As is my tradition, I’ve once again made a mixtape of my favourite songs of the past year. I definitely spent a lot less time listening to a wide range of tracks in 2018, instead putting a few favourite albums on repeat, or getting into artist discographies (notable discoveries for me this year were Lee Hazelwood, the songwriting of Nile Rodgers and the compositions of João Gilberto).
On the album side, my three favourites of the year were Cadence Weapon‘s Cadence Weapon, the Arkells‘ Rally Cry and Jessie Reyez‘s Being Human in Public. Other albums I put on repeat came from Shad, Shy Kids, Fucked Up and Saltwater Hank, as well as the re-issue/remix of the Beatles‘ White Album, and I suspect I’ll be going back to Kacy Musgraves and Jeremy Dutcher in years to come, though I haven’t listened to them as deeply as the others this year.
On the concert side, my favourite performance of the year that I saw (via livestream) was Beyoncé headlining Coachella which, had it come out as a live album, would also have been my favourite of the year. Locally, good times were had seeing Kym Gouchie, Danny Bell, Children of the Wave, Saltwater Hank and Flying Machine— all of whom are connected with a brand-new record label in town, Good Egg Records— and represented with tracks on my mixtape.
As always, I have followed the Said the Gramophone rules for year-end lists which is that these are songs I heard for the first time in 2018, and no artist is to appear more than once with the exception of guest appearances (which is why Cardi B and Chance the Rapper show up twice).
There are some songs that didn’t quite make the cut that are still good, and many more that I probably didn’t hear that are even better, but these are the ones that I spent time with and mark memories from the year that was.
You can stream on Mixcloud, listen to the Spotify playlist (none of the local artists are available there, though– find them on Bandcamp) and download the mp3.
Previous years: 2017 | 2016 | 2015 |2014 | 2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010
Track list:
The Fool Pt 1 (Get it Got it Good) – Shad
Missing U – Robyn
City Looks Pretty – Courtney Barnett
Finesse (Remix) [feat. Cardi B] – Bruno Mars
Happy Man – Jungle
thank u, next – Ariana Grande
Body Count – Jessie Reyez
High Horse – Kacey Musgraves
High Rise – Cadence Weapon
FACES – The Blaze
Love It If We Made It – The 1975
I Like It – Cardi B
No Brainer – DJ Khaled
Night Shift – Lucy Dacus
Returning – Paul White
GTFO – Mariah Carey
Nevermore – Milk & Bone
Paper – Danny Bell
Jealousy – Macy Gray
Shirtsleeves to Shirtsleeves- Flying Machine
High Hopes – Panic! At The Disco
Party For One – Carly Rae Jepsen
Make Me Feel – Janelle Monáe
Body – Loud Luxury
X – Nicky Jam
Solo (feat. Demi Lovato) – Clean Bandit
Lost In Japan – Shawn Mendes
This Is America – Childish Gambino
Rabbit’s Revenge (feat. Bassnectar, Big Boi, and Killer Mike) – Tom Morello
The Warriors – Snotty Nose Rez Kids
APESHIT – The Carters
Majesty (feat. Waisu) – Apashe
Killmonger – Ludwig Goransson
I Feel Like a Failure – shy kids
Catahoula Man – Generationals
My Own Thing (feat. Joey Purp) – Chance the Rapper
Nice For What – Drake
Better Now- Post Malone
My My My! – Troye Sivan
Relentless – Arkells
Raise Your Voice Joyce – Fucked Up
Lord of This World – Children of the Wave
If You Know You Know – Pusha T
PROM / KING – Saba
Waniska – Kym Gouchie and Northern Sky
Mehcinut – Jeremy Dutcher
Lay Low – Dan Mangan
liability (demo) – Tove Styrke
Mexico Sunrise – La Dante
Fish Cannery – Saltwater Hank
This piece was originally published in Thimbleberry Magazine Volume 2, published January 2018. Volume 3 is available now.
At the Bulkley Valley Museum in Smithers, there is an exhibit titled “Ephemera: Things That Exist for a Short Time Only.” Included in the display is a 1949 wall calendar from the (now gone) McRae Hotel, a brochure for a previous incarnation of the annual Fall Fair and a newer paper bags from SpeeDee Printers (“Northern B.C.’s Office Experts Since 1958”).
“On it’s own individually an item of ephemera may seem trivial to preserve, but when several examples are examined together they can offer important insights into the past,” the exhibit explains.
“Historians study ephemera to understand social, cultural, and political views in a society, and how those views changed over time.”
Items of ephemera are “often paper-based”, including cards, movie tickets, menus, posters, and calendars. One paper-based item not listed is, I think, one of the most ephemeral of all: newspapers.
Consider this: in a grocery store, the item with the shortest shelf life is a newspaper. Thousands of pages of printed information lose their value in the time it takes a jug of milk to reach its best before date. Within 24 hours of rolling off the press, newspapers are worth more as kitty litter or birdcage lining than as a source of information about what’s going on in the world.
The inability of newspapers to retain value is reflected in their decline across the country and around the world. In the time between me writing and you reading this, more than 30 Canadian papers will cease publication, including the 128-year-old Moose Jaw Times. In a beautifully produced radio documentary for The Sunday Edition, David Gutnick visits the city to get a sense of what that means for people living there. The saddest part is the indifference expressed by a group of retired residents gathered at a local cafe. One person points out something I’ve heard many times before: by the time the paper comes along, you already know what’s in it, so what’s the point?
And yet, as the Bulkley Valley Museum explains, the value of ephemeral items is in aggregate, and accrues over time. I’m reminded of this frequently as I explore the Prince George Newspaper Digitization Project (pgnewspapers.pgpl.ca), a partnership between UNBC, CNC, the Prince George Public Library and the Prince George Citizen to make a searchable database of every paper published in the city, dating all the way back to the Fort George Tribune in 1909. In the earliest available issue of that paper we learn that there is a need for mail service more frequent than once a month, there’s an election, and that “booze” (the scare quotes are in the headline) is being sold illegally in Fort George.
Then there’s the ads. William Blair & Company promises to sells boots, blankets and hardware at “prices as low as at Quesnel.” WM F. Cooke proclaims his availability to take you by canoe or dog sled to any point on the Fraser River, and A.G. Hamilton advertises the pending sale of lots on the South Fort George Townsite. In just less than a quarter-page, a portrait of the community as it was is painted in a way I’m not sure any news story could.
I don’t say this to diminish the importance of a newspaper but rather, to heighten it. By running reports from city council and the courts alongside sports photos, wedding announcements, comics and advertising, you get a daily time capsule that has yet to be replicated in any other form. While we’ve taken to filling our social calendar with Facebook event invites, I wonder how we will find out what people were doing on evenings and weekends without the preserved community events page of a newspaper.
Seriously: try and figure out what was happening around town on May 25, 2017 using Facebook’s search feature. I can’t. I can, however tell you that on May 25, 1962, plans were underway for a cross-country ski trail cleanup at Hickory Wing, the high school was hosting an open house, and Prime Ministerial candidates John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson were set to make dueling appearances in town for the ever-important Prince George vote. Plus, I learned by glancing around the page, rain was holding off wildfires, folks were having doubts about Saskatchewan’s plan for state medical care, and it was possible to have Lucky Lager delivered to your home for free.
When people talk about the closure of small-town newspapers it’s often on the subject of things like holding city hall to account and how we need investigative reporting that no one else will do. Which is true. But I also think the simple act of chronicling a community is important, and that happens in the non-news sections of a paper as much as in the headlines.
Recently, the website 250news.com shut down after pioneering the world of online news coverage in northern B.C. To its credit, the Exploration Place recognized the importance of the site’s twelve years of existence and ported its pages to an online archive of its own. While valuable, browsing through these archives of a digital news site don’t quite have the same effect as browsing through the archives of an actual newspaper, because all a news site has is the news: there are no ads, no weather, no… ephemera.
This past May, I was given the chance to interview the author Lawrence Hill on stage as he came to town to to accept an honourary degree from UNBC. I’d never done anything like this and to prepare I did something else I’d never done before– read a whole bunch of things by and about him to prepare: essays, interviews, novels and his Massey Lecture series. It was a different way of experiencing an author’s work and I found recurring themes and ideas that I wouldn’t have noticed using my more traditional method of switching up authors between books. The deep-dive method is one I’m eager to try again.
Anyways, I also recorded the interview and now I’m putting it here. It took place just days after Mr. Hill returned from Switzerland to be with his mother as she chose to die, something that had not yet been made public via this lovely essay in the Globe and Mail. We talk about family here, as well as other recurring themes of Hill’s work: race, politics, the state of the world and his different ways of working. He was very generous with his thoughts and it was definitely a highlight of the year for me.
This originally appeared as a series of Tweets on Oct. 27, 2018.
I’ve modified it some to work as a blog post.
I also ran it as a radio piece which you can listen to below.
This past weekend, I attended a memorial service for Drew Schemenauer where I said a few words, and I’d like to share them here.
For over thirty years, Drew Schemenauer was the transmitter tech for CBC Radio in Prince George and the central interior– a huge area covering hundreds of kilometers.
I only met him a handful of times– he had his own, separate office in town and spent much of his time on the road, climbing up mountains and 200 ft towers to do repairs
I only met him a handful of times– he had his own, separate office in town and spent much of his time on the road, climbing up mountains and 200 ft towers to do repairs.
When a radio station people spend their days with goes off the air, you get a lot of phone calls. Which is why Drew’s work was important.
As much as my job is done digitally– I record interviews on an iPhone, write and read scripts from a computer– most people’s interaction with radio is still very much rooted in the analogue world.
And in order for that to work, you need people like Drew scrambling up mountains and towers in the snow and cold to figure out why the signal in Horsefly or Mackenzie has gone out.
The irony of this is that in order to keep us connected, Drew had to spend most of his time working alone. And his is one of those jobs where if you do it well, people don’t even know you’re there.
And so people like me get emails and letters of thanks for broadcasting during floods and fires but the reality is if a signal goes down, there’s nothing I can do. We need people like Drew.
And so people like me get emails and letters of thanks for broadcasting during floods and fires but the reality is if a signal goes down, there’s nothing I can do. We need people like Drew.
The first time I met Drew was actually when I ran @CFURadio at the University of Northern B.C. We needed to put a new tower up, and I got in touch with him.
He spent a weekend afternoon doing this even though we didn’t have the money to pay him at the time. And later when I had saved it up, he never came to get his cheque. Eventually I had to look up his home address and drive it out there.
Today his son told me that there’s a pile of uncashed cheques in his dad’s house from doing stuff like this, and ours was probably in there.
Anyways, the point is this: that university station is a community, it’s been a social gathering and launching point and line of help to so many people. And Drew helped it survive even though most people involved with the station have probably never heard of him– nor he of them.
And all across this piece of land the size of some European countries, Drew was out there connecting Prince George to Quesnel to Chetwynd through the magic of this thing called radio. He was an essential part of our community.
They played this song at the memorial. Drew preferred the old stuff. So I’ll be putting it on the playlist for Monday’s episode of @daybreaknorth. And then listening to it over the FM dial. Thanks for everything, Drew.
Anil Dash writes about the ongoing impacts of Hurricane Sandy in his New York neighbourhood:
“I still see buildings with the high-water mark outlined on them, and I still remember which places stayed open to serve people in those incredibly dark nights when we didn’t even have street lights to show the way. Any day now, they’ll be shutting down the most essential subway line in our neighborhood for massive tunnel repairs that are expected to take years to complete. This is all still recovery from a storm that most of the country has already forgotten about, that the popular memory remembers as ‘not as bad as they thought it was going to be’.”
Does that ever resonate. Earlier this summer I drove south for the first time since the 2017 wildfires which were (until this year) the worst on record in British Columbia. Looking at the charred landscape along the side of the road I realized that while for me those fires were out of sight, out of mind, for the people living in the Cariboo they were still very much a physical presence, and will be for years to come.
Speaking to people in the industry earlier in this year, I was told that we still don’t have a good sense of how that 2017 wildfire season will affect the economies of forest dependent communities, as the amount of trees allowed to be harvested has to be reduced and readjusted to allow for recovery of local ecosystems. And even so, we have news this week that not enough was done to protect rare fishers following those fires, making them even more at risk— and all this is before we factor into this year’s wildfire seasons, which burned even more than 2017.
Meanwhile, drought conditions in northwestern B.C. continue to worsen, prompting warnings that fish might not be able to successfully spawn, which means the whale populations off the southern coast will continue to die off. In the wake of the J50 orca dying this summer I listened to an interview with a researcher putting together all the puzzle pieces contributing to the problem from the United States north through the province, connecting issues that we tend to isolate into localized problems into a much larger catastrophe.
The trouble is it’s really, really hard to put all of this together. Lord knows media organizations have been trying. That said, I’m issuing myself a personal challenge to better contextualize these seemingly isolated stories in my neck of these woods as part of the larger picture of what’s happening all around the world.
Every once in a while you will come across a piece of writing that is able to frame an alternate worldview for you in a way that it provides a whole new lens through which to view any number of things. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve realized Anne Applebaums recent essay in The Atlantic, titled “A Warning from Europe: The Worst Is Yet To Come” is one of those pieces.
Using the backdrop of Poland from the last nineties until today, Applebaum’s central thesis is, I think, captured in this line:
“Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all societies eventually will.”
While that was what struck me most the first time reading the piece, the part that’s been popping into my brain time and time again reading the news is her attempt at explaining why this is the case. Most valuably, she challenges the idea that everyone, naturally, believes in meritocracy.
“A rigged and uncompetitive system sounds bad if you want to live in a society run by the talented. But if that isn’t your primary interest, then what’s wrong with it?
“If you believe, as my old friends now believe, that Poland will be better off if it is ruled by people who deserve to rule—because they loudly proclaim a certain kind of patriotism, because they are loyal to the party leader, or because they are, echoing the words of Kaczyński himself, a ‘better sort of Pole’—then a one-party state is actually more fair than a competitive democracy. Why should different parties be allowed to compete on an even playing field if only one of them has the moral right to form the government? Why should businesses be allowed to compete in a free market if only some of them are loyal to the party and therefore deserving of wealth?”
S
I’ll let you draw your own parallel here.
Applebaum goes on to write that unlike North America, where we seem to take progress as an inevitable march of history, parts of Europe tend to view history as circular– liberal democracy to oligarchy to liberal democracy to oligarchy, with shades of difference but nevertheless swinging back and forth. I don’t know if she’s right, but looking at the world as it is now, it’s tough to argue she’s wrong.
Hello and happy Sunday! I’m spending the day enjoying the fall weather– getting the garden stuff done, mowing the lawn one last time, hanging the canoe.
At work I’m primarily in election mode — I started this week with a preview of the race for mayor in Prince George on Monday, and I’m producing an all-candidates forum Tuesday night (Sept 25) at the public library. You can find details here.
I am told the Kool Aid man plans to withdraw from the mayoral races in both Kitimat and Terrace tomorrow. #bcmuni pic.twitter.com/xm6hAgsorr
— Andrew Kurjata 📻 (@akurjata) September 17, 2018
I also did some reporting on the spike in homelessness being seen in Prince George and, sadly, another woman lost along Highway 16.
On my blog, I wrote about the joys of walking— and by way of illustration here is a thing that brought me great joy while out for one my exploratory walks downtown.
There’s a job opportunity I’d like to draw your attention to — a digital producer position with CBC. It’s based out of Kelowna, but would be focused on the entirety of the interior and northern part of the province. Join B.C. Beyond Hope.
Musically this week I’ve been listening to the songs of Lee Hazlewood, who I just discovered as an amazing blend of country, pop and big band from the 60s. Aside from his own weird career, he wrote tracks for Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and, most famously Nancy Sinatra (including “These Boots Are Made For Wakling.” There’s a playlist I made here and and older article about him here. I’ve also been playing more Otis Redding, the beautiful 2018 Polaris Prize-winning album from Wolastoq First Nation opera singer Jeremy Dutcher and, for his birthday, Leonard Cohen.
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Some other things worth sharing:
Controversial TV show sparks debate about changing racist attitudes toward Indigenous people
“In the series First Contact, which airs on APTN, six white participants travel across Canada and openly air their thoughts about Indigenous people, whom participants describe as “lazy,” “alcoholics,” “welfare cheats,” and “hopeless” among many other negative stereotypes.
They are then introduced to Indigenous people who share stories about their lives, history and realities in hopes to educate.
When I first saw the concept for this one, I thought it seemed really interesting, but I’ve re-evaluated that some in light of the criticisms I saw from people I respect and follow on Twitter and whose sentiments are captured in this piece by Angela Sterritt.
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Ellie Kemper (The Office, The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) on the ways in which actors are tougher than babies.
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Movie news! Filming is beginning for Monkey Beach — based on a book by northwest writer Eden Robinson, starring Prince George-raised actor Grace Dove. We had a great interview with Dove on the show a while back about Indigenous representation in Hollywood and I look forward to seeing this.
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Also I am unreasonably intrigued at the news that Lebron James has tapped Black Panther director Ryan Coogler for the sequel? remake? of Space Jam.
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Raccoons bust into Toronto woman’s home, stare her down while defiantly eating her bread
We don’t have raccoons here* and it’s probably good but there’s also a part of me that wishes we did.
* Some interlopers, but there doesn’t seem to be any permanent population.
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This has become my new most popular tweet. The show, though, is actually pretty good and about some interesting issues which you can read about here or listen to here.
Finally…
“It’s fascinating, the things you see when you’re on foot.”
To mark World Car-Free Day this past week, the Guardian ran a series called Walking the City, exploring “the joys (and trials) of urban walking.” The quote at the top of this post is from their first piece in the series, an essay by David Sedaris on his lifelong habit of walking places, all around the world and one of numerous pieces that had me thinking about walking this week.
For my money, the best way to explore a city is on by bike — the combination of speed and flexibility gives you the best of walking and driving — but there’s a joy to walking, as well, especially if you’re with someone else.
On our first trip together, in our early twenties, my wife and I went to Havana. We stayed somewhere in the suburbs and walked long distances because we couldn’t afford that many cabs. Over a decade later I still remember the streets out of our hotel room to a nearby ice cream place, and recall the heat of getting to a beach in a way that I wouldn’t had we driven. I remember the texture of Wuhan, Hong Kong, Wellington and other cities from foot-based explorations.
My wife is the one who got me back into the habit of walking for the purpose of getting places in day-to-day life. While I was inclined to walk in the woods but drive to the store, she sees no reason not to combine the two. As Fran Lebowitz puts it elsewhere in the Guardian series, “People who drive everywhere ‘take a walk’, but for me its a form of transportation.”
An essay that’s stuck in my mind since I first read it is Drew Magary’s “Walk: A Message to the Class of 2017.” It is a 2,000 word piece urging, cajoling, pushing people to, in Magary’s words, “Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk walk”:
“I have never regretted taking a walk. Every time you walk, a bunch of cool shit happens. You burn calories, for one thing. You think of cool ideas. You also get an immediate sense of the layout and vibe of wherever you happen to be. It’s a cheap shortcut to feeling like a local. I walked around downtown Atlanta for two hours once, which was long enough for me to realize, ‘Oh hey, this is the part of town that sucks!’ Then I went and walked around a cooler part.”
Here’s an example of why walking places is great. When we visited Turkey we went to a place called Uchisar Castle, a place in the desert where homes were built into a mountain. To get there we took public transit which meant that unlike the tourist buses, we were dropped off a few blocks away. The walk there took us down a residential street where we saw some strange things.
I have no idea why there were piles of mannequin legs and squashes on the same street, but there they were. Anyways, we went to Uchisar Castle and it was as amazing as it sounds and probably moreso, and then we had to walk back to take the bus. We took a different street and as a result passed a house where grape juice was flowing from the roof into a barrel where a young man and his little brother were collecting it. We spoke with them in a combination of broken English, French and Turkish and were invited up to their roof where the father was crushing the grapes for juice, and given a sample. It is one of my favourite memories, and one that wouldn’t have happened if we’d just driven to the tourist spot and then gone back to our hotel.
But this applies just as much at home. I regularly walk around downtown during my workday just to see what new things I can find. This week, it was this, which brought me no shortage of joy.
Another walking discovery was this in a tiny little alley in Smithers a few years back.
If you like to find the Easter eggs people leave throughout their community, walking is a must.
In England there’s something called “The Right to Roam.” It’s amazing. You can take foot paths through private property connected to public roads– walking from village to village through farmer’s fields. We spent a few days getting almost lost in a place called the Cotswolds, which looks exactly like a storybook. You can listen to an episode of 99 Per Cent Invisible about how this law came to be here.
Just this past week we were out walking our dogs and we cut down an alley I am not sure I’ve ever been through, in the neighbourhood I’ve lived almost the entirety of 33-year life. I saw greenhouses and dogs and garbage cans I’d never seen before, which is more revelatory than it sounds.
Walkers get it. Will Self wrote about this in the Guardian series, as well: “If you know your way around it (or are prepared to get lost), you can always find a vista that’s been overlooked, or an under-recognised corner of a familiar neighbourhood.”
Like me, Self lives in the same neighbourhood he grew up in and walking, he says, “loops me back in to my own lifecycle.” Sometimes when I’m going down a street, I’ll have memories of walking the same path when I was 23, 16, six-years-old. This is an underrated part of returning to where you’re from and it becomes more interesting with age.
You can also observe other walkers to figure out where to go. Tristan Gooley suggests, “Watch for someone who doesn’t pause before crossing the road – the better we know an area, the less time we spend at the pavement’s edge.”
Or follow strangers. Debbie Kent writes about, “handing over control of exploring the city to someone else,” in the words of artist Phil Smith.
“The Belgian-born artist Francis Alÿs varies the recipe with his continuing work The Doppelgänger: every time he goes to a new city, he finds someone to follow based on feeling that they bear a resemblance to himself in some way.
“Meanwhile, for those too anxious to follow people, there is an alternative: Morris has tried following dogs – although that usually means following their owners, too.”
“‘Flies, birds, cats,'” suggests Smith. ‘I’m more interested in following animals these days.'”
Finally, I just want to share Ashleigh Young’s take on walking as something that contributes to “unwanted social encounters“:
“I was once walking on Wellington’s beautiful south coast, along a long footpath – empty but for an old housemate of mine with whom I’d badly fallen out years earlier. We walked towards each other on that path by the sea, as though in chilling slow motion and after approximately 100 years, we passed. It felt like an outtake of Blue Planet.”
Walk. Walk walk walk walk walk walk walk.
Links from this blog post:
See also:
I’m not quite sure when it happened, but some time over the past few months there’s been a noticeable change in the population of people around downtown. It used to be that there were a few regulars on the sidewalks around my office with the occasional new face. But now there’s fewer people I recognize, and more of them.
I’m not the only one to make this observation. Other people who work downtown have brought it up, independently, asking if I’ve noticed. City councillors have said they are getting more calls from business owners. According to bylaw services, they’ve recorded over 500 instances of people camping compared to 72 this time last year (partially because of proactive enforcement, but still).
Today I went out to talk to some of the people at a regular camp spot off the highway, and a nearby food bank. At the food bank I was told demand has been surging since August and again, lots of new faces. There were two men who wanted to talk to me. One was from Prince Rupert and had moved to Prince George to upgrade his trades. He’s renting a place for $450 a month, he told me, but relies on the foodbank. He said its very important for him to stay away from drugs, but not everyone makes the same choice. The other guy came from Dawson Creek just last week. He’s going through a divorce and wanted to start from square one, and is staying in a shelter while he figures out his next move.
Over at the camp, only one guy would talk to me, but we talked a while. He said he’s been living out of a tent he packs around in a shopping cart since August. He came to Prince George from Burns Lake a couple years ago, but only became homeless last month. He never thought it would happen to him. He said he’s looking for work but hasn’t had luck, and most of what he gets is short hours, low pay, under the table.
The city has an initiative where bylaw folks go out and clean up these camps, and make contact with the people living in them. It’s a way to keep downtown cleaned up, as well as be a point of contact. That’s from the city side. From this guy’s perspective, he has to pack all his belongings up every day and move around town before finding a place to sleep. There are shelters but they don’t work for him. He wants a place of his own.
None of this is an answer to anything. None of it is to say anyone is right or wrong. It’s just some conversations I had with three of the dozens of people that are part of our community that I think we should be thinking about, and that I know many people are– in a variety of ways.
With the nomination period now closed, I’m in election coverage mode at work.
I’m organizing an event close to the beginning of the campaign, which is useful in that it will be the first out of the gate, but challenging in that it gives me a pretty short time period to prepare. Until Friday, I didn’t even know if there would be a mayoral race (there is, now) so the decision was made to make it an all-candidates forum so we could start inviting candidates with a little bit of lead time.
The other challenge of that is we now have 15 people — 13 council candidates and two for mayor — to introduce people to in a relatively compressed time period of two hours. That’s eight minute of talk time per person if you have literally no pauses, introductions or questions.
More realistically you’re looking at maybe four to five minutes per person. I asked around and was given a format from colleagues in another office that I’ve adapted in a way that I think will work.
The Format
We’re going to have a pile of questions, and a pile of candidate names. Additionally, each candidate will have two cards. After the introductions (1.5 minutes per candidate), a question card will be drawn. If a candidate wants to answer that question, they have to play a card. As many people who want to answer can, but then they are down to one card– one more answer. If no one answers, a candidate name will be drawn and they will answer (but they don’t lose a card).
The mayoral candidates will be given specific questions, in addition to their cards, and whenever one answers, the other will have a chance to, as well.
The Prep
Of course, it’s not enough to come up with a format. You also have to:
So that’s where I’m at this week– plus reaching out to candidates for other coverage over the course of the election.
Oh, and I also did an election set-up piece this morning. You can listen to it here.
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:
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.
* * *
Selections from the blog this week: Rebalancing, river finds, and Winnie the Pooh.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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.
* * *
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
“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.”
* * *
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…
* * *
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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In 2012 I felt my time being stretched thin— I had two almost full-time jobs and multiple volunteer positions, so I quit a job, I resigned from a board and I vowed to make time for myself. I wrote about it as my 2013 New Year’s resolution under a post called “Quit Stuff. Be Happier.”
“I have my time back. I’m able to see friends more regularly. I’m able to curl up at home once in a while and just read or watch a movie. I’m able to take time for myself, and rest and recharge for when I head out into the world again.”
Well, I’m here to report that did not last. In the intervening years I took on new responsibilities at work and in the volunteer positions I maintained, I added a writing gig and, slowly but surely, the balance I felt like I’d achieved at the beginning of 2013 slipped away until hitting another breaking point earlier this year.
It’s actually shocking how closely my feelings about 2018 echo the words I wrote about 2012:
“It wasn’t any one thing. It was just the cumulative effect of having no evenings, weekends or downtime. Losing touch with friends. Never just sitting and relaxing at home.”
And just as in 2012, the stuff I had committed to stopped being a commitment, which led to guilt, which led to– well, another round of rebalancing.
As much as I could, I took the summer off. I continued to work, but I did nothing else outside of that– no extra meetings, no new projects. Rather than an extended two or three week vacation, I blocked my time into several super-long-weekends so I had four to five days off in a row a couple times every month. I didn’t use that time to go out of town, instead focusing on connecting with family or friends or finishing projects around the house that have been on my to-do list for years. I read, and I listened to music I love.
Now fall is here and I feel much the same as I did back when I would be going back to school– I’m ready to engage my mind, I’m excited to see people again. After no after-work meetings for months I had two this week, and while at the beginning of the year this would have felt like just another problem on the pile, this time they felt like good, healthy uses of my time.
But this time I’m aware that balance won’t keep itself. Looking back through my blog, I see several posts on a recurring theme: the need for me to learn to control my time (see here, here and here for just a few).
I know I’m not alone in this. Talking to people in real-life, and reading posts online, I know many people feel stretched thin. It’s a major issue and I hope if you are feeling it you are able to 1. validate your feelings and 2. give yourself your time back.
Odds are this is a lesson I’ll need to learn again. But hopefully this time I recognize the signs that things are getting out of control earlier, and I’m able to correct sooner.
In Dawson Creek, councillor Mark Rogers has decided not to run for re-election because there are “too many old white guys“:
“When you look at the candidates that are currently running they do not represent the Dawson Creek demographic. Our community is young with a variety of ethnic backgrounds.
“Many of the candidates are even endorsing one another. That is a slate and won’t provide our city with diverse opinions and ideas on council. I really hope that before the Friday deadline some people will step up and run to ensure we get some new voices on council. If they don’t, we won’t even have an election. We really need people to step up and challenge the status quo.”
Prince George Citizen editor Neil Godbout has similarly appealed to someone– anyone– to add their name to the list of candidates here. There is just one candidate for mayor, and nine people running for eight council seats. Godbout argues a lack of choice is bad no matter the circumstances, and could lead to a decline of democracy.
There’s still until the end of Friday afternoon for people to put their names forward, but if the current trends hold the most interesting question for many B.C. cities up north won’t be who will be the next set of city leaders, but why do so few people even want to apply for the job?
For the last few days, we’ve been hit by sudden deluges of rain. Glancing at it out the window one evening, a childhood memory was triggered.
It’s a scene from Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day, where it rains so hard the words wash off the page. Here’s the full sequence:
“It was raining all over the Hundred Acre Wood. There was a thunderstorm on page 71… And on page 73, there was a bit of a cloudburst.”
This trick of playing with the literal text of the book was one of my favourite parts of the Winnie the Pooh films when I was a kid– the acknowledgement that they were inside a book was just so fun. At other points in the story, the narrator reveals Owl “talked from page 41 to page 62” or, in a later cartoon, turns the book sideways to help Tigger out of a tree.
I wanted to learn more about this form of storytelling and came across a media studies website that classifies it as part of “diegetic shifts of Winnie the Pooh”:
“The structure of Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery day remediates print books through narration that shifts fluidly between omniscient voice-over and conversation with on-screen characters. Innovative text treatment also renders words on the page as both part of the framing device and a component of the diegetic story-world.”
According to a small making-of documentary, this aspect of having the characters interact with the book they are in was the vision of director Wolfgang Reitherman, although I notice it’s also lifted in some ways from the original stories by A.A. Milne. Take this exchange from “Chapter One: In Which We Are Introduced.”
“Once upon a time, a very long time ago now, about last Friday, Winnie-the-Pooh lived in a forest all by himself under the name of Sanders.
(‘What does ‘under the name’ mean?’ asked Christopher Robin.
‘It means he had the name over the door in gold letters, and lived under it.’
‘Winnie-the-Pooh wasn’t quite sure,’ said Christopher Robin.
‘Now I am,’ said a growly voice.
‘Then I will go on,’ said I.)
It’s also the central conceit of one of my other childhood favourites, Chuck Thompson’s “Duck Amuck”, in which Daffy Duck is made fully aware he’s on a piece of paper:
Both of these stories are well-regarded: The Blustery Day won an Academy Award, and Duck Amuck has been inducted into the Library of Congress. What strikes me about them is there’s no other format they could work in: the storytellers are not just telling a story, they’re telling the story in a way that can only be told in this format.
It reminds me of Bill Watterson of Calvin and Hobbes opining somewhere (I think the Tenth Anniversary Book, but I’m not sure) that the best comics are funny visuals AND funny text– if you’re not using both, you’re not utilizing the medium to its full extent. There’s also a Quentin Tarantino line in the recesses of my memory about loving action sequences because they’re the sort of thing you can only do in movies. It’s all about working the format you’re in to its full extent.
“If you’re not thinking about sound design, why isn’t the story just a print piece?”
As an addendum, the design of the characters in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons are gorgeous: note how you can see the underlying pencil sketches under the watercolour.
Further reading on the animation style in the Winnie the Pooh films:
“What’s extraordinary is a democratically elected government trying to be shut down by the courts… I was elected. The judge was appointed.”
This shortly before invoking the notwithstanding clause in order to go ahead with shrinking the size of Toronto’s city council despite a court ruling that doing so is unconstitutional (if none of this makes sense to you, a good overview is here.
Putting aside the specifics of this case — whether council is too big or too small, whether the provincial government should be rushing to reduce it, whether the court ruling was stretching the definition of freedom of expression and assembly — there is something broader to say about Ford’s comments on whether the courts should be able to check elected governments.
“The Premier seems to think his mandate entitles him to do whatever he pleases and any opposition is illegitimate. He suggests there is something wrong with judges overriding democratic decisions – even when those decisions are found to violate the Constitution. To be sure, many governments have expressed frustration with court decisions. But it is virtually unheard of for a Canadian political leader to appear to question the idea that we are a nation of laws.”
“The premier is, in fact, gambling that Ontario voters see Charter rights in the same way they view an abundance of city councillors — as excess, expensive baggage on an efficient ship of state.
“Or put it another way: if this move gets a simple shrug from Ontario citizens, public opinion is no longer an effective check on politicians who find the Charter of Rights an obstacle to governance. So who is going to be the next premier to find the Charter inconvenient?”
Of course, use of the notwithstanding clause is perfectly legal– after all, it’s part of the constitution, too. On that, here’s Andrew Coyne:
“It is, to be sure, part of the charter, as much as the rights whose override it permits — inserted at the last minute, as part of the grubby horse-trading that is otherwise excoriated as having ‘left Quebec out’ — but that does not oblige us to accept that it should be. For its message is essentially to negate the rest.
“The rights so gaudily guaranteed in the charter, it says, are not in fact guaranteed at all. They are not permanent and universal, but temporary and contingent — not even rights, really, so much as permissions. And what the government gives it can take away.”
One thing that really stood out for me while earning my political science degree is just how many of the checks and balances of democracy are actually just past lawmakers crossing their fingers and hoping future politicians respect unenforceable norms.
Or, as Asher Mercer put it on Twiter:
“This era of western politics will be remembered for the widespread realization that many many things we thought were inviolable rules were just niceties from which we figured no one would ever deviate.”
Ad nauseam
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