Archive for September, 2024

Can’t You Hear the Music?

September 30, 2024

I don’t know if you remember those old black and white B movies. The ones where the hero goes through the whole movie being a day late and a dollar short, the villain is always two steps ahead and the fair maiden or the good hearted dufus blunder into danger. There’s always danger to blunder into…and that is when you hear the music. The hero hears the music but faintly, because it looks like he’s too far away. Up to that point we’re not sure who the villain is but he or she is always a very bad person. So the music tells us that something bad is going to happen.

The composers who work on film scores are specialists and the musicians know their stuff. In many films the music sound track carries the story…Some bring extra tension by running against the action…Hitchcock loved to use music as a bludgeon.. Even when I was a kid sitting in a theatre I wanted to warn the good guys or the innocent victims to turn around and get the fuck out of there…the bad guy is there waiting with an axe…Flee you idiots…can’t you hear the music?

They don’t, of course, but we do and that makes us feel a kind of moral frisson. We can’t do anything about it but we know it’s going to happen. But the rational part of our brain keeps us from dealing 911. We’re in a movie theatre stupid…but I’ve seen people shout at the screen…”Look out…” As if..

I don’t know about you but I’m hearing the music a lot lately and it feels like I”m stuck in that theatre watching the bad shit unfold and hoping that dumb-ass-never-get-there-in-time hero will get there in time, this time. Do you think he will or she…will?

They don’t make movies like that anymore except as pale parodies. No, now the heroes are macho motherfuckers armed to the teeth in camo and there’s at least three of them going to save us all from the mad scientists gang. they race over city streets and country sides across deserts in armoured cars and planes. I mean, four of these guys could take down a country. And yet…at a certain point in the movie the audience will feel the betrayal…one of the hero team is working for the baddies. The fair Maiden has been having a secret affair with the boss hero but the chief bad guy thinks she’s his girl…Betrayals proliferate…who can you trust? and here comes the music…danger lurks . Maybe the bad guy isn’t as bad as everybody thinks, maybe he wants to save the girl from an evil sordid world…take her away to a little farm in central America near a beach with palm trees. Maybe the good guy is too much of a macho hard case who wants to save her and dress her in a white and pink pinafore with ribbons in her hair .

The music has become much more complicated, Intricate and twisted. You want to leave the theatre but you can’t. Just then the neighbour comes out of his house with an assault rifle (He’s an ex-soldier who lives alone and likes it that way). He listens to Frank Sinatra records on a vintage Bang and Oloffson Stereo and the noise from next door is a problem. Now…the music sound track has Frank Sinatra singing in the back ground and the neighbour in a bath robe with his AR 15 marching up the driveway. The Heroine screams and armoured van full of macho motherfuckers in coming around the corner half a block away. The bad guy spots the neighbour and spins around .. The music hits a mini crescendo. Bad guy shoots and wings the neighbour in one leg. The van load of MMFs is too damn slow but they’ve all loaded their guns and pulled on their black beanies . They’re listening to Led Zeppelin through their head sets.

There’s a sudden quiet in the drive way with the neighbour down on one knee. The music is quietly urgent….Come on, Come ON…get up …the asshole is coming, stupid. Can’t you hear the music.?

The neighbour whips up the rifle and drills the bad guy who looks totally surprised .Like…he didn’t know that was a real gun..

The Maiden screams .

The Van load of mother fuckers arrives and leap out and search the joint for the rest of the bad guys..

There are a few shots in the background and we can see the crew searching the house looking professional with their own spot of adrenaline music but the main music tells us that its all over and the fair maiden is with the neighbour who saved the day…tending to his wounded leg.

“where did you come from ?”she asks

I live next door right over there…Can’t you hear the music ?

And we do…It’s Frank Sinatra singing “Luck be A lady Tonight.”

Wait a minute…this aint no movie…

In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Israel, In Washington, In London, In Paris, in the hallways of high schools in America, On dirt roads on Indian Reserves, In filthy basements with needle littered floors and shivering bodies in rags and blankets. Different music…

Hear it?

Blues 29 09 24

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I know what I like

September 27, 2024

I had a friend named Walter Lacosta. Walter was a truly strange dude. He arrived in Canada sometime in the early sixties from some eastern bloc country and set about becoming himself. He told me once that he had been someone else before his current self and that his current self kept changing and evolving. So much so that he felt he needed anchors to hold the core of his being in place while the evolution was going on. That way he wouldn’t wake up one morning not knowing who the fuck he was. He therefore invested a lot of energy in discovering what sort of anchors he needed and which were the most effective. Friendships were high on the list because they help define who we are and that’s true for all of us. Unfortunately Walter wasn’t good at friendships. People thought he was batshit crazy and he dressed in black martial arts outfits and shaved his head. He was a two hundred pound walking menace, Walter, and that suited him just fine, because he was a very paranoid person. Martial arts was another anchor for his soul and he did work at it but he kept getting thrown out of the dojo because he didn’t like hitting people. Well not exactly, he thought that he’d like to hit people and had a long list of people he’d like to hit in his head…but the ones in the dojo just weren’t on the list. He thought if hurt them they wouldn’t like him. Are you getting a little of the flavour of Walter? Believe me there was much more.

Quite aside from everything else he was an extremely bright fellow. Well read, finely attuned (as all paranoids are) to the world around him and filled with aspirations. He was at one time, part of the story editor program at the CBC . This was a program designed to develop young people interested in media and the arts and to lead along the path to becoming producers or more likely into careers in broadcasting . I don’t know if he was any good. I didn’t know him then but I know others who were in the program and they did very well.

Walter ended up driving a cab in Toronto. He loved and hated it. He told me that it would be a great gig if he didn’t have to pick anybody up…or if he could pick them up and just take them where ever he wanted. Walter did acid while driving his cab. His eyes looked like pinwheels and he looked like a B-movie assassin . I wouldn’t get in a fucking cab with him and I liked him. He was a feature in the fringe art culture of Toronto. Surreal people who lived in the shadow world of Queen Street bars and music halls. He got a job as muscle for male strippers which opened a whole world of sexual insanity for him. He self published a diary of his days and nights with the cock ring gang. It’s four volumes of hand written observations. I have one around here somewhere.

I usually worked on my drawings late at night…I liked the quiet. It wasn’t the quiet of noise that I liked because I loved Italian Rock Music at the time but it was the quiet of movement. Cities have a lot of noise and light pollution for sure but cities are places of constant movement. Cars, people, activity, that’s “movement pollution” and it diminishes at night. Walter would show up randomly at that time and we’d talk. He was never quite at peace but he was calm enough when we talked. His search for himself was exhausting, led him up dark alleys and blind streets. He couldn’t really understand the world and he was very bright and he had a better view of it than most people. He thought that understanding the world would help him place himself in it. Personally I didn’t give that much of a shit. I’d found lots of places in the world that I didn’t quite fit and I was content with that. He had the feeing that the world didn’t like him..well paranoia, I suppose. On the other hand he thought it was all hilarious, like there were cosmic jokes everywhere that most people never saw…

One night we were ripped to the tits, talking gibberish and thinking it made sense. He said ” I don’t know what’s going on but I’m ready for it. I don’t know what it is but I know what I like.” . Later on we came to conclusion that we didn’t know much about Rastafarianism but we liked the dreadlocks and reverence for weed.

I kept moving, coast to coast, and it was a while before I got word of what happened to Walter. He checked out at Cherry Beach. It was a place where he liked to go at night…look out at the water. The police constantly harassed him there. He was too weird. I don’t know if he ever found himself or became himself. I think he was always the self he was going to be . He just couldn’t reconcile the many pieces but I like to think they were all there . I didn’t judge him then and I don’t judge him now. The time we spent together was crazy and delightful. Misfits, stoned and laughing at the night…not knowing what it is…but knowing what we like. See ya later Walter.

And maybe that’s enough.

Blues: 26 09 24

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Atrocity

September 26, 2024

I’m eighty two years old and I can’t remember a time in my life when atrocities were not being committed somewhere. I may not have known it at the time but I learned about it later. I also learned later that atrocities were being committed for generations before I was born. I don’t think we need a dictionary definition of “atrocity” . It’s pretty clear that these are moral transgressions against people or peoples reprehensible enough that a majority of us would or should be outraged, and feel that it should be exposed, arrested, prevented.

Unfortunately, the fact that they keep happening and they become larger or more unimaginably horrible is adequate evidence that prevention isn’t possible. it’s not a question of whether we should just live with it. In fact we do live with it and that makes me wonder about the ethical and moral frameworks that underpin our society…globally. We all know that the moral boundaries of different cultures, different societies , are not the same but we assume that certain fundamentals should apply universally.

Don’t we?

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about legal and moral boundaries that should be applied to Artificial Intelligence. , AI. More then fifty years ago scientists were debating about the rules governing robots. It was early days back then and almost no-one was talking about AI but there were a tiny number of thinkers who could foresee a day when computers would become powerful enough to learn by themselves. Somewhere along the line they came up with the ethical guideline that they called the “prime directive” . And it is an interesting philosophical concept that declares that robots should not be made that kill people. I think the underlying principle was that there should only be “good” robots that wouldn’t hurt people. Military funding of robotic research and development kind of put that prime directive in the shade. But AI is far more potent than a robot that welds parts on your car or vacuums your living room. What kind of prime directives should apply to AI and from where would they be derived?

More importantly, how could they be enforced and by whom? Lately scientists and world leaders in the tech fields have been warning that AI may be more dangerous than the nuclear weapons threats we’ve been living with for seventy odd years. The nuclear weapons business is generally state controlled and internationally monitored. AI is neither.

Consider this. You buy something from Amazon or any other on-line outlet. The purchase, even the search without a purchase is recorded and tracked back to your computer and Amazon will use that information to contact you directly to offer similar products . We never stop to think about the complexities of computation, communication and data mining that involves. Now consider the buying habits of hundreds of millions of people becoming data points to be mined by AI. O.K. now think about “the cloud” . What the fuck is the cloud? It’s data storage not confined to your computer or my computer. So where is this cloud and who has access to it. Well people actually pay for access to it so that they extract data for a variety of purposes. But…AI has access to it.

Wait. Wait. Let’s not get all paranoid about this. The fact that AI can learn by itself and the sources of learning are many and varied and include what is stored in the cloud should be a concern but we don’t need to get crazy about it.

Which brings us back to atrocities. What makes atrocities possible is the deterioration and failure of a universal moral framework which identifies and prosecutes and prevents the proliferation of atrocities. When we consider the potential for mischief that is possible with AI…it seems that we need to re-examine the whole idea of universal prime directives and that means looking at our whole socio political and economic structure, globally. How we live and how we relate to each other, how our laws work or don’t work.

If we don’t…it will be our own atrocity.

Blues: 25 09 24

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The Asshole Index

September 17, 2024

There ought to be one.

It seems to me that the general population of assholes has grown exponentially in the past twenty years. There have always been enough to go around and I suppose during the “kinder and gentler” sixties and seventies when daily weed insulated me from most of it I started thinking that maybe it was just me…Maybe it wasn’t that there so many assholes around but that my intolerance had given me a bias that saw more than there actually were. But right here and right now, I think no…there are really more of them. I might even be one of them from time to time and at my age with my various afflictions I’m O.K. with that. While I’m selfishly willing to cut myself some slack I’m less charitable about the proliferation of assholes and identifiable types and sub-types we’re seeing every day. T.V. is full of them and they appear in the streets, in shops and stores, on bicycle paths, and today’s favourite, behind you at stop lights in jacked up gigantic Dodge Ram pick -ups and Ford F150s and big Escalade S.U.V.s. In my car they fill the whole rear window with chrome grill. For a tiny moment I think that if I leave the light too slow…the mother fucker will eat my whole car. Asshole! Now, it might be a perfectly nice person in that urban tank, I don’t know but it is the asshole-ness of the situation that makes it feel unlikely. So that’s maybe partly on me, I should just chill.

The trouble with asshole-ness is that encounters are cumulative. You can only ignore so much until one day you wake up and find that breakfast has turned against you. What was tolerable a year ago is now not so much and from what I hear, a lot of people are feeling that way. And here is the vicious cycle…the less tolerant we are , the more likely we are going to become part of the asshole-ness. If only temporarily.

There are professional ass-holes. No doubt about it. Over officious people with a little authority who take it too seriously and seem to enjoy making others miserable, or who just get too much joy out of flexing their tiny power. Lately (or maybe always) that includes police. I have been bashed a couple of times and bullied more than a few times by police who were far too diligent in “defending the community” from my perceived misdeeds. (Yes, there were some misdeeds). Politicians, I don’t even want to go there. Anybody reading this will certainly have their own idea of who is an asshole in that bunch. Bureaucrats can be great assholes and they can do it almost anonymously. Try reaching somebody at the phone company about a problem. Better still, the tax office.

In the old days I ran into inanimate assholes. I had a green VW that was a true asshole. Wouldn’t start when I had to be somewhere, went to sleep on the highway twice. I’ve had computers that mysteriously vanished pages of work, a drawing table that tipped and dumped a bottle of India ink over a drawing that I had worked on for several hours. Asshole.

My own true love swims several times a week at a local pool. She told me today that she was chatting with one of the older ladies at the pool and they noted that it seems like a lot of the older men there behave like assholes. Crowd the lanes, splash other swimmers and rudely order people out of their way. They need to be careful those old assholes. My old lady is an organizer . She’ll mobilize the other old ladies and sneak up under those dudes and pull them under. Hah!

Blues: 17 09 24

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Those Who Have Not

September 15, 2024

Why do I write this? It is pontification, words thrown into the air to fall wherever they may. Today my words are about the homeless. Millions of words have been written and spoken about the homeless. It is as if they are now a separate species. As if they passed the point where they were a problem that could be solved and entered a state where their existence must be endured, where a border must built in our minds. Our condescending, concern accepts the unfortunate necessity of it. Retrieves the retrievable, rewards the “Deserving Poor”, those who prove willing to pull themselves out of their “condition” and climb the ladder of civilized society again.

As if this is a condition that they somehow brought upon themselves and choose to stay in. And this contrivance is as old as the idea of “haves and have nots” . It is a contrivance that admits no connection between the haves and have nots, certainly no responsibility beyond a vague charitable concern for our fellow humans. It would be an absurd proposition, to suggest that any of what we have, has been taken from, or reduced what they have …to the point that they have…nothing.

But this pontification, and I write it as one who is not homeless…even though I have at times been very close to that state…enough to know that it is a state. It has internal rules and boundaries, means and methods and cultures and communities and a form of society, because while each, like all of us is an individual, to live, survive, without a home, requires alliances, relationships. There, now I’ve said it, accepted the notion of a separate state whose members are not like us. Well It’s true isn’t it?

Isn’t it?

Oh for sure, come on. Now we have to talk about our whole society and its various arrangements and compromises. Let us look for a few sentences at the super rich. There is getting to be a very large number of them, some well known to all of us and some who quietly remain as anonymous as their paranoid ancestors. I have been convinced for years that they are a separate species, some self made , many born into it. WE all know there are separate rules forth…life styles that most of us can’t even imagine. WE know that they posses enormous wealth and power…to do and be whatever and whomever they like. Not an exaggeration. These are the aspirations of capitalist society. There are wealthy people whose lives are conducted in ways that separate us from them in exactly the same way as those who are home less… a separate state. Works that way for whole countries, rich ones, poor ones, ones so devastated and exploited that even homeless people on the street here in Canada may be better off than people who have been bombed and blasted to death and whose towns and cities have been reduced unliveable rubble.

The punch line is that they did not do it to themselves. They didn’t create these separate states of existence and maintain them. We all did. We all created the species of super wealthy and the state homeless have nots. Yes we did. Over the past hundred years our comic growth has become so rapid and pervasive used on new technology and means of production that created explosive wealth…But as a society we saw the wealth become concentrated and soon the wealth itself was generating wealth. Meanwhile those with little or no access to means and opportunities had to be employed by those who do. Then those who had the wealth ( here comes that separate species) used the power of it to advance technology and science and reduce the need for so many employees. Oops. Dilemma . People were still needed to buy the stuff that kept super Yacht gassed up. What to do? Well they got there government on their job. Calculated the numbers of consumers required to keep the wealth machine going and growing and came to their conclusion that governments would need to employ people and also subsidize business and the wealthy (Oh no, really?) .Then we all noticed that people were being squeezed out the edges. Lost jobs…not just jobs but whole factories and industries. Lost families, lost homes, farms, businesses. Became part of the under state.

O.K. let’s wrap this up. They’re not a separate species, neither the poor and homeless nor the super wealthy untouchables, They’re subcultures of our whole society and they are connected to all of and us to them.

And that final pontification is my suggestion of a starting point to think about these things in a different way. Or just more words into the air on a humid Saturday night. For the moment I don’t care, I’ve said what I wanted to say…I’m going to finish my bourbon and go to bed.

Blues: 14 09 24

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What…?

September 13, 2024

I didn’t watch the debate between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump. Like millions of other people in the U.S. and the world I felt a surge of relief that somebody besides President Biden was going to run against Trump. I stopped writing my blog months ago because I just couldn’t keep myself from venting my frustration about the insane circus that American politics has become. Since then it has become clear that similar patterns have evolved in European countries and the Middle East . The temptation is to view it all as a shift to the right and authoritarian conservatism around the world but it is more than a simple political trend. It is a deep and significant shift in the socio-economic culture of all of these countries.

The fundamental inability of governments to address and solve the multitude of complex, inter connected grievances of working and middle class populations has led to distrust and failure of confidence in any government , left or right. Regardless of the orientation, neither left nor right can deliver solutions on the range of issues emerging in the twenty first century and more significantly, the policy making processes and priority setting machinery are trapped between twentieth century, obsolete, party policy agendas and more modern, technological, data based, systems that could help balance the resources available with the issues most relevant to people and enlist their assistance in addressing the most pressurized grievances . Instead, we see retrenching of rigid positions and confrontation politics with irrational conspiracy theories and a growing hostility that ensures that force becomes the most likely lever for change.

I was tempted to watch the debate with the sound turned off on my T.V. to see if it changed my perspective. On the surface there would be two well dressed, middle aged, respectable looking, people in civilized surroundings, engaged in a debate. Nobody waving arms or throwing things. Nobody charging across the stage. nobody collapsing in hysterics. With the sound off…it might have been bearable. But I couldn’t do it. Because I knew that this was never going to be an exercise of reason…it was always going to be political theatre. So in the end we are back to the people…whether they like one character or another…in the absence of any clear understanding of the consequences of either being a winner. And I don’t just mean in the U.S. They same game applies in Canada and in Europe and elsewhere. Maybe the problems and solutions have become so complex that no politician or media outlet can explain them reasonably…let alone offer hope that they will be addressed. One of my friends called this “Best Chance Politics” , that people should vote for whomever they think has the best chance of accomplishing something. The corollary is that people will vote against whomever has the least chance or…who has not demonstrated any such chance currently. Not good news for modern democracy.

Blues 13 09 24 (Friday)

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Who Knows

September 12, 2024

Who knows where the madness comes from. There are no little trolls like this living next door but they live somewhere. They come out with guns and knives and slurs and rage and hatred and fill our screens with obscenities to a point where we are used to it. And we shouldn’t be. I heard on the radio the other day a man asking: “What if Christ had came again in the last hundred years…and got blasted and buried under rubble in one of our countless wars?” . Good question for Cristians I suppose. For me the question is why guns are for sale at Walmart? Why in the most powerful country in the world, wealthiest, supposedly smartest, are there almost as many guns as there are people? Why are hand gun manufacturers anodizing their weapons in pretty colours to attract women buyers? Why do we shake our heads and walk away after every mass shooting?

Of course there’s a phone book full of “why’s” and a scribble on the back of a used envelope with the answers. I just can’t remember where I put that envelope. Old age I guess.

Have a nice day…

Blues: 12 09 24

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Chagal Art

September 11, 2024
Everybody needs to pause and reflect. Look around. Don’t think “politics” think “people”. Sometimes, life just isn’t funny. Thankfully lots of the time…it is.

Blues 11 09 24

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It Ain’t Easy

September 11, 2024

It was pretty mundane actually. It was early spring and the last bite of winter had faded away…there had been a couple of little heat waves where the temperature spiked up to the thirties C. The season of head colds and aches and pains. You want to get outside and see that first pale green of buds on the trees. In the post covid world even if you’ve had every available vaccine, you get nervous if a cough lasts more than a day or two. Both Louise and I had nasty coughs that lasted a while and we checked ourselves out with the Covid test kits…and they were clean. We decided to see our doctor to find out if there was a bronchial virus going around. That led to a chest X-ray for each of us. Both of us had some lung issues , hers led to a bronchial specialist and mine led to a CT scan.

The short part of the story is that one test led to another and a date with a thoracic surgeon. And a diagnosis of lung cancer. More tests and biopsys confirmed it was stage four melanoma and it was also in my prostate. I’d had melanoma as a skin cancer a dozen years ago, had surgery and three years of follow up and got on with my life. I had learned a lot about melanoma and hearing that it was in my lungs was a chilling news. Nothing really prepares you. Louise was with me in the meeting but in the moment there is a feeling of total aloneness. In that moment alone you know that you will die. After a certain age every body “knows” that they’re going to die and for most of us it’s an abstract concept. In that moment alone it’s no longer abstract…it’s concrete. Personal. There may not be a date but it is none the less specific.

At that point you have to , I had to step back from that abyss and say “O.K. what now?” . And “what now?” is to get with the program, meet the oncologists, learn the options and as my niece says you learn how to live with lung cancer rather than surrender to the idea that you will die from it. Yes, of course I will very likely die from it…I’m eighty two years old. I would have died from something pretty soon anyway. Might have fallen off my bike. So the inevitability of it becomes a littler less intense. I’ll live with it until I die from it or from something else.

Are there “life lessons” in all of this? No, I don’t think so. I think life lessons are what our lives bring us every day. If we’re very lucky, there are a wide range of them and each one shapes who we are. So I’ll just keep on keeping on, thank you.

It has however, made me think a lot more about the nature of love. My love for my partner Louise who is living this with me and the constant reminder that I’m not alone. My love for my friends is deep and abiding and they are all supportive and I appreciate it. I don’t think we express it enough, that love. I come from a generation that barely was able to express it at all…inside or outside of a family. Maybe the generation before me lost too much…too many wars, too many disasters, too many loves lost. And they closed those doors. It has taken a long time to open them again, to let love in and out. And yet, looking around, I see and feel the anger and frustration, the conflict and hatred flaring and bursting into flame and I also see people pulling those doors closed again…fearing to love… fearing the loss implied.

Hate does not heal, love does and I think we need to work on that. Share it. Spread it, remind those we love that we do…love them. Like I love you. I do.

When this started I wrote to my friends and told them I wasn’t going to keep or write a cancer journal and this note is not that either. Lung cancer doesn’t define me. It’s not who or what I am. What I choose to write in this blog should be about what is.

Blues: 10 09 24

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