The Visionary and the Administrator

It's been a couple weeks since I wrote here. I've been busy: I went to Vancouver and, when I returned, hosted a house concert for Suzie Vinnick. The concert was awesome but only four people showed and I felt like a heel.

I've done some thinking about the "everything is getting worse" mentality from which I sometimes suffer. It's a mindset that is very destructive to day-to-day morale, motivation, and even self-esteem. I inhabited this place for a long time in my life, particularly in the years immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001. If one looks, one can see the world he knows crumbling, enemies lurking everywhere and apathy.

I've done much to banish "everything is getting worse" by not watching television. I get my news from a little Google sidebar and avoid the stuff I don't want to see. I have also stopped reading activist websites, which honestly just make me angry at the world and then make me feel powerless. As a result of study of The Principia Discordia, I've been able to see the world not as crumbling, but as changing, and make my peace with change.

However, I've done some serious thinking about "everything is getting worse" lately. Not because I'm thinking of subscribing to its ideals again, but to see if it has any truth at all. After some deep thought, I've created this grandiose statement:

"It is the nature of our society for products to get worse."

If you would, I would like you to think of a brand-name food item that has been around for several decades (assuming you're old enough). It can come off a grocery shelf or be served in a restaurant. Close your eyes, visualize it. Think about how it looks, how it tastes, it smells, how it is packaged. Now think about how it used to be. Visualize it in the same way. Compare. Was the older version of this food product bigger? Did the package contain less air? Did it taste better? Did it cost less? Chances are that you can answer yes to at least one of these questions, probably more. Think of another food item and repeat the process.

Sure, currency inflation explains why it costs more, but from the perspective of the average consumer, what else is inflation but the manifestation of everything getting worse? There is some bias, of course, in the question of "did it taste better?", because when you were younger you had more taste buds and everything tasted better. But in the question of taste, consider how the major soft-drink manufacturers switched from cane sugar to corn syrup as a sweetener in the 80s. Putting questions of obesity aside, how did that affect the flavour of our pop?

Don't try to deny it. In our society, once a product or idea is marketed, the forces of capitalism begin their work. Those who make their living from it seek to make it cheaper to produce, smaller and tagged with a higher retail price. It is a slow process, usually imperceptible with the passing of years. The McDonald's cheeseburger of today is a very different food item than the ten-cent burger of 1937. Specifically, it's smaller, more expensive, and made with less-wholesome but cheaper products.

It's not just food items, either. It's all products and services. It's in entertainment: the sequel is always worse than the original. In workplaces all over the world, people are getting laid-off while the workload stays the same, the remaining employees tacitly asked to work overtime without pay and openly asked to "do more with less". It's not just free-market services either. The quality of service from the Canadian government, for instance, from the NFB to the CBC to Medicare to the Canada Pension Plan to the Canada Council, it's all worse.

Every good product and innovative service has two metaphorical figures locked in loving embrace and struggle: the Visionary and the Administrator.

The Visionary is a creator of ideas. She has creativity to see problems from new angles, courage to challenge established order and luck. The Visionary's desire is to change the world in her image. At her best, the Visionary dreams of new ideas that make our life better. At her worst, the Visionary is a reckless wastrel that destroys resources on bad ideas.

The Administrator is a facilitator. He has common sense, a grasp of reality and the ability to think critically about what is important. The Administrator's desire is to draw black ink. At his best, the Administrator helps Visionaries and employees realize their maximum potential, gathers and manages resources wisely and makes life easier. At his worst, he destroys creativity, fears change, overworks employees and makes policy that benefits Administrators.

It is a never-ending cycle. It starts with an idea, dreamed by a Visionary. An idea is just an idea and doesn't become reality until the Visionary seeks help from an Administrator. The Administrator helps the Visionary see what is realistic for the idea, provides creative limitation, finds funding and manages the workforce. The idea expands and grows to its full potential.

Then something happens. At some point, control of the product shifts from the Visionary to the Administrator. Either the Visionary moves to a new product, or dies or becomes complacent. The retail price goes up as the brand is established. The budget shrinks. The product changes in tiny ways. The workforce used to create and support it vapourizes with layoffs. The Administrator is rewarded by bigger payoff, but the product suffers. The only way to return the product to its former glory is the actions of another Visionary, but at this point, Administrators fear jeopardizing their holdings and resist any new changes. When the product suffers, so does the public.

It's just how it goes. The only things that will motivate Administrators to reverse the effects of their product-destroying policies are the actions of hostile Visionaries that threaten their holdings. It explains why dynamic industries, like those related to techology breakthroughs, are always in healthy competition and have good products: today's computers are decidedly better than those I grew up with. However, beef technology has not improved and my Whopper Jr. is worse than the one I ate fifteen years ago.

As we drift through life, it is very easy to see how great ideas are ruined every day and fixate on it. Some guy died waiting for publicly-funded cancer treatment. The Star Wars prequels sucked. My Pepsi doesn't taste like it did when I plucked it from my Grandad's bar fridge when I was a kid. I can't buy O'Ryan's Sour Cream and Onion chips anymore. Canada's international reputation is besmirched, diminished from the days when Lester B. Pearson blah blah blah everything is getting worse blah blah blah.

To thoroughly enjoy yourself in this society, you must have an appreciation for the new and marvel and must not cling to that which is dying and changing for the worse. Enjoy them while they're still good. Get lost in a video game sometime and marvel at the graphics before another game trumps them. If Burger King fails to offer you a good Whopper Jr., seek the burger that some Visionary somewhere else is offering and do not shed a tear for the decline of your favourite meal. Vote out the government of tired old men. Hail Eris.

Above all, you must not be afraid.

http:/pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Saskatoon's Irish Music Community

For centuries, the Isle of Erin has been exporting the Irish. They left because of persecution by the English, potato blight, service in foreign armies, and hope in the new world. Every city across the globe has an Irish community. Quietly and without fanfare, every week, they gather in pubs to sing and play instruments: the Irish Music Session.

Ten years ago, I knew nothing of this. The circumstances that led me to Saskatoon's Irish Music community are part of a well-rehearsed tale. It's a story that's all too-familiar to those close to me, but I must recount it again.

In 2000 I was in my mid-twenties and lost. In the 90's, I had wanted to be a classical musician and composer. I pursued a Bachelor of Music degree with a Theory and Composition major when I left high school. However, I soon fell out with my University's chief composition professor, he being a strict modernist who studied with John Cage, I being a headstrong tonalist. After a few years of frustration and resulting low self esteem, I changed my degree to escape him. I briefly played viola with the Saskatoon Symphony, but was let go. After I finished my degree, I put my viola aside and did not touch it for two years. I truly thought that music was over for me. I felt angry and betrayed.

I cannot tell you how painful this separation was. Music, for me, is the closest thing I have to church. My first truly religious experience where my skin tingled and my consciousness soared occurred when I was playing viola in the last movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. Music has since been my proof, however vague, of a higher power. My instrument has been my altar and melody and harmony my prayers.

Soon after the decade turned, I met Eileen Laverty, who told me of the existence of the Irish Music Sessions at Lydia's pub, hosted by Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. The following Saturday, viola in-hand, frightened and not sure what to expect, I stepped into Saskatoon's Irish Music Community.

All around me was the thump of bodhrans, the strum of guitar and bouzouki, the ringing of fiddles and lively voices singing beloved songs. Jigs and reels whirled in my brain. There again was that divine exhaltation I had lost, lifting my consciousness into ecstasy. After three glorious hours had passed, I was dizzy and elated.

It has been ten years since that day and Irish folk music has never left me. The people I met there welcomed me. Through them I discovered that I could sing, fiddle and play the banjo. I founded the wandering evening session that started at The Publican, but found a home at McGettigan's, the Brass Monkey, The Park Town and finally the Mendel Art Gallery. I've spent wonderful hours with the South-Central Ceili Band and the Residuals.

Last month, I stood up at the Lydia's session and told all present how grateful I felt. But that's not enough to thank all those musicians I have met over the years. If I had enough money, I would have expressed those thanks in beer that day. I'll write it here again: Thank you all, my friends. Even that is not enough. The gift that Saskatoon's Irish Community has given me, my renewed love of music, is greater than any alcohol or words could commend.

A special props goes out to my peeps in The Residuals. Ted Leighton, Rick Kroener, Rob McInnis, Meaghan Haughian, Bettina Grassman, Mike Podiluk, Gareth Bond, Erin Gaucher, Chris Meek and all those who have ever been a Residual, you're the best. Thank you for the music and the memories.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Vanishing

Zoey wants to explore ruins. Sort of. My twelve-year-old niece mentioned it in passing as something we could do while she's visiting us in Harris. She thinks it would be creepy, and therefore fun. I'm not entirely sure that she was serious when we discussed it, but I was. I know that a ghost town called Valley Centre is located on Highway 768, so on the sunny Saturday before she is scheduled to leave Harris, Zoey dons proper exploring shoes and an embarassing shirt of mine that we don't mind getting dirty. We leash the dog, board the Mazda and drive the gravel highway looking for someplace "creepy".

The old Hillview schoolhouse is locked and, despite Zoey's urging, I am unwilling to force the door. We peer inside basement windows at a plastic Christmas tree and octopus boiler, then decide to move on. Set against the golden hills in the distance is a brown grain elevator. I am reasonably certain from my memory of Google Maps that Valley Centre is located on 768, but the distant elevator is north of the highway. Then again, Google Maps also thinks there is an Indian Reserve to the east of Harris and the Stonebridge neighborhood in Saskatoon is called "Stonerideg". We decide to check it out.

It is not Valley Centre. According to the faded paint on the elevator, it is Bents. I stop the car on the hill to prevent the undercarriage getting scraped by weeds on the disused track into town. To our right is an abandoned house with smashed windows and flaking white and red paint, beyond that is a cluster of wooden buildings greying with age. To our left is the elevator.

"Oh my god," says Zoey. I feel the same way. I had expected to explore some toppling farmhouse with outbuildings filled with old paint. This find is scarcely believable. Such places exist.


We decide to avoid the nearest house because it looks the most recently-occupied and for some reason I find this unnerving. We follow the track to what was obviously once the general store. We tell the dog to sit and stay outside the door. I enter first, partly because I have no idea how stable the structure is, partly because Zoey is skittish.



For an abandoned ruin, this store is surprisingly sound. It is dark inside but light leaks through broken panes. Where on tracks more beaten an old building like this would be thoroughly ransacked and looted by boozing teenagers and people like myself and Zoey, the Bents general store is surprisingly intact. Stock still sits on the shelves, including a display of women's shoes. Old appliances and cabinets lie open everywhere. In places the floor is plastered with ancient paper and piles of swallow shit.


A counter with a porthole in the wall separates the general store from what looks like a post office in a rear room. Tiny cubby holes are labelled "McNaughton", "Wylie" and other local family names. Here the layer of paper on the floor is thicker. Zoey discovers a pamphlet promoting John Diefenbaker's Conservative government from 1962. I smile to myself as we sift the papers and discover personal documents from the late fifties and early sixties. Confidentiality was apparently not a huge issue when this office was abandoned.


The dog is now whining and circling the building. Before we leave, Zoey searches the women's shoes to find a pair that match as a trophy. By now, any fear she felt in exploring this place has vanished. So has her search for identity: the need to prove herself as a good person, a bad person, or a pretty girl. In this desolate yet beautiful place, I am also seeing Zoey for the first time. She is adventurous and free-thinking and I am secretly pleased.

We stash a load of loot at the car and then head toward the first house we saw. Hundreds of swallows wheel around the old TV antenna. Inside are drooping light fixtures, swallow nests, wood panelling, a used bar of soap and signs for an auction sale.



Judging from the No-Name shopping bags lying on the bathroom floor, this house was abandoned in the late eighties or early nineties. The whole town of Bents must have been auctioned off in this way. The last resident of Bents, probably an octogenarian, lived in this house on the edge of this rotting town, watching it collapse. At last concerned family members or death pried them from this home and their life was auctioned for a pittance. If ghosts exist, one surely stares from the windows of this home, watching the remains of Bents slowly vanish beneath the grass.

The next house we explore is in worse shape. In the living room a rusty pram is sinking into the floor. Zoey and I have found the creepiest thing we will see today. As we are leaving, we discuss why it was so creepy. I tell her, "Icons of youth in the midst of death are always creepier than just death." She agrees.


Zoey can't help posing every time she sees me readying the camera. I try to secretly photograph her without much success as we search the grain elevator. The elevator shelters an enormous scale, old machinery for scooping wheat and rotting bowls full of screws and nails.


A sturdy-looking ladder leads to an upper floor. Zoey wants to climb it. I forbid her to do so. When she asks why, I tell her it's because I don't know anything about architecture and I wouldn't want to be the one to tell her dad that she was crushed when a grain elevator collapsed on her. She says, "So, if I was your kid you wouldn't have a problem with it?" I confirm.

Outside the elevator is a graveyard for farm machinery. As Zoey and the dog clamber around in it she speculates on the function of various contraptions. She believes that the tractor she is sitting on might still run. "Alright," I say, not wanting to shatter any fantasies. Zoey's mind is open and imagining possibilities in this place and I don't want to spoil it. Just by being here she's discovering volumes about the lives of long-dead Saskatchewan and I don't even have to say anything. I am proud of her again and keep my thoughts to myself.

As evening approaches the sky turns radiant and high clouds paint strange patterns in the eerie blue. It occurs to me that this moment is of such shocking reality and beauty that it is to be treasured forever. In my adulthood, I can recognize these moments as they happen, but when I was a child I had no idea. Now I have only scattered memories and regrets that I didn't pay more attention. I hope that Zoey will remember this moment as I will.


On our way back to the car, Zoey wants to get a picture of herself riding on a rusty swing set. It's awkward but she manages to take a seat and pose. The symbol is painful. There she is, a girl poised on the edge of maturity, the toys of childhood becoming uncomfortable, her youth vanishing as surely as Bents is vanishing. In twenty years she will be a freethinking woman and Bents will be but piles of windblown, grassy timber and iron.

All things must change and have their beauty. But for now my niece, this town and the prairie that surrounds us are perfect. I thank God that I remembered to bring the camera to capture them as they were in this moment.


http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/

Fire in the Head

I am feeling very passionate right now. About what, I don't know. Is that odd? Perhaps some words violently tapped upon my keyboard will reveal the mystery.

I often get in moods like this late at night. I feel I am on the verge of something great and profound. I want to shout the injustices of the world and reveal some great hidden truth.

Underneath this urge is the threat of crippling nostalgia. My memory is a curse. While I struggle with basic concepts like, "I have an appointment at 3:30 today," I have a vivid memory for my place in the past. Long-gone smiles, remembered smells and snatches of music torment me. I can close my eyes and recall a moment almost perfectly. I get lost and when I open my eyes I want to cry. Days gone by can never be relived.

It doesn't matter if the memory is from a rotten time in my life. Why on earth would I want to be back in the mid-late 90's? Was I not frustrated, lonely, socially retarded, terrified of women and defeated? Yes I was. But there was this one time I was looking out the window of my apartment on Broadway at night, a Radiohead B-side was playing and giant snowflakes were falling. I stared into orange street lamps, feeling cold air leaking through the window. The radiator clicked and cooking dust drifted into my nostrils. I was lonely but content. I was free. It was the late 90's, I was there and I will never be so again.


Even as I sit here typing I wish I could just have an hour in that time and place, walk Broadway as it used to be and visit the young versions of my friends. We were so... I don't know... heady? Full of possibility. Now reality has scarred and scattered us. I miss us, those young people with their cigarette smoke, ironically-enjoyed b-movies and their, "What do you want to do?" "I dunno, what do you want to do?". I miss my apartment. I miss how it all made me feel.

Aw, Jeez. I guess I've strayed into crippling nostalgia. It's at times like this I must remind myself that the 90's weren't that great. Three of the ten top-selling albums from the 90's were by Celine Dion. There was this huge recession that nobody acknowledged, this awful, boring, drawn-out economic slump that affected everybody except baby boomers. My apartment had mice. Mealworms lived beside my bed. Dr. Jim Pankiw was my MP.

This isn't working. Thinking about the 90's vermin is making me nostalgic. I should probably just stop typing. Before I do, if any of my 90's friends are reading this, I'll just say I love you. We should hang out and watch a lousy movie sometime.

http://pharoahphobia.blogspot.com/