I recently received the following voicemail from a student: Actually last week. The calculator. Oh, Jesus, no, no! (Audio unclear)That was so loud. Mr. Ellen might come over here. Here we go, move on. What else you got? We’re running out of time. How’s your day? Because you can’t. This kid keeps asking me questions and they don’t have a question anymore. How was your day? Bob, I’m out. What’s the information? Yeah. It would not be shocking. It would not shock me tomorrow.
The hyped moment of this week’s Toronto Maple Leaf press conference was tabloid reporter Steve Simmons offering his vitriolic remarks on John Chayka’s hire as general manager. “You talk about due diligence…but many think this a sham. Words like ‘con artist’, ‘liar’, and ‘salesman’ have been said.”
While it’s possible that Mr. Chayka won’t do well as Toronto’s GM, the hiring isn’t the point here. It’s the bitter, self-centered nature of Mr. Simmons. I’ve previously blogged on the tendency of sports media towards flailing stupidity, focusing on reporters such as Dave Feshuck (Toronto Star) and Cathal Kelly (The Globe & Mail).
This has been on my mind for many years. Beginning in 1997, I worked as a sports reporter for a now-defunct Vancouver weekly and witnessed firsthand the behavior of these Neanderthals, many of whom only ask questions along the lines of “What’s it feel like to lose again?” I was once in a post-game scrum with Allen Iverson, an NBA rookie at the time, who fielded endless critical questions about his posse. When I asked him about his decision to change tactics in the fourth quarter, he looked at me in surprise. “Oh, a sports question.”
I eventually wrote a piece on the miserable state of sports journalism. I interviewed athletes such as Peter Zezel (Toronto Maple Leafs), Mark Messier (Vancouver Canucks) and Othello Harrington (Vancouver Grizzlies) as well as Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston and Neil Amdur, the sports editor for The New York Times, asking their opinions on the aggressive, often uneducated nature of sports reporting. There was a clear consensus on how challenging this could be, Mr. Gaston especially amused by line of inquiry, given the target the media had painted on his back in those days. I completed the piece, offering it to The Globe and Mail, and was told it couldn’t be published because I had named names.
Gary Mason, the sports editor of The Vancouver Sun at the time, was one of those names. Among other things, I cited his laughable decision to write about his personal hike up Grouse Mountain and not the Vancouver Canadians championship on their final day as a Triple-A Baseball Team. Instead of witnessing an historic day at Nat Bailey Stadium, Mr. Mason had wandered off. “The Grind is so popular, it has become a zoo.”
Astoundingly, Mason has since become a Globe and Mail national affairs columnist, giving us hope that Simmons too might drift off somewhere and allow someone else to take his place and actually report on the intricacies of decision-making in the sports world.
“The test is today?” Anni looked like she had just got out of bed. “Since when?”
“I posted the date last week.”
“Where?”
I nodded at the whiteboard beside her.
“Oh, I didn’t see that.”
“It’s on Google Classroom too.” I turned back to my desk. “And we had a class discussion about it on Monday.”
She crossed her arms. “I don’t have my book.”
“I told you to bring your book to every class.”
“Can I borrow yours?”
“Me too,” Betty sidled up. “And I need to work in another room.”
“What do you mean?”
“My ADHD.”
“Since when have you had ADHD?”
She scoffed. “Like…always.”
“Me too,” Anni echoed. “I have it too.”
Betty crossed her arms with Anni. “We both do.”
The path of least resistance beckoned. I sat them at opposite ends of the room next door and returned moments later to find them chatting in the back. “Seriously?”
“Have you ever been to Scotland, Mr. M?”
“Scotland?”
“My family rented out a castle in Scotland for the summer.”
“Anni, you’re writing an test.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Betty laughed
“We’re fine.” Anni waved her book absently. “We just have to write it.”
When I was a kid, a group of teachers decided that I should skip Grade Three. Mr. Fleming took me down the hall to his Grade Four class. I didn’t understand what was going on, just that I was suddenly in another grade. There was a writing exercise, maybe a math test too. I don’t remember much about what happened, except that I didn’t spell something right – the word “sheep” keeps coming to mind – or maybe my e’s looked like a’s. I don’t remember. But before the day was over, Mr. Fleming escorted me back. I was in Grade Three after all.
I now do some work as an external grader, which means that I assess student work from schools outside my district. My grading has been considered consistently accurate over the years, so much so that they had recently doubled my work load, including re-assessing those who they thought failed to meet their standards. Recently I was promoted to team leader, an assignment that lasted less than a week when they informed me that my grading was now unacceptable. We’re sorry to inform you that you will not be able to continue your grading. We are sure you will appreciate that our first concern must always be for the integrity of these assessments.
There was no recourse, no means of questioning or challenging the decision. It was my Grade Three/Grade Four experience all over again. I had been exceptional or whatever for a day and then I wasn’t. Institutional gaslighting at its finest.
I’m spooked listening to my breath, thinking that it might be somebody else ready to tear me apart. I turn my phone around, and there’s nothing there. I’m stupid enough to think that this might be real. A child, still a child.
I’m driving the winding road at the bottom of the city, thinking it’s the next left and never getting there, searching for whatever and it always being ahead. I’m lost. Maybe worse.
I’m on the phone. No one’s answering. I limp across the street. The door won’t open. There’s a siren and then another. I vanish into the dark and walk and walk. The anger comes first and then the fear. I work myself up and get back to the anger. I want that sense of control as the bear chews off my face.
Are Trite Questions the New Headlines? Is This the End of Civilization? Is Musk An Immortal? Is Trump the Savior? Oh, well, maybe yes to those ones.
But more to the point: Is This Really The New Super Food? Who is The Most Dangerous Person Alive? Why is Everyone Afraid of This Tiny Thing? Why Does Everyone Ignore This Advice? Can This Dog Really Speak Ten Languages?
Why Are All of These Questions Never Answered? I’m waiting.
I am a great admirer of Cormac McCarthy’s work. No Country for Old Men, All the Pretty and The Road are intensely terse and darkly compelling. Blood Meridian is absolutely mind-blowing and one of the few books I’ve (tried to) read multiple times. To be honest, McCarthy is a great inspiration for my own writing.
And so I was pleasantly surprised to learn of McCarthy’s The Passenger, a book published in 2022, a year before his death. “A brilliant book,” reads the review from The Los Angeles Times. “An elegiac meditation on guilt,” writes Esquire. “The first novel that I’ve read in years that I want to read three more times to savor,” proclaims The New York Times.
Sadly, none of its true, as the book is awful. Weighed down by relentlessly repetitious, cliched dialogue, completely undeveloped vapid characters and heavy-handed explications on random topics such as the Viet Nam War, quantum mechanics and the Kennedys, it’s a 437-page spew that could have been a novella at best.
I’ve encountered no greater mystery in life than myself. In a just society I’d be warehoused somewhere. But of course what really threatens the scofflaw is not the just society but the decaying one. It is here that he finds himself becoming slowly indistinguishable from the citizenry. He finds himself co-opted. Difficult these days to be a rake or a bounder. A deviant? A pervert? Surely you’re joking. (159) I could go on. Or to be more accurate, Mr. McCarthy could go on and he does.
The book felt debilitating for me in the end, making me wonder if I knew good words and that, leaving me to wonder how McCarthy could write this sophomoric gobbledygook, how the maladroit dross wasn’t purged and how the press could offer such sickly sweet sycophantic praise.
Certainly, we all have our bad days, but this book made me recall the line from McCarthy’s own The Road: Just remember that the things you put into your head are there forever. And so not just the cannibalism but now this book too.
Artemis II is about to take us back to the moon, where as noted by Buzz Aldrin in his 1974 memoir, Return to Earth, there is a starkness of shadows and the unusually brilliant white, a contrasting white like no white I had ever seen.
Upon returning home, Aldrin wrote, When I wasn’t in bed, I sat staring at the television set. If a man reflects at all, it is usually near the end of his life. and it happens only because there is little else to do. My depression forced me to stop and, for the first time, examine my life.
Examine my life? What’s that? Do I just close my eyes and think deeper? Or clean my thoughts and think not at all. All or nothing?
Red or black, 11 or 21, everything on that, plain and simple. Forget the lies and compromise. Ditch the morons. Ignorance and fury out the back. One more drink and get that number, Artemis II. 500 on magnificent desolation.
If I were to have dinner with anyone living or dead, I would choose Jafar Panahi, the Iranian director of The White Balloon (1995), This is Not a Film (2011), Taxi (2015) and this year’s It Was Just An Accident. Even though Mr. Panahi speaks no English and I speak no Farsi, I believe there would understanding through his entrancingly beautiful films and the humility he shows in every interview I know.
Mr. Panahi and I would talk about films and books, living in this chaotic world and the American Tragedy. Mr. Panahi understands that there is no such thing as the American Dream, no success story of rising to the top of the capitalistic ladder, that there is only tragedy, a sacrificing of everything for personal greed.
This tragic tale has been told throughout Western history – from Aeschylus’ Agamemnon slaughtered by his wife, Clytemnestra, through Scotland’s Macbeth beheaded by Duncan to the American’s Daniel Plainview sitting in blood and piss – each furiously violent stories of how the attainment of power leaves you desolate and dead.
The fates of Gates, Zuckerberg and Musk are not hard to determine; like Trump, the bitter and ignominious final chapter is coming fast. None of us will be sad. Mr. Panahi and I would laugh and nod about that and then talk about better things, films to come and maybe even of one day living in a tolerant and empathetic world
It’s not like I had expectations of anything worthwhile, but I still was depressed at the pathetic nature of this year’s Academy Awards. Worst of all is the bald-faced lie of inclusion.
Sinners, a predominantly black production, was hailed for receiving the most nominations in Oscar history (16), winning four, including Michael B. Jordan for Best Actor. Great, right? Or as Jordan said, “God is good.” Uh, no. Sinners is not a very good film, meandering through vampires and gore to nowhere, paling in comparison to Fruitvale Station (2013), Ryan Coogler’s first film with Michael B Jordan which received zero nominations.
Autumn Durald Arkapaw, the cinematographer for Sinners, became the first woman to win in this category. Great, right? Uh, no. There have only been three previous female nominees ever in this category – Rachel Morrison, Ari Wegner & Many Walker – a profession known historically for being for men-only. Why? Yeah, good question.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another won six awards, including Best Picture and Director, and featuring a black female lead, Chase Infiniti. Great, right? Uh, no. Anderson’s previous films, including There Will Be Blood, Punch Drunk Love & Magnolia, were not acknowledged – despite being far superior in substance, style and meaning.
Worst of all this year was the exclusion of Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just An Accident, not only the best picture of the year but perhaps the decade. Also excluded, not even nominated (!), was Alex Babenko’s 2000 Meters to Andriivka, documenting the futility of war in Ukraine. Ukraine? Iran? Whatever. But…”God is good.” Okay.
Conan O’Brien, the host for the evening, spent much of the night performing gags related to the increasing irrelevance of the Academy Awards, due to the present generation’s inability to focus and empathize. Wow, okay. As my mother used to say, “Isn’t that the pot calling the kettle black?”
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