Formation

By now, everyone and their mother has seen Beyoncé's Formation video.  The think piece cottage industry has dutifully performed its reactionary function with assiduous alacrity, SNL has done a spoof, we've almost (but not quite) gotten to the inevitable backlash.

My immediate reaction to the video was a deep understanding of why black social media was so enthusiastically embracing this recognition from their self-anointed Queen coupled with a healthy dose of skepticism about Beyoncé's sudden political awakening.  I had an in-depth conversation with Dr. Rei about it, where we discussed whether this piece was "for" a non-black audience and who gets to say whether Bey is "authentic" or not, and I've had some time to marinate in this and absorb some thoughts from people much smarter than I, enough to formulate a tenuous, hopefully reflexive response, with the caveat that, as regular and faithful readers of this blurg now, I have not now, or ever been a member of the Bey-hive.

1) I made peace with the authenticity of Bey's strategically timed-political awakening (the timing, not necessarily the authenticity as a whole).  If she wants to get overtly political in her work now, then she's a grown a** woman, making her way in a workaday world, so if she wants to address this head-on now, then by all means, go for it.  And if it makes her basic white girl fans take a minute to contemplate the larger issues and systemic oppression of black bodies in contemporary North American society, all the better for it.

2) I would argue that the imagery of the video, the aestheticization of the black experience and the signifiers of southern blackness that she/the director (and for the purposes of this writing, Bey herself will stand in for the choices of the director) are invoking, the heavy hand with which these are put into play, diminishes the affect and meaning.  There are real bodies that drowned in New Orleans.  Creating that stylized aesthetic distance is somewhat problematic, but I'm not sure where I stand on that, only that I have misgivings.

And because I am now, and forever more rooted in a Marxist understanding of class and cultural studies, I would argue that the substitution of Bey's body for those real people, is a semiotic leap I cannot, in good faith, take.  The class privileges afforded to Bey separate her from those bodies.  Those people drowned not just because they were black, but perhaps moreso because they were poor, and the collusion between those two lines is impossible to untangle.  If Bey was actually in Katrina, there is no way that George W. Bush himself wouldn't have sent Air Force One to lift her out.

I get what she's getting at, but despite her southern black roots, I feel like the association has been severed.  You can't be BFFs with Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin, possibly the personification of clueless white/class privilege and then think that your black female body can be inserted into that symbolic narrative.

Or can you?  I don't think so.  I am also suspect of the invocation of Katrina, over 10 years after the fact.  But who am I to say?  Am I allowed to talk about this?  Do identity politics and resistance necessarily entail a zero-sum game where we have to pick which of our identities we privilege - why does Bey have to choose whether shes' identifying as a woman, black, or rich?

Post-colonial studies taught me about strategic essentialism as a tool for working around the homogenizing effects of global capitalism.  Is that what Bey is doing?

3) I think it's important to divorce the reception of the video and read that as a separate thing.  There's the video itself, the audience, the constructs that make the production of such a video possible (music industry), the author of the video, and meaning is constructed in the spaces between all of these forces/actors.  I think the fact that for the most part, black social media lauded the video and wanted to see this mass-market representation of a particular black experience reflected is in itself, a worthy by-product and its own discussion.  Who is the audience for this video?  Is it white America?  Is it black America?  Is it a primer for white America to understand black America?  Does this hunger for reflection trump the more problematic, perhaps (and I say, perhaps) exploitative elements of the imagery?

I haven't come to a conclusion on this, but these considerations, this nuance, is all a necessary part of the conversation.

Less controversial - Sophie Gregoire-Trudeau's cringe-inducing number at an MLK event:

I showed this to Academic Book Club last week.  When I showed it to the Dotytron, I was like, "Isn't this the worst?!" and he's like, "Totally, she white-lines it through 9 different key changes in that last line!" which I think misses the point, but is so endearingly Dotytron.

Pretty low-key weekend up ahead for us, for which I am extremely grateful.

Fin.

On raising a weirdo

or, potentially, weirdoes.

The Big Yam last week: "Sometimes at school, my brain shows me pictures from last year, and I don't want to see them, but they go wherever my face goes."

Me and the Dotytron: "What."

LOL.  This kid, man.  This kid, who comes home from school periodically and will say stuff like, "I didn't play with anyone.  No one wanted to play with me," and then I drop him off at school and everyone's like, "BIG YAM!!!"  "Over here!!!" and I ask him, "Who is that?" and he's like, *shrugs* "I don't know."  He's such a little weirdo.  Such a clueless, lost-in-his-own-world weirdo sometimes. I find it very believable that he might be so immersed in his own world of play that he ignores kids trying to play with him.

When I came back from my trip, the Big Yam spent the weekend punishing me for leaving by being a giant beast.  Screaming, disobedient, obstructionist, difficult to the extreme and basically the worst version of himself, which in turn, made me the worst version of myself.  This Maclean's article on "The Collapse of Parenting" had already made the rounds and we had already fielded significant looks from our respective mothers about our "parenting" (or perceived lack thereof).  I ended up listening to this guy on the CBC and that Maclean's article is pretty terrible in the way it misrepresents him.  First of all, I'm not sure he's entirely qualified to talk about it, being a family physician (and psychologist, but whatevers) and second of all, the approach that he espoused on the radio was "strict but loving" which is what the Dotytron and I generally aspire to, and have actually been told we're more on the strict end of the spectrum.  This guy's approach seemed to come back to common sense stuff - like, putting the family back at the centre (don't overschedule your kids), limit activities, eat dinner together, not everything is a consensus, etc., etc.  We've heard it all before, and yet...sometimes it feels like nothing is working!

That weekend when I came back from my week away wasn't great, I'm not gonna lie.  I ended up screaming my face off and hauling the Big Yam's butt upstairs and dumping him on his bed when he was screaming at me and hitting me in the face (which is no easy task because he's pretty much 7/9ths my size at this point) and I also stuck him in the basement bathroom with the lights off (he can reach the lights but was too busy losing his s**t to remember that) when I caught him kicking Lindsay in the head.  At the same time, I tried the progressive discipline thing, I tried mirroring back his feelings, I gave him opportunities to express himself in a more constructive way, but at a certain point, after 15 minutes of this in a grocery store when your kid is sitting on the floor and freaking out, there is a point where you have to hiss at them that they are embarrassing themselves in front of everyone.  Or is there?  I dunno.  I'm just trying to muddle my way through!  What would YOU do?

Shortly after, we ended up having another bad weekend where the Dotytron and I were both stressed from work and brought it home and just weren't up for 15 minutes of variations on, "I know you're mad, but your behaviour is inappropriate, if you want to go up to your room and scream there, you can and come back when you're ready to talk..." and we both snapped more than a few times.  That night, I resurrected the "fireside chat" model, and I had a talk with him, starting with apologizing for raising my voice.  The worst part?  When he said that: "When you scream at me it makes me more mad and I can't stop being mad."  Way to cut to the heart of me, Baxter.  So we talked about how screaming is not an appropriate response to being mad and that if he does want to scream, he can do it in his room and we'll give him one warning and then if he still screams we'll take him up to his room but we won't be mad when we do it, etc.  I think we might have gotten through?  Who knows.  It was definitely worthwhile to have the conversation just to be reminded that my losing control was feeding into his loop of losing control and it wasn't helping anyone.  Things have been better since the chat, but he's still an emotionally volatile weirdo.  Not sure there's anything that can be done about that.

I also take solace in JJ telling me that she heard from a psychologist that some kids need to be yelled at because it kind of snaps them out of their inward cycle.  It's the equivalent of a bucket of cold water to the head.  All justifications aside, the fact that my kid could self-identify the effects of us raising our voices is enough incentive to make adjustments to the way we handle outbursts.

It's just not very easy, this whole, raising people thing.  Making sure you're strict but loving and you preserve their weirdness but also allow them to buck convention.  Imagine if your kids end up basic? How often do you think that happens?

The twins are at the stage where they have cottoned on to how boss it is to sleep in your parents' bed and actively campaign for it, every night.  Twin B will go from punching me in the face and then laughing uproariously and otherwise being a complete and utter maniac and then at night, he's the softest, sweetest little bag of smushes - it's like all the fight just exhales on a breath at night.  He insists on having us lie next to him on his floor mattress, and then he turns to face you, throws an arm around your neck to pull you in close, and then presses his face against yours.

On to other weirdoes.  Am **I** a weirdo for feeling the hots for Zayn Malik?  Or, a 2016-Grammys version of Justin Bieber? The one with the voice of an angel and who was part of a hype-inducing Jack U performance at the Grammys?

I'm just already getting excited for an EDM show this summer, and I just don't care who knows it.  Being able to party with my brother who is 10 year's younger and his girlfriend and get messy to top 40 EDM is a pretty fun outlet for my pent-up dancing desires.

This weekend was kind of insanely busy - I loved every minute of everything, but I could have used a touch more downtime.  Friday was the Big Yam's parent-teacher interview and then I did a million errands and then took the Big Yam to a skating session with his homie.  The good thing is that I learned that I'm actually NOT a terrible skater.  I can do it.  I just get shook and too much in my own head.  This time was way better.  Saturday we had another Big Yam homie over, then we packed up and visited friends in KW and then came home and hosted another group of the Dotytron's musician friends.  One of whom had just finished treatment for Hodgkins.  Can you imagine?  I can't.  It takes my breath away.  I can't imagine how scared and scarred and freaked out I would be.  This is happening now.  You read stories of people your own age who are getting cancer and some of them make it and some of them don't, and while it's rare, it's not freakishly rare.  We are moving into that cohort.  We are not young anymore.

That digression notwithstanding (if you want more catch-your-breath-at-your-own-mortality material, read this stunning article in the Guardian), it was actually a great hang.  One of my god-Dotytrons was there.  He's a ginger, which I never thought would be appealing, but him and Domhnall Gleason are turning me around.

Saturday we took the kids swimming, where we learned conclusively that Twin B has NEGATIVE instinct for survival/self-preservation.  There was a ramp into the pool and he would RUN across the deck and then start trotting down the ramp, his eyes alight and his mouth open in big, belly-chuckling glee, even as the water is coming up over his head.  He will no-look jump into the pool and just trust that everything will turn out alright.  It's terrifying.  We spent Saturday and Sunday with my family, doing a delayed Xmas and then came back on Sunday, did a quick tidy of the house, and then hosted our favorite non-blood family, the Dr. Rei-Hans.  I couldn't think of a better way to spend my Family Day then sitting in the basement playing Super Mario Brothers with those guys.  My heart was filled to the brim with love this weekend, even if the Dotytron and I did nothing to observe Valentine's Day, other than get into a heated exchange about whether Kendrick Lamar's first album was "commercial."  Ain't love grand?

Multiple, multiple, book reviews coming at you soontime!

Fin.

No, YOU'RE spamming ME.

OK.  For real, I'm back this time.  I came back from my work trip and things were mental with my timelines and extra commitments but I just submitted the thing that's been consuming me for the past three weeks and I'm free for the time being.

It has been a SLOG.  Travelling for work involved grueling days - up at 6am, in meetings all day from 8am to 5pm, then packing up, going to the airport, hopping on our tiny charter plane and then going to the next destination, checking into the hotel around 8pm.  I didn't really get the hang of how to travel with this group until mid-week, at which point, after consecutive nights of indigestion from eating dinner at 9pm, I came up with a quasi-solution that involved wolfing down my lunch in 15 minutes, then going for a walk so that I might grab something I could eat on the plane and then have a reasonable digestion window before going to bed.  Travelling with my clients meant that I had to be on all day, every day, and even though my threshold for being "on" is high - I am, after all, master of the inane questions-based small talk - being in anonymous hotel rooms without the benefit or "your" stuff or "your" people wears on you.

I did get to do some fun things.  Like:

Win $20 at blackjack at the casino in Windsor.  UGH! Gambling is so FUN!  Why is it so fun?!?  My heart was racing and I had to make a decided effort not to spend my whole night there. 

  Marvel at how Robo-Cop-y Detroit looked across the river.

Order $20 worth of Johnny Rockets and eat it in my bed in my pajamas uninterrupted.

I wanted to try this restaurant called the Hoito in Thunder Bay - it's the oldest restaurant in Thunder Bay and sells Finnish pancakes.  My colleague told me to "just call an Uber," there were "so many" when he was in "Tiny Tom," Ontario (in retrospect, totally a made up, place!)  so I woke up at 6am, got ready, and opened the Uber app on my phone.  Radio silence.  I called a cab and misunderstood the distance AND cab rates in Northern Ontario.  I ended up paying $30 EACH WAY for this $10 breakfast.  It was good, but not $70 good.  I was a proper city-girl n00b and I deserved the taxi fare pwnage I received.

Northern Ontario is a mess.  After sitting through a bunch of deputations, I totally get why everyone hates Toronto and the Greater Golden Horseshoe.  The discrepancies between infrastructure funding up there versus down here are appalling.  First Nations communities who are the potato in the hot potato game between the various levels of government, high unemployment, high addiction and homelessness issues, sectors with razor thin margins that are being pushed beyond the limit.  I felt for these companies and industries, who are trying to create jobs, being squeezed by pressures from well-intentioned labour and environmental policies.  It's really a conundrum - there are no easy answers at all.  But I do think it's important to at least attempt to view things through a rural/Northern lens when we're developing public policy.  In the same way that I think it's important for urban advocates to understand and journey to the outer reaches of our city (and don't give me the whole, "I don't travel north of Bloor" parsimony) before they go ahead and propose policies that work against people who can't bike to work and don't want to.  This myopic tendency is a thing, and it's a thing that we have to work against, in order to build and nurture the relationships that are going to create the impetus for change.

After my eye-opening week abroad (I also got into green smoothies while I was away - so for real: travel does change you), I came back to work and have just been in head-down, beast mode trying to summarize over 300 oral and written submissions and then turn that into a draft report, after two days of local hearings.  It's been a sedentary marathon.  My butt's been glued to my desk chair and my muscles have definitely atrophied, but my deadline is insane and this is just what you gotta do to facilitate the democratic process, 'naw mean?

In the midst of all this I was contending with that fundraiser family dance I'm organizing (done this past weekend - YES!), and my parent council commitments, and dealing with static from weirdoes in the service of my parent council commitments.  Like, people are cray.  There's no way around it.  I'm the "volunteer coordinator" which means that I signed up for this new role and got no direction.  Fine, I can deal with that.  I set up this spreadsheet and aggregated volunteer names but the list isn't robust because at the Big Yam's school, parents in charge of certain activities are very proprietary about "their" lists of volunteers.  Which is weird, but okay, I can deal with that, too, I guess?

Anyway, someone wanted me to send out an email to ask for volunteers.  I do, with a nice italicized message underneath my name saying that if you don't want to be on the list, just email me.  This broad emails me and tells me she never asked to be on the list and that according to Canada's new anti-spam legislation I can't email people who haven't asked to be emailed, blah blah blah and then she links the Anti-Spam FAQ in the email. Da fuuuuuuuuq?!?  I research for a living, you b!  Don't test me!  So I fire back an email and say, no problem, I'll remove you from the list, sorry for the inconvenience,  I don't think that calling for volunteers constitutes the "commercial activity" the legislation is referencing.  Warm regards, me. Then she WRITES BACK.  BECAUSE PEOPLE ARE CRAY (remember how I told you that?  Still true.)  "Regardless of what the legislation says I still don't want to be on the list."  Oooookay.  I didn't respond to that email (BECAUSE I'M NOT A PSYCHO).  THEN!  Four days later, she emails me AGAIN!  She forwards me this thing and says, "I checked and you're right, requests for volunteers aren't considered spam. I still don't think anyone should be on this email list unless they requested it." (Italics mine).  At this point, I'm like, YOU'RE spamming ME!  Why can't you just shut up?!  Why do you care about having the last word with the volunteer coordinator for our kids' school?  Are you seriously so inept that you don't know how to ignore and/or delete the one email a month (at most) you're getting from me?!?!  I DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THIS BULL!

I just can't.

Leftover picture from when we went to Lolly's farm over the holidays.

Sick Twin B

Throughout this time I've gone through my usual whirlwind of micro-obsessions.  I have many many thoughts on Beyoncé's Formation video.  The Big Yam has started saying, "Excuse-me moi" to preface his points and it is amazing.

So we watched the movie Dope on the weekend, which is a fun, awesome movie that speaks to everything I'm into.  I'm super into teen caper movies (teen comes into ill begotten gains, uses it to their own advantage to shine on some adults, hilarity/wisecracking ensues) which I'm convinced is a genre, but when pressed by the Dotytron, I couldn't think of any other examples (The Secret of My Success)?  I'm almost positive this is a thing.  I'm totally obsessed with all the style in the film, but particularly, Diggy's (the girl on the right, above).  Her outfits were amazing and if I were 20 years younger, I would totally go for it.  The costume designer went for an overtly 90s aesthetic, so if I were 20 years younger, I would have been period-appropriate, though I don't think I had the style sense or body confidence to put things together with half as much panache.  The movie is like Attack the Block - teens, of a very particular type (in this case, geeks, in Attack the Block they were chavs), get in over their heads and meet some characters as they hustle.  I loved it.

THIS. BOOK. OBSESSED.  Remember Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl?  In that book, the protagonist wrote fanfic (that was peppered throughout the novel) about these two characters, Simon (a mage) and Baz (a vampire and mage), who were from this Harry Potter-like series written by a fictional author in the Fangirl world.  Well, Rainbow Rowell, being the amazing creature that she is, took those characters and wrote a book about them, in her own voice, and it was SO FREAKIN' GOOD.  I squee'd my way through the whole thing, savouring pages with gay romance and kissing and quips, and then as soon as I finished it, picked it up and read it right through again.  A book that should have taken me 2 nights to read, I stretched over a week (twice!) because I loved it so.  The characters were fully-realized and the dynamic between Simon and Baz is the perfect antagonistic stuff of teen-beat dreams.  It's like Buffy and Spike, Riggins and Layla, Veronica Mars and Logan Echolls.  There's a strong female friend, Penelope, who is even better than Hermione because she's got more of a sense of humour and is more overtly misanthropic.  People have dismissed the world of Carry On as Harry Potter fanfic, but I disagree.  It's its own thing, which is what makes it so addictive.  The story is self-contained and the narrative is compelling - it falls a part a bit near the end - I'm not clear on what we're supposed to think of the principle villain, but notwithstanding my love of British magician boarding school tales (and make no mistake: Rowell knows what makes for good British magician boarding school tales [read: she includes a lot of food descriptions]), I would have read a single volume for each year of Simon Snow at Watford (their Hogwart's).  The modern world is acknowledged (they have cell phones), and all in all, the romance was delightful and the supporting characters are fantastic and feel real.

I've read a few gay romances and they never did anything for me, and I was beginning to worry that I was too heteronormative to handle it, but based on the HOURS I spent looking up Simon and Baz fan art and additional fanfic, I can report that I was just waiting for the right story and the right characters and Rainbow Rowell served them up to me on a platter.  I can't recommend this enough.  One of my top books of 2015/16 (it was released in 2015) for sure.

Dead. Seriously. So hot.

I can't even.  Thank you, teenage girls everywhere for pouring all your frothing, hormonal, tentative sexual energies into making Simon and Baz fanart/fanfic.  You are treasures, the lot of you.  

I went from reading that (twice!) to tackling Jonathan Franzen's Purity (for academic book club, obviously) and seriously?  Like, what is this?  Is this white privilege in book form?  Because that's how it feels to me.  I can't even (in the bad way).  Now I'm at the 20% mark and am somewhat committed to seeing it through.  UGH.

After a long week and a weekend that felt even longer, I warmed up a coconut bun and put it on the dining room table.  I went to supervise the Big Yam practicing piano for about 1 minute, and when I came back to retrieve my treat, I saw that Twin A had stuffed the ENTIRE thing into his mouth.  He looked up at me, and through a mouth full of ill begotten gains, said, "I ate it all."  This is kind of what it sounded like, but his cute, soft voice was even cuter muffled through a coconut bun filter.

Here's what we've been eating for dinner, lately:

Bi bim bap.  I bought the thinly sliced ribeye that's in the freezer section of Chinese grocery stores (for hot pot) and mixed it with purchased kalbi marinade, stir fried it, and then added thinly sliced carrots, mushrooms, and snowpeas with a touch more marinade and piled this on top of rice.  Topped with a fried egg and sesame seeds, this was a very budget-friendly weeknight dinner (total cost was about $20!)

More budget weeknight dinners - French onion soup and croque hermaphrodites (ham and swiss with a fried egg on top)

Sunday supper a few weeks ago was meatloaf - sauteed brussels sprouts (which Twin B strangely loves), and a sweet potato-cauliflower-yukon gold mash.  Things my kids hate: mashed potatoes.  I don't get it.  

Another budget weeknight meal - sausage and peppers (sear Italian sausages, then bake on a tray with sliced peppers, onions, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with oregano and chili flakes) served up with soft mascarpone polenta (done in the slow cooker), and sauteed rapini.  My kids hated this meal, but I loved it.

Lately I've been craving retro 90s, 2000s desserts like creme brulee and molten chocolate cakes.  I don't know why molten chocolate cakes fell out of favour, but there's really no reason why?  Who doesn't like an underbaked, warm, gooey brownie topped with ice cream and salted caramel sauce?  Clearly not me, judging by my nightly consumption of one such dessert.

Budget weeknight dinners: Hawaii edition.  Steamed rice, topped with fried spam, a fried egg, with canned gravy on top = moco loco.  Hawaiian people are geniuses.

I was all inspired by my Discerning Coyote friend so I pulled my 9 year old (!) sourdough starter out of the freezer where it's been for 3 years (!) and brought it back to life.  I made two ugly loaves that tasted pretty good, all things considered (all things being: I was rushed, I subbed wheat bran for wheat germ, my starter is sluggish, I didn't have a razor blade to cut the tops, and I was rushing like whoa).

Yesterday was pancake Tuesday, so we had Swedish pancakes with lingonberry preserves and maple syrup and bacon from the Mennonites, which is the very best bacon in the world.

Fin.