Playing my full set at Displace Hashery (W. 4th @ Blenheim). A little out of the way, but always a fun time!
Posts By Crommunist
0 Displace Hashery
0 Saturday
What happens to musicians after they stop being popular?
Ben Folds and John K. Sampson are two of my favourite songwriters. They both have this unbelievable talent for creating vignettes of life, tiny slices of existence, that evoke a emotional context much larger than the 3 or 4 minutes that the song lasts for. This song represents my attempt to emulate that feat.
Lyrics: … Continue Reading
1 Boys 4 Real – Reflection Week 5
I will readily confess that Week 5 is the one I was most looking forward to. Our fifth module looks explicitly at societally-defined and reinforced images/definitions of masculinity. For someone with my particular set of interests, this module was a big part of the reason I wanted to get involved in the program in the first place. I think that, short of protecting and encouraging women, recognizing the arbitrariness of the boundaries around ‘manliness’ is a practicable and meaningful step toward reducing gender inequality. Because the most common contemporary version of masculinity is also tied up in femmephobia, homophobia, and manifest destiny ideation, tearing down that particular edifice helps open a path to a number of other pro-equality ideas.
The first activity associated with the module asked the guys to critique some images: a UFC trailer, a scene from Casino Royale, and two pictures of infants. For the infants, they were asked to identify the gender of the child pictured, and it was funny to watch them scrutinize every detail of the photos for hints about gender, and instead of immediately concluding ‘you can’t tell’, finding and sticking to arbitrary justifications: “look at the hair”, “you can tell by the eyes”, “the way the diaper is fitting…” We talked a bit about how gendered expectations get put on us at a young age, and what kinds of things are “for boys” vs. “for girls”.
During this discussion and the ones that followed, I felt torn between the usefulness of the binary gender model and the fact that I don’t agree with it. Even the program itself is set up in terms of binary gender, and the discussion that is required to tear down the idea of binary gender would take much longer than the allotted time, and would bring the central function of the program itself into question. I think it must be questioned, but I didn’t think we could do a good enough job in the little time we had, and I didn’t want to do it half-assed. … Continue Reading
0 Sin Bin Battle of the Bands – Semi-Finals
I’m competing in the Sin Bin’s Acoustic Battle of the Bands. Audience votes are a big part of the adjudication, so any and all participation is appreciated!
9 Feminism: for all your 2000 parts
I was having a discussion with a (cis-female) friend of mine about the challenges she was having meeting date-able guys. She’s quite tall, and has a difficult time dating guys who are much shorter than she is because of a long list of complicated reasons, some mechanical some psychological, which restricts the pool quite precipitously. But she said beyond the simple fact of physical compatibility (we’ll ignore for now the proportion of tall guys who she’s nonetheless not attracted to physically), the biggest obstacle she was having is findings guys who didn’t piss her off during their first date by saying or doing something that betrays a shitty, gender-essentialist, retrograde attitude toward women. This is a sentiment I have heard from many other friends – even ‘nice’ guys who might otherwise be fine to date take themselves out of the running by holding on to (and voicing) anti-feminist and/or misogynist attitudes.
If you (like me) are an openly feminist cis gendered heterosexual (‘cishet’, hereafter) guy, you’ve probably encountered the meme that guys are just pretending to be feminists to get laid (or worse, I suppose, actually adopting the tenets of feminism and self-brainwashing in order to get some consensual hotslappy going). ‘Real men aren’t feminists’, is the implication (if only there were a longer discussion of this topic somewhere). ‘Real men’ are deeply invested in perpetuating a rigid definition of masculinity, and any deviation from such perpetuation is a revocation of their ‘man card’; either that or they are actually adhering to the idea that men will do pretty much anything to get sex, including either mass deception or self-delusion. … Continue Reading
0 Wicked Games (Weeknd cover)
This song got stuck in my head as soon as I heard it the first time. I would very much like to emulate the simple backbeat in my own writing – take a very simple scale and turn it into something epic. Here I try to put my own stamp on this tune, which I am very much looking forward to incorporating into my live set.
0 Boys 4 Real Reflection: Week 4
Yesterday was my fourth inning as a Wisdom Champion with the YWCA’s Boys 4 Real program. As I have done in previous weeks, I will try to summarize some of my thoughts and feelings as I go through the process.
My anxiety about working with kids has faded to a cautious wariness. I know that the second I completely stop being worried about how I’m doing is when I start to make mistakes. The consequences of mistakes are somewhat magnified, I think, because of who I’m working with. At the same time, these aren’t infants I’m working with – they’re young adults who have families and home lives and lots of adult figures in their lives other than me, a guy who hangs out with them for 2.5 hours a week.
Listening to Tobold Rollo has changed a lot of my thinking about young people, specifically children. I had long embraced a sort of benevolent paternalism when it came to kids. Born out of a reaction to former practices that treated children as small-statured adults, possessing the same mental and emotional capabilities as a fully-grown person, I went to the other extreme. Children were in need of protection, for their own good, and needed to be sheltered until such time as they were mentally mature enough to assert their autonomy. This model treats children as proto-human; figures that will some day become people. It is, by definition, a dehumanizing doctrine.
I have instead tried to treat the participants in this program with the same deference and respect that I had previously reserved for adults. They have my trust until they demonstrate they are not worthy of it, they are peers rather than subordinates, and I don’t make decisions on their behalf. I catch myself periodically dipping into my previous patterns of adult/child dichotomy, but for the most part as long as I remain mindful of it, I think I’m doing okay.
The thing that keeps catching me off guard is how compliant and non-defiant the guys in the program are. If they are asked to do something they do it, and while they are energetic and easily distracted, they’re engaging earnestly and thoughtfully with me and the other leaders. I expected to have to deal with a lot more snickering and misbehaving, but instead we’ve been able to spend time discussing and planning and conversing, which is definitely my preference.
One thing I am still struggling with is the sheer amount that we are expected to cover in an hour-long session. There has not been one week where we have done every activity in the book, regardless of how scrupulously we try to stay on time. I also question how much of the material is being absorbed as opposed to merely being ‘worked through’. My brief stint as a violin teacher has taught me a bit about how to distinguish the two processes. The things we’re talking about are large topics, but we’re spending maybe 20 minutes on them. I know there’s an issue of boredom to factor in if we don’t keep the days moving, but most of the time I feel very rushed. We’re not spending as much time as I’d like on the specific topic of high school either, and I think that’s the biggest source of anxiety for them right now.
We’ll see how it develops as the term moves towards its end.
6 Unsettled: Reflections on patriotism and non-white settler identity
Depending on who you ask, I was born in Vancouver, Canada, or I was born on unceded Coast Salish land in the traditional territory of the Musqueam people.
Because there are a host of privileges and responsibilities that accompany someone based on the place and circumstances of their birth, this is not a question of mere semantics. If the land under the city I was born in was never legally ceded to the government of Canada, then there is an argument to be made that I am not Canadian. But because I grew up completely divorced from Musqueam culture and Musqueam heritage, it would be risible for me to claim that my lack of ‘true Canadian-ness’ makes me Musqueam by default.
Which then raises the important question of what/who I am.
Legally speaking, I am Canadian, and I can sleep secure in the knowledge that a land claim that would strip me of my citizenship and its privileges is unlikely to arise or become successful in my lifetime. I am a ‘status Canadian’ – Canadian by the arbitrary act of a system that grants privileges and titles based on little more than a wink-nudge agreement between powerful people. I get to travel the world as a Canadian, I get the protections and rights afforded Canadian citizens, and nobody questions the legal validity of that citizenship (even if they should). But it may, nonetheless, be worth taking a moment to imagine where I fit into a discussion of Indigenous sovereignty, since it’s a topic I follow closely.
My father was born in a British colony that had been bought from the Dutch that had been forcibly stolen from the Carib and Arawak people indigenous to that region of South America. The colony was built by slave labour stolen from people indigenous to the continent of Africa. Owing to the attitudes of the slave traders and owners who settled in that land and established that colony, we may never know where in Africa my father’s ancestry (and mine, by extension) comes from. “Africa” will have to be enough for now; possibly forever.
Because my father was lucky enough to be able to access the British-imported education system and the Roman-imported religious system, he was able to leave the (by then former) British colony he was born in and emigrate to another (by then former) British colony: Canada. A wink-nudge agreement between powerful men in Canada changed the rules for immigration to allow people from certain British colonies to come to other British colonies. Female members of my father’s family had been allowed to immigrate because the powerful men in Canada needed people to work in their homes, and they had made a wink-nudge agreement that the colour of the skin of my aunts and grandmother was no longer a de facto barrier to their being allowed to live in Canada. My father, however, was black and male, so he had to wait. Not enough winks, not enough nudges. Not yet.
But because a certain wink and a certain nudge from certain powerful men happened, my father was able to live and work in the British colony of Canada. A man whose ancestors had been stolen for labour and taken to a place where the land had been stolen was finally deemed acceptable enough, by the shifting standards of the cultural descendants of the slave traders and owners that had taken Africa from him, to contribute paid labour to a place where they had stolen the land of other people. One blanched hand of the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (gods, but does bell hooks know how to coin a phrase) washing the other.
My mother’s family emigrated from Ireland and Germany three generations before her birth. They eventually settled and homesteaded in British Columbia on land that was stolen from indigenous people. Despite the colour of the skin of my mother’s ancestors, they were not considered ‘White’ enough – rather, as castoffs who were only allowed to settle here because there was a need for labour and the Irish were so devastated by famine and racism at the hands of the British that they were willing to flee their homeland for the possibility of a better life. The land my mother’s ancestors lived on was given to them by people who did not belong to it. They were, somewhat paradoxically, allowed to live there because, despite not being ‘White’, they were deemed culturally acceptable enough to be afforded second-class status.
My father’s ancestors, had they wanted and been able to, would not have been allowed to emigrate to Canada and build a farm in those days. Wrong colour, sorry.
My mother was Canadian by birth, like me. My father was Canadian by act of government. Both ‘status Canadians’ – granted rights and access by the magnanimity of winking and nudging powerful men. Both carrying the stigma of their ancestry and familiar history. Both patriotic Canadians, albeit by radically different paths that still had uncanny similarities.
I was born, depending on who you ask, in Vancouver, Canada as a result of the collision of these two lives and histories. In my identity is carried the collective history of multiple continents, multiple thefts of land, and multiple winks and multiple nudges by powerful men. Despite the convoluted historical realities, I am legally Canadian. I am a ‘status Canadian’. I am proud of my country, I am proud of my identity. I am ashamed of my country, and I am confused about my identity.
The land I was born in was stolen from the people who belong to it. But it is still my home. I still belong to this land, because there is no other land on Earth that I could claim as mine. I have no connection to either Ireland or Germany. My father is not indigenous to Guyana, despite belonging to that land in the same way I belong to this. We don’t know where in Africa his ancestors may have called home, and if we did there is enough of Canada and Ireland and Germany in me that I wouldn’t belong there either.
For better and for worse, I am Canadian.
A major crux of the conversation about Indigenous sovereignty in Canada is the gap between ‘settlers’ and Indigenous people. I am a settler. My mother’s family settled here. My father emigrated here by a wink-nudge act of a settler’s government. I was born here, and have no other home, but I am still a settler. I have no difficulty accepting the truth of that appellation – regardless of the fact that I was not in the room when the winks and nudges were exchanged, I still derive my status from the results of the resulting agreements. For better and for worse, I am Canadian. I am a settler.
What complicates this conversation, however, is the confluence of ‘settler’ and ‘White’. In much the way that racism in the United States is plotted on a ‘Black/White’ axis, the struggle for sovereignty here is plotted on axes labeled ‘Indigenous’ and ‘White’*. Looking at the issue from a systemic level, the colonial system that makes Canada possible is white supremacist and white descended, and it is entirely reasonable to recognize it as such. However, the reality of Canada is that it is a country literally built by people who were neither white nor ‘White’. Chinese, Hungarian, Ukranian, Italian, Caribbean, Indian, Japanese, Métis, Indigenous, Aboriginal… Canada owes its existence to the efforts of people who fell outside the social category of ‘White’ (at least at some point).
And into this paradox comes the fact that my father owes his status as a Guyanese and a Canadian to a white supremacist colonizing ideology. Add to this the fact that my mother’s people weren’t white enough to be ‘White’ when they first came here. Victims both of the same settler colonial mentality that makes me a Canadian born on Musqueam land. Born Canadian to an African man and a German/Irish woman.
I was discussing the idea of patriotism with two friends who are African immigrants. They both, as is typical of immigrants, believe that newcomers have a duty to adopt the practices and traditions of the land they have moved to. Not total assimilation, mind you, but rather a recognition that you are a welcomed guest and that you have an obligation to repay the invitation with such courtesy. My father believes the same. I’m sure my maternal great-grandparents did too.
I am a ‘status Canadian’. I am not an immigrant to Canada, but I am a settler. I am not White, but I do derive a great deal of privilege and protection from a white supremacist system that has taken much from Indigenous people. My question to my friends was this: whose practices and traditions should I adopt? As a Canadian by birth, I am not an immigrant and owe no duty of courtesy to my hosts. This is my home. I have no other. According to that model of belonging, I have no obligation to anyone. I am, however, also a settler. I am a (welcomed?) guest living in the territory of Coast Salish people. Do I have a duty to adopt their practices and traditions? Do my immigrant friends also have that obligation? To which nation must they ally themselves?
Inasmuch as I am here because white colonialists stole my father’s ancestors and made them work stolen land, I am a victim of white colonialism. Inasmuch as my mother’s family was here because they were allowed to settle on stolen land, I am a participant in and beneficiary of white colonialism, and part of the same settler system that Indigenous sovereignty protests against. I owe my status to the theft of land from Indigenous people by colonizers and settlers, and in the same token the theft of land and labour makes me a hereditary victim of that same process.
When lines are drawn between ‘Indigenous’ and ‘White’, am I not simply written entirely out of the equation? I am not Indigenous, but I was born here and have no other possible home. I am not White, but I carry with me and in me the products of white settler colonialism. It is not a question of being ‘a bit of both’, as I might consider myself when discussing ‘Black/White’ racism, but of being ‘neither one nor the other’.
As much as I want to add my voice to the chorus of people demanding justice for Indigenous people, I am in a very uncomfortable position. I am nowhere on the ‘Indigenous/White’ axis. I don’t exist on that continuum. I am not an immigrant, which would (in some ways) be easier – if I were, I would have made a voluntary agreement with the nation of Canada. As someone who was born here, I made no such agreement – the agreement was made on my behalf before I was born. I am not White, which would (in some ways) be easier – if I were, I would embrace my own heritage for its flaws and faults and advocate as an ally. I am instead a non-white settler who owes his status and privilege to the same system I protest against, and who represents both criminal and victim in the historical theft of the land and labour of non-white people.
I am still, obviously, working my way through these ideas. I think this kind of reflection also extends to people whose parents are immigrants from European countries, albeit with a different historical context than that of my father’s family. This is definitely not a ‘poor me’ kind of piece – considering the number of problems it is possible to have, a bit of existential jiggery-pokery is a really light burden to bear. This has just been on my mind since I started really tuning in to conversations between my fellow settlers and Indigenous activists and adovcates.
*Obviously it is more complicated than that. There are identities like “Aboriginal” and “Indian” and “Native” and “First Nation” that make any attempt at classification an exercise comprised entirely of smoke and mirrors. And winks. And nudges.
0 Boys 4 Real – Reflection Weeks 2/3
I was negligent and didn’t post a reflection last week, so this one will encompass two weeks of the program.
My level of anxiety about the program has dropped precipitously over the past couple of weeks. I’ve been able to lean on the active participation of the two Facilitators I have in my group to do a lot of the programmatic stuff, and I have been able to work mostly behind the scenes rather than trying to drive things forward. Martin and Michael, my co-volunteers, are both highly motivated to do well and highly capable, which is a relief. I think it would be a bigger problem if I had a lackadaisical team than if I had a few unruly students.
Week 2 was largely uneventful, and I don’t really have too much to say about it except that I am disappointed that our group chose to do a cancer fundraiser. Obviously I respect their choices, but I would have liked to see them choose something that involved more than raising funds “for cancer”. Community service should, I think, involve actually interacting with the community. Of course, considering the multitude of ways I have failed to live up to that over my own 29 years, maybe that is an unreasonable thing to expect from a group of 12 year-olds.
One of the things I have noted with interest is that when our group combined with the ‘WTML’ group, some of the strongest personalities in the room belong to the young women. They clearly have no biological programming to make them more demure and soft-spoken, and it looks like they haven’t internalized the talking points about “women’s roles” in scial interactions yet. I am as challenged by the most outspoken young women as I am by the outspoken guys in my own group, but that is not something that is ‘their fault’ as much as it is something for me to learn to deal with effectively.
I did pull one of my more rambunctious guys aside at the beginning of our Week 2 session because someone had mentioned that he had been a bit disruptive the previous week. I think I managed this conversation well. I told him first that he wasn’t in trouble and I wasn’t upset with him. I said that I was really glad he was in the program because he’s got a great sense of humour and pumps everyone up, but that some people have a hard time dealing with that level of energy. I told him I struggled with it a lot, and that I had to learn to keep my eyes and ears open for the reactions of others to figure out how not to bowl them over. He seemed receptive, and I’m willing to bet he’s heard something along these lines before. I’m not holding out a lot of hope for the magic of one conversation, but we’ll see how it goes.
The last thing I want to reflect on here is the ’empathy’ session we did in Week 3. The topics we’re discussing in these sessions are really broad and important, and we have to cram them into 20-minute chunks which is really frustrating. I understand that we are time constrained, but I think we do ourselves a disservice by presenting these things as ‘soundbyte’ topics. This was particularly evident to me this week when we did 20 minutes on ’empathy’ that required us to first define it and then act it out. A lot of the guys hadn’t really been exposed to the concept before, and asking them to act it out resulted in some sketches that were not only completely unrealistic but also (in some cases) missed the point entirely.
I am glad that I was able to inject something I think is important into the discussion though: the idea that it is not enough to simply not participate in harmful behaviours. We ought to, when we can, speak up in opposition to them. This wasn’t mentioned in the syllabus materials, but it’s an important lesson I’ve learned in discussions of misogyny and bullying. Part of the problem is that the victims feel like they’re ‘crazy’ for feeling victimized. The presence of a few supportive voices saying “you’re not wrong, and I’m angry too” makes a huge difference, and I wanted to get the guys thinking about that a bit.
I remain optimistic and excited about the next 5 weeks.
3 All models are wrong; some models are useful
This is a phrase I use often in my work: “All models are wrong; some models are useful”. A meaningful portion of my job involves using statistical methods to create models. Some of those are the kind that one thinks of when you use the phrase “statistical model”, which is often some sort of regression analysis – you take a bunch of variables, apply some kind of mathematical rules to them, and then interpret the results. I’ve made vague reference to this before.
The other kind of model that it’s common for someone in my field to build is referred to properly as a ‘Health State Transition Model’, but colloquially called a ‘Markov Model’, or even more colloquially simply as ‘a model’. In these sorts of models, a matrix or array stands in as a possible state of health that someone can be in, and you describe mathematical rules that govern the likelihood that values held in one ‘state’ might migrate to another ‘state’.
Crommunist 