The question before us, and here the first person plural is inclusive, dynamic and welcoming, is why in earthly fuck would you, and here the second person singular is a friendly and cognitive abstraction for any and all of us, come inside to Larry’s Folly, a bohemian baking paradise built on the jittery but stimulating foundation of serving coffee, on a day when the temperature outside on the streets of Parkdale, Toronto’s bulwark against the forces of reckless capital investment and gentrification, is, at about 9:15 on a Saturday morning, about 20 degrees in the Canadian measuring scale of Celsius (one of two ways we know we aren’t in America) and rising like an Air Canada jet just before the unseasonal work stoppage which will be remembered as that autumn the Government stayed out of the way of the airline and its pilots for as long as it reasonably could without intersectional conflicts breaking out in Fredericton and Portage la Prairie (there’s a Canadian name) and Bobcaygeon and Cape Breton and of course, Tronna (its secular name) until both sides collapsed in uniformed exhaustion and got back to delivering a service which has come under occasional scrutiny for its lapses and is consequentially at the cutting edge for strategies in the delicate and burgeoning practice of customer care, or to use the old parlance of the ports and prairies, the complaints department.
My dad, in the face of whinging, crying or rebellion mounted by his children against any proposal or call to action (doing the dishes), explained that the Complaints Department was on the Seventh Floor, which even at the ages of 6, 4 and 2, we could tell was ridiculous and pretty fucking impossible because the house had three floors. The abstraction was my introduction to the limitless possibilities of the mind and the conceptual frameworks of surrealism and the absurd. The door opened on you can complain on a floor that doesn’t exist, and it never closed, and now, where the door once was there’s a just a tattered sheet billowing, through which the real and illusory alike blow with equal gusto and verisimilitude. It’s a problem. But at least I am not running for high office. People who can’t tell real from less real are only useful to sell advertising during reality TV (where the unreal becomes real) or publishing jittery, stimulating Substacks.
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Let’s take a moment to observe the magnificence that is Madeline’s plum coffee cake. I would say delectably moist but it sounds like a commercial. It’s just really fucking good. Hang on… Sigh. A perfectly good reason to sit and tap into the peculiar and venerable machine that is my late 2013 Macbook with its new keyboard. The coffee and cake are a little bit of country down here in Parkdale, a hard copy urban snapshot yet to be digitized into the cloud.
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On the counter at Larry’s Folly is a hard copy of the Globe & Mail, Canada’s newspaper for the multi-syllabic. Hard copy is a perfect description for paper that folds and crumples; it simultaneously reveals the limitations of language and acts as a metaphor for our thwarted ambition. Like if you buy a social media feed to ostensibly liberate political speech and end up (with your end up) making speech meaningless, your freak flag hanging uselessly over a sad outlet mall for overheated hot takes and a castle of braying young men who think responsibility and care for others is a negligible political position to be actively fought against, like communism or doing the dishes.
The newspaper on the counter is jumping up and down at the prospect of an election (as long as it doesn’t happen during their summer vacation).
DEEP BREATH
And here this weekly tremor of words and shuddering, fear and loathing, this anonymous pilgrimage into invented histories and realties of the Gen they call X will do the thing it absolutely should not do and talk about the home country and the politics therein. Suffice to say the backstory of this voice might include employment relationships which preclude articling in favour or against political flowers in the federal garden.
And what a garden! To say it is an exciting time in Canadian politics is of course an old joke. It’s more like watching wheat sway in the prairie wind and letting the mind wander. Canada has never extracted itself from extracting and never hesitated to bail out Bay Street. We just can’t help ourselves. We love that money! In another place and different colonial history we would be a boring Nordic social democracy (we see you, boring Norway!) but we have an insatiable buyer next door for our raw materials and we grew up on game shows that turn shopping into a contest. We constructed our reality as a metaphysical mall maintained at 24 degrees Celsius, a place to delight in, while in the Eastern bloc the TVs and cigarettes were pathetic (because they had to keep up with an arms race; see Oppenheimer, it’s better than you think. If you don’t fall asleep).
Children of the cold war didn’t know and still don’t know a world that is not creating an endless demand for production. How’s this for a hot take, twits on X: The cold war was a marketing idea for infinite weapon manufacture, and the concomitant government spending made the 1950s a laugh riot for white people.
We liked the cold war so much we brought it back. Who then, will be the next 007? My money’s on Florence Pugh. Or Flopu.
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So, let’s take a look at that newspaper on the counter over there where Madeline cheerfully deposited my morning delicacy (it’s gone now, save a few evidentiary crumbs, and I mourn its passing and celebrate the love it gave). The forecast, as it has been every day for many moons, is the end of a (minority) Liberal government and the arrival of a (majority) Conservative one. It amounts to the weather because this is the only outcome in Canada. It might as well just be clouds then rain; you can’t lose being a prognosticator across these ten provinces (I see you PEI) and three territories (shout out to the NWT). Gimme a three-letter acronym. Like NDP. LOL.
You attend a play called Election, Canada! (free tickets) and you open the program and see the cast for the candidates for Prime-Minister and you are underwhelmed. You consider ditching the play (there’s only old people here anyway and you’re worried this means you are in serious decline) but the lights go down and you have a full beer anyway.
The incumbent is Gen X. He is an intuitive man who feels the wind on his face and sails accordingly. His position is due entirely to his family history. He is in the doldrums, quite alone in his boat, blowing on his sail.
The NDP leader is not the best to ever do the job and not the worst. His lack of eloquence is not endearing like Tim Walz’s down home thing. It’s more, what is the word… boring. His latest calculation to leave a memorandum of understanding is celebrated as a spectacular blunder by almost every news outlet, so you can bet it is a good idea. He is in no danger of being Prime-Minister. We are curious if Québec can ever love him, given certain, uh, ethnic particulars. We’ll stay to the end and see.
It's the particulars that induce clicks on websites and attract advertisers. And the particulars are, now more than ever, under the influence of our charming neighbours. The Conservative leader has refashioned himself with a bad haircut and learned to smile when talking about removing supports for drug users and the homeless. For his audience, he labels reporters tools of Liberal governments (they are tools of all governments, if you want that perspective, because they are tools of democratic societies as much as authoritarian ones) and so will not engage with them. Whether he knew how this would play out or not, it has succeeded beautifully in creating a clement weather system for this career politician. The newsy types, like a kid whose dad will not talk to them, are anxious for his approval and deferential to his discomfiting glares. It’s embarrassing, but Canadians are used to being embarrassed. It’s the other way we know we aren’t in America.
SEVENTH FLOOR
· No mention here of the Greens or the BQ. This is what zero responsibility looks like.
· The disappearing complaints department applies to the behemoths Google and Facebook and Apple. They don’t need to answer you when their shit doesn’t work or fucks up your life.
· Interestingly (only to me) Google’s Chromecast Audio (2016) was and is a simple, excellent and cheap tool for streaming high-res audio. So of course, they ceased production after one generation and just keep making more crap that doesn’t work and eats your data. We’re so Eastern bloc, 1979.
POLITICAL THEATRE (PARAPHRASED)
· Kamala: Without editing, you suck and everyone knows.
· Donald: They’re eating the dogs they’re eating the cats.
· Pearl Jam: Like Pilate I have a dog.
· “The news is like the weather, only its manmade” – Woody Harrelson, in the lamentable Natural Born Killers.
· Oliver Stone movies are l70 minutes of zero responsibility.
· At a downtown film festival (you know, as in festive) there are objections voiced against a documentary film they have not seen by Conservative ministers (epic cynicism for a party that says government should interfere less) and very conspicuously, the deputy PM. I have not seen it. They should fuck off and let me if I want to.
PLAYING ON LARRY’S STEREO
· Boygenius’s album appears to be, like an attentive theatre goer, aging very well indeed.