I am always forgetting how old I am – and I think it’s because I hang around younger people who haven’t realized that I really don’t understand what the hell they are talking about, and that what I’m really thinking when they are going on and on about the environment and apartheid and baby seals is: get a job, hippie. My wife is their age, and I’ve come to realize that it’s often better to let her do the talking now. I usually have to defer to her when it comes to the new lingo. Apparently it’s no longer cool to say get jiggy with it or to even break dance, for that matter. Yep, all about irony these days…

My forgetfulness could have something to do with not children of my own. Not that I have anything against having kids; my wife and I are planning on having an ankle-biter or two in the near future. (It’s only a matter of time. I’m Italian, she is Chinese; can you ask for a more potent combo?) It’s just that watching friends survive for months at a time on power naps and car-crying, I am often witness to the mental and physical effects of pushing the limits of one’s mind and body. As one father of two pointed out to me the other day: There’s a bottom to this. You can only get so tired. To which I promptly responded: Dude! We went to this awesome Karaoke Bar last night and stayed up to watch the sun rise! It was awesome! Why didn’t you come? Thus learning that when you are around the newly-parented, never ever mention any place more exotic than Walmart.

(Speaking of which, profile pictures have been budding baby faces for some time now. It’s as if all of my high school and college friends have grown really really cute second heads, or they have chosen careers in ransoming children)

As you plainly see, for the most part, parenthood to me has remained abstract, viewed from a safe distance. My exposure to it has been kept strictly to the showroom level. When a child misbehaves in my company, he/she is taken to another room by one of the parents (this fills me with an extraordinary sense of importance, which is why I like visiting my friends in the burbs. I always leave feeling like Caesar)

At 37, I can’t say whether a childfree status is the average these days, or if it is evidence of MPPS, otherwise known as Male Peter Pan Syndrome, where the subject demonstrates a reluctance to sacrifice some of the benefits and freedoms of having no kids: going to bed and sleeping in late on weekends; going to bars and nightclubs; taking off at a moment’s notice on long road trips; watching racy movies at home; wearing only underwear around the house etc.

Then again, I am a cantankerous, straight-laced curmudgeon – as my wife calls me – and it’s not like I actually DO many of those things anyways. I’ve always hated nightclubs, or any place you have to line up for an hour to get into, then spend the rest of the night screaming across a miniature table. In fact I’ve never liked any place that plays live music, even. Well, why should I have to wait until the band takes a break before I can talk to my friends? The band should just play their music at a reasonable level, for god’s sake. Really, just give me a nice, quiet pub where I can bitch about the current state of affairs. Or better yet, give me a quiet porch or balcony where I can drink wine, smoke, and bitch about the clothing – or the lack thereof – of the youth these days. (And that’s what I usually do. When my regular drinking friends aren’t available, there’s nothing I like better than to attend parties of my wife’s light-drinking friends, where I pick a nice little corner, drink too much red wine, hold fascinating conversations with myself and eventually fall asleep) Hmmm…given this new information, it could very well be that I suffer from GOMS, or Grumpy Old Man Syndrome. Thinking about it, I AM very protective of my front lawn, I’m always losing and forgetting things, and I have a tendency to pull my pants up above my belly button.

Really though, at 37, it’s most likely that I am stuck somewhere between Adbusters and Old Miser’s Monthly: while I am dreadfully mistrustful of private enterprise and deregulation I think that everyone under thirty years old should be in the military or in prison, or until they realise that most people don’t want to share a doobie on the floor of a hippie commune in the Okanogan Valley. I’m at this place where a number of opposing fronts – rosy idealism Vs. grim reality, the delight of personal freedom Vs. the fulfillment that comes with responsibility – are colliding, and I can’t quite tell what the forecast will bring. What I do know is that, though there is always the temptation to glorify the past – college and high school days – nothing is a remotely interesting as what is happening now and what lies ahead.

4. Never has the plight of humanity been so eloquently expressed in so few words.

3. I’ve been racking my brains to come up with something snarky to say about this video, but I’m at a loss. There is nothing you can say against an old couple just having fun.

2. Sheer giggle factor got this video to the number 2 spot. If anyone can understand, what is the guy asking the Ibex? And what in the world is an Ibex?

1. Feeling stressed? Overwhelmed? Please allow Carl Sagan to put your troubles in context for you.

As appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Vol 61, No.1, 2010.

Let me be clear: it’s not that I hate listening to “No Woman, No Cry”. It’s actually quite pleasant. I simply don’t get the genre’s wide appeal. I’m always startled by its immediate effect on women. Within about three beats, regardless of where they are or what they are doing, girls start dancing. Such a remarkable response to such unremarkable music; to me, women might as well be swinging their hips to the muzac version of Christopher Cross’s “Caught Between the Moon and New York City“.

I know what you’re thinking: Bob Marley and the Whalers isn’t the only Reggae group around. You’re right, but I couldn’t name another group, and beyond the nine or ten songs on Legend, I couldn’t name more than two reggae singles. Funny thing is, I suspect that most people in Canada wouldn’t be able to either. I can’t speak for women, but I’ll let you in on a little secret: most men I know don’t like it, not really. They tolerate it as much as they don’t tolerate Justin Timberlake. Sure, songs from Legend made it onto our mixed tapes, but they were included to break up long runs of Hendrix, The Doors, and Led Zepplin. I can’t recall a single time when a group of friends listened to a Reggae-only compilation.

What I do remember is that when Reggae was playing, eighty percent of the time there were girls present, and dancing of course.  

3. City folk who bum rides instead of taking transit.

I’m a driver, and so you’d think that after spending three weeks and about two hours a day taking public transit to work, I would be a little more sympathetic to those of you who take the subway. But no, what’s happened is the opposite.

I can’t understand what everyone is complaining about. It’s so easy! No screaming about the jerk who just cut me off, or the slow poke puttering along in the fast lane or the idiots in front who don’t notice the advanced green (I hate those people). I can sit back listening to my Ipod and read. What’s the problem?

(Actually, I get it: you want to feel special! And what better way to feel special than to appeal to a friend’s good nature by recounting fictionalized transit horror stories and have him/her drive screaming through cross-town traffic to pick you up from your door, so you can sit in the passenger seat, listen to your Ipod and read. And of course let’s not forget all the little errands you’ve secretly plotted while being chauffeured to your destination – ‘oh, since we’re in the area, could we stop by blah blah blah and pick up some blah?’ Finally, while being taxied around, please remember to mention how cars are destroying the planet, and how drivers are mostly rich, yuppy scum. We love that. Really, if you wanted to feel special, couldn’t you just go out and buy some Hagen Dazs?)

Boy, that felt good. I needed to get that off my chest.
 

2. Kurt Vonnegut.

Believe me, I’ve tried, but I just don’t get you (I am addressing his ghost). I think you have a choice: classify your work as either poetry or short stories. Please don’t try to tell me that what you’re writing is prose. Kurt, someone could sneak into my house one night, shuffle together the pages of three of your books, and I wouldn’t notice the difference.

Also, as for your whimsical social commentary? Well, we live in a time of unparalleled access to information. Non-fiction has never been more popular. Those of us who would read your books are well aware of the world’s machinations and injustices. We no longer have to rely on fiction writers for our quota of social and historical digressions. These days, the only thing I need from you is to hold a thread and to tell me a story.  

1. Cops like this and this.

You’d think they were jaded veterans, but no, Constable Adam Josephs aka Officer Bubbles, has been on the Toronto force since 2007, and the other – whose name hasn’t been mentioned anywhere I could find – has been with the Vancouver police since 2009. On his Facebook page (now changed to ‘private’), Officer Bubbles claimed that his present job is ‘collecting human garbage’. The nameless Vancouver officer has sent his ‘sincere’ apologies to the victim, through a police spokesperson, of course.

The streets didn’t twist them; these guys arrived on the streets with a ready dislike of people. And I know the type: claim to hate urban centres but morbidly fascinated by their marginalized occupants whose powerlessness instils in them a sense of power. These police officers could thrive in no other environment as policemen. In wealthier neighbourhoods, the inhabitants would have better access to lawyers and a greater sense of entitlement.

So, cities knowingly hire these aggressive bullies (who cannot spot a bully?), police unions protect them, and the law takes their word over the public’s. They would have to beat an old lady to death in front of a justice of the peace to get fired. So here’s what I suggest. Keep these guys – and all police for that matter (they are all complicit) – in court. Every ticket you get, choose the trial option.

Good cop, bad cop, policemen hate court and paperwork. You know what really ticks them off? Five or six weeks before the trial, courier the prosecutor’s office and request ‘complete disclosure’ regarding your ticket. The police officer has to sit and create and copy a file of all the paperwork he did (or didn’t do) after giving you the ticket. If he didn’t do the paperwork, he might not show for the trial, and your ticket is dismissed. If he does show, and even if you have to pay for the ticket, at least you will get some satisfaction of having him sit on that little bench while you pepper him with questions!

5. For god sake, don’t watch this. Don’t. It’s disgusting. What the hell’s wrong with you? Why would you want to have any part of an Italian gore flick like this? Yes, yes, we all sneak a peek when we drive by a car accident, but ‘peek’ is the operative word here. We don’t pull up lawn chairs and start cooking up popcorn. You’re sick, I tell you, sick!

 

4. Mother of God…Glenn Beck has written a political thriller. Yes, that’s right, Glenn Beck. And Fox has brought Donald Lafountaine and his gravelly voice back from the dead to do the trailer. I promise that watching it will be like swallowing Morpheus’ red pill: you will never trust anyone EVER again. Avert your eyes! (One line from the trailer: “The Dog returns to his vomit”) No! Don’t do it!

 

3. There is no need to watch this public service announcement about sex, because we all know that for young women in school, there is nothing sexier than a male virgin.

 

2. There is something wrong with Dennis Hopper reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “If” to a country and western audience. I have no problem with Hopper, Kipling or the country crowd. It’s just something about the mix that is not right. It’s like seeing Santa in July; or a drag queen singing The Star Spangled Banner at the Indianapolis 500, in Spanish, and the crowd actually loves it!

It’s wrong, just plain wrong.

 

1. Ok. I was joking about the first four videos. Go ahead and watch them, they’re mildly entertaining. But I’m absolutely serious about the next one. It’s from the video blog series staring a young and cute Florida couple. The videos, which I beg you to boycott, for the most part are about them as they go about their day to day lives: shopping, swimming, and taking the dogs for a walk. They talk, they laugh, they watch TV.

My problem is not with this couple. My problem is with the viewers and subscribers.

I cannot, for the life of me, understand how each 20-minute segment can get anywhere around 750,000 views. This means that close to a million people will watch a sitcom-length ‘episode’ of these two – I never learned their names, I suppose it doesn’t matter – window shopping at Mall of America and going to lunch at Fuddruckers.

What are we becoming? There was a time where we would rack our brains to get out of watching a filmstrip of the neighbour’s trip to Egypt. We had better things to do. We had standards! Now, we have no problem with watching Jack and Jane check their dog for grey hairs. Could they – and vloggers like them – be the new generation’s quiet reprieve from the mainstream media’s sensory bombardment? Are they the new Saved by the Bell? Something to be watched with a Saturday morning hangover?

I don’t know the answer, but I think we can use some standards. Comedian Louis CK once opined about his childhood in Boston, where people would “beat the shit” out of each other for no reason at all. Harsh, yes. But as Louis CK put, “it kept quality control”. I like this couple, and I am not advocating that people go and pummelled boring bloggers….just the people who have nothing better to do than watch them. So, watch this one at your own risk…

Oh, when I think of all the places
my ex-wife yelled at me!
                                         Throughout
the house: in the kitchen and
in the bathroom, in the living room
and on the stairs, in the basement
by the washing machine,
and standing by the bookcase, throwing
books and yelling.
                         She yelled
at the supermarket check-out counter
when I thumbed through a copy
of Watch Your Weight, and on the corner
of Randolph and Michigan
during the biggest blizzard
in fifteen years.
                         In the backyard,
her voice growing hoarse
and raw with the madness
her mother and grandmother
and great-great grandmother
bequeathed to her, she yelled
until the neighbors looked over
our rickety back fence
(then she yelled at the them
for listening).
                         In the car,
especially in the comfort of the car:
on a five-minute trip to Burger King
or a ten hour drive to another
state. She yelled about the traffic
and her grievances at work
and what I had or hadn’t done
that day.
                 She bitched and belly-
ached, she fretted, carped and groaned.
She delivered tongue-lashings
and gave everyone every last
piece of her mind. She bewailed
and bemoaned her treatment
at the hands of strangers. She bellowed,
griped, groused and grumbled.

She even kvetched
occasionally, but primarily
she yelled.
                 She yelled at midnight
and at midday and
in the twilight—nothing about her voice
the slightest bit crepuscular.
She yelled at noon and
in the afternoon and early
in the dawn, before the stars
had faded, before I’d fully
come awake.
                         From what I hear,
she’s doing fine without me
there to listen, alone in the house
I gladly signed away, alone
with the wide world that made her
so desperately unhappy,
alone, alone but yelling still…

David Starkey is the poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California, and director of the creative writing program at Santa Barbara City College. Among his poetry collections are Starkey’s Book of States (Boson Books, 2007), Adventures of the Minor Poet (Artamo Press, 2007), Ways of Being Dead: New and Selected Poems (Artamo, 2006), David Starkey’s Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2002) and Fear of Everything, winner of Palanquin Press’s Spring 2000 chapbook contest.

As soon as I saw the Black Bloc marchers, I was captivated. I forgot about the student and labour union demonstrators, the climate activists and the anti-war protesters. If there was a group that would push the boundaries that day, it looked to be this black-masked cabal of men and women who spent the first leg of the march blocking camera lenses, hunching over each other, trying to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. I trailed them South to University and Queen, where I saw my first line-up of riot police.

These officers, mountain bikes thrust out in front of them, were impassive. They spoke only to ward off people who got too close to them with cameras. Beyond them, stretching across King Street, was a line of heavy-geared riot police, and beyond them were the horses. I must have waited at the intersection for about ten minutes, the small, excited part of me hoping for a violent encounter. Nothing happened. The march was directed along Queen Street. I had the sad feeling I would never get to The Wall.

At intersections along the south part of Queen, lines of the heavy-geared policemen stood. At first, their presence was menacing, but the menace soon subsided to novelty. They were immovable objects, but their faces were visible behind the plastic visors. People took photos of themselves in front of them, with thumbs, placards, and sometimes middle-fingers raised. Everyone, myself included, was hoping to get their photo published Eye Weekly, it seemed. It was a childhood game of dare.

The Black Bloc hijacked the march at Queen and Spadina. There was a moment, when their instructions to the crowd conflicted with those of the regular volunteers, that I became very scared. “If something happens here,” I thought to myself, “the police would be reluctant to get involved.” Whistles blew, shrill voices bellowed orders and the crowd of black-clad activists ran past me in the opposite direction, crowds of spectators in tow, cell phone cameras at the ready. I realized that although we were surrounded by men in riot gear, this strip of road was a no-man’s land. No laws or rules applied. Only today do I understand that if someone wanted to cause severe property damage, this would be the perfect situation to do so.

(This period of lawlessness was interesting. The majority of the people on Queen were spectators, dressed as if they were going to Sunday brunch. During serious moments, when things were being thrown or when voices reached fever pitch, they would stand back and watch the dissident/authority-figure struggle unfold. When things relaxed, they would chat with each other, walk about and take pictures of odd things taking place in front of the riot police: two girls doing yoga stretches, another holding a placard with the words EVERYTHING IS OK, a girl with a caped chihuahua in her bicycle basket. The best way I can describe it, is that it was very tense, surreal and a little euphoric)

During the ensuing carnage, the part of me hoping for a little violence vanished. Windows were broken and mailboxes were tipped over; a masked protester threw rock at a glass door in front of me. I regretfully said or did nothing.

I felt sympathy for the policemen. Through the afternoon they remained mostly impassive, standing there while the emboldened and unmasked protesters shouted shrilly in their faces: “We are peaceful, how about you?” When the officers did move, like when they tried to rescue what they could of the cruiser on Queen, it must have been like walking on eggshells: bumping a protester would elicit shrieks of outrage from the irate crowd.

As for the unmasked protesters, there were the kind of people I avoid at parties, the kind whose conversations tend to turn to sermons. They sat and cheered from the top of the ‘captured’ police car, tribal and ecstatic, their thought patterns regressed to their brainstems. And how tired and cliché the tactics were, for both masked and unmasked dissidents! Sitting atop of police cars, shattering the windows of banks and coffee shops, to me, is akin to Avril Lavine busting a guitar 40 years after Pete Townsend. It was a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.

The funny thing is, I made it to The Wall that day.

It was by accident. A friend and I turned a corner and there it was, a chain-link fences mounted on cement medians. Behind, stood rows of silent, helmeted police. As we walked the side of its parameter, I was amazed by the quiet, and by the fact that I wasn’t being tackled and handcuffed. Groups of others stood around as well. We had made it to The Wall, and none of us new exactly what to do. Riot police on one side, looky-loos on the other, and silence. It was odd and intimate. For the most part, we all talked and took photos. After hours of mindless braying, it was a relief to finally have a conversation. An older gentlemen talked with us about the Black Bloc.

“They want this civilization to collapse,” he told us, “and then a new one will rise from its ashes.”

“Who runs the new civilization?” I asked.

“I don’t think they’ve thought that far ahead.” he responded.

Afterward we walked up Yonge Street, following the route that the Black Bloc was said to have taken earlier that day. Store front windows had been broken at regular intervals up to College street. Unlike what some newspapers have claimed, it wasn’t just the franchises that got hit. Local places were hit as well. Zanzibars marquee was damaged (apparently, the new civilization won’t have strip clubs), and the jewellery store at Gerrard and Yonge looked to have been looted (political dissidents have gotta eat too, you know).

In the wake of the hijacked protests, Facebook and Twitter are awash with comments about the event. Some say that the police cars were ‘decoys’ to tantalize the crowd into violence. Others are claiming that the police had infiltrated the Black Bloc’s ranks to instigate violence. Some editorials express outrage at police inaction (especially during the Bloc’s run up Yonge), some are railing about police brutality (especially on the day after). Among the plethora of perspectives, I hope that can agree on two things.

Firstly, these kinds of violent protests no longer work (Actually, I’m beginning to believe that the effectiveness of public demonstrations has run its course). They do not gain the public’s sympathy or support, which should be their primary goal. I’ll be clear: NO CAN HEAR WHAT YOU WANT. Protests like these have become a spectacle by the extreme, for the extreme, their very own “So You Think You’re a Dissident?” There must be a new paradigm. I don’t know what it is. But I think we can start by changing the approach. Instead of thinking “I have a right to do this, and that’s all that matters,” rational people should be asking themselves, “Is what I’m doing effective in bringing about the change I want?”

The second point is that genuine demonstrators are being used by the parasitic Black Bloc. This group could not operate without the cover of decent protesters, who are right now being involuntarily arrested on behalf of these vandals, wrapped in their brochure-length manifestos.
During the protest I was asked by a member of this group to stop taking pictures and to show some solidarity, as if I were there to support him. It’s time to break the illusion of support. At future demonstrations they should be called out. If demonstrators want to chant, then they should start by chanting something like, “Black Bloc Blows!”

Funny, for years I’ve admired the participants of these kinds of protests. I listened to stories about Seattle and Quebec City with awe. What changed my perspective turned out to be quite simple: it finally happened in my city. Breaking things to make a point loses its impact when it’s your shit being broke.

Addendum:

Innocent and mistreated by police?

Want justice? The first step is to start telling your G20 stories:

http://ccla.org/2010/06/29/resources-for-g20-related-complaints/

And here:

http://g20inquiry.com/