Month: April 2018

April 24:  Toronto lost a degree of innocence yesterday when a young man in a van plowed through crowds on Yonge Street killing 10 and injuring 15 more. I say a “degree of innocence” because I believe that many people felt that an attack of some sort was just a matter of time. Toronto, as the largest city in the country, is an obvious target and it seemed to be only a matter of time before something happened.

People have experienced a range of emotion. Some are angry, some sad. If I feel anger it is because this is such a senseless act – so selfish and unnecessary. But I am also angry because this appears to have been the act of a man with mental health issues and the system did not provide him enough support, and did not identify his intention to do harm before the fact. So ten people paid with their lives.

Many people are sad. Even though they may not be affected personally, I think we feel sadness because we know intuitively that we have all lost something we value deeply: the security and openness that we feel as Torontonians. Most of us felt that terror attacks and the random shooters common in the United States happened to others, not to us. Now we’ve lost that sense of distance and perhaps even smugness that gave us the unreasonable belief that we were somehow different and would therefore escape the emotion of an assault.

Several weeks ago, an horrific bus crash in Humboldt Saskatchewan killed 14 people. While it was shocking and saddening for the rest of Canada, it felt like an “accident” that happened at a distance that somehow removed it from having an immediate and direct impact on our lives. I was shocked and amazed to see that a crowd-funding effort had netted more than $10 million to support the victims’ families. At more or less the same time, a bus went off the road in India killing 23 students, yet I couldn’t find a gofundme page for them.

Dozens of people seem to die every day as a result of horrible accidents, suicide bombs or terrorist attacks. Their lives are no less valuable than ours, yet the distance and frequency of such attacks makes them somehow less significant: Just another bomb in Syria. Toronto has been lucky to avoid an attack, until now. And while it was not a “terrorist attack” in the literal sense, we did lose our innocence and have woken up to the potential damage that a “real” attack could do. Many other cities and countries live with this reality every day.

Toronto often seeks to be “world-class” and perhaps now more than ever before, that may be true. We have learned that we have the same potential to be a target as Paris or Brussels or Barcelona or London or Beirut or …

Further reading: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/toronto/article-the-truths-canada-needs-to-remember/

April 15: Frequent reader(s) will know that I have been learning to play the electric bass, so it’s exciting to announce that I had a recording gig last night at Koerner Hall with the Hot Sardines. Based in New York, the Hot Sardines play funked up jazz written by everyone from Al Jolson and Sophie Tucker to Duke Ellington. The concert was recorded for a future CD and, along with 1,134 other souls, I will be on it, making a continuing contribution to musical history in Toronto. The band includes trombone, trumpet, reeds (clarinet and sax), drums, bass, piano and a singer.  And a tap-dancer.

At first, the tap-dancer seems a bit odd. He sits in the middle of the band with his arms hanging over the side of his chair, quietly tapping away to the rhythm of the song. At some times, with the shifting feet and flailing arms he looks a bit like a man having a seizure, but when the solo arrives ( does one “solo” on taps ? ) he leaps up and belts out a texture that adds a new dimension to the music. At this point he looks more like a demented marionette on black ice, but it all works.

My musical weekend started the night before when I played at Chamber Sweets, an event put together by the New Horizons Band. Chamber Sweets is a concert to promote small groups of musicians from within the NHBT organization. Students form a group, pick the music and rehearse a short number. Each band is limited to 2 minutes, and there’s a wide diversity of music given the range of experience and ability within the NHBT universe.

My band chose a version of Pachelbel Canon in D Major played on trumpet, French horn and bass. It was arranged with my bass doing a 4 bar solo introduction: 8 notes in total repeated throughout the piece. I managed 7 of the 8 notes, skipping one in the middle somewhere. Arriving at the beginning again, I recalled our instructor saying that if you make a mistake, the best thing to do is own it and continue playing like there’s nothing wrong. Which I did. Having managed all 8 notes the second time through, the rest of the group joined in and we had a more or less uneventful performance from then on.

As I listened to the other bands I realized that most people made some sort of mistake during their performance. Some were more noticeable than others, but none were fatal to the outcome. It reminded me that music is an art-form that must be performed. You can look at the notes on a page and have some idea of how it might sound but until it is actually played by musicians – mistakes and all – it is lifeless. It is in the playing and interpretation that it gains life.

Even my band-mates in the Hot Sardines have miscues: The tap dancer sat thrashing in his chair through a half-bar when he should have had the lead. So it gives me comfort to know that, as I practice for next years performance with them at Koerner Hall, my best is good enough. I will never be error free. That’s part of what makes performing music so exciting.

April 2: A friend recently started an on-line course for creative photography using his Apple iPhone. It has been fun watching his skill improve and see the results of his effort. As he got better, he started posting batches of pictures to Facebook, and actually developed a devoted following. I realized that, if I was to continue to see his work, I would need to consider joining as well.

To say the least: I was reluctant, but after some thought, I decided to take the plunge. On entering the site I was asked for a bunch of personal information which would presumably be used to “make my experience more enjoyable”. Data related to age and sex, schools I attended, where I worked and a personal photo were all sought, and ignored. Once I became a member, I was asked to download Messenger and started to receive news items and advertising that looked suspiciously like some things I had already seen on my own searches. I got a long list of “friends” already on the site – some that I had not seen for many years and for good reason –  and asked to “like” them so that we could chat on Facebook.

After a couple of days on the site, the story of the Cambridge Analytica data hack broke in the news. A small avalanche of stories appeared in the papers about the subtle effects of electronic devices on our daily lives, and more specifically, the loss of privacy on-line. They pointed out that people now use their cell phones to capture an image of a place or an event, rather than taking the time to experience the place or event first-hand, and to then take an image as a reminder. On-line groups of friends have replaced actual live friends, and their “like” provides an endorphin hit that becomes mildly addictive. Like-minded communities become insular and inward-looking, receiving a stream of information tailored to their viewpoint. More extreme views were often reinforced with feeds from dubious sources.

Much of this was not news to me; it mirrored my view of many of the sites most of my friends used. My photographer friend often said that he spent several hours a day on electronic media including Facebook and Instagram. While I sometimes felt like a bit of a Luddite for not being more active on-line, I had no desire to follow his example and shortly thereafter, I uninstalled Facebook.

In reaching that decision I needed to balance the convenience of having access to my friend’s pictures against the obvious incursions into my privacy and personal data sought by on-line sources. I am already very aware of being tracked, and the potential for loss of privacy or worse, and being on sites like Facebook only seemed to magnify those threats. While I will continue to use this site to share my miscellaneous ramblings (with the security ratcheted down as tight as I can get it), I’m off Facebook. I’ll need to find another way to enjoy my friend’s photography.