A Poetry Machine Man, A History Boy, 25/05/2016

I was originally going to continue my reflections on the Bush Administration, then I heard that Gord Downie was dying,* so I put that on hold. 

* Or slowly dying. Or not quite dying, but still going to die quite soon. I’m actually not sure what’s going on with this tumour. 

Yeah, Gord is dying. But very slowly. More like dying, but on hold. Probably not going to see 60, which is a horribly young age to die. But he’s 52 right now. Still likely a few more years. And he's going on tour again soon, in a concert series that fucking everyone will want to see.

In the context of this strange year that’s already seen the premature deaths of two musical legends already – Bowie and Prince – hearing the news of Downie’s imminent mortality still made me reflect on his place in my life. 

The Tragically Hip and Gord Downie particularly have such a legendary place in contemporary Canadian culture that every person’s memories of them becomes a small part of the country’s entire tapestry. So a few strands for the occasion.

A friend of mine tweeted that, like a lot of Canadians, his first big rock show was a Tragically Hip concert. I can’t lay claim to that myself. My first big rock concert was Bob Dylan on the Time Out of Mind tour, watching him in a 2000-seat venue with festival seating so I could get right to the front of the stage. So fuck you.

But a few years later came my first Hip show, on the Music at Work tour in the 6000-seat venue the city built to replace the old 2000-seat place so they could attract bigger bands. Then the Tragically Hip finally came to St John’s. Gord’s laid-back, unpretentious pose in his striking music videos – Canada’s great television surrealist Bruce McCulloch behind the camera – always made me feel like this was a kindred voice.

I was a teenager still figuring out that I wanted to write for a living, to spend some of my time in life producing art that would bring people some pleasure, happiness, and make them think. I didn’t know anything else about what my voice would be. And maybe in Gord’s eerie lyricism, there was something I could start with.

They were cinematic in how often and profoundly Gord’s lyrics were poems of imagery than they were narratives. Images that were more like the filmmakers I admired most deeply at the time and as I grew older – Kubrick, Herzog, Murnau, Iñarritu, Burton. 

And I think all of us in Canada knew that too. It was why the more ambitious, smarter MuchMusic hosts – George in his prime, Sook-Yin, Bradford, even Bill Welychka, who I always thought was kind of a dick – loved interviewing him. Gord was more than just a typically empty-headed pale CanCon imitation of some American musical archetype.

Yet I had a sneaky suspicion for years that this is all most people thought of the Tragically Hip and Gord Downie. It first developed when I read through reviews of the band’s albums on AllMusic. They’ve since been rewritten with some actual critical knowledge of the band, but when I first found them, they were weirdly ignorant.

The reviewer loved early Hip albums, with their unapologetic middle-of-the-road riff rock musical style. Then the songs started sounding a little artier around the mid-1990s. Trouble at the Henhouse started giving the AllMusic reviewers some trouble. It was as if they never heard Gord’s poetry in the early records, as if the band’s ordinary-sounding bar rock obscured the artistry of the verse.

The intellect was always there, underneath the party rock and too-frequent Leafs references.** Could so many not see it?

** This is the 21st century, so new Canadian songs about sports legends need to include at least the Jays and the Raptors. This isn’t a white country anymore.

I really don’t think many could. At least, there were many who didn’t, even if many others could. Gord could release brilliantly abrasive solo records, they could make poetic, evocative videos like “Music @ Work,” “Bobcaygeon,” and “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken,” tour with more obviously smart artists like Sarah Harmer, bring their names to environmentalist politics. The Hip were a party band.

I suspect that Hip fandom, once you take samples from across the country, includes quite a few who are also enthusiastic Nickelback fans. They like simple songs with chugging, poppy, bar rock riffs. They also probably don’t bother with Gord’s solo albums or listen to that many songs the band made after 1998.

Or maybe all those other fans come home from the Nickelback concert and throw on Coke Machine Glow to chill with a joint, thinking to themselves, “I can’t ever let my friends know that I’m into this intellectual shit. The guys’ll never let me hear the end of it.”

I wonder if Canada will ever see a band like the Tragically Hip or a lyricist like Gord Downie after he dies. They seemed to articulate a kind of cross-Canadian identity that everyone could agree on. But maybe the times aren’t right for that kind of band right now.

Yeah, there are still a lot of people in this country who like Nickelback, which in the words of another famous Canadian, is both bogus and sad. But Canadian music has blossomed more than anyone three decades ago could have expected. Back when the Tragically Hip was the only popular band in the country that didn’t sound like some American band.

But there seems to be no one band now, in our embarrassment of musical riches, that can stand for all of Canada the way the Hip can in our culture. The huge number of bands and side projects around Vancouver’s New Pornographers, Toronto’s Broken Social Scene, or Montreal’s Wolf Parade, and all the social networks of awesome musicians that flow from those scenes. Our most popular rock exports Arcade Fire. 

But Canada is so much more than its rock music. Drake and the scene around him, like The Weeknd and everyone else with a vaguely defined contractual relationship with OVO or the Toronto Raptors, is a powerful statement of Canada and 21st century Canadiana globally. 

The triumphant rise of indigenous musicians and artists – and the political, social, and ethical messages they bring with them – likewise can’t be ignored. Indigenous musicians across the country have been catapulted to international visibility through the Idle No More movement. 

There is no sound on Earth like the joyous polar rage that screams from Tanya Tagaq. Buffy St Marie descends before them all like the resurrection of some Yoda of Saskatchewan. 

There’s never been anything quite like The Tragically Hip and Gordon Downie. When he’s gone, he will be missed. But the music of Canada is so much richer and bolder now than when he and his band began.

And I saw the constellations reveal themselves one star at a time.

Words in Memory of a Photojournalist, Advocate, 16/03/2016

This weekend, I spoke at a memorial for the photojournalist Ali Mustafa. He was a Canadian killed in Syria, travelling with the White Helmet paramedic brigades documenting their dangerous activity in Aleppo.

He died at the age of 30 in a March 2014 barrel bomb attack on the city by the Syrian government. 

I was speaking on behalf of the Syria Film Festival, where I’m communications manager. It’s a volunteer position I’ve held since the first festival in November this year. We included, during that festival, a small exhibition of Ali’s photos, along with a poster introducing his work. 

But I didn’t actually know Ali myself. He died a year and a half before I started volunteering with the Syria Film Festival. The organizers, one of whom was a good friend of Ali’s, only thought of the Syria Film Festival months later. 

Yet there I was giving a speech at a memorial for a man I didn’t know. And his mission in life – freelance photojournalism in the middle of brutal crackdowns on the Arab world’s democratic revolutions – is something beyond what I could conceive of myself ever being able to imagine myself doing.

He feels like a very different kind of person than me.

We broadcast video of my memorial speech on Periscope, but I’m not sure yet if it’s been recorded. I improvised a lot of what I said from notes, but here’s my reconstruction of my own speech. After introducing my role in the Syria Film Festival and the festival’s work so far promoting and memorializing Ali’s life and work, I reflected on how;

I mean yeah, I'm speaking here. But I didn't even know
the guy. 

“The Syria Film Festival wouldn’t exist without the bravery of people like Ali Mustafa. People who pick up a camera or some other kind of art-making equipment and make some kind of art, some kind of record of what happened in the cities of Syria, in the public squares of Cairo.
“And I can understand why someone who lived in Aleppo would join and document the demonstrations against Assad and the civil war that followed. I understand why an Egyptian would go to Tahrir Square with a camera. It’s their country. Their home.
“It's not my home. To consider taking on that kind of danger, such a mission? I’d ask myself, ‘What? Doesn’t anybody in Aleppo have a camera? Oh, you’re going? That’s great. I’m happy for you . . . Stay safe, stay safe. I’ll feed your cat while you’re gone.’
“We owe an ethical debt to Ali and everyone like him. Their bravery isn’t my bravery. I don’t even have to be brave. I live in a democratic country, and I have all my life. I don’t have to be brave to say that I think everyone should live in a democratic country, and be free from violence, poverty, and war. I've been fortunate to live in a democratic country, in relative freedom, and at peace. It’s easy for me to be an idealist.
“I noticed one of the quotes from Ali, from his Twitter account, that's hanging on the walls here, and I wanted to talk about it, even though I've already prepared my remarks. I planned well ahead – I wrote them yesterday.
“He writes, ‘I feel sorry for all the idealists, purists, dreamers of the world; those who never bend, but easily break. This world was not made for you. In the end, it will devour you whole.’
“I don't know if Ali Mustafa considered himself that kind of idealist. I know I try to be. For now I can only stand in awe of someone like Ali. Maybe one day, I’ll understand it.”

The next Syria Film Festival is this November, opening at the Isabel Theatre Nov 6, then at Jackman Hall in the Art Gallery of Ontario for the rest of the weekend. Other screenings throughout the year.

He Embodies Creativity (The Bowie Post), Composing, 12/01/2016

His death shook the world with grief and celebration. When he released the brilliant Blackstar on his 69th birthday, I thought it was a cheeky birthday present. It was his own eulogy for himself.

I can’t help but wonder at his physical state as the end came, especially after I heard that the Blackstar recording sessions wrapped just over six months ago, and the videos were filmed around the same time. I imagine an emaciated, skeletal Bowie, wracked with an imploding, catastrophic physicality. Inescapable.

Some of the tweets I read were about how impossible it is to write a simple summation of Bowie's career. Yes, there was the music, but there was also the films he made and performed in, the innovations in theatre, and the visual arts. He was forever changeable.

David Bowie was a living embodiment of the vibrancy and value of process, mutation, hybridity, strangeness, restlessness, and change. He's the West's greatest icon of the reality of flux.

This, when I think about it, is how Bowie has influenced my own creative work, and my entire intellectual approach to life. 

In the world of marketing and branding, consistency is prized. This is true for a lot of Western philosophy too. Each of us has an essence, the content of our identity that never changes, that makes a thing who and what it is.

This is what it typically means to "stay on message,” or at least maintain the brand. You continue forward, satisfying and staying true to what your audience expects of you. Any changes to your brand are accomplished slowly, so as not to disturb or irritate your audience. 

And in most cases, that underlying essence remains the same. Brand X retains the core set of values that it embodies in the public eye. Your brand is the one part of any person or company that remains certain and eternal in the face of all the constant activity that flows around you in the world.

Ever since Parmenides, one of the mystical metaphysical seers of ancient Greece who began the Western tradition of philosophy, truth and even existence itself is only real when it does not change. To be changeable is not even to be real.

Change, whether in the radical form of death or just everyday alteration, is the negation of existence itself. What is, is – if it is, then it can’t not be. If there’s no true you that's immune to change throughout all the flux of your life, then your own life has no foundation, no ground, no identity.

Bowie didn't change that concept. In a lot of ways, that concept still exists, and permeates the Western mind-set, if not the human one. But through the worldwide success of his art and his personality, he did more than any other person more quickly to kick that concept to pieces.

Bowie is a process thinker’s musician. He foregrounded flux and embraced it as reality. To change was the nature of his identity. Continuity and identity emerges from motion, not stability. 

What if what’s expected of you, is shock and surprise? Reality is flux and transformation, the creativity to make the new. The eternal is worse than the dead, because the eternal was never really alive. 

No life lasts forever, but the affects you generate persist, because they integrate with the world around them to change it. Your immortality isn't about preserving some essence of yourself in the eternal. It’s to proliferate your influence on the world so that the universe is different from how it would have been if you never existed.

Everything ends, but death is not the end.

That was a fantastic last album, and a very kind man.

He Was a Man Who Made Me Laugh, Obituary, 12/08/2014

When you live in a world at war, it can seem crass to mourn celebrities. War continues in Israel and Palestine, punctured by brief moments of non-shooting. There aren’t really any moments of non-shooting in Syria and Iraq, where the governments of both countries have pretty much collapsed into civil war while thousands of innocent people are dying on Sinjar mountain because of who they are. Ukraine is still in civil war. There’s one epidemic of ebola and hundreds still of malaria. There are riots in a Missouri suburb because a policeman shot an 18-year-old young man. Whenever I go to Jackson Square, I pass the same old homeless man who I wish I could spare even a dollar for.

So it can seem crass to mourn a celebrity who made people laugh. I’ve long been part of an intellectual tradition of cultural criticism that bemoans the worship of inflated egos and rich performers who fritter away the undeserving amounts of money they earn on houses, cars, drugs, boats, drugs, women, vanity projects, drugs, political causes you disagree with, drugs, violent crime, witless activism, clothes, capital gains tax shelters, cocaine, and drugs. Also, drugs. But sometimes, a personality connects with so many people in so many different ways across so many years that it makes public mourning acceptable, or at least inevitable.

And our cultural products aren’t just empty pieces of entertainment. I mean, some of them are. But the best of them are brilliant pieces of art. Of course, they’re also the products of commerce, and there are many good arguments that the commercial aspects of art, especially cinema, degrade it. Because film and television is an industry, we can all too easily describe its power as corrupting. Yet it is still art, so can still move us emotionally and intellectually to view life a little differently. And some performers in that industry are so remarkable, talented, and singular that even the most bitter failed performer can’t deny that they deserved their success.

The Fisher King (the only one I own), Hook, The Birdcage, Insomnia, Death to Smoochy, the music video for “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” Good Morning Vietnam, Aladdin, Toys, the first Night at the Museum movie, a brilliant episode of Inside the Actors’ Studio, a couple of hilarious interviews on The Daily Show, Jumanji, Awakenings, Good Will Hunting, Mrs Doubtfire, AI: Artificial Intelligence, The World According to Garp, Dead Poets Society, a bunch of standup and improv clips over a 40 year period that I’ve watched on youtube, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. That was everything I’ve seen him in. Not comprehensive, but enough that I remember that wonderful laugh, full of joy.

He was the only person who could have successfully, and realistically, played the King of the Moon.

I haven’t been doing very well in some parts of my life lately. My freelance editing work hasn’t brought in as much money as I thought it would this summer, and it looks as though I’ll be getting even less in the future, and having to hustle even more just to get what little I can manage. I spent a lot of yesterday evening worrying about how I’m going to work through my career transition. A lot of employers are hesitant to hire someone who’s in his early 30s and doesn’t have experience in their industry, and whose experience is in universities, a field that a lot of folks outside it understand just as little as the folks inside it understand what everyone else does for a living. But I have the support of someone I love, and who loves me, and at least my career as an artist is getting started. So I don’t think about suicide.

I mean, I used to. When I was young. We’re all a little overly dramatic when we’re young. And there are still plenty of times when I wonder if the mistakes and hurtful things I’ve said and done in my life will end up mattering more than the kind things I’ve done and said and written that made people smile, or laugh, or impressed them. Very occasionally, there are times when I wish I could have known my father as anything other than a set of stories and a brain-injured, opaque old man. Yet there are also times, even more rare, when I hate that old man for what he said to me as a teenager, as if he wanted me to commit suicide. 

I had a feeling Robin Williams would die soon anyway. That heart surgery he had five years ago was pretty intense, and cocaine and alcohol tear your cardiovascular system to shit after a while. But I don’t know what’s been going through his head. It’s not like I ever met the man. I only watched a bunch of his movies and he made me laugh a lot.

I remember one scene from The Fisher King, as he’s running away from a hallucinatory red knight, breathing fire, the colour of blood, chasing him through New York. He’s haunted by trauma and fear. He only wants to be happy again.

In Memory of Darren Hynes, Redux (with apologies), 10/03/2014

You may have noticed that my post from this Saturday relating some memories of a former professor of mine has disappeared. This is because, where I wanted to write a series of brief recollections that depicted what stuck in my mind about a former colleague who died too young this March 1, I expressed them in a way that offended some of his close friends. This is why I’m no good at funerals; I always say the wrong thing. Or worse, I say what I want to be the right thing in the wrong way.

Because I don’t remember Darren as a perfect person. He wasn’t. And neither am I. But where I wanted to describe my memories impressionistically and respectfully, I appeared instead dismissive, as if I held him in contempt.

When I think about my own relationship with Darren as a student colleague at Memorial University’s philosophy department in the mid-2000s, today I think about someone who wasn’t getting a fair shake anymore, and who deserved better than what he got. My first impression of him came when I was 20 years old, taking a summer course from him in the philosophy of the natural sciences. I still have the book of essays from that course, because it was a solid collection of essays central to the development of analytic philosophy of science. I found him very fair to me, after one day in particular. I had volunteered to do a presentation in that course on a subject having to do with philosophy of physics. I had the philosophy down, but was still a little sketchy on the physics. Of course, the physics was the focus of a persistent line of questioning from my friend P. As I was becoming flustered, Darren noticed and filled in the physics background better than I could (and he still gave me a terrific mark on the presentation). It went beyond what I think most professors would do for a student, and I really appreciated his doing me a solid that day.

Because I don’t remember very many people doing the same for Darren, myself included. He would always attend the weekly discussion groups the philosophy department would organize, called Jockey Club. And he would quite often be corrected by some other professors in the department. Sometimes they’d be right, because we all misread an idea sometimes, or speak without knowing the full conceptual or historical context. But sometimes, people would disagree for little more than the sake of disagreeing, picking holes in his perspective that weren’t truly present. I don’t think I ever did that to him. At least, I hope not.

He had a remarkably distinctive mannerism when speaking as well. He would hold his hand up, palm facing inward, in front of him, then draw the tips of his fingers together as he spoke, moving his hand away from him. Back and forth, as his fingertips would draw together and spread apart. I don’t know how he developed that habit. At least Darren tried for some theatrical flair.

I feel as though I never treated him as well as I should have. Partially, that was why his early death affected me so much, so unexpectedly. One commenter on this weekend’s memorial post accused me of acting superior to him. And I didn’t intend to do that the other day, although I appeared to do so in relating the following memory.

I felt uncomfortable around Darren when I’d visit the philosophy department on my occasional trips back to St. John’s during my doctoral work. His academic career seemed to be stalling over the last few years. When he first started teaching at Memorial, he was employed on regularly renewed yearly contracts paying a full salary. Over the last few years, he was hired only as a per-course instructor, with much, much lower pay. He could become frustrated and stressed easily, so I imagine he didn’t take it all that well.

While this was happening to Darren, my own career in universities felt like it was soaring. From 2007 to this year, I’ve attended 14 conferences (across four countries in addition to Canada) including the upcoming Canadian Philosophical Association at Brock University in St. Catharine’s. I’ve presented or commented at all but two of those conferences. My article publications continued at a parallel pace. I felt as though, with a track record like mine, the next phase of my university career was assured. So when I saw Darren still struggling to be published, having trouble just hanging onto his mediocre job at Memorial and not getting any feedback from applications elsewhere, I did feel superior. And I wish I had the chance to make up for that somehow.

It’s why my post from this weekend disappeared so quickly after Darren’s old office-mate Bernie Wills told me how offended he was by what I wrote. In the last year, I’ve hit a similar wall in my own career, one that I think hit me harder because I was so over-confident in the certainty of my coming success. I don’t know that I’ll ever work in a university again, but at least this has hit me just as I turned 30, at a young enough age that I can make a reasonable adjustment to my livelihood. I don’t know what I’d do if the same collapse of academic employment hit me in my late 40s, as I could see happening to Darren. It took me nearly a year just to get back on my feet as it is. For all the academics being pushed out of the system they’ve already given decades to, at a time of life when a fresh start has become practically impossible, I don’t know how recovery can be done.

Bernie told me that he and Darren had prepared some fascinating work on Plato that has so far gone sadly unpublished. I remember one day, Darren being terribly upset over an article being rejected from a journal. But the paper was over 50 pages long, and journals just don’t publish works of that size anymore. I remember in the early days of what became that collaborative project on Plato that Darren tried to explain it to me, something to do with the concept of the dyad. I didn’t really understand what he was getting at, but it sounded fascinating and original. Too many journals of ancient philosophy today are too conservative to publish large, strange interpretive works.

I still think Bernie should try to get a book contract for it, though. More people can read books. That way, more people can have Darren Hynes on their shelves.