This Week's music

This week I am into the Polaris prize nominees, but only 3 of them really:

Last week's music

Last week I resumed my love affair with Youtube which had been put on hold due to China blocking the dam site. I got into old school hip hop mixed with new school beats from the Ninja tunes label. This was a good Youtube playlist:

Toronto is ROC

I've only lived in the Rest of Canada for 3 months in my life. I don't really consider New Brunswick to be Rest of Canada because I lived in a francophone community which was just not very Anglo Saxon in its outlook. My three months in the ROC were spent hitchhiking across Canada, living in lower East side Vancouver and working on a flower farm in the Yukon; not exactly the typical ROC experience I would say. Toronto is ROC, it is the center of the ROC experience and I would say it is pleasant enough. I would say that it is a good place because the WASP element is mixed in with the entire planet. So when I was walking in downtown Toronto and saw the bagpipe wearing skirt sporting Scotish guy, my attention was immediately diverted to the reggae Jamaican guy with dreads riding his bike and screaming sme non-sense "Babylon" or something. That is good. Toronto takes the British politeness, love of order, Victorian era prudishness, and Protestant work ethics, and uses it to build this multicultural hodgepodge of everything that is very interesting if you enjoy people and culture.

Now the critical theory, French nationalist in me screams " but it is all overpowered by Anglo culture and moors"! But I am left wondering. What is quite amazing in this city is how everyone seems to live together quite fine. I have only been here for a while, like a week really, but I think I get the point that nobody is going to look at you funny if you wear a turban and a dress, man kiss a man, or scream at people down the road in Chinese. Everything goes in a great mix of indifference and economic logic that is very refreshing when coming back from China. Even the whities are joining in and they have a bunch of urban tribes that can be visited as I travel across the city; from urban hip, to suburb clics and  banker money people. The WASPs gain from all this great food, cultural excitement and (I am sure) a self glorified sense of satisfaction at having arrived there first and therefore having in large part built the basis for this great experiment.

Obviously this is all fodder for the separatist because French in this metropolis becomes just another minority group. Well I say "to hell with that" because a federation should be able to house many different political and cultural systems under a state and Canada has obviously been pretty good at that. So for today and until I get pissed off, I lay glory upon you Toronto.   

Toroto Night

I met up with my friend Jon. He is a fluffy intellectual. Fluffy because of the curly afro he sports on his head. Intellectual because he is like woody Allen, but less funny, he is still pretty funny though.

We were at a bar and I commented on a man's beard, he had just bummed a smoke. He was a Geopolitics PhD at York. He seemed to be really into religion and academic theory. Critical theory more precisely. He lives in the ivory tower. We then proceeded to get drunk. After a while we left for another bar. The guy told me repeatedly I was a Marxist.Jon left, he was probably bored out of his mind that me and this guy had just been taking academics for the past 4 hours. Me and the beard try to get into another bar. I somehow got refused at the bar. I might have been a bit confrontational. I think maybe I refused to show my ID or at least made sarcastic remarks to the bouncer, its ironic because I had just befriended another bouncer at the other bar. This upset the bearded academic, "Can you get in the system? Can you?" he yelled at me. It was a bit odd and we parted. I got his phone number and promises we would play badminton. I am sceptic as to whether the number is real or not, don't really feel like trying it right now.

My head hurts. Maybe I will read Das Kapital today.