Categories for Musings

Before he won in a landslide in 2010, I recall the same things being said about Rob Ford

As in: he can’t win, he won’t win, he won’t last past [pick a date].

Well, here we are, folks. Donald Trump is going to be the GOP nominee – unless there is a gang-up, in which case he will be the new Ross Perot. Either way, I’m reminded of what I usually say to my bewildered urban pals: “There’s another country out there, and most of us progressive types have never been to it.”


Mbongwana Star – Malukayi (feat. Konono No.1)

You must listen to this. You must.

Matt Galloway was playing it on CBC’s Metro Morning as I came in today. I asked him who it was. Here’s what he read to us:

“In 2015, no piece of music so transfixed me as Mbongwana Star’s “Malukayi”. It summons an entire landscape. It moves like weather. Mbongwana Star is a group formed by two Congolese men in their 50s: Coco Ngambali and Theo Nsituvuidi, former members of Staff Benda Billi, who play music from their wheelchairs.”

This song is incredible. It recalls some of the ambient stuff I (secretly, usually) love: Public Image’s Radio 4, Pere Ubu’s Blow Daddy-o, the Liars’ Be Quiet Mr. Heart Attack. And anything by Wendy Carlos, going back to when I was 16, when he was Walter.

Check it out. And thanks, Metro Morn.


35 years ago today

My girlfriend Paula Christison had been over, and we’d been studying, then watching something on the little black and white TV we had. My Carleton roommate, Lee G. Hill, was there too. Lee and I had been great friends in Calgary. In junior high, we’d started a couple fanzines with Beatles-centric themes. In our shared room on Second Russell, we had a couple John Lennon posters up amongst the punk rock stuff.

Paula left for her place downtown, so Lee and I were studying when the phone rang. It was Paula. “John Lennon’s been shot, babe,” she said. “It’s on the radio.”

His assassination, on December 8, 1980, was of course a terrible tragedy – and so, to me, was the fact that his last album (before the inevitable avalanche of ham-fisted compilations and retrospectives) was a piece of self-indulgent, saccharine shite like Double Fantasy.

Generally, he always needed Paul as an editor, and vice-versa. But his best album – and one of the best albums of all time, in my view – was Plastic Ono Band. It was like him: it was stark, and raw, and different, and deeply, deeply personal. Some say the LP was the product of his dalliance with primal scream therapy, or his response to the (necessary, and overdue) collapse of the Beatles. To me, it was instead an actual piece of art and great rock’n’roll, improbably found under the same piece of shrink wrap. Like listening to someone’s soul, without having received an invite to do so.  You should listen to it today.

The next morning, exams weren’t cancelled, though it felt to me like they should have been. When I walked into Carleton’s gym, there was a guy sitting there, already wearing a John Lennon T-shirt. I wanted to punch him. Instead, I just took my seat and wrote the stupid exam.

Thirty five years. I can’t believe he’s been gone that long; I can’t believe I’m way older than he ever got a chance to be. It sucks.

Here’s my favourite picture of him, the one I used to use on posters I’d make up for Hot Nasties shows.  I liked it because he looked like a punk. That’s Stu in the background, I think.  Also long gone.

We miss you, John.  Hardly knew you.

Lennon_l


In this week’s Hill Times: sunny ways indeed 

It was odd, the “sunny ways” thing.

Not the phrase in and of itself. It has been around for a while. Sir Wilfrid Laurier apparently used it first, one hundred years or so ago. Said Laurier:

“If it were in my power, I would try the sunny way of patriotism, asking…to be just and to be fair, asking to be generous to the minority, in order that we may have peace among all creeds and races…Do you not believe that there is more to be gained by appealing to the heart and soul of men rather than by trying to compel them to do a thing?”
 
In an never-ending election campaign characterized by bald ugliness – cf., the use of the niqab as a wedge issue, the saturnalian “barbaric practices hotline” stunt, the candidates who didn’t know much about the Holocaust or basic decency – Justin Trudeau’s invocation of Laurier’s aphorism struck a chord. We need to recall the better angels of our nature, implied Trudeau, or we will all be in big trouble. Canadians listened, and they responded. They obviously agreed: sunny ways, whatever those are, are desirable.
 
Surveying the entrails of various polls, it’s apparent that the Liberal leader’s political honeymoon isn’t over. His first few weeks haven’t been without difficulty, but he remains endurably popular. The silly “Nannygate” tempest, the necessary Syrian refugee recalculation, the customary fiscal cupboard-is-bare announcement: none have put a dent in the affection Canadians feel for the youthful new prime Minister.
 
And yet, and yet: 2015 does not feel like it is ending in a particularly sunny fashion, does it? Just this week, there has been terrible unfairness of the hand that was dealt to Liberal MP Mauril Belanger. There has been our surging unemployment rate, at a time when the reverse has been happening in the U.S. There has been the election of Nova Scotia’s Geoff Regan as Speaker, and his call to stop heckling in the Commons – greeted by actual heckling. There has been the new government’s plan to reform Senate appointments, condemned within minutes by British Columbia.
 
And there has been the murder of 14 men and women in San Bernardino, of course, happening in the same week we remember the massacre of 14 women at the Ecole Polytechnique 26 years ago.
 
In yesterday walks tomorrow: the challenges we collectively faced in 2015 with the old boss – growing terrorism, shrinking economies – are likely to be the same challenges we will face in 2016 with the new boss. No revelation, there. But what is to be done about it?
 
I passed along my single recommendation a close friend of Justin Trudeau this week. Your greatest asset, I offered, is Justin Trudeau himself – and his ability to connect with Canadians, to communicate with them in a way that they understand. In the election campaign, it worked in a dramatic fashion: Trudeau’s charisma and sunny ways vaulted the Liberal Party from a distant third place to a definitive first. Trudeau – more than any single policy plank, more than any single Grit candidate or ad – was the reason the Liberal Party defied convention, and won.
 
So: use, then, the bully pulpit that is the Prime Minister’s Office. Use Trudeau, himself, to make the case for civility in the Commons, and accepting Syrian refugees, and actual Senate reform, and a better approach to security. Use his voice to rally Canadians in the days ahead.
 
Stephen Harper was a tactician and technician: he completely lacked the oratorical skills, or the inclination, to do what comes naturally to Justin Trudeau. Not since Jean Chretien, in fact, have we had a Prime Minister who knows that the way to reach people is through their hearts, and not just their heads.
 
2016 is giving us every indication it will be as grinding and as bleak as was much of 2015. Canada, however, already possesses the means to reassure itself.
 
Justin Trudeau, your hour has come round at last. Time to use your voice to show us what that “sunny ways” stuff really meant.