Star

We put up for sale the warmth of the sun

Rollers

January

January, why do you have to be so cruel?

It’s tough for many people in northern climates to scrape their way through the winter months. Not to overstate the obvious, but being cold is unpleasant. I live in southern Ontario, so we get about the most moderate winters in Canada, with the exception of Victoria and the lower mainland of British Columbia. The cold itself might be tolerable if wasn’t for the darkness. Newspaper coloured skies in the pertually overcast southern Ontario winters can compound the effect of longer nights, making January a tough row.

It’s fitting that the earliest published research into seasonal affective disorder (SAD) appeared in January of 1984. It seems fitting. Why would any journal publish such an article in July? The research met with some skepticism at the time of its publication, and maybe that’s just the way it is for new ideas. People who come up with new ideas might be skeptical by nature, but the answer to the abiding question behind this research seems like an obvious one to me: Are people who live in northern latitudes more susceptible to depression in the winter? Um, clearly YES.

Maybe the skeptics either lived in regions where the winter darkness is not as severe, or they were simply unaware of the prevalence of seasonal mood disorders. It’s safe to say that seasonal depression is, by and large, accepted as a reality by people who live through dark winters. This is not to say that everyone suffers from it, but rather that everyone knows it’s out there.  Still, in the heady and optimistic 1980s, the community of psychological and psychiatric  researchers had its disbelievers. After all, it was morning again in America.

I doubt that it was easy, back in 1984, to talk about mental health in general, and mood disorders in particular. Despite the mixed bag of lived experiences in North America, the ’80s are remembered as a period of optimism. I don’t exactly remember it that way, but I belong to Generation X, and most of us got slammed pretty hard by the 1980s. We should have known that we were in for a tough go when some bastard (whose name I will not recirculate) shot and killed John Lennon before the first year of the decade was over. There was a deep and relentless economic recession where prime lending rates were in the low twenties, and that coincided with the discovery of the AIDS epidemic, administering an ice-cold shower to everyone’s libido. Chrysler introduced the K-Car. Somehow, The Gipper was turning shit into Shinola, or something. The power of positive thinking can take people a long way, but sometimes the power of positive thinking jumps the shark and becomes Pollyanna. It’s not easy to know the difference. Here are some positively great things about January: the days are getting longer, nesting in the house in January can be a good time to catch up on books you’ve been meaning to read, winter camping, long shadows, outdoor skating. Enjoy January the best you can. Be well friends.

Mask

Ghostwriting is a supremely postmodern act, which is not to say that it’s unique to our time. I would imagine that people have been paid to provide ideas to people who have none for as long as ideas have had currency.

Cuba Libre

Is the revolution over?

Fidel Castro’s revolution seized power in Cuba nearly 60 years ago behind the 26th of July Movement. Their efforts began in 1953 and culminated in the ousting of the Batista regime on New Year’s Day 1959. The appetite for revolution was stoked by Batista’s right-wing agenda that included the economic disenfranchisement of the middle class, and the rapid erosion and ultimate suspension of liberties including the right to strike and democratic politics. Batista initially aligned himself communist ideals, but was eventually seduced by Cuba’s wealthy elite and established an oligarchy that profited handsomely from business interests that were premised in association with American organized crime. In the process, Batista widened the gulf of economic and political power between the ultra-rich and an increasingly impoverished Cuban society.

In the years that followed the revolution, Castro nationalized commercial interests and properties, ostensibly to liberate the population from the tyranny of capitalist and corrupt interests. The revolution pitted Castro against the U.S. because of two major issues. First, the U.S. feared that Castro would officially align his regime with communist interests in Latin America and worldwide. Second, the U.S. had backed the right-wing government of Batista during the revolution. Relations were essentially doomed from the outset.

Only two years after the revolution, the United States imposed economic and travel embargoes upon Cuba. Initially, Cuba continued to engage in trade and travel with most European countries, Central and South America, and Canada. Over time, U.S. influence on other nations systematically isolated Cuba from any possibility of economic sustainability. Castro’s revolution was besieged, and the outcome would be determined by a waiting game, where simple attrition would pick away any prospects for the Cuban population. Castro officially aligned himself with communism, established and maintained public institutions from the proceeds that came out of the nationalization of private property, and set about resisting dissent through passive and active means. Over nearly six decades, the Cuban imagination was galvanized behind nationalist and socialist ideals while their economy ducked and weaved through the geopolitics of the cold war.

Did the revolution die with Fidel Castro yesterday? It depends on which revolution we speak of. Certainly, Fidel’s revolution plateaued a long time ago. The economic embargo has proven to be an effective counter-revolutionary measure, and the U.S. has won by virtue of the fact that they can afford to be patient. It is doubtful that the lives of Cubans will change in any appreciable way as the Cuban economy gets in line with neo-liberal ideology. Cubans have suffered from the ravages of colonialism and the population is largely descended from a history of systemic impoverishment at the hands of colonialism.

Castro’s regime was guilty of crimes against human rights, which made it easy for the U.S. to frame a cruel economic embargo around the defense of civil liberties within their sphere of influence. The hypocrisy of both framework is easy to deconstruct. Castro’s most vile offenses were committed against political opponents and homosexual men. During the same era, the United States committed the same state-sanctioned offenses against their own populations, and was struggling with the end of Jim Crow laws. Castro created a climate of suspicion among Cubans in order to recruit the population in policing the circulation of political ideas. In the United States, the same tyranny against thought and expression without evidence took place under the McCarthyism. And the most glaring hypocrisy of capitalist ideals in the means used to kill communism in Cuba. Capitalism had to forsake the tenets espoused by its high priests, Adam Smith and Milton Friedman. It had to commit the ultimate capitalist sin by using government interference with the free market in order to prove it’s superiority. Surely, if capitalism’s proponents had faith in the ethos, they would have let market forces destroy communism in Cuba. Their use of economic regulation proves that they don’t really believe what they preach.

In the end, fundamentalism in both economic systems has proven to be utterly antithetical to political and economic freedom from tyranny. Elites in both states reap the rewards of tyranny against their populations. Economic disenfranchisement is rampant in both states. Did the revolution die yesterday with Castro? That’s doubtful. A slow and quiet revolution started a long time ago. Arguably, Castro’s revolution did little to elevate the status of people from the Batista regime, and the coming capitalist revolution shows little promise of doing any better.

Admittedly, my brief account of Cuban history cherry-picks cause and effect in order to assert that it is dangerous to reduce the arc of Castro’s legacy to a simple narrative casting him as hero or villain. I argue that one could pile rhetorical evidence on both sides and the result would simply be a more rigorous examination that supports the same conclusion.  The lesson that can be taken from an examination of Cuba’s history is that we need to actively engaged in democracy and think critically about how our system works. We should be willing to continually assess democracy and improve upon it in order to prevent us from following any one person over the brink and into misery. A multitude of voices engaged in continual dialogue is the only way to assert liberty and build resilient ramparts against tyranny from political and economic elites.

 

 

 

Don’t tell them…

“Don’t tell them that their economic system has collapsed under its own weight. They live their plight every day.”

“Don’t use the government taxis. Only use the independent taxis. The government taxis are corrupt and dangerous.”

“Don’t go into Centro at night.”

“Don’t stay at the government hotels. They’re filthy.”

“Don’t eat at the government restaurants. Their kitchens are dirty and the food is bland.”

 

 

Creativity: Kurt Cobain and Parody

Coming to terms with creativity can be an unnerving and messy process for anyone who is most comfortable with a linear approach to thinking and learning. I’ve seen it countless times when teaching music, visual arts, and creative writing, and I continue to struggle through as I learn and growth as an artist. Students are often looking for formal guidance when asked to create. The institution of education has taught students that there are structures in place that define the ways in which cultural artefacts are and have been created. For instance, a student likely learned about the conventions for stringing words together to create sentences. They learned to communicate ideas using the comfort afforded by rules around the basic parts of the sentence. These building blocks are solid and provide the satisfaction of a binary outcome: the sentence is either correct or incorrect. The challenge for the student is (firstly) learning to recognize the difference. The second challenge is an optional one, and that is the challenge of appreciating the long continuum of quality. The first challenge is the easy one for students to overcome because it can be learned in a linear way.

When I teach creativity, I prefer to reject any notion of a binary outcome and ask the students to use an alternative rubric like beauty, affect, or emotion. So-called “good students” are typically the most uncomfortable in this moment because “good students” have been trained to deliver products for feedback that are judged in ways that are tangible, measurable, and relatable to pre-existing exemplars. The thinking that is deployed to arrive at those products is often linear, rational, logical, and at the nuclear level, binary.

Exercises in logical and linear thinking have value. A linear and rational approach to solving a problem may be the most useful tactic in some instances, like troubleshooting computer code that isn’t working properly or refining the design of a mechanical part so that it fits into specifications that have been delineated by fixed criteria. The problem is that this kind of thinking is incompatible with creativity, by it’s very nature. It’s not demanding innovation, but rather the opposite: rigorous and detailed conformity. The thinkers who are most successful in this setting are those who can combine the deepest understanding of the system they’re working within, and who can then perform in the most exacting and disciplined manner within that system.

Through my experience as a person trying to improve my own creativity, and as a teacher trying to make creativity an important aspect of the classroom experience, I came about the opinion that if we want to teach students to truly be creative, we need to promote the parallel growth of their non-linear and disruptive thinking. I think it’s safe to assert that mainstream education institutions have done a fine job of teaching conformity, and they’ve served the so-called “good students” well. Like good accountants, these good students can keep track of all of the details, produce reports, map historical trends, and extrapolate those trends into the future. Good accounting skills are important, by the way, so don’t make the mistake of concluding that my framework around this subject is privileges one way of thinking or problem solving. Also, I’m not claiming that it’s not possible to be creative within that context. But I hope you can predict where I’m going next.

I feel like the pedagogy that we inherited from the Victorian age, and that the institutions of education proceeded to refine throughout the 20th Century, probably worked to kill creativity because it privileged the virtues I described above. [Others have come to this conclusion before me, but I came to it in a different way]. Creativity was actually disciplined and punished in order to make teaching and learning more systematic and accountable. I’ll use the example of music to illustrate my point.

Students have been taught to understand the conventions of western music as if they’re examining a balance sheet. Young musicians are essentially taught a language system and the history of Western music. Presumably, the well-intentioned people who established and promoted this kind of learning hoped that by knowing the language system of Western music, students can communicate with each other. And by knowing the history of Western music, students can place music on an arc of evolution. Also, the two work in synergy to perpetuate an understanding of what is “good” music, and what isn’t. After all, how can one possibly play a musical instrument without understanding the rules of the language system and the vocabulary of all musical “words” available to them. This is parallel to the way we learn to understand language. All valuable stuff, and also very linear.

Knowing vocabulary and language conventions does some work toward guiding a student to becoming Anton Chekov or Carol Shields, but in the process of doing so, it’s possible to, by way of discipline, teach the creativity out of the student. For instance, one could learn language and vocabulary and other important structural aspects of language with increasingly rigorous precision and never arrive at creative brilliance, or even at creative mediocrity. Again, this structural way of making meaning out of communication systems is essential, but I fear we’ve failed at teaching creativity.

I’ve heard the argument that creativity can’t be taught, that it is the sole domain of the talented. This is flat-out wrong, and inverted. I think creativity is the domain of most people, at least until they’ve been sufficiently rewarded by structural ways of thinking. The talented outliers might have more resilience against discipline, or their creativity aligns with the conventions of the medium at an early enough age that they’re exempt from discipline. Educators, trained in this way of thinking, decide that the talented student demonstrates an understanding of the conventions that the education system tries to teach. Advancing this premise, such an exemption would liberate that talented student from the tyranny that befalls the so-called untalented, and permits that student the freedom to explore their own creativity in an unrestrained way. All the while, the talented student is praised for having some kind of divine inspiration. I propose that perhaps that talented students simply got the freedom from discipline they needed to go off and explore.

There’s another way that creativity can come about within a system that privileges linear and structured learning, in spite of methods of discipline. The student of creativity can be so obstinate that they persist and explore on their own, despite the efforts to make them demonstrate an understanding of the conventions. I’m not suggesting that creativity is best fostered through a rejection of the conventions. What I’m saying is that if an education system has built a fortress around a particular mode of understanding, it might take rebellion from within for creativity to flourish.

To grow one’s understanding of conventions is essential to understanding how to communicate with the rest of humanity. Otherwise, the most creative person in the world will make creations that fall outside of a system of understanding created by a common language, and be declared childish, insipid, unrefined, unskilled, and unworthy of inclusion in any canon of human artefacts. The challenge, then, is to learn the formal and structural elements of a language system, while simultaneously learning how to be inventive. Both skills need to advance in tandem in order for the creations that come from a person’s imagination to be understandable by the rest of humanity.

I suggest that nearly all people who can be held up as icons of creativity developed a parallel understanding of formal elements while still holding on to a connection to the way their imaginations worked before they understood how to use those formal elements. Kurt Cobain is a relatively contemporary of this. I’ll use this example because I’ve listened closely to his music, and read widely on life. I think you’ll find that you can lay the framework of my argument over many other icons of creativity.

I’ll address the debate over whether or not Cobain deserves to be held up as an icon of creativity. There are basically two dominant positions on this question. The first dominant position is advanced by fans who simply love his work and can’t really articulate why. They feel connected to some or all of his oeuvre, and that connection runs deeper than an examination of the merits of his musicianship, as measured against, say, the conventions of Western music or the conventions of song lyrics as poetry (if such conventions even exist).

The second dominant position on the question of whether Cobain merits status as a creative force is one that is most often advanced by people with a deep understanding of the conventions of Western music. They’ll cite a long list of Cobain’s contraventions, including but not limited to the fact that often sings flat, his guitar solos are simplistic, and the structure of his songs demonstrate little to no mastery of the conventions of music. Additional charges against Cobain are that his lyrics don’t seem to make much sense, and that his journals reveal the fact that he was singularly driven to become a rock star. All of this is true, and the last point is probably particularly offensive to people who were taught that the pursuit of music must be a kind of martyrdom in order for one to be take serious as a creative person. Or that for a person to be financially rewarded for their creations is a sure sign that they lack creativity or talent.

There are other positions on this question, but these are the dominant ones in circulation in the popular press and among musicians in general. I’ll advance the position that Cobain was powerful creative force who was intrinsically motivated to develop parallel understandings of the formal structural conventions of the genre and musical inventiveness. I’ll use one example to articulate my position, though there are more available.

Cobain’s own journals, and the anecdotes of people who knew him, assert that he went through a period of time where he learned popular music from the masters. His study started with Credence Clearwater Revival, which grounded his knowledge of popular music in Americana. CCR’s songs conform in a structural way to American folk, blues, and country. Kurt didn’t just learn the songs. He studied how the melodies wove through the chord changes, how their songs derived from the various forms of Americana music conventions of rhythm, meter, and harmony. At the same time, Cobain was also studying John Lennon’s post Beatles work with Yoko Ono, known for subverting, inverting, and departing from the same conventions of Americana.

Cobain moved quickly to studying hard rock forms from bands like Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, Kiss, and Queen. It is said that Kurt was drawn to the subtle androgyny that some of this music deployed in order to position himself against the often homophobic mainstream. At the same time, Kurt was deconstructing music from the punk genre by The Stooges, Bad Brains, Black Flag, and Sex Pistols. This is another example of learning the conventions of a genre and then seeing how others subsequently defied the conventions.

Throughout Cobain’s self directed exploration of popular music, he was creating original music based in the things he was learning. It is well known that he was intrinsically motivated to become a rock star, and countless journal entries support the common knowledge. Cobain wanted to become a rock star, but had no interest in learning repeating what other rock stars had done. During the time after Nirvana’s first album Bleach, and their breakthrough album Nevermind, Cobain dug even deeper into popular music to determine the most vile offenders of creativity. He sought out the opposite of what he wanted to be. Maybe he was indulging in an overexposure of what he hated most deeply. Or maybe he was engaging in a creative exercise, either knowingly, or subconsciously. Regardless, it was in this period that he composed the song that became his breakthrough work, and one that would define the following decade of popular music.

The Nirvana hit Smells Like Teen Spirit from their breakthrough album Nevermind was written as joke. Kurt was obsessed with the song More Than a Feeling by Boston, and would rail against it’s complete lack of creativity to anyone who would listen.

Krist Novoselic reflects on what it was like to record with Kurt Cobain in an article from the October 3rd 2013 issue of Rolling Stone magazine. Novoselic states that Cobain would bring the core of a song to the band, chords and melody with some kind of vague notion of lyrical content, then they would help to flesh out the arrangement and make it into a Nirvana song. Cobain would add lyrics and phrasing at the end of the process, when the structure of the song was in place. Apparently, Kurt preferred his lyrics to be nearly completely metaphor and pun, rather than literal. Cobain wanted to be a rock star, and he pulled it off. So that’s what it looked like in the room when Nirvana wrote songs, but how did Kurt come up with the unusual, almost atonal riffs and melodies? The story behind the writing of the song Smells Like Teen Spirit offers some clues.

Cobain came to rehearsal during the period when the songs for the album Nevermind were in gestation. He was in wry mood, which apparently was a common theme. Kurt was immersed in songs by the people he admired, but also those by the songwriters he loathed. He often railed against crass commercialism and formulaic writing. One song in particular was More Than a Feeling by the American band Boston. The song was a hit for the band, topping out at number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, and putting the band on the map. Cobain brought the song to rehearsal, but while playing it, he goofed on it. He mused about how the same song might have sounded if The Stooges had written it. He shifted the major-key tonality to minor, simplified it and played it with recklessness that was in opposition to the original. His bandmates hated the original song, and thought that Kurt’s rendition was “stupid” it at first blush, but after working it over for an hour, they came around to seeing the charm and ingenuity of his approach.

To most musicians comfortable with improvisation, this approach is nothing new. It’s a game that we play all the time. This sort of irreverential parody, soaked in levity and self deprecating musical humour, is often the cornerstone of inventiveness. The trick, for Kurt Cobain at least, was to push past the joke and turn the song into something that is new and unique in its own way. This kind of creativity is derivative, but only in the sense that the creative process used another work as a starting point. Oscar Wilde proclaimed that imitation is the sincerest from of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness. I’d be hard pressed to find a creative person who disagrees with Wilde. In the case of Smells Like Teen Spirit, Cobain wasn’t imitating, but deriving from, departing from, deconstructing, and deriding, More Than a Feeling, to the extent that he invented something new and interesting.

 

 

1.1 (Employment) Agency

1.1 (Employment) Agency 

[This is a serialized work of fiction that has been numbered, starting at 1.0, to make it easier to read in sequence.]

For the fourth day in a row, I’ve circled around to land in the same place I was exactly 24 hours earlier. For four days, I’ve been dwelling on circles. I’ve been commuting, which is a mind-numbing act of slow circularity that stands in contrast to the way unemployment confers an infinity of time to reflect and create. M-Ploy Labour, to whom I have contracted myself, despite their questionable reputation, has placed me at a large parcel sorting facility belonging to a major courier. The courier occupies an expansive sheet-metal clad warehouse in the industrial suburbs of Stoney Creek. Where soft-fruit farming once thrived in the rich soil and moderate climate of the narrow strip of land between the Niagara Escarpment and Lake Ontario, this part of Stoney Creek has been rendered lifeless, paved over and populated with warehouses and industrial strip malls. A multi-lane freeway flanked by service roads on either side and a parallel railway thrust through the middle of this peninsula of land create a bustle that belies its utilitarian emptiness. Massive and imposing steel rectangles that occupy entire city blocks are separated by windy parking lots and streets lit by sodium vapour lamps, casting everything in a jaundiced glow at night.

This is the second time that M-Ploy has placed me with the courier. The first time, I worked a few weeks of night shifts, which were made nearly unbearable by the challenge of having no car and the limited hours of transit service to that part of town. Travelling from Concession Street to Stoney Creek means taking a bus into downtown, transferring to the Barton Route 2 bus and riding that to the end of the line, then transferring again on the Stoney Creek Central route 55 bus, which takes me to within a 10 minute walk of the courier. It’s hard to let go of the kind of money it takes to buy, maintain, and insure a car, especially when it takes so long to earn it. All of this is made marginally more bearable by the fact that the HSR bus rolls right past the end of my street.

Perched here on the brow of the escarpment, leaning back against a bench at my bus stop on Concession Street, I can see clear across the city, the harbour, Lake Ontario, and beyond to Toronto. Its glass towers rising out of the lake, which were rendered in grayscale only seconds ago, are ablaze in orange as the first light breaks over the horizon and bounces off their crystal facades. The sky has shifted to an otherworldly hue, like an image sent back by the Curiosity Rover, or a the horrific beauty of an unspeakable apocalypse. The sun inches out of Lake Ontario, and the spectacle of sunrise warms my face and excites my imagination.  

1.0 (Employment) Agency

1.0 (Employment) Agency

[This is a serialized work of fiction that has been numbered, starting at 1.0, to make it easier to read in sequence.]

 

With the universe of natural things always spinning and twisting, I find it a wonder that we can stand upright. Should we not be be staggering punch-drunk and nauseated with motion sickness from being trapped in cycles and circles and loops and gyres, doomed to go back over ground we’ve already covered and will cover again tomorrow? Think about it. Our planet revolves on its axis with a superimposed wobble, an oscillation that the tender creatures inhabiting its surface experience as days and seasons.  The moon begirds the Earth. The Earth and the other planets hem in the sun. Stars spin in galaxies. The objects of the universe diverge on an outward tide from the centre that will, if we are to believe the modern legend, collapse back down upon itself some day in a cataclysmic implosion. For now, at least, we’re riding an immeasurable galactic inflation, the embodiment of the mathematical concept of infinity that itself is too large to apprehend. If we are standing on a world in a grain of sand, how many worlds would exist on a beach that seems to carry on past the three miles I can see to the edge of the horizon?

Blogging

I’ve been blogging for a number of years and in a range of ways, but lately I’ve been thinking about creating a blog that represents the ideas that circulate in my imagination, and the things that I do and create. I’ve had false starts with blogs about wilderness tripping and creative writing. They seemed insincere because they portrayed me as some kind of expert in a particular area. They were text with no context. That’s not what I want to do when I blog.

So what am I trying to do? Thats a good question, and one that I considered carefully and for quite some time. There are plenty of blogs out there, and does the world really need another one? The answer I came up with is: No, the world doesn’t need another blog, but I do. I need a blog because it will serve to organize my thoughts, collect ideas in one place, share knowledge, solicit feedback, and provide potential collaborators and like-minded individuals with some insight to my world. Maybe a blog can create new possibilities for me.

For now at least, I don’t see the need to declare a connection between my ideas and my employer. It suffices to say that I make a living teaching children who are intellectually gifted. I work in a setting that is steeped in a range of precepts around innovation and enrichment. I’m not an academic, but I’m deeply invested in ideas. Much, but not all of what I think about is framed around my profession, but I’m not enamoured with the notion of writing a blog about teaching. While I respect and understand how, for some people, their profession is the keystone of their identity, that’s not the case for me. I see my profession as the place where all of the things I know and have done in my life converge to provide my employer with some utility, and in trade, I get a way to live with purpose and make a living. It’s a nice synergy: my interests bestow upon me a set of skills that can be mustered in such a way as to advance my employer’s goals. They happen to deem those skills worthy of compensation. I like the arrangement, and as long as they keep paying me to be me, I’ll keep showing up.

However, writing blog about teaching feels, to me at least, like looking through a telescope the wrong way. It’s backwards to the way I imagine myself and my place in the world. I know from maintaining my previous blogs that I won’t be able to sustain a steady flow of content to satisfy my inner overachiever. In the pursuit of some kind of framework around how this blog will look, I did some reading and found this article in The Guardian that gives me a place to hang my hat. Maybe this blog is para-academic. Maybe I can live with that handle. Maybe it’s not necessary to have a genre.

It is yet to be determined if anyone will find my approach to blogging cohesive enough but, to bring this back to education, maybe my obsession with understanding blogs in genres points a problem in how I expect to be apprehended by a blog-reading public. If I can find a way to bring all of me to bear on this blog, train the lens on my thinking and creating, perhaps that could provide a glimpse into what it means to teach people to bring their whole being to bear when learning to solve problems. I hope you follow.