are people irrespective of their skin colour, but saying this to a victim of racism is like telling someone with dead lost to a Holy War that there is no god. The underlying fact of it is irrelevant when in practice it can mean life and death.

I’ve heard Jews here scared to publicly criticize a provincial or federal policy lest they get audited say they’d feel safer hearing Muslims, perhaps living in arms-range of Hamas or ISIS, publicly denounce these two barbaric groups, even if the consequences for doing so has been death or worse (death of family members to send a message). Many Muslims do publicly denounce these groups, but there are understandable, practical reasons why they may remain silent. Many people who hate ISIS don’t bother to claim so publicly because they never say anything publicly. Silence doesn’t equal consent. On the flip side I imagine there are racist CEOs of companies only begrudgingly removing Confederate flags from stores now out of profit motive, sensing shoppers (thankfully) want this. It’s Pride now, and I imagine homophobic CEOs realise rainbow flags are good for business. Knowing a person’s private heart is complicated.

White people often think everyone is in a race but us, so when a white person does something they’re just a person doing it, not a person of a race. Many white people don’t feel compelled to publicly denounce white crimes because it doesn’t occur to us that we should. This white guy killed people in my name, and that’s unacceptable. Many other white people also hate this shit but don’t have a public platform to denounce it, but I do so I will.

I get that white people bemoaning the conditions non-white people live in can sound like giving themselves a sanctimonious pat on the back–look what a humanitarian I am! Gushy white liberal guilt makes for poor reading. But seeing it exclusively in these terms makes it about the author when what matters is the article’s subject, in this case those murdered for not being white. Anyway, it doesn’t take an especially enlightened humanitarian to denounce race wars or the death of innocent people. It’s the right position and it’s important, but it’s mundane and basic.  

It’s hard to talk about this stuff without it devolving into platitudes. Both social justice advocates and those who lament PC censorship both speak them. But consider, there isn’t a single worthwhile principle or philosophy that can’t be reduced to a corny platitude. When dealing with these issues it’s easy to scoff at this or that often repeated slogan or pre-packaged phrase, but align yourself with the substance behind it.

Dizzy Gillespie used to say that “everyone’s my brother until they prove otherwise.” If I had the power I’d “extend the chill” to non-white people, a phrase I like because it has a light touch on a heavy subject and carries the idea of allowing everyone to do what white people take for granted, innocently wander about enjoying life without fear, oblivious to even the thought, that for no reason it might suddenly end.

For now and from afar, it seems this ghastly crime is doing anything but starting a race war. I hope I’m right and I hope that continues.

LIT CRIT–Haruki Murakami: After the Quake review

09 Thursday May 2013

Posted by in Literature

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I decided to read some Murakami for a few reasons. So many girls on OK Cupid claim to love him, and they usually list other decent writers alongside him. I want to relate to these chicks I’ll never meet. Murakami is still alive, unlike all my heroes. I’ve read some Ishiguro, but not much Japanese writing otherwise. The proprietor of Doug Miller Books, the fantastic second-hand bookstore located at Bloor around Christie, recommended this one to me after I told him I had already read and loved Barney’s Version and A Confederacy of Dunces. You trust a man after he recommends you those.

I really liked the stories. The narrative alternates between swift glossing over of years and extended dialogue. To give a picture of his aesthetic, it seemed to me like a Japanese water colour painting in that the focus of the painting isn’t situated squarely in the middle. Murakami puts the central event of the story in a corner or over to the side, and this has the effect of rendering what went on before or after more pertinent. I think this is what gives his stories weight while writing with such a light hand. Each story has space.

Light hand: this may sound like a stupid, clichéd term, so let me expands. Murakami talks about hard ons and hangovers while citing different old jazz musicians and literary references, so there’s no pretentious baggage that often accompanies “literature.” He writes about people who are fun-loving and light-hearted people, and also dark and suicidal, portraying them all with a pretty full picture in a short space. He’s a minimalist, meaning there’s no room for bullshit. Though remember, I’ve only read these short stories so I’m only describing his writing as it pertains to this collection. I’ll get to his novels one day soon maybe.

He’s good on dreams and surrealism. What I mean is he takes for granted that the fiction doesn’t need to correspond to journalistic standards of writing where things must be proved,  accurate, fact-based. If a frog comes to save Tokyo from an earthquake we must not ask if this is really possible. You will miss the point.

Imagination isn’t bound in good fiction.

I am amused that the Washington Post Book World described him as “poetic.” I hope this critic has read him in Japanese, not in English translation. I found the stories taut, moving, and suggestive of more than is there. Not poetic, but light. Perhaps this is what they meant, or maybe they meant to write something that would sell books.

The stories are easy to read, but I feel like they’ll reward rereading too. There’s more to get out of them. He’s anything but a stuffy, stodgy writer, and he is more wise than what people think of when they say “literary.” His sentences are stark and short, not the generous,  expansive, majestic stuff of Melville. But still, he’s cool.

Good stuff Murakami.

7.3/10…a fine rating.