Hand update: I’ve got a pretty gnarly scar, but there’s progress. Two weeks ago they removed the stitches from my palm, and I would not wish that pain and discomfort on anyone (note: they can’t anaesthetize your hand for this).
Psychologically I’ve been up and down. I’ve had to work through a feeling of being violated, of having to re-familiarize myself with what my hand can do (via physio) while fighting the fear that I’m going to pull or tear something in the process of rehabbing it back to where it should be.
While this has all been going on the political world south of the border has erupted into a swirl of chaos and condemnation. It’s a type of deja vu, considering we went through four years of this already. In the end, one of the people running for the presidency represented change and the other chose stability; the problem of course is that stability is hard to defend (let alone promote) when the candidate in question is trying to be a celebrity-endorsed centrist while there are so many voices in the mainstream media complaining about a left-wing cabal sacrificing the sanctity of American values. Frankly, it’s only a matter of time before the same debate amps up on this side of the border (it’s basically already here), what with a thoroughly mediocre Prime Minister playing out his third term similar to a sitting duck Biden, with little regard for the public malaise around his party. Cooler heads prevail when there are reasons to stay the course and our current PM struggles to even sell his wins let alone address his weaknesses.
When I wrote my third novel, The Stars Align for Disco Santa, it was during the worst year of Trump (2020), and was certainly influenced by many of the things that have now come to fruition: authoritarian politicians abetted by corporatist tech companies running roughshod over and unveiling the frailty of democracy, exposing how much of the West is protected by evidently feeble gentlemen’s agreements and empty platitudes of decency. In other words, if Harris had won, my book–soon to be doing the rounds of publishers via my agent–would’ve still been relevant, but reflective of a dark time in society now past. Now? It seems more pertinent than ever, which is terribly sad (an understatement), but here I am.
You write the book you have to write. By the time it hits the market you have no say on how trends will have changed in the interim, how the landscape and zeitgeist will have shifted. When my first book was picked up by Wolsak & Wynn, I had to wait nearly three years before it was published; in that time the media landscape seemed inundated with time travel narratives, so that when The Society of Experience finally came out the conceit felt certainly less unique than during the years I’d spent writing and polishing the manuscript. In short, you really have no choice but to deal with it, and I can only hope that, by the time Disco Santa does the rounds, publishers will see it as rising to the occasion.
I’m posting this as a service to the wider community, based on my recent experiences attempting to use Voice Control on Mac as a result of losing the use of my hand due to surgery. For reference, it’s in response to this acknowledged problem with Mac OS systems where, often after an upgrade a bug is introduced that renders Voice Control unusable owing to an error involving the downloading of language files. Having tried all of the prescribed fixes (which no one seems to have found entirely effective), I came across a solution, and one reason I’m posting it here is that the forum thread is closed to responses.
I came across the fix when someone, hearing I had hand surgery, inadvertently suggested I use Siri (which I’ve never used and frankly don’t have use for). However, under the impression that perhaps I could use Siri as a backdoor solution, I happened across a rather magic “fix” which isn’t a fix but rather pointed me in the direction of the Dictation feature in Mac, which I found on this page. Basically: Choose Apple menu () > System Preferences and click on the Keyboard icon and choose the Dictation option (as opposed to the Voice Control option in the Accessibility section)…and sure enough, I could finally activate the option of having voice-to-text successfully. The best part? You don’t even need Siri for this feature (thank god).
It took me many (many) hours to find this fix, so I thought I’d post this so that anyone else having a similar issue will be able to (hopefully) have a way to enable this.
On this note, I have to say that doing client notes with voice-to-text is rather a godsend; not only for my temporary one-handedness, but I actually found dictating my notes verbally was both easier and faster than typing from memory. It could just be a me-thing, but somehow typing my notes from memory requires more effort (mentally) than just openly talking about them via a microphone. I may very well switch to this in the future, semi-permanently, however I’m just happy that I managed to find a solution to this annoying bug.
As someone who has been part of the online tech community since the 90s (Microsoft, Linux, and now Mac), I believe in the value of giving back to the community and I hope that by posting this I can relieve someone of the burden of Apple’s inability to render a fix for this, especially given the circumstances under which someone might need to access this sort of tool.
P.S. The cast was removed from my hand and I’m in the process of doing some intense physiotherapy (literally every two hours I’m supposed to do this), which has allowed me to type two-handedly once more. I’m very thankful for the care I’ve received at St. Michael’s Hospital over the last week. It’s been a bit of an emotional roller-coaster, which I imagine I will write about here sometime soon.
Earlier this year, when I received a notification that the band Slift was playing at Lee’s Palace in October, I immediately bought tickets. I had happened upon their music on a random afternoon, sitting in The Embassy, a music-forward community bar in Kensington Market. It’s a place where the staff play whatever music they like, who are also–crucially–young and have good taste.* I asked the bartender what band he was playing, because it was this wall of psych-rock with virtuosic flourishes of metal and prog. He told me the name of the band, who were from Toulouse, and went to pains to focus on the album in question, the one we were listening to. The album, from 2021, was called Levitation Sessions. According to its Bandcamp page it was recorded “inside the ultra-high voltage electron microscope at the National Institute of Applied Sciences’ CEMES Laboratory in Toulouse.” It’s one 70 minute live-off-the-floor set, based on their studio album, Ummon.
So I bought the album and really adored it; how skilled the playing was and how their sound didn’t seem to veer into the sort of unintentional self-parody that can accompany metal and prog (let alone psych-rock). Every form of music has its tropes, the things that make it necessarily stereotypical, even if the “music” is chaos. And their tone! My god, this album bled tone. To be able to pull something like this off, and do it in such a serious and committed way, was something I admired. I didn’t want ironic detachment or self-knowing winks to the audience. That said, it’s a very specific type of music, and largely because of its bombastic intensity doesn’t exactly make for, um, ¿stable? music to play in the background or on my walks to work.
Here’s the thing: no matter that after a dedicated month I ended up only listening to them intermittently, I was desperate to know what they were like live. I wanted to see/hear/absorb them in-person and how they performed, curious how they could replicate their blistering recorded sound. Obvs, when I received the notification it was a no-brainer.
Months passed (aka the summer), and as the date of the concert approached, especially as I was coming off a hard week at the office, I found myself equivocating. The show was on a Sunday night after all. I was facing a brutal week ahead of me as I prepared–mentally and emotionally–not only for an upcoming four-hour Case Based Assessment I was randomly chosen to complete for the College of Registered Psychotherapists, but also for my upcoming hand surgery 😬 in just over a week. When the Sunday arrived, I received an update from the ticket vendor informing me that, due to issues at the border, the bands (the opener was Meatbodies) would be going on an hour later than scheduled. This meant that, optimistically, Slift weren’t going to take the stage until sometime after 10pm.
As exhausted as I felt, I was determined to go. I took an inventory of the least number of things I needed to bring with me (phone, ID, keys, etc.), because I wanted to be able to shove it all in my pockets. If you’re thinking that this was a preventative step for potential pickpockets, you’d be wrong…
(Side story: around two-and-a-half years ago, when the neglect of human-to-human contact became felt in my bones, along with other necessary disappointments and indignities–among them feeling robbed I didn’t have the opportunity to have a blow-out with friends on my 50th–one of the things I told myself I would do when things Got Better would be to get into a mosh pit. Somewhere. Sometime. Was it a declaration? I don’t know, but wishing for a mosh pit certainly kept my focus afloat sometimes.)
In any case, I proceeded to plan my outfit: old jeans with holes, basic black T-shirt, and a hoodie which would keep me warm outside but could be tied around my waste when it got hot during the concert.
It’s easy to misremember the interior dimensions of Lee’s Palace. It’s a medium-sized venue that can seem cavernous if you’re at the back, leaning against the bar (this was me during Meatbodies) or conversely more intimate down in the pit near the stage. There isn’t a bad sightline at Lee’s. When the opener thanked the audience and started packing their gear, I went against traffic and secured a spot at the back of the pit, knowing that the turnover wouldn’t be that long. Even as the three members of Slift proceeded to set-up their equipment on stage I still wasn’t sure what I was expecting, whether it would be Worth It, and another part of me was reminding me that it was a work night .
From the start it was clear they were there to deliver the goods: a full-on sonic assault, beginning with Ummon, from the self-titled album. It was clear why Slift is a headliner; guitarist, drummer and bass player performing as an organic entity, whose intense focus on rendering each song as passionately as they could was balanced by the fact that they seemed to be plugged-in as a band. No formulaic crowd chatter, no shout-outs except for a single note of thanks to the audience. Gradually, in front of me like a brewing storm, between those pressed against the stage and those of us at the back, I could see a mosh pit forming. Kids bopping…then kids bopping into each other…then kids pushing…and then the bopping kids crowd starts growing. THERE ARE PEOPLE MY AGE IN THE PIT! I make my way to the perimeter, and take on the role of pushing moshers back into the mass of bodies to prevent them from colliding into those at the back who only want to watch the show (please see this handy page for mosh context). It was while they were playing Citadel on a Satellite that I got so close to the whorl of bodies in the centre that I ended up being thrust into the chaos. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve been in a mosh pit (I crowd surfed in my thirties, I remember that), but I wasn’t prepared for it…which I think is the whole point. It wasn’t like I was doing this because I felt immune to danger. Strange hands pushing me about from different angles, me crashing into other moshers; at one point I was pushed backwards, hard, and almost lost my balance but someone was there to push me back in. You can’t control this. You can’t prevent this. You can’t analyze this. You can’t think this. And as soon as I was part of it, I stepped back and returned to guarding the perimeter, soaking in the music and the adrenaline (and yes, the sweat).
Slift probably played for the better part of an hour-and-a-half, maintaining their concentration throughout. My fifty-something body felt like it had been transported to my twenties, only the irony was that my body was in better shape (hello, gym) to be able to keep going for the entire set. When the house lights went up and we began to mill out of Lee’s, I felt lighter. The heaviness I’d been feeling was abated. I felt less scared of adult things. I was also proud that I stuck to my resolution and let myself lose control and fall into the pit.
* If you ever wonder where I find music, this is a great tip (cafés are good, too)
As I’ve done previously, I thought I’d post a list of things I’ve seen in the last while. All of these can be found on major streaming services.
Plan B
Produced for CBC, (streaming locally on Gem) Plan B is a well-made drama with a sci-fi twist. The premise in each season (note: the seasons’ storylines aren’t linked so you don’t need to watch them in order) is the discovery of a phone-in service called Plan B, which — after you submit your payment information — can take you back to an earlier sequence of your life, allowing you to re-live (and re-adjust) your timeline.
The show does a lot without a big budget. It helps that the writing is solid and the premise, rather than being dreamy, often ends up only creating more domestic ethical and moral conundrums for its characters than it solves. This is gritty, grown-up speculative drama (see: Black Mirror, Twilight Zone) that will invite a lot of questions from the viewer about the ways “control” can be addictive to those who are insecure, or indulge our need for justice in ways that goes beyond the grasp of our intent. I found the just-released second season more compelling, but I would recommend the series as a whole.
Time Bandits
I was not particularly interested in watching this, despite multiple critics giving it praises. I’m skeptical of producers taking my childhood memories and rehashing them for the next generation. Discovering that Taika Waititi was behind the series budged the needle a bit. Then there was finding out from my partner, just as I was sitting down to watch it, the controversy over one actor’s on-set experiences during the production of the show. So yes, mixed feelings going in.
While the first episode contains a lot of promise and is definitely the comedically sharpest of what I watched, it’s a case of diminishing returns afterwards. There are some genuine moments of whimsy and satire, and Easter eggs for Python fetishists, but it ends up overly plot-driven with surprisingly little-to-no interest in character development or relationship building. Less surprisingly, Waititi himself is cast but feels inserted just to fill the running time by chewing the scenery. I’ll note that this was made to include a younger viewership, so it’s possible some jokes I thought were basic might land better with children. We stopped after four episodes.
The Lady in the Lake
Based on a novel by Laura Lippman, The Lady in the Lake features Natalie Portman in her first major TV role. The series revolves around two murders in Baltimore in the 60s, the first being a young girl found by the river. This draws-in two narratives from two very different parts of the city. The first is through Portman’s character, a smothered Jewish housewife who is frustrated by the oppressiveness of her social circle and coming to terms with the sacrifices she’s made. The second is by Moses Ingram (who you may recognize from The Queen’s Gambit), a Black single mother who works as a window display model when she’s not making money on the side at the local gambling house.
The lives of the two leads intertwine (albeit in different timelines) as Porter leaves her husband and resentful son, and moves into an apartment in a Black inner-city neighbourhood as she begins a journalistic pursuit of the girl’s murderer. Ingram’s thread is certainly the more propulsive of the two, as she tries to balance municipal political disappointments with supporting her stand-up comedian husband, with everything centred on a nightclub run by a powerful racketeer. There’s a writerly attempt here to draw a parallel between the shared experience of two women oppressed by their circumstances, both of whom must ultimately rely on their persistence and resourcefulness. However, this shared experience can sometimes feel a little like wishful thinking given the fact that there are significant socioeconomic differences between both characters, despite both in their own way paddling up-river in a male-dominated society. Ingram’s stakes are also much higher: she may be the Lady of the title.
There’s a lot going on in this show and certainly maintains a novel-y feel to it. I don’t know what it is about jazz clubs and films / shows that want to be a lot more than they are, because while The Lady in the Lake captures the politics and culture of its era and sports a good cast, the overall telling of the story can feel uneven, despite being a twisty and intimate glimpse of a different time.
I suppose this is a gratitude post, but my friend Marcos, whom I went to film school with, recently received a Canada Council grant to make an independent film, which is super-exciting. Not only because of his getting the grant but because he was able to make an hour-long project that he’s been sitting on for quite a while, which (at least I think) spoke to both his interests speaking from the perspective of someone who for a several years worked as a journalist in Peru in the volatile 80s and 90s, as well as someone who regularly can be seen around the neighbourhood we share, setting up a tripod with a Bolex, shooting whatever shorts he manages to make on his own time. In other words, it’s nice to see people who “put in the work” be rewarded.
The reason I write about this is that he recently sent me a cut of the film in question, looking for feedback. And it wasn’t until I watched it and began to think critically about it that I was transported back to my time at Rhombus Media (2002-2007). While I was there I would regularly be handed VHS tapes (and subsequently DVDs) of whatever documentaries, TV shows and feature films were being worked on at the time. I may not have been paid particularly well (we won’t go there) but I was exposed to so much and — importantly, I think — treated as someone whose opinion people there respected. This combination can in some circumstances be exploitative, but — at least about the feedback notes — I had no doubt they appreciated the perspective.
As I sat down to write my reflections and recommendations on my friend’s film, I began thinking about sound design, colour correction, and picture editing in ways — functional, aesthetic, creative — I honestly haven’t tapped into that deeply for the better part of seventeen years. It was a great exercise for me (not to mention helpful for Marcos, I hope). I say this because it’s one thing to sit and watch a random movie and Have Thoughts about it, but another altogether to have to put into words, clearly and constructively, how someone might go about making improvements: things that slow the pacing too much, cutaways that don’t necessary make visual sense, establishing shots that seem orphaned from what it is they’re attempting to establish. It’s a skill that, with surprisingly little effort, I was able to tap into, and I felt very gratified to have been offered the opportunity to do so, and to be reminded that the twenty odd years I spent in the industry, starting at the bottom of the ladder in TV commercials as an assistant editor/gofer and walking away after working on the SAW series as a post supervisor, wasn’t for nothing (or at least only collecting stories to tell at parties).
It took someone on social media posting a reminder of an upcoming deadline for me to realize that I haven’t applied for a writer’s grant in the better part of three years. For anyone outside of publishing reading this, while there’s no obligation to do this (unless of course you’re depending upon writing for a living, in which case it pretty much would be an obligation), it can make life a lot less burdensome for those who want to be able to take time off work so that we might devote ourselves more thoroughly to our writing projects. Most of us secretly bend time and space to be able to spend a few hours here and there each week.
This strikes me whenever I’m researching residencies for writers. A lot of the ones I’ve been interested in have a time stipulation of something grand, like “at least three weeks”, and that’s a deal-breaker for me. I pay for residencies out of my own pocket, and typically 5-7 days is the max I can allot. This is where grants come in. The big ones, from the Ontario Arts Council and Canada Arts Council, have the capacity to provide wide financial support (in other words, scalable to the needs of the applicant, depending upon their professional and personal circumstances). The catch is that you have to go through the application process, which necessitates answering a lot of very detailed questions, not only about your project but about things like your budget (which in itself requires a breakdown of living expenses, etc). You have to essentially provide a compelling argument for the arts council awarding your project, as well as providing a reasonably accurate idea that you (the artist) understand what it is that you’re talking about from a financial perspective.
One of the reasons I’m writing this post is that I think it might be easy for outsiders to think that Arts Council grants are easily awarded, as if it were a question of simply hacking an algorithm. Let me assure you: they are not. If such were the case, there wouldn’t be professional grant writers marketing themselves (and paying their bills assumedly with something other than magic beans). Most artists might be able to summarize their projected finances, or describe their motivation for being an artist, or provide a captivating enticement for their current work-in-progress. Not many can do all three. And, just to add a dose of reality, even if you manage to ace all three, you’re still at the mercy of whomever is reading your application and whatever inevitable cognitive biases and preferences they have.
I’ve never received a big grant, though I’ve certainly applied. I supposed I stopped applying for the same reason I begin walking when I realize the streetcar isn’t coming any time soon; I’d rather try to achieve something on my own than be let down by something out of my control. That said, I run a small business. If I take time off, I don’t have any income. So yes, when I see a TWO MONTH MINIMUM on a writer’s retreat, I can get punchy. Truth is, there’s something strangely out-of-date about a framework whose parameters so clearly prohibit those who don’t have careers which allow such long absences.
The grant I mentioned at the beginning of this post is the Recommender Grants for Writers (via the Ontario Arts Council). It’s not nearly as big (or as arduous to complete) as others. I was lucky enough to have been awarded once before, which helped me book a flight out west to the Banff Centre for the Arts for a self-directed residency, so I pushed myself to submit a sample of Book Three to one of the indie publishers who are participating in the program this year, hopefully before their internal deadline (with this grant in particular, which runs from September to January, the deadline for submissions is set internally by the publishers).
One of the benefits of grant writing, and a reason for my writing this post, is that it can motivate (aka force) you to polish/revise/clarify your work for an actual (aka real) audience, even if you never see them or know exactly what they liked or didn’t. It can be a good prod to work on your bio (which a lot of writers freak out about), or the synopsis of your piece. I’d like to think there’s no downside, other than going through a bit of stress.
There’s a lot going on in the world, which accumulatively makes it difficult to address in a way that doesn’t sound glib or vague, so I’m going to keep this about the things I’ve been watching on streaming services lately.
The Pigeon Tunnel
Errol Morris (Thin Blue Line, The Fog of War) directs a documentary about author John le Carré? What’s not to like? Well, as someone who is an unabashed fan of both, I found the result to be perplexingly unsatisfying. It’s a near continuous interview with Le Carré (whose real name is David Cornwell), interspersed with research clippings, biographical re-enactments, and clips from (mostly BBC) adaptations of Le Carré’s work over the past 50+ years. Unlike their individual works, it simply never rises above what is a rather pedestrian affair. Plodding, lifeless, and visually uninteresting. It felt as if Morris went into this under the impression that, like Robert McNamara in The Fog of War, he would be able to peel away Le Carré’s defences and force him to confront the betrayals and complicities of a former low-level spy whose father was a serial con-man. It doesn’t happen, and it’s somewhat telegraphed right at the beginning when Le Carré addresses the art of interrogation. Morris, it seems, is simply unable to extract anything amounting to a confession or unguarded moment — I had to ask myself whether he’s ever interviewed an Englishman before. It’s also not lost on me that, given the author’s sons and estate weigh heavily in the production credits, there might have been some political interference also. Strictly for fans only.
The Fall of the House of Usher
I like what Mike Flanagan has done with mainstream TV horror. Starting with The Haunting of Hill House, he’s been able to assemble a troupe of performers in order to tell, in ways both chilling and accessible, stories that rise above their reference material (Shirley Jackson, Henry James and in the current case, Edgar Allan Poe) in order to address human connection, family bonds, and spiritual faith. Even efforts that are so-so (The Haunting of Bly Manor) have their moments of sharp observation, and his cast is typically strong. The Fall of the House of Usher follows suit and is undeniably stronger than Bly and more relevant (via its unmistakable reference to the fentanyl crisis sparked by the Sackler family and Purdue Pharmaceuticals) and engaging than Hill House. I still think the vampire drama Midnight Mass is his best work, but Usher has a lot going for it (for one, it doesn’t have MM‘s monologues). There’s an unfortunate tendency throughout the series which seems to correlate sexuality with corruption of character, but at the same time — unlike Hill House‘s very American family-first romanticism — it takes no prisoners. Nice to see Canadian actor Bruce Greenwood as the patriarch of a fate-ridden family.
Infinity Pool
I finally got around to seeing this (note: this is the director’s cut) and I was blown away by it. It’s my first time watching the work of Brandon Cronenberg, and while it’s hard not to remark on the body horror that it shares in common with his father’s oeuvre, it very much stands on its own. Its story about an aimless author riding the coattails of his wealthy wife, who falls into increasingly bizarre and existentially terrifying events involving a group of mysterious tourists he meets at an exclusive resort is as hypnotic as it is nightmarish. There is some excellent world-building here (the resort is in a fictional country with its own customs and language, which adds to the tension), and Alexander Skarsgård is solid as the self-involved protagonist who catches on too late to what is happening as he’s enmeshed in a series of violent incidents that are punctuated by hallucinogenic orgies. The standout here, however, is Mia Goth, who plays one of the fellow tourists who draws Skarsgård into a web of deception. She is at turns alluring and terrifying. Not everything makes sense here, but it stops (thankfully) at being too clever for its own good. Note: the director’s cut is much more explicit, fyi.
So, let me try to summarize the previous entry (this a just a running thought, folks, and if it seems to be directionless I’ll pull the plug): I’m attempting to invert the notion of “too much freedom,” which is typically aimed towards people seeking acknowledgement of social justice issues, seeing as in reality if there’s going to be an argument for “too much freedom” it’s in the much more serious and widely documented actions by right-wing extremism.
Part of what I’m musing on are questions of how we got here. How, for example, we have so many people who are poorly informed.
There’s an interesting piece in the Globe & Mail, by columnist David Parkinson, pointing out the chasm that can exist between what a populace thinks they know, and what the more complicated truth may be. In this case, some myths that Canadians seem to have come to believe about our economy. We think our interest rates are the highest compared to other countries, but the opposite is true; we think the carbon tax is hurting our wallets but its overall effect is practically negligible on the average person. An easy takeaway from this is the need for better public education about how the parts of the economy work. But even the best education can’t save us from our own psychology.
We’re easily influenced by phenomena which can seem to draw its own conclusions. The sight of a street person sitting on the sidewalk, drinking from a bottle a sherry distracts from the many possible reasons, likely spanning many years, how that sight came to be. If we were able in that moment to step back, we’d begin to see how factors such as socio-economic status, childhood instability, and mental health issues probably contributed to this outcome. Were we magically to have access to this information, it’s likely we would conclude the street person we see on the sidewalk probably didn’t choose to be where they are, which is where our minds might go if we don’t know any better, or don’t wish to know any better.
A very interesting piece of data is the prevalence of brain injury in homeless populations. We know through research data that street people suffer from a host of unfortunate situations. While data may not tell the full (read: nuanced) story, more and more it provides a scaffolding to better understanding, potentially leading to better social outcomes. The problem is that, to the average person a) data is invisible, and b) because most of us just want our individual lives to go well, and don’t have the time or capacity to understand everything else, we rely on a combination of news, friends, social media, suspicion, projection, transference, you name it. So, even before treading into the topic of intentional disinformation, there are many ways in which we can unintentionally lull our way into thinking we know more about things than we do.
All of this said, a defining issue, which I touched on previously is one of severity. There’s a significant degree of difference between someone who mistakenly believes the federal government is responsible for the Bank of Canada’s decisions to hike interest rates, and someone who is spreading hatred against LGBTQ+ individuals on public channels. The consequences to the former are few and isolated. To the latter other people’s lives may be at stake.
And this is where disinformation makes everything worse. It’s the difference between someone having strong feelings against a politician or member of society, and that same someone wanting to storm the Capital building or intimidate drag storytime at the local library.
And I should take a break and come back to this…to be continued.
I’ve been piecing together something recently, or rather I’ve been doing it very passively for the last few years.
There’s something I took from a controversy from years ago. It was during the conversation that was happening about the voice of Apu (first started through the documentaryThe Problem With Apu, then followed by a rather wilting Simpsons episode in response). I don’t want this particular controversy to necessarily be a centrepiece of what I’m trying to get out, and yet it might be so that’s why I don’t want to jettison it entirely.
The thing I took was from a response by Matt Groening to the suggestion that Apu’s depiction was outdated and/or even racist. “[…] I think it’s a time in our culture where people love to pretend they’re offended.” (link to larger USA Today interview).
I’m not sure what Matt Groening’s technical role description is today, but in the beginning he was counter-culture. All you need to do is look at some of his Life In Hell strips to get that picture. He knew how to tweak the nose of authority with a deeply humanistic empathy for the severe consequences that come with authoritarianism and fascism. The Simpsons gave him a larger canvas, first as an experiment/time-filler on The Tracey Ullman Show, then when it had its own TV slot, which it proceeded to…well, it’s such a ubiquitous cultural product that any summary seems trite, doesn’t it?
I was deeply disappointed by Groening’s dismissal at the time, and something about it has been eating at me. It was a mark (if not a casual philosophy) of a type of individual who was speaking from a place of disproportionate comfort: money, power, influence, achievement, cultural impact. And what he was suggesting was that we were the ones with too much: accommodation, choices, ideas. And that by virtue of this we were the thin-skinned ones. He might as well have said — and I swear that Groening did say this, but I must’ve inserted it into my memory because it’s not part of any response of his at the time — that this was a case of “too much freedom”.
There’s a great irony to this dismissive sentiment, and it’s something I largely see perniciously emulated in right-of-centre cultural criticism: these people [children, racialized individuals, the systemically disadvantaged, etc] have it easy, and maybe if they worked harder they would shut up and enjoy their life. And I guess this is where I’m doing some mental wrestling because I actually feel there is too much freedom, but, rather instead of it manifesting in some nightmare of political correctness (waiting for that any day now btw), I’m seeing it in the form of the anti-vax movement, the so-called “freedom convoy” movement, the indisputable rise of far-right militarism under our noses, denial of climate catastrophe and people who demonstratively don’t understand what 5G is.
I’m tempted to ask: are these just two sides of the same “too much freedom” coin? If so, what’s on the other side, because it feels like a bullshit piece of bothside-ism to frame it as such. Is the answer truly you can’t have any progress towards a more just society without a carte blanche allowance for the worst of humanity also?
Separately — just sayin’ — supposing we could, how would we go about lessening “freedom”…without that being a flaming giant untenable nightmare-in-the-making [insert ghost of Stalin]?
I’m tempted to ask: are these just two sides of the same “too much freedom” coin? If so, what’s on the other side, because it feels like a bullshit piece of bothside-ism to frame it as such. Is the answer truly you can’t have any progress towards a more just society without a carte blanche allowance for the worst of humanity also?
I’d be happy to live in a society where my neighbour is a conspiracy freak. To each their own. But when the conspiracy freak starts vandalizing public infrastructure and sowing wider social chaos for beliefs that — political ideology aside — are unfounded or delusional, then part of me sometimes wonders whether there is too much freedom. I’m not talking about being inconvenienced by traffic due to a protest. I’m talking about something like Jan 6th. I’m talking about not just freedom to be stupid, but an enabling of stupid, a metastasizing of stupid as freedom gives it more license. I can’t help but want to tie this into what I think a big part of the problem is: where we get our information, and who/where we get it from. The thought being not that there’s a central source of misinformation/distortion that needs to be regulated (or vanquished), but rather — yes, you saw this coming — social media.
Anyways, I need to leave and come back to this … I’ll either tack onto the end or start something later…
[quick insert] But here’s the thing: social media is just a messaging service; McLuhanism aside, within the context of what I’m talking about, the social medium isn’t the message(s). I also want to avoid a reductionist approach that is hyper-focused on seeking a singular villain, and leave room for complexity and randomness, the stuff that keeps us from convincing ourselves that patterns, just because we notice them, have to be something (causal, intentional) outside of themselves.
