Absolutely Useless Thoughts: 7

By Arjun Basu | Published: January 26, 2017


It is difficult to talk about useless thoughts these days when the world is mesmerized by the useless thoughts of President Whack-A-Mole who is pretty much doing what he said he would do. All of those people who voted for him because they didn’t “take him seriously” or just “wanted to see” what would happen or who claimed there was “no difference” between The Orange One and Hilary are not just assholes but idiots and guilty of the most intense kind of intellectual laziness. The sheer awfulness coming out of Trumplestiltskin’s mouth is leaving an insanely smelly oil slick over America. And soon it might be a literal one. Normally, I don’t feel bad for anyone who must live under a leader who was voted in by democratic means. But I am beginning to feel very bad for my American friends. Very much so.

1. And what is up with Jared Kushner? Like he appeared smart. Sure he had the misfortune of having Sir Whines A Lot as his father-in-law but still. It appears that there is a rupture in his family because of what he is doing. Or not doing. His brother was very visible at the Women’s March. Jared seems to be abandoning everything he may have believed in earlier in life, but his new station very much questions the make up of his very soul. A friend said that he thinks Kushner is gay and that he married a drag queen. That would at least make him interesting.

2. Speaking of dicks. We were dicks to the Neanderthals. They seem like they were nice folk, and the DNA we inherited from them made us start smoking. Or something. I’m not too good with science.

3. And further speaking of The Mouth That Roared, it is possible to escape from him. Because a town in Austria has a job opening. For a hermit. If it’s a 4-year term, where do I apply?

4. Do you like parking garages? Do you like self-driving cars? Well you can’t like both.

5. Did you know there is a “war on cash“? Because there is. Before you ask, “Why would there be a war on cash?” or “What kind of Communist manifesto are we talking here?” this war is being waged in places like Germany and Sweden and Holland. And it’s fucking a lot of people up (never mind the war on cash in India which is a totally different story). And I haven’t even mentioned Bitcoin yet. Because that just new cash.

6. Speaking of cash, you should have bought Dominos stock. Yes, pizza. You should have bet on pizza and not on, say, Google. Because people always need pizza. There’s a chart to prove it. The stock. I don’t need to prove that people always need pizza.

via GIPHY

7. Do you ever wonder what it’s like to move to a place so foreign, so diametrically different from the land of your birth that down is up and yes is no? (This might soon be how it will feel for everyone to move to the US as long as they’re not Muslim or Latino because then the point is moot). This story might make you rethink your assumptions. Especially if the place you end up does not resemble what you know from the movies.

8. Speaking of assumptions, Dubai’s firemen now have jetpacks.

9. This story, of a boy and his special friendship with a bunch of marmots (oh, behave), is an antidote to everything the Golden Haired Id will say or do.

10. And if the boy and his marmots don’t do it for you, this website just might. It’s the most random peek at humanity ever. It is also completely hypnotizing. At least it is to me. Because it is Asshole-in-Chief free. I promise. Why? It randomly selects YouTube videos with zero views.

via GIPHY

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Absolutely Useless Thoughts: 6

By Arjun Basu | Published: January 9, 2017

Might as well number them. Because I think I’m going to be doing them on a regular basis. So the first officially regular collection of Useless Thoughts, is AUT: 6. Makes about as much sense as anything else in the world right now.

1. Do we ever regret what technology does? Are we so enthralled that we kind of forgive the errors we make in our headlong rush to “the future”? I’m asking because it just seems we’re at a point where we are going to give up a lot of our freedom for the sake of convenience. Sure, Google is convenient, and Facebook allows you to keep tabs on your second cousin’s new puppy, but I get the sense we ain’t seen nothing yet. And the company that’s going to really lead the charge toward a real future, and I say real in the sense of the future = flying jetpacks, is…Amazon. And more specifically, Alexa. We’re going to talk to our things now. And sometimes the things will get what we say wrong (because we’ve forgotten to switch off the defaults and the results will be hilarious). But they will do it with cute faces so we’ll forgive them. More and more, the most prescient movie ever feels like Wall-E.

2. I am a Gen Xer and have never felt anger toward Millennials. I tend to shy away from any headline with the term “millennial” in it because it’s a lazy catch all phrase meant to disparage “the young” and tends to be a flag for articles that overgeneralize and oversimplify complex ideas, meaning they were probably written by Boomers, who as a group do that kind of thing and are to blame for almost everything.

3. Speaking of oversimplifying, and of our headlong drive toward dystopia, and speaking of driving, look what Uber is doing. (Honestly, Uber just fills voids, like any good business. You don’t have to like that they fill voids, but if it works it must be filling in need).

4. I’m big on the health of the oceans. Of water in general. And as a corollary, I’m not a fan of plastic and its ubiquity. Sure, plastic filled a need, and it did it so well that chances are the fish you eat has plastic in it. So it makes perfect sense that in the future, the ugly Australian fish you order at the local restaurant may well come from…Iowa. Because that’s the kind of world we live in.

5. And speaking of health, shopping malls are in bad health and struggling with ways to fill up all the empty space that come with store closures. Before you blame the internet (and you can) in general and Amazon specifically (you can do this, too), perhaps blame…the malls themselves. And you, because you’re responsible for everything. We all are. But I, for one, am never going skiing in a mall. Probably.

6. The Chinese take a long term view of everything, which is why the government doesn’t care what you think and never has (unless you’re talking about Taiwan and then they get pretty prickly), and why this story makes a certain amount of sense: The Chinese are “easing” a 2,000 year old monopoly on salt. And you thought water was important.

7. I don’t know about you, but I’m still evolving. Not in the holistic sense, but in the sense that I’m a human and we’re still evolving in a very real sense. Not only that, we’re still discovering organs inside of us. (I honestly thought we only had 5 or 6 organs, tops, not 70).

8. Pluto’s unceremonious demotion from planetary status was harsh and I’m still not over it. So perhaps it’s a feel good story that Pluto shares some unique features with Earth, which is still a planet, and would definitely be a feel good story if planets had feelings, which they don’t, but Pluto’s not a planet, right? So who knows?

9. I still don’t know what to think of President-elect Whack-A-Mole other than that I am more convinced then ever that we must learn to ignore his tweets and just focus, people, focus on what is happening, because our concept of “authoritarianism” is false, the facts are much more boring and the banality of it is why its so potentially insidious.

10. My agent, who is wonderful and talented, etc etc has my new manuscript out with publishers in two countries (UK and Canada so far) and nothing, no word, and being a writer you start to wonder whether or not what you’ve written is any good. Because this thought is in the back of every writer’s mind, it’s the thing that keeps you honest and that keeps you going. So you think it, and you pause. Until you get back to your next manuscript and keep on keeping on, because as I’ve said before, writing is a sickness and I don’t think we’ve found a cure for it yet. (And to the editors in the UK and Canada that have the manuscript, what are you waiting for? I’m not getting any younger here.)

11. This is my favorite new thing maybe:

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Absolutely Useless Thoughts, Jr: 2017

By Arjun Basu | Published: January 2, 2017

best-sweatpants-for-men-0I might as well continue this, right? After all, my only new year’s resolution is to buy sweatpants. I own sweatpants already, but I need a new pair. And, apparently, the athleisure thing has peaked, so maybe there are good deals on sweatpants now. Or even on companies that produce sweatpants.

1. Should we rename our species? Like are we really sapiens? Some people think we’re not and should be named accordingly.

2. Cars. We won’t be driving them. Or trucks. Already, self-driving trucks are driving self-driving cars. This is bad for a lot of people. No one seems to connect automation with unemployment much (Trump still hasn’t figured this out) but worse, automation has led to inequality. And very few people in power care about inequality. But they should.

3. And now someone has built those scary human-driven robots we see in sci-fi movies.

4. Fish have feelings. Sometimes very strong ones. Finding Nemo is, perhaps, a documentary….

5. Speaking of food, this is a great story about Chinese food in small-town Canada. There have been terrific books about Chinese food in the US (I highly recommend this one and this one and this one), but not so much about Canada. Out West, especially, every single town seems to have a Chinese café. I remember once taking my son to Milo, Alberta (his name is Milo) and we ate at the only restaurant in town, a Chinese-Canadian restaurant where you could get chop suey and won ton soup or a hamburger. North America is full of these places and you often think of the people who work there, who own these places, often the only Chinese people for miles.

The Milo Cafe, Milo, AB

The Milo Cafe, Milo, AB

6. Speaking of food, this story is one of the most delightful I read all year, not really about food so much as about a time and place but most of all about brothers and the odd bond they share, even when the bond doesn’t feel so strong. I loved everything about this story. Bonus for being set inside a Carl’s Jr.

7. American soft power is still its strongest and hardest power. I’m not sure the incoming President knows this because culture is not one of his strong (and ill-fitting) suits. But when KFC and Donald Duck become synonymous with Christmas in places as disparate as Japan and Sweden, well, that’s the hardest example of soft power.

8. I can’t keep up with TV anymore. I didn’t watch TV for a while because I couldn’t find the time. Then I realized it was because all the good shows are now long form serials – you have to watch them from the beginning to get what’s going on. I watch some shows now. But still, TV’s gotten so good these days it’s like too much of a good thing. I don’t know how anyone has time for anything anymore.

9. New Hampshire is not far from where I live and suddenly there is reason to be afraid of this simple fact of geography.

10. You’ve heard of OPEC. But I doubt very much that you have heard of the maple syrup version of OPEC.

11. It snowed in the Sahara. I’m sure this happens from time to time. It’s quite beautiful.

12. I hope 2017 turns out to be less awful than 2016. The pessimist in me suggests 2016 was just a warm up. We’ve suffered in the past and will suffer in the future. From a purely Canadian perspective, 2016 wasn’t so bad. But globally, well, more people were happy to see 2016 in their rear view mirror. And then the new year started with a terrorist explosion in Istanbul…

13. My son, who is almost 17, doesn’t quite get the concept of rotary phones. Or even the pre-internet era. This video of an old Cathode Ray Tube television, slowed down, might freak him out. But I could watch this forever.

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Son Of And Yet More Absolutely Useless Thoughts

By Arjun Basu | Published: December 16, 2016

bubbles
1. I’m going to run out of things to call this series of posts or I can push it beyond the limits of good taste and logic and then keep going. I choose to keep going. Not because it is easy. But because it is hard.

2. I’m going to say something nice about journalism (next point). But before I do, here’s something that is obvious: journalists missed the Trump phenomenon because they don’t inhabit the same media bubbles that the people who supported him inhabit. I’ve written about bubbles before. And about how the internet facilitates, encourages and enhances our bubble lives. The idea of getting out of your bubble is easier said than done but one look at the world, and how incomprehensible some people are to others, should encourage you to get out a little. Easier said than done, I know. I just don’t believe that a world of bubbles is a good place. Because eventually bubbles pop.

via GIPHY

3. Now, having just pissed on journalists, let’s all admit that we need journalism. With the rise of fake news, and with it, the reality that someone out there thinks almost anything is plausible, we need good journalism more than ever. And we need to pay for it. Because good journalism is tiring and expensive and requires many talented people to come together to unearth the stories we need to hear. Because without it, we don’t get stories like this and this, both heartbreaking stories about the abuse of young athletes who just wanted to become the best at their respective sports, who trusted their coaches and supervisors to do right by them, and who were victimized not just by those adults but by the entire system(s), the value we all place on winning, the way some will look away when things get icky and uncomfortable. Every time an adult says “how am I supposed to do explain this to a child?” I want to look at them and say “You’re the adult.” And make them watch this Louis CK bit (especially the end, starting around 1:04)

4. In the future we will all eat bugs. We won’t have a choice. And we will learn to love them just like we have learned to love almost every other thing we eat (have you ever seriously looked closely at a chicken?). Plus, there are a lot of bugs. Like, really, this is their planet and we’re the interlopers. But we eat things and eventually we will join the small groups of people who already eat bugs. Because they are everywhere. The good news? Someone has already invented the cutlery. And it’s pretty fucking gorgeous. And good packaging is the first rung on the ladder of acceptance.

5. It’s breath suckingly cold here today. There is snow on the ground. How to shovel it efficiently and quickly? How about using a Hoverboard? Sure, they blow up, but that’s only because they overheat. But the cold weather solves that problem. This kid is a genius, in other words. Keep an eye out for him. He’s going places.

6. Social media. What a crock. Right? But should your posts land you in jail? Just for being a woman? Maybe. If you live in Iran or Saudi Arabia.

7. The internet of things. What a crock. Right? Especially when it’s spying on your kids. Or better yet: Imagine if everything we owned came embedded with a microphone? Stop imagining it because it’s happening.

8. George Saunders who is great and can elevate anything into something way more elevated than you imagined it could be, writes about why he finally wrote a novel. (This comes from Austin Kleon’s great newsletter, which you should definitely subscribe to because it, too, is great).

9. The Obama Presidency is coming to a close and Ta-Nehisi Coates writes an amazingly personal piece about what this singular presidency has meant to him. And to African Americans in general. You read this and you miss Obama already. A lot. When my kid was much younger we used to joke that he suffered from “instant nostalgia.” Maybe it wasn’t a joke.

10. Booze. What can’t it do? If you switch your poison, it can help extend your life. And it can also help settle national debts. Don’t you wish that you had lent Cuba some cash now?

11. RIP Alan Thicke, who was an amazingly prolific and successful writer of jingles and theme songs. His music will outlive Dr. Jason Seaver. Probably.

12. I turned 50 this past week. This is very very hard for me to believe. These things also turned 50 this year. I’m in good company. Mostly. Now, kids, get off my astroturf!

13. These are the heroes we all deserve. (Though I could use without the condescending use of “feisty” to describe these ladies – though I have to admit they seem pretty feisty in the video and the would-be robber seems like a loser perfectly susceptible to that brand of feistiness.)

via GIPHY

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And Yet More Absolutely Useless Thoughts

By Arjun Basu | Published: December 7, 2016

1. Lists are coming out. More and more of them. I can foresee a day where, really, everything is a list.
• Best of the day.
• Best of the week.
• Best of the month.
• Best of the year.
• Best of 2:00 PM.
• Best Tweets you missed since you last check Twitter 17 minutes ago.
• Best hot dog I ate on my way to work.
• Best insults overheard in the park.
• Best commercials during the the first half of the football game.
• Best articles you should read right now.
And then, of course, the worst. The lists of the worsts. Why choose anything anymore? Just read lists.

lists

2. If you’re going to make a list of best movies? Make it in the form of a movie. Just watch this whole thing.

3. The British, despite their faults, are, well, funny. Here is Boris Johnson, who is only as funny as your politics might allow, saying the word “pub” about 8 million times in the span of 2 minutes and then running away to avoid responding to a question. I mean, he’s hilarious. Also, he wants a pint. Badly.

4. If a man is going to receive a “bionic” penis, should that man be a virgin? And should he deny his bionic penis to the women who are “bombarding” him with requests to take it for a test drive? If you’re this man, apparently yes. Because he’s “tired”(!!!!) More proof the patriarchy hates women.

5. Is the world going to hell? I don’t know. Honestly I don’t. Sure, Trump. And Brexit. And so many other things. Also – we’re fucking with human evolution apparently. Maybe it’s going to hell. I mean, look at this.

6. So if we’re going to hell, what better way to pass the time on the way to hell than with…data? Wait. What if it’s really cool data. I mean, data is killing us and tracking us and enslaving us. It’s the opiate of the masses. But this data is kind of gorgeous.

7. Unfortunately, some people are already in hell. This is the kind of journalism that reminds you, again, that you probably have it good. Or you’re lucky. Or your complaints are a little whiny. I hate how the New York Times covered the American election. And I hate how they bowed down to Trump when he visited their offices. That kind of capitulation felt like bad (old) American jokes about the French. Surrender monkeys! But, this is harrowing. And just amazing. (And of course Trump thinks the guy behind this is a good person…)

7. Speaking of Trump. Are the Germans going to be the bastions of liberalism? Like can they save the western world? Will Hollywood have to stop making Nazi movies? Just out of decency? Does Hollywood do anything out of decency? More to the point: Did the Germans see Trump coming?

pess

8. More pessimism. Read this and tell me we don’t already live in a Dystopia. Just read the keywords here. And this is by a “futurist” who works for a car company.

9. And, well, this is absolute pessimism. This is getting into 1984 territory. If any of these things happen (and each and every one is plausible) I’m going to shut off all media and hide in my room.

10. If I hide in my room, I will need access to some Dan Dan Noodles. Then I can survive.

dan-dan

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More Absolutely Useless Thoughts

By Arjun Basu | Published: November 30, 2016

bf

1. Is there anything more depressing than the pushing and shoving and punches thrown every Black Friday? And doesn’t Black Friday feel especially apt this year? Isn’t 2016 a kind of Black Friday bildungsroman for all of us? No? I kind of think it is. Because don’t you kind of enjoy it? You shake your head and watch people fighting over a flat screen TV and admit it, this is like reality TV and wrestling all rolled into one. The cameras are there, so those crazed consumers are egged on and they lose all sense of themselves and they snatch toys from kids. Without thinking about it. Search this stuff on YouTube. There are annual compilation videos of consumers fighting over just about anything. (I’m not going to include those videos here. But you know how to search things on the internet.) But then… then you remember real life. You recall your empathy. You realize that everytime you said “this is like a TV show” in real life, you ended up in a world of Brexit and Trump. Those are real people fighting over real TVs because the marketing industry figured out how to kick start Christmas sales. And it involves real kicks.

2. If it’s a food fad, chances are the harm to nature is big. You name the fad (quinoa!), bad things are happening. The new bad thing is happening to…coconuts because now everyone wants to drink coconut water. I really think beer is a lot more refreshing.

3. Lists are starting to come out. Everyone has a favorite list, even people who hate lists. I hate lists. But I’m writing one now. I’m just as awful. (We live in an era of cognitive dissonance so there.) I don’t think these lists should come out until January. There’s little to do in January anyhow. I understand why these lists come out in December, before the year is out (everything is about consumption, right?), but deleting December from the year is like Congress deleting the last year from President Obama’s term to justify not approving his nominee for the Supreme Court. Of course it counts. The year lasts right through to the end. To December 31st. Anyhow, here’s The Guardian’s list of books of the year, and here’s the New York Times (and here), and here’s Quill & Quire’s.

4. trumpIsn’t getting more and more obvious that Trump was a grift all along? That he’s in this to make his family richer than it already is and that his cabinet is going to run the country and the world? That he doesn’t care about the truth and thus challenges some basic things about, oh, everything? He’s more than just post-truth. He embodies a kind of fluidity with language that is either appalling or amazing or both. And for whatever reason, journalists continue to report on his ridiculously unhinged tweetstorms. There is no reason to. Either way, journalism is completely and totally screwed. Unless…

5. …your newspaper is bought by a billionaire and then learn that “fast” doesn’t equal “bad.” A great read about The Washington Post in the digital era.

6. Speaking of lying, what is fiction but a lie well told? Michael Chabon is one of the our finest prose stylists, constantly evolving, a surprising classicist in the best sense of the world. And says this:
screen-shot-2016-11-30-at-12-54-29-pm
The entire interview is worth a read. It really is a post-truth world.

7. The only show I might watch on broadcast TV right now is Bob’s Burgers (the most realistic families on television are almost all animated – Bojack Horseman may be the most human character on TV). I have no idea what’s on any channels. If I’m not binge watching something on Netflix (last one: The Crown and I highly recommend it), I’m watching something else on cable (Westworld). The only reason I haven’t cut the cord yet is live sports and I’m going to figure this one out soon enough. But apparently there are some decent shows on broadcast TV (so decent they are already “overlooked”). But barely. (I still think the best show of all time was M*A*S*H).

8. RIP Florence Henderson.

9. This baby, for real, is your antidote to 2016 (as is this gesture).

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Absolutely Useless Thoughts

By Arjun Basu | Published: November 19, 2016

1. Trump is playing whack-a-mole. He’s been doing it from the start. He wins because he expects you to think in traditional norms. So the playing field is uneven and always has been and then he just starts throwing stuff out there and challenges you to respond to each and every thing because someone is begging you to. But then you just get tired and want to take a long nap. And he gets his way again. This is how he conducts business and it’s how he won the election. So what I’m saying is you have to pick your battles with him and that means ingesting a lot of really crap stuff.

2. More Trump. It’s hard to believe he’s not even President yet. How much are we going to have to talk about him come January? But this past week’s Tweetstorm was perfect Whack-a-Mole strategy. You settle a fraud case for $25 million (!), then tell your VP to go to the theatre very publicly, and then go on a twitter rant about how he was treated so that no one talks about the settlement, or the fact you’re still conducting business as the head of Trump International while you’re the president-in-waiting (Trump is a walking conflict of interest), or the fact that your incoming cabinet is a kind of retrograde thinking’s greatest hits. Where do you start? Is the US even capable of figuring all this out? The media isn’t. Because the media doesn’t matter (I’m about to contradict myself in my next point but who cares, it’s the Age of Trump) anymore. Probably. Macedonian teens are as powerful as the NY Times. Maybe Trump was right and the country is broken. And his election is the proof. Trump is his own tautology. (And this is the truest comment from Kellyanne Conway ever – we shouldn’t care about Trump’s tweets. They are a distraction. He’s playing Whack-a-Mole. Look away. Trump may be the least important member of his own government. He’s a symbol. Look elsewhere.)

Bored entrepreneurial teenagers from Macedonia gamed the system. Macedonia is the country in the black circle.

Bored entrepreneurial teenagers from Macedonia gamed the system. Macedonia is the country in the black circle.

3. Moose fight. This is my favorite out of context quote ever. OK, not ever. Of the past week maybe.

screen-shot-2016-11-19-at-9-54-31-am

The quote comes from this story, which is something I found because I subscribe to Dave Pell’s indispensible Next Draft, a kind of smart curation of the internet that comes to my inbox every day. I highly recommend it. (My two main news aggregators are Next Draft and Quartz. Though I should also say this: subscribe to your favorite news site. Buy newspapers and magazines. Support websites. Pay them. Journalism is hard work and requires funds to function. There is no free news. You know what free news gets you? Absolutely nothing. And worse. Read my next point.)

4. I’m tired of talking about “fake news” and “real news” and when are we going to start talking about how facts became partisan? This is a chicken-egg thing and I don’t know where it started. But the bigger item here is how easy it has become to disseminate anything. The democratization of information means you, too, can believe that the earth is flat, find a tribe of the like-minded quickly, and become a potent political force. The internet empowered us, sure, but it has also created bubbles (what is an algorithm but data that keeps you inside your bubble?) and killed facts. Let’s be clear: There are no facts now. We live in post-fact world. There is simply what you want to believe. The internet has brought a lot of people together and done good things. Agreed. But it is also driving us apart, allowing us to live in parallel worlds. More, it is an incubator of cognitive dissonance. And as the world gets larger and larger, and the internet gets more and more intimate, our collective retreat from the world will only lead to a greater divergence of fact. Or to put it this way: fact and opinion will converge. They already have. Perhaps they always have. I don’t know. Perhaps it’s how we make sense of a world with billions of people.

5. There are global people, internationalists, ready to jet off to Hong Kong or work in Vienna, and then there’s everyone else. Neither side really gets the other. Being global and local at once is becoming harder and harder.

6. The pundits get everything wrong and then we continue to listen to the stuff they say. We deserve everything that happens to us.

7. The North Pole. This is really not good news, people. Or it might not be good news. Depends on your news source, I suppose. Though I believe this is existential and a far bigger threat than anything else. Even the Pentagon thinks so. Though the folk who just won the White House aren’t quite on the same page.

8. Leonard Cohen lived in LA. But his hometown can be found in his every word, lyric, stanza, thought, note, everything he ever wrote. The outpouring of emotion here – never mind around the world – was and continues to be quite touching. Here’s a photo from his home in Montreal, taken a few days after his death:

img_2205

This story in the New Yorker, published after the release of Cohen’s final album, is thorough and lovely.

9. I’ve written about 2016 already here and important people die every year but 2016 just seems like it needs to go away. And quickly. Six weeks left.

10. I’ve decided to only purchase black, white, and grey clothes from now on. Or a combination thereof. That doesn’t mean I’m going to wear black, white and grey clothes exclusively, at least not yet. But I won’t be replacing anything I currently own with something similar (I own a lot of blue things). I put the “absolutely” in “absolutely useless.” Or perhaps it is my own way of confronting the oncoming approach of 50. Which is something that will happen before the end of 2016.

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Oh America!

By Arjun Basu | Published: November 10, 2016

trump
I don’t want to add to the handwringing. The pundits were wrong, anyhow. So so wrong. Yugely. Bigly wrong. And I’m no pundit. As this election wore on, I kind of turned away and grew numb. Because while I scoffed at the idea of Trump’s victory something inside me was whispering that this eventuality was possible.

Look, I’m just a Canadian, so my handwringing is useless. But considering how many Americans didn’t vote in this election, that might not be true. My point of view is almost as valid as the millions who could have voted but didn’t.

This chart kills me:

And then this one, too:

chart

So Trump won the thing with less votes than Romney garnered when he lost to Obama. That is bad math. And, yes, he won with less of the popular vote, but that’s the system. Being Canadian, I’ve seen governments form strong majorities with less than 40% of the vote (though our systems are different enough that this is really an apples and oranges comparison). And to top it off, people called it. Months ago. Michael Moore called it almost perfectly. This is back in the summer. He wasn’t the only one. But the granularity of his prescience is impressive.

I was in London for Brexit and I remember thinking about this new world, about how most Londoners had no idea this was coming. Similar forces voted Trump in as well (though let’s combine this with voter apathy, voter suppression – which worked like a fucking charm, and, let’s face it, a Democratic party campaign that was short on real ideas and was more in rest-on-our-laurels mode).

So already, a shop was spray painted with Swastika in Philadelphia (on the anniversary of Kristallnacht no less). Various POC have mentioned harassment and casual racism. “This is America” now means something else. Trump’s cabinet looks like an amazingly motley crew of morbid. The earth is about to get a lot dirtier and unhealthier. So long science. So long facts. And people are genuinely scared. There is nothing that happened during the campaign that should make them feel otherwise. Any touch of the “other” in you is now magnified, as the white majority takes its last kick at the can. I hope the assholes don’t remain emboldened. But the thing about assholes is they never know when to quit. That’s one of the things that makes them assholes in the first place.

There have already been protests in the cities (of course in the cities) and I imagine that protests in front of Trump properties across the country and around the world will continue for as long as Trump remains President. And if those protests galvanize enough people to form an effective – and loud – coalition of people, constantly reminding the world that 75% of Americans didn’t vote for Trump, that’s something. Or could be.

But return to those charts. Trump won and it turns out the system was rigged in his favor. He played the system perfectly. He did just enough to win. He complained about the system and the otherness of America just enough to drive up his vote in just the right places. His margins in those swing states in the Upper Midwest were thin, almost non-existent, but enough. Turns out he knew how rigged the system really was and played it.

Eight years after the US electrified all of us by electing a black man to be President, by electing someone who represented the “better angels” of America those same people turned around and elected an orange racist plutocrat up on charges of child rape and fraud. It’s almost as if the past eight years hadn’t happened. It’s almost as if the “progress” we were witnessing was too good to be true. Coupled with the Brexit, and the rise of the far right throughout Europe and elsewhere, and the debasement of the “other” – which has reached enough critical mass as to be mainstream – and we are living in dark times. People who want to fix it should probably remove their sunglasses right about now.

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The Waiting (is the Hardest Part)

By Arjun Basu | Published: September 10, 2016

long-viewWriting is hard. I know, cry me a river. What isn’t hard? Watching TV? Maybe. Ok, maybe watching TV isn’t hard. Watching good TV is another story. Or finding good TV. Or anything good. Especially if you’re searching for something on Netflix. Canadian Netflix. Which is the worst Netflix in the world.

But writing, too, is hard. Worse, is the business of writing. That’s really hard. It’s harder still if you’re impatient. The business of writing is slow food in a food court world. Except in a food court dedicated to slow food. But you see what I’m getting at. The business of writing is like trying to get hardened honey out of a jar. Sure, you can self publish, and more power to you, but I don’t want to be writer and editor and publisher and marketer and book seller. I just want to be the writer. So I’ve made my choices. I’m living with them. But let me complain just a little. About waiting.

via GIPHY

You write a book. You write it a few times. If you’re lucky. If you’re me you write the book 4 times and you think it’s good to show (and you consider yourself lucky because the last time you wrote a book you wrote it at least 10 times so if you have something decent enough to show after 4 you might be feeling a little good about yourself) and then you find a new agent (because your old one retired) and then you write the book another time (well, 2 really) so that it can be ready for market and then, and then, it’s summer, and the publishing industry is like some genteel club that summers in Tuscany and has to pack their trunks and order extra horses because so many trunks and then the train, oh, it takes a while to get to Tuscany and then you spend the entire month in Tuscany. There is nothing like finishing a novel right before this happens. Because you have mistimed things. The publishing industry is going to Tuscany. Or the Hamptons. Or Costa Rica. They are in all the nice places and none of the nice places are their offices.

Let us drink over yon for a fortnight whilst the writers work the plow...

Let us drink over yon for a fortnight whilst the writers work the plow…

So you make use of that time. While the publishing industry is in Tuscany, you’re buying books because you’re stupid, because, well, you have to write another book, because it’s what you do. And now you want to write something else, not just any book, but a book that requires a bit of research, maybe a lot of research, because you are an idiot with idiot interests and want to say idiotic things in a slow food manner to a food court world.

At least the research is colorful

At least the research is colorful

But you do it. You hope that the publishing types, newly recharged from their summer sojourns, love what you’ve written, and then purchase it, so they can publish it in, oh, 18 months. These are people that take the long view.

They are not:

• astronomers
• geologists
• paleontologists
• evolutionary biologists
• mortgage specialists

But they are also not:

• Usain Bolt
• short order cooks
• horse flies
• politicians

They are somewhere in between. Publishers do not do fast, unless you were just acquitted for a spectacular crime, or got caught doing something very dumb, or want to get elected to something – then publishers can get your book out in the time it takes to binge watch that show you’ve been wanting to watch and that everyone else has and so you decide to just so you can take part in that conversation finally. Because it sounds like a good conversation, because you’re tired of missing out on things, you need to take charge of your life, finally, and stop blaming your parents for your laziness.

Did I mention writing is hard? It is. But waiting to see it out in the world, at least, again, if you aren’t self-publishing, is even harder. So all this to say Tom Petty was right.

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2016 Sucks Shit

By Arjun Basu | Published: April 21, 2016

Bowie. Glenn Frey. Lemmie. Natalie Cole. Alan Rickman. Abe Vigoda. Phife Dawg. Garry Shandling. Ken Howard. Maurice White. Merle Haggard! Keith Emerson.

It’s only April, for fuck’s sake.

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