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So, Rob Ford and Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci walk in to a library…
August 3rd, 2011Permanent link to this post
Of empty libraries and hollow horses at City Hall
“I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands…” — Jorge Luis Borges, The Library of Babel
I shouldn’t have to write about library cuts. And I definitely shouldn’t be able to do it by just linking to a column I wrote about library cuts four years ago. Yet here we are:
In many ways, library staff are frontline workers. “It’s a population service and so much more than getting a book,” says TPL board chair Kathy Gallagher Ross. “We’re talking about the gap between the rich and poor, and that gap is tied to information. I’m a nurse; it’s a primary prevention measure that we have created and nurtured the strongest library system in North America.”
The Long Game
July 18th, 2011Permanent link to this post
An attempted introduction to basic political strategy at City Hall
“Effective organization is thwarted by the desire for instant and dramatic change, or… the demand for revelation rather than revolution.” — Saul Alinsky Read the rest of this entry »
The police may have made us into tea, but at least now we have this interminable PDF
June 6th, 2011Permanent link to this post
I report on the first of the (ostensible) reviews of Toronto police misconduct at the G20 in a guest post for Torontoist:
Except, halfhearted efforts to the contrary, there is no official narrative. There’s a shifting pseudo-narrative, told and re-told by many voices in a pidgin of what reporters saw, what reporters understood, and what we’ve managed to hear and understand ourselves from friends and strangers or our own failed-Jenga-tower of memories.
It averages out to something like this: last June, the G20, who travel the world creating jobs, came to town, bringing with them a particularly impressive fence. But, the Protesters of Toronto (a proud but inscrutable people, with a rich history stretching back as far as 1999, when they emigrated here from Seattle), having a religious aversion to fences, planned precisely two days of protests, and no more. As is their way. Because of the fence.
Hidden, unknown, among these gentle savages lay the Black Bloc. The Bloc, who hate our freedom, and our windows, emerged from the protest, went on a rampage of bloodless violence against Business Owners, and briefly burned down Toronto. Fives—even tens—of attackers overwhelmed the security forces of numerous cities and jurisdictions, none of whom had any prior experience with large protests.
The link? You’re reading it right now. In case you missed them, I also wrote a couple of pieces on police politics and theatrics for OpenFile.
Notes From Underwater - the journal of a land animal living at sea(*)
January 26th, 2011
Permanent link to this post
I tell people I started swimming to deal with a breakup, but I’m not really sure why. Maybe I missed that peculiar feeling of fluidity and freedom I associate with hours spent playing in the water as a kid; maybe I was looking for Don McKay’s “other gravity.” Maybe I figured it was time to get in touch with my inner jock. Maybe I just finally caught on: swimmers are hot.
In any case, over the last couple of years I’ve been muddling, paddling and puddling through a half-serious attempt at self-training, using the water and my body to gain a better understanding of both. There are times when I feel as though the practice helps me improve in just about every way except as a swimmer - the physical payoff often feels fleeting and hard to measure, while insights in to my form in the pool are always at least as applicable, through analogy, to the form of my daily life as someone trying to be spiritually awake, artistically active, and socially engaged (healthy, in a word).
Swimming is rhythm. That extends beyond the pool. For a young(—ish) (pseudo-)anarchist begrudgingly discovering his need for structure while stubbornly remaining committed to a freelancer’s life, the personal commitment to hitting the pool at least twice a week has had a surprisingly clarifying effect. Just as the rhythmic return of a recovered arm gives velocity to one’s forward crawl, my own rhythmic return to the pool each week has helped me find velocity in a relationship to time that doesn’t have much to do with the conventional calendar anymore.
Swimming is form. For someone prone to ‘multitasking’ (read: nervously firing shells packed with the buckshot of half-finished projects at the prowling beast of mortality), it’s been a revelation to realize that the best way to get to the other side is to not worry about getting to the other side. Stroking as fast and hard as you can is a good way to get tired, and not much else - if your form is insensitive, your strength won’t help you, and neither will the water. If swimming is rhythm, then swimming means being where you are. That’s what gets you where you’re going. Fitness is one thing. Focus is quite another. Speed isn’t something you use, it’s something you earn.
Swimming, for me, is meditation. And it’s inoculation, against a society that’s so obsessed with speed and power, yet so anxiously and apparently hostile against a deeper understanding of either.
In the belief that it might be good for me, and that some others may even find the results occasionally interesting, I’m going to combine it with my other regular form of meditation - writing - and start sharing regular Notes From Underwater here on the site. There will probably sometimes be a fumbling focus on the minutiae of swim form, but the intention is really to dredge up analogies between swimmers’ singularly absurd obsession and life in our absurdly singular world.
A world in which his job is unnecessary: on the Ryan Russell funeral
January 24th, 2011Permanent link to this post
If you live in Toronto and are only mildly-to-moderately allergic to mass news media (no one’s completely immune - they’re kind of like dairy products that way), you likely heard of, saw, or attended last week’s funeral for Sgt. Ryan Russell, recently killed while on duty.
His death was a tragedy. The funeral and attendant media circus were a fascinating and troubling alloy of emotion and ideology. In an article for OpenFile, I tried to chart some of the undercurrents:
“Before the bizarre death of Ryan Russell, almost nine years had passed over Toronto without a police officer being killed.
In that same time, more than fifty-one women (statistics are only available back to 2005) were killed by their domestic partners.
How many of their funerals did we watch?
To be honest, I would have declined to, even if I’d been invited—just as I stayed away from Russell’s, to which I never was.
I avoided the procession. I avoided, in particular, news coverage of the procession. And I avoided, especially, radical lefty friends’ reactions to the procession. Funerary False Dichotomy Funtime (”The police are magical heroes!” “The police are a band of thugs!”) is my third least-favourite game in the world.”
Of Ford and “Bougie design wars”
December 17th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Guess who voted Ford? Source: CUCS. Click the picture for a bigger version.
Did Mayoral votes break along geographic lines - or along class lines? Source: Torontoist. Click the picture for a bigger version.
Oh, Toronto’s hipster left. If you’re not being too quick to overlook Rob Ford’s ideology because of Ford’s “common person” supporters, youre being too quick to tar all Ford voters with Ford’s ideology.
I know we’re supposed to accept that the election was about city vs suburbs. And I know we’re not supposed to talk about class anymore (especially since our hipster cred relies to a great extent on which of the two Torontos-to-come we’re more likely to appear to end up in) - but without its counsel, the debate over “our” new Mayor so easily devolves into meaningless poles of aesthetic and affect. He’s just a boor! No, he’s a common man!
Actually he’s both (a common boor), and he’s neither: he’s a wealthy businessman swept in to power by overwhelmingly low-income neighbourhoods as a direct rebuke of perceived “downtown” politics. The election wasn’t uptown vs downtown, it was poor vs less poor, via a rich guy - which is… annoying. Yes. And, no, we don’t know how votes actually broke by income, or what changed in notoriously low voter turnout among, say, high-rise tenants or other marginalized populations. But I suspect there’s something here we need to deal with. The fact that Rob Ford is pretty much the last man in the universe able or willing to deal with it - he’ll probably actively make it worse - doesn’t invalidate the concerns of those who voted for him, or make it any more reasonable to join the platitude arms race.
I’ll give the last word for now to Denise Balkissoon. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in her rant - and I don’t know if she’s aware of the irony of using the term “bougie” in a call for more substantive politics - but damn if it doesn’t say some things that need to be said. The links below were added by me.
…if you resort to despair couched in hipster irony, you’re succumbing to his bully pulpit. A hockey broadcaster tries to pick a fight with you, and so you give him what he wants? Quit the bougie design war, ok? Use your voice for something more than cute buttons. I say this as a non-car owning, rabidly pro-bike cyclist with a year-round rider (and graphic designer) for a partner: your cute pink cycling badge is meaningless to a hotel cleaner who lives at Markham and Sheppard because “It takes me 2 hours to get to my minimum-wage shift job” doesn’t fit on a button.
Don Cherry clarifies his remarks on “pinko cyclists,” in light of the importance of physics to the Common Man
December 10th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Don Cherry here.
I’ve been getting a lot of flak for my speech at Rob Ford’s investiture (a fancy title for Mayor-Making Party) this week. Most of it was about the first sentence: I referenced my pink suit, saying, “I’m wearing pink for all the pinkos out there that ride bicycles and everything.”
A lot of people didn’t like that. Some people called it over-the-top. But they have no idea just how many tops I stayed under (at least three). I only had a few minutes that day, so I want to expand now – because it’s about time we started having the courage to name what’s right in front of our faces: all cyclists are agents of the USSR. They are Soviet spies. I don’t think it could be clearer. We might not like to admit it. And the Soviet Union might not actually exist anymore. But that isn’t stopping them, is it? No. And you know why?
Time-travel.
They’re not just pinkos, they’re goddamn time travelers, and only guys like Rob Ford have the courage to say so. That’s why I voted for him, that’s why I brought him a big jug of Plum Sauce on Thanksgiving, that’s why I went out at sunrise on the first snow day of the year and pissed his name on the frozen pond before they’d cleared it off, that’s why I call him at any hour when I’m sad about the choices I’ve made in my life. I let Rob Ford reassure me after I’ve had that dream about Brett Favre again because fucking cyclists don’t even respect the goddamn space-time continuum.
And if there is one thing that defines Canada, it is the space-time continuum. I mean that literally. The land we call Canada is a discrete event in spacetime, alright? Tell me it isn’t. Go ahead and try. You can’t. Because that’s what this great country is all about: objects with knowable dimensions and positions, not sharing the same position as other objects.
“Oh but Don what about learning to share the road?” And maybe I should just share the puck with you when I’m on a breakaway? Listen up, kook: sure, OK, yeah, objects or events can coincide in either interval or position, but never both. Never both, you commie bastards.
That’s why our ancestors had to kill all those Indians, that’s why my money can’t be the government’s money too, and it’s why cyclists don’t belong on our roads with our cars – because of physics. Don’t believe me? Well then good thing it’s not me talking, numbnuts – it’s the Kelvin-Planck statement. Any good Canadian kid knows how that goes: it’s fucking impossible for a system operating on a cycle to receive heat from a single reservoir and produce a net amount of work. You hear that, hippies? Cyclists aren’t just lazy, they’re thieves. They steal from motorists.
That Kevin Planck there, he was a good kid. Came outta Sudbury. Played right wing for the Oilers. And he knew what it was all about: hard work, family, glistening rich men doing fancy dance moves on special blade shoes, and the second goddamn law of thermodynamics.
So when you come home from a hard day at work and you get another letter from the government saying that they’re going to put energy into an ordered system in order to postpone its progression to disorder, you get fed up. You say, hold on just a second there, Bucko: is that a thermally isolated ordered system? Then its tendency to disorder can only increase, can’t it? No other way, fuckface.
Any Joe Lunchpail could tell you that, but these politicians don’t know what’s what. I think they actually think that a net output of work is possible without constant input of energy. I think they don’t realize that the taxpayers aren’t just a heat reservoir – we are a goddamn heat source. And we keep on transferring heat, more and more each year. Toronto doesn’t have a heat input problem – it has an entropy problem.
“Oh but we need to try and make equality,” say the pinkos.
Equality? You know what that sounds like to me? A dynamically ordered state. Uh uh. I don’t think so. I didn’t let Trudeau take a dump in the Stanley Cup during Woodstock and I won’t let anyone get away with that bullcrap. ‘Cause you know what Boltzmann called a dynamically ordered state, right? You’re damn right. An infinitely improbable configuration of energy.
And you know, I don’t totally know what that means. But I shouldn’t have to. And now that Rob Ford is Mayor, I guess I don’t. So put that electron in your Heisenberg microscope and try to precisely measure both position and momentum - you Stalinist shitheads.
“War is becoming a general phenomenon, global and interminable…”
November 26th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Because the isolated space and time of war in the limited conflict between sovereign states has declined, war seems to have seeped back and flooded the entire social field. The state of exception has become permanent and general; the exception has become the rule, pervading both foreign relations and the homeland… [T]here is ever less difference between inside and outsde the nation-state: low-intensity warfare meets high-intensity police action. The “enemy,” which has traditionally been conceived outside, and the “dangerous classes,” which have traditionally been inside, are thus increasingly indistinguishable from one another and serve together as the object of the war effort… [B]eing identified with the enemy tends effectively to criminalize the various forms of social contestaton and resistance.
- Hardt and Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, pp. 7 - 15
What do Rob Ford, the G20, and an empty film studio have in common?
November 20th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Source: Torontoist
This past Tuesday, I was thrilled to take part in launching Coach House Press’ Local Motion, clutching my contributors’ copy as I joined Che Kothari, Desmond Cole, Jennifer Lewington, and Kelly Grant on the opening discussion panel.
The book was dreamed up a year ago and pitched to Coach House by Dave Meslin as a more practical finale to the uTOpia series of speculative books about Toronto politics. The launch was billed as an “Election Hangover Party,” but with celebration tempered by mourning, it felt more like a wake.
My chapter in the book was itself written as something of a wake for Toronto’s “Cultural Renaissance.” Remember that? When we got a bunch of new buildings? And people were still asking Richard Florida to speak at events (though not everyone was so taken with him)?
Yeah. That particular bubble kind of burst. And the idea that a few flagship developments could ever have somehow fomented wider creativity was just trickle-down economics in hip new thick-frame specs, anyway. But the idea of a “creative city” stuck in my craw, and I wanted to tease out the implications of actually building one, rather than picking a few broad categories of information workers, calling them a “creative class,” and subsidizing anyone who said they knew how to attract them. Even if the approaching Ford years make that approach feel utopian by comparison, it’s still important to insist on an economy of equality being the only foundation for an economy of creativity.
Which brings us back to the summer, and the terrifying crack-down on protests against the G20 summit.
My chapter lingers for a while over the old Toronto Film Studios site on Eastern, exploring it as a symbol of everything that can go wrong with the replica renaissance approach. The symbolism was only strengthened during the protests.
As I outline in the book – pulling together themes explored in columns written earlier about the community fight over the site – it was already bad enough when the rush to create one cultural development gutted an existing cultural asset (and very nearly replaced it with a Wal-Mart). But even in writing the essay I couldn’t have imagined a more tragically appropriate end to the story: for two weeks, the old studio was a prison.
Of course, if TFS hadn’t abandoned the studios, the “detention centre” would have been set up somewhere else, and some other neighbourhood would have had troops throwing skinny kids armed with opinions up against their houses like ragdolls. But an abandoned film studio, hollowed out, turned in to a gulag, and ringed by troops paid for with money that could have gone in to social services? That’s just too perfect. It verges on satire.
And it makes a point I wasn’t able to bring up during Tuesday’s panel: people protesting the G20 (or the chilling legacychilling legacy of its “security” passion play) and people organizing against Rob Ford are engaged in a very similar struggle.
You probably noticed the headline in the Post yesterday: Ford said “You really can’t have enough police.”
Except, well - yes, you can. I think we found our threshold. The G20 gave us a pretty clear picture of “enough police,” thanks.
And Ford’s statement sums up succinctly what was being protested. “You can never have enough police” - deadpanned by a slash-and-burn Mayor-elect whose platform was anemic enough to fit in a single Twitter post (“SPENDING BAD,” say Fiscal Hulk) and leave room for 7 hashtags? That is neoliberal economics: insistence that what society really needs is to reduce the interference of “big government” - oh, unless we’re talking about the military or the police. ‘Cause those should be fucking huge.
It’s governance by binge-and-purge: binge on systems of control, purge (PDF) programs of assistance to make up for it. It’s got little to do with efficiency, and a lot with making sure the cream rises to the top, with a healthy dollop ladled off for those who’ll help it stay there.
As the picture of what happened during the G20 ”security” operation keeps getting clearer, it keeps getting harder for anyone to say with a straight face that the actions of law enforcement were focused entirely on enforcing laws. Police actions become much easier to parse if you think of them not as reactions to the protests that weekend, but attempts to define the boundaries of those to come. Much of it seemed simply intended to punish protesters and build as many intelligence files as possible just in case there’s anyone who didn’t get the message.
I’d say there’s a pre-emptive element to Ford’s politics as well - or rather, the politics he represents. I believe he ran for just the reasons he said he did, and I think it’s for these reasons that the majority of his supporters voted for him. But there’s intent and then there’s cause.
We’re hovering around the threshold of an era which would call on us to either redefine scarcity or redefine abundance. And there’s a certain sort of people who benefit from Ford’s politics that would rather it be the former.
It turns out that nothing – especially not fuel, nor space, nor the patience of those traditionally pigeonholed into second-class status – lasts forever. Those on top are growing subtly but visibly anxious about being able to stay up there and ride things out, which would be harder to do if “their” wealth were squandered on community services, but much easier if “taxpayers’” wealth were funneled upwards (a more accurate term than Ford’s “contracting out”).
This is what made outgoing Mayor David Miller’s hasty and oblivious praise of the police immediately after the G20 so tragic. Leaving aside the debate to be had on some particularly ill-advised (but widely misunderstood) protest tactics, his words were a slap in the face for those who spent their weekend facing down the ideology he spent much of his term eloquently opposing.
Yes, he did it in Council Chambers, while activists did it in the street. I’m not sure that distinction should matter as much as it seems to. And if Ford starts becoming successful in kicking community groups to the curb, it may not for much longer. For better or worse.
Rennet-baiting to swerve you better
November 16th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Oh, hello. I didn’t see you come in.
First, thanks so much to everyone who came to the launch of Local Motion. It was an honour to speak on the panel, and I’m going to try and post some further thoughts inspired by the night on Wednesday.
Second, pardon the chaos; I wasn’t able to attend to this site for the better part of a year. There was… an incident, and my words were not my own for a while. Which is to say nothing of having to abandon my campaign to not be Mayor — though to be honest, helping someone else to not be Mayor had essentially the same result, and paid better.
I’ve started an overdue overhaul of the site, which will probably be ongoing for a while. The front page is serviceable; everything within is horrible. This is a metaphor for something.
I’m on Twitter for some reason, and my twitter feed is over there, to the right. And you can always email me at this thing: mike REMOVETHISatREMOVETHIS linebreaks REMOVETHISdotREMOVETHIS comTHISTOO. Always. Because we care.
Because you probably don’t not want to
March 12th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Thank you, no
City budget chief Shelley Carroll said I should run for Mayor (please don’t tell my anarchist friends. If you are my anarchist friends, please don’t… tell me?). For the whole race, Carroll has easily been the favoured candidate among people voting for people not actually running for Mayor. And it’s easy to see why - she is certainly running for Mayor far less than any of the other high-profile candidates, who, sources tell me, are all running for Mayor.
So, in the world of people not running for Mayor, she is something of a kingmaker, and if I’m not reading too much into a 140 character message (which I think we will agree is basically impossible), she has thrown her non-support behind my non-campaign, telling all the people who won’t have an opportunity to vote for her that they should really think of it as an opportunity to not have an opportunity to vote for me instead. And why not? I want the job even less than she does.
I don’t not want the job so little, in fact, that I have decided to step in to the ring and run the only campaign that could ever establish the passionate passivity people aren’t disinclined to imagine demanding of someone who could technically be Mayor if absolutely everyone else died. As Toronto member of the National Abdication Party, my platform will be simple: Once I am elected, I will resign.
Give me your vote: I don’t want it.
CANADA (is slashing childcare funding)! CANADA (supports torture)! CANADA (is an arbitrary pseudo-geographic entity created to facilitate the upward transference of wealth)!
March 1st, 2010Permanent link to this post
The most surprising thing to me about the victory of the People’s Glorious Skate Brigade would have to be just how many Team Canada members live in Toronto - almost all of them on College St. to boot. And they flew back here immediately after the game (before its ultimate resolution, in fact) just to spread the word. That shows spunk. And hustle. And… lack of respect for space-time.
“WE WON!” shout revelers in Little Italy. “WE WON!”
No, listen. The Olympic hockey match you just watched was in Vancouver. You and I are in Toronto. What you propose is impossible. That was some science I just did, there. Free of charge. No, don’t thank me. The fact that you didn’t vomit on my shoes is thanks enough.
I find all this Olympic revelry to be a fascinating study in cognitive dissonance. Canadian government’s approval of torture? Not our problem! Public money subsidizing the tar sands? We have better things to worry about! Genocide of First Nations people? In the past! It wasn’t us! Let it go! Gold medal in hockey? EVERY CANADIAN DID THIS WE ARE ALL THE BEST I AM JOINED IN SYRUPY ORGIASTIC UNITY WITH THE NATION STATE OF CANADAAAAAHHH OH MY GOD IT’S NEIL YOUNG I THINK
Look, while we’re all in A Mood, there are a great number of other things I also didn’t do which I would love to be getting public credit for right now regardless - and, honestly, some things I didn’t do but really should have, for which I might be able to use a little absolution. I’m not above the forgiveness of strangers.
What I’m saying is that I love the idea of all of us going out in to the street and meeting eachother. I just think I’d like it if we could stop shouting. And I must add: I think I might not want us to go back inside - at least, not until we’ve figured out a way to stop doing whatever it is we’ve been doing every day that makes us need such frantic cacophonic fantasy so badly every night.
What I’m saying is that I love the idea of all of us going out in to the street and being happy. I just think I’d like it if first we could all go out own up to also being rather sad. I think the latter will make the former ring so much more true. And I know that sounds simplistic. But so does everything you’re shouting right now - and honestly unless you start shouting poetry, I’d really like to just get some sleep.
Your bias is showing
February 16th, 2010Permanent link to this post
Toronto’s operating budget, like a body floating into the portlands just before sunrise, approaches. So, it’s time for the the Toronto Sun to call us all “taxpayers” and complain about how stuff costs money.
The piece, though unremarkable in terms of content (Doug Holyday discovering something people could have not spent money on just means it’s a Monday), is an interesting little study of how objectivity works in the news media.
The tone is traditional J-School Disclamatory. The author himself is barely present; it’s “critics” who move the story, their expert observations which are dispassionately presented for our assumed benefit. But what about that term, “critics?” For such a dry, unremarkable, almost diminutive word, there’s tremendous privilege conferred.
Note the rhythm. First, we meet Shelley Carroll, budget chief. One individual - and not one with much of a voice, since there’s no quote. Then, we are introduced to “critics,” suggesting a large group of people joined in ther opposition to the likes of Shelley Carrol. When we meet Holyday and Minnan-Wong (who are quoted fulsomely, and without comment - more on that in a second), they are the implied representatives of this larger mass.
What if the term “Mayor’s opponents” had been used instead? How about the more specific but less ennobling, “Two of the Mayor’s right-wing opponents?” Or even just “fiscal conservatives?” “Privatization champions?” “Perennial axe-grinders?”
Savings could have been made by contracting out some services, limited hiring instead of 4,000 new staff added since 2003, and not letting unionized staff bank sick days, Minnan-Wong said.
There’s no reason to believe contracting out - privatizing - services is naturally cheaper, and there are cases when it increases costs. Most hiring has been to keep up with mandated service levels - legally required according to current arrangements with the province. And Minnan-Wong knows well that the sick day bank is being phased out by the strike settlement.
“Objectivity” - just print what the “experts” (who usually just happen to be in positions of jealously guarded power) say and let people decide for themselves - is easily exploited, by either politicians or reporters. In this case, it would appear to be both.
But really, I just came here to point out one wrinkle in particular which caught my eye:
The Toronto Police Services Board’s operating budget requires 4.8% or $41 million more than in 2009, Toronto Zoo’s board wants 3.2% or $500,000 more, the Toronto Public Library Board wants 3.9% or $6.4 million more, and Toronto Public Health has asked for an extra 1.7%, or $743,000.
Your money! The Zoo and Libraries want it; Public Health asks for it. But the police, whose budget dwarfs that of the other three combined? They require it.
As they say, the devil reflexive conservatism is in the details.
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