confluence, episode 30: the voices we listen to

Posted on 16 September 2018

It’s been nearly four years since I found out that a voice I admired, a voice I listened to daily, a voice that helped bring me into the world of radio, is a voice that over 20 women associate with some of the darkest moments in their lives.

That voice came back into the public this week in the form of a written essay in the New York Review of Books, which I read and with which I am still grappling.

I will not make a secret of the fact that until those events of four years ago, my understanding of the degree of violence, abuse and discrimination women face on a regular basis was limited to non-existent. My brand of believing in gender equality was a blasé “of course women should be allowed to work and be paid the same for the same job” with no understanding of the systemic barriers standing in the way of something approaching equity.

Even the post I wrote in October 2014, attempting to work through my own feelings on what was transpiring (the title “Stunned. Shocked. Betrayed” should give you a sense of what those feelings were) reveal, to me at least, the limitations of my understanding of what was to come, of #BeenRapedNeverReported and #MeToo, that would help advance the public conversation and my personal perspectives on gendered violence, abuse and the legal and societal frames in which they exist.

The degree to which I have grown since then is the degree to which countless women were brave enough to speak up about their personal experiences and the larger context in which those experiences took place. 

The strategy I adopted was to simply listen — I had no expertise in this area, no personal experience, and so it was a time to simply learn from those who did. It was a strategy served me well then, and it has served me well again these past two days in trying to sort through how to react to a piece that boldly titles itself “Reflections From A Hashtag.” If it is a strategy you are interested in pursuing, you may wish to start with:

• Anne Thériault: What Women Want From Jian Ghomeshi
• Minisha Krishan: Jian Ghomeshi Doesn’t Deserve Anyone’s Pity
• Anne Kingston: “Jian Ghomeshi’s #MeToo Moment: It’s All About Him

Thériault’s piece, in particular, tackles a question that keeps bubbling up lately, which is: what, if any, is the road to redemption after something like this? There are a few other pieces out there along similar lines, most notably Michelle Goldberg, Laura Miller, and Marissa Martinelli. A frank discussion can also be found in this Twitter thread from Robyn Doolittle.

Also, if we’re at a point where we want to hear first-hand experience of what it’s like to struggle in the aftermath of an accusation, H.G. Watson reports on the chilling effect of being sued for talking about sexual assault, while Eva Hagberg Fisher writes about what it’s like to write about being harassed.

Finally, Isaac Chotiner asked some pointed questions of the editor who opted to commission the essay that sparked all this, and it’s… something.

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Selections from the blog this week: Rebalancing, river finds, and Winnie the Pooh. 

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Democracy, now

The Atlantic magazine has an issue dedicated to the question of Is Democracy Dying? The piece that stuck with me was Anne Applebaum’s tracing of her own experience with the polarization of post-2000s Poland and the modern political movements taking place in the United States, western Europe and, though it is unnamed, Canada. Friends and family are torn apart, objective reality dismissed and this line echoes in my head: 

“Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.”

Meanwhile closer to home, municipal elections are fast approaching (October 20, mark it in your calendars!) I spent part of Friday afternoon watching the final nominations come in fast and furious and then wrote a piece about it.

Although the lede image and title are humorous, underlying it there is a potential problem: the mayor’s of Fort St. John, Dawson Creek and Quesnel are all being acclaimed. In Prince George and Dawson Creek incumbents are being challenged by political neophytes– one 65, the other 24. And in Terrace, the Kool-Aid Man has since announced he will not be running, with the intention to withdraw from the race Monday. Why do so few people want to lead northern B.C.’s cities?

On the more positive side, the council race in Prince George is shaping up to more interesting than it originally appeared with several new names coming forward over the last week. I will be producing a public forum featuring as many nominees as are able to come out on Tuesday, September 25 — event details are here.

And the ever-illuminating Doug Saunders has a piece out on Doug Ford’s fight with Toronto city hall and argues this is part of a larger global crisis in which cities are bigger, more important, but as powerless as ever.

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Accents, Apu and Accountability

Anil Dash has a great post titled The price of relevance is fluency which tackles the issue of powerful people (mostly men) who complain about things like the PC Twitter mob (“There is no ‘Twitter mob’, there’s only people,” Dash says, pointing out the obvious).

“You’ll hear awful shit like, ‘I don’t know whether to call them Black or African American, or what?’ or terrible ‘jokes’ about the appropriate pronouns that people should be identified with. Now, these powerful folks don’t want to be held accountable for disrespecting people with different identities, and the powerful certainly don’t want to be mocked for their illiteracy in contemporary culture, but they damn sure want to make certain that you know they’re not interested in indulging modern norms for showing respect to others.”

It made me think back to Heer Jeet’s piece on how the character of Apu in The Simpsons, once viewed as benign and even progressive, is now problematic given that his Indian accent, played for comedic effect, is voiced by a white comic. It’s a pattern that’s played out before:

“These days, Amos ‘n’ Andy is remembered as a prime example of minstrel comedy: characters originally created on radio by white actors who adopted broad black dialect that played up a lack of education. But as William and Mary historian Melvin Patrick Ely pointed out in his 1991 book The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy, the reality is more complex. When the program first aired on radio, it was beloved by white audiences, but polarized black ones. Some black listeners hated the show from the start. One letter writer complained in 1930 that the show taught the world “that the Negro in every walk of life is a failure, a dead beat and above all shiftless and ignorant.” But the show also got fan letters from many black readers who were grateful to receive any representation and who credited the actors with doing realistic dialect. ‘Those fellows must have been reared with colored people,’ ran one fan letter.”

Related to all of this is the growing popularity of CBC’s sitcom Kim’s Convenience as it makes its way onto Netflix in other countries and becomes a word-of-mouth hit for its portrayal of a Korean family living in Toronto.

In Slate, Inkoo Kang writes about lead actor Paul Sun-Hyung Lee’s accent, saying it “sounds like Korean-accented English but resembles no manner of speaking I (or any Korean Americans in my acquaintance) have heard before. In their scenes together, Umma and Appa speak in broken English rather than in Korean—an artifice that never ceases to remind me that the show is just as much for non-Koreans as it is for ‘us.'”

In response, Lee tweeted a link to a 2016 interview in which he was questioned about the accent, its origins, and its use:

“I get feedback, and I’m sensitive to it—I hear people go, ‘That doesn’t sound Korean, who is this guy! He’s not Korean, he should be ashamed, he sounds terrible, how come they can’t get accents right?’ That bothers me. I care about the character so much. I am Korean. And you know what, and pardon my French, but f–k you, that’s my dad’s voice. So if you don’t like it, go f–k yourself, because that’s how my dad sounds. But on the other side, I hear a lot of people saying that it sounds like their dad. I’ve had Korean families whose fathers have passed away, they’re in tears, and they say, ‘You sound just like our Appa did.’ They hadn’t heard his voice in years. And it’s incredibly moving.

“The accent—the accent isn’t the joke. It’s part of who he is, but it isn’t the joke.”

I am a huge fan of Kim’s Convenience and I am glad the people making it are putting thought into these things.

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Also…

I joked that we may be pinning too much hope on libraries at this point, but this essay by Eric Klinnenberg does make a good case for their vitality:

“Older and poor people will often avoid Starbucks altogether, because the fare is too expensive and they feel that they don’t belong. The elderly library patrons I got to know in New York told me that they feel even less welcome in the trendy new coffee shops, bars and restaurants that are so common in the city’s gentrifying neighborhoods. Poor and homeless library patrons don’t even consider entering these places. They know from experience that simply standing outside a high-end eatery can prompt managers to call the police. But you rarely see a police officer in a library.”

Related to that…

However, librarian/excellent Twitter follow Donna Lowe makes an important point about all this:

“It’s interesting how this writer, by way of praise, casually expects librarians to take care of children, de-escalate violent situations, etc. That’s not really our job, fwiw.”

Worth noting.

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Some other things worth exploring:

“Don’t Get Your Hopes Up” Is the Dating Mantra of 2018 

I Shouldn’t Have To Lose Weight For My Wedding. So Why Do I Feel Like A Failure?

‘We’re closed forever!’: How the search for the perfect selfie led to bedlam at an Ontario sunflower farm. This is just so good.

Last week I shared a couple of links to Billy Joel profiles, so it seems right to share this piece titled ‘The Worst Pop Singer Ever‘ in which Rob Rosenbaum makes a plea not to rehabilitate his image:

“And the badness of really bad art is, I believe, always worth affirming, since it allows us to praise—and to examine why we praise—’good’ or ‘great’ art.”

I’m a WNBA player. Men won’t stop challenging me to play one-on-one.

Was MySpace Music’s Best Social Media Platform?

“Everybody knows that I’m an asshole, the news is that he’s an asshole.”

– Reporter Michael Hastings, as told by Ben Smith

The downright abomination of stunt marriage proposals

Shannon Proudfoot:

“We have already become frighteningly meta as a society. We think about the photo we’ll post on Facebook to commemorate an event instead of just living the moment while it’s ours, or we mentally draft the tweet we’ll post to announce “some personal news” the moment they offer us the job.”

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Musically, I’ve been on a Clash kick this week — intellectually, I put the Beatles down as the best band ever, but in my heart of heart, the Clash are my favourites. I put together Spotify playlist with all their available songs in chronological order and you can really hear how quickly they evolved from a great punk band to the only band that matters.  I particularly love their experimentation with dub, hip-hop and basically everything else on Sandinista! and I agree with Joe on it– “There are some stupid tracks, there are some brilliant tracks. The more I think about it, the happier I am that it is what it is.“

Also, RIP this week to Rachid Taha, the Algerian musician who did the brilliant cover of the Clash’s “Rock The Casbah”.

If you’re feeling more downbeat that punk rock, I discovered four hours of country-soul that got me through a rainy Sunday.

And…

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Misc.

98 years in the same location. Only business in the city I know of that’s older is the Northern

And finally, a happy ending to the story of that inflatable duck that knocked out all that power: 

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