My first novel: Still More Stubborn Stars

 

It's out now. People are calling it funny and sweet. One thing for sure, it's not autobiographical, though it contains lots of bits and pieces of my growing up on Prince Edward Island in the 1970s, '80s and '90s. 

Avoiding vaccine panic

 

Last May, when COVID-19 vaccines were a dream, I researched and wrote a story for The Walrus on how COVID-19 vaccines would affect the anti-vax movement. Now that vaccines are here, so much of what was said to me then seems prophetic of the issues that would emerge. Here’s an extended quote (only partly published in The Walrus) from Noni MacDonald, professor of Paediatrics (Infectious Diseases) at Dalhousie University and the IWK Health Centre in Halifax.

I’m going to be careful how I use some of these words: none of these vaccines will be given approval for use in Canada without scrutiny, and I mean deep scrutiny, with the science that’s available, and a decision made that there’s adequate science to go forward. But none of these vaccines, just like most new drugs, will have be done on millions of people, and these vaccines will eventually be given to millions. There will be rare, and very rare side effects, that we didn’t know anything about in the pre-licensure trials, because we don’t put a million people in a pre-licensure trial. What we will need to ensure that people understand is that whatever gets licensed did have careful scrutiny pre-licensure, and post-licensure I am expecting them to put in place very significant surveillance programs to detect serious adverse events following immunization, and then careful scrutiny to see if it was due to the vaccine or not due to the vaccine. Can I do a parallel for you? Do you remember in Denmark when there was a big kerfuffle over the HPV vaccine, and their uptake [in 2014] went from 80% down to 40%, there was a big TV program about it? That [perceived adverse effect] was not due to the vaccine. Those were immunization stress-related responses. We see those in people when they’re being immunized. If I do something stressful to you, I can make you hyperventilate, I can make you have seizures. Other things can happen. They’re not due to the vaccine itself, they’re due to the act of being immunized. If we’re going to give a vaccine to as many people as we’re expecting to over a period of time, we will have many immunization stress-related responses. How well public health responds to this, how well it’s explained to the general public, how well they’ve prepared to prevent those reactions from happening, because there’s stuff you can do, all of that is going to make a huge difference in how that vaccine is seen. The complexity here is large.

¿Libertad personal o negocio millonario?/Get high, sell high

This fall I wrote a piece for El Cultural, the high-minded magazine supplement of Mexico's La Razón newspaper, about Canada's decision to legalize cannabis. The article was published in Spanish, translated by my friend Wenceslao Bruciaga. It was a complete privilege to work with Wences and be published in El Cultural.

Canadian readers might find this a bit 101, but here is the original English text of the piece.

Get high, sell high: Canada’s cannabis reforms are more about money than personal freedom

By Paul Gallant

One warm fall night two years ago, a lineup of people stretched down a block of Church Street in downtown Toronto, all of them waiting to get into the Cannabis Culture boutique. The store was run by Marc Emery, known as Canada’s “Prince of Pot,” a marijuana entrepreneur who has gone to jail a few times for the cause. The store might as well have been selling bottles of eternal youth, people were so excited. Each time the boutique’s front door opened, marijuana smoke rolled out into the street, but you’d hardly notice because there was already a cloud of pot hanging over the sidewalk—so many people in line were already smoking up. Mostly young, mostly middle-class, the patrons looked like attendees at a Drake concert. Inside, in glass jars on a glass counter, there was a choice of 12 strains of marijuana, with names like Sharks Breath and Girl Scout Cookies and prices ranging from C$5 to C$14 per gram.

At the store’s peak, more than 1,300 people visited the location each day. And it was just one of maybe hundreds of marijuana boutiques that sprung up across Toronto and across the country after Canada’s federal government announced its plan to legalize marijuana. After the government started preparing the policy in 2015, Canada quickly became the Wild West of weed, with entrepreneurs, the police and various governments pulling this way and that, trying to anticipate what the marijuana marketplace will look like after October 17, 2018. In the meantime, on sidewalks, in parks, at parties and at concerts, the smell of dope has become more common than the smell of tobacco. Canadians tokers embraced the transition period as an opportunity to experiment and push the limits. Walking to the grocery store, walking to my gym, in outdoor beer gardens and on restaurant patios, for the last couple of years, I smell weed everywhere I go.

During the 2015 election campaign, Trudeau had promised not just to decriminalize marijuana, like the Netherlands with its coffee-shop culture, but to fully legalize it and create a system for Canadians to grow it, sell it, buy it and smoke it. The system might also provide ways to export it, if the rest of the world wanted to buy Canadian. The old system, Trudeau argued a few weeks before the election, “makes it easier for young people to access marijuana than it is for them to access beer or even cigarettes and continues to fund the kind of crime… that is a real challenge for our communities.”

Soon after the election, entrepreneurs and smokers started acting like all the laws against marijuana had been wiped off the table. Boutiques and lounges like Cannabis Culture sprung up all over, sometimes several on the same block. It seemed like there were no rules at all.

But over the last couple of years, the government has made it clear that Canada’s version of legalization will not be a free-for-all. By the spring of 2017, seven Cannabis Culture locations, including the one on Toronto’s Church Street, had been raided and closed by the police, as had many other pop-up boutiques and dispensaries across the country. Emery and his wife Jodie were charged with drug trafficking, conspiracy and possession. (A year into the court process, Emery had been fined a C$5,000 for trafficking—a mere slap on the wrists.)

When the laws come into effect on October 17, cannabis will be much more tightly controlled now than it has been over the last few Wild West years. “On the face of it, the restrictions that the government is putting on the marketing and the distribution seems pretty strict,” says Jan Westcott, president and CEO of Spirits Canada, an organization that represents the distilled spirits industry. Pot growers might eat into the “good times” market share of his members.

The all-night pot shops and lounges that are still operating will likely be put out of business. The police will again become interested in teenagers smoking dope in playgrounds. Unlicensed marijuana dealers will be arrested and charged.

That’s because the legalization is not so much about fun, but about money. The days of big-business cannabis companies has begun. You’ve heard of Bacardi and Smirnoff, Marlboro and Pall Mall? Get ready to hear about Aurora and Canopy Growth. Sure, Canada’s new pot laws will make life more relaxed and convenient for smokers. No more need to do drug deals in dark alleys. But mostly it’s about going corporate, and most importantly, more taxes. Turn on, tune in, buy low, sell high.

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Canada loves to regulate pleasure. Historically, there’s a culture of trying to protect people from their impulses and the consequences of too much fun. We had national Prohibition on alcohol from 1918 to 1920 (my home province, Prince Edward Island, outlawed booze until 1948). Until the 1960s in Ontario, Canada’s most populous and richest province, liquor-store customers carried booklets where their purchases were recorded, so employees could say “no” if a customer was buying too much booze. “Fundamentally, they don’t trust the users of these products and they want to be sure it’s not too easy to get and it shouldn’t be too easy for children to get,” says Craig Heron, professor emeritus at York University’s Department of History and author of the 2003 book Booze in Canada: A History. Since Prohibition, provincial and territorial governments have controlled almost all alcohol distribution. In some provinces you can buy hard liquor only from government stores, and the sale of beer and wine is also very tightly regulated. There are complex rules about when you can buy alcohol, where you can drink it and how much you must pay for it. Bar closing hours are taken very seriously.

And that’s just booze. Our tobacco laws are among the strictest in the world. Taxes make cigarettes very expensive (an average of C$14 for a pack of 20), and, in the stores that sell them, cigarettes packages must be hidden behind unlabelled doors. Health warnings must cover 75 per cent of the packaging. A new law expected soon will prohibit any branding on cigarette packages—all brands will be forced to use the same font on a plain brown background. So much for selling smoking as a glamorous lifestyle.

So nobody would have pointed to Canada as the first country, after tiny Uruguay, to legalize pot. Though almost half of Canadians (49.4 per cent of men, 35.8 per cent of women) will smoke marijuana at least once in their lifetime, according to the government agency Statistics Canada, only 14 per cent of Canadians aged 15 years and older reported use of cannabis products in the previous three months. Fewer Canadians smoke up than Icelanders, Americans, Italians and Kiwis.

Marijuana was made illegal in Canada in 1923—almost 100 years ago. Maximum penalties for possession of up to 30 grams are a fine of $1,000 or six months in jail, or both. Being convicted of trafficking pot can bring a sentence of life in jail. But since the 1990s, government and police haven’t been particularly interested in enforcing marijuana laws. The Baby Boomers generation, which still holds the strings of power, associate weed with happy memories of their wild, freewheeling youth—something to take as seriously as a few beers. The police have better things to do than arresting people for a joint. In Vancouver, the country’s most relaxed jurisdiction, growers like Marc Emery were mostly left alone to refine their products, creating hybrids for energy or relaxation. Canadian growers became known for more and more THC content in their weed, providing an intense high.

After a court ruling in 2000, the government was forced to permit the use of marijuana for medical purposes. At first, the government envisioned a system where medical marijuana was grown and distributed by the government, for people who had a prescription and a diagnosed health problem, like cancer. But cannabis clubs and lounges opened that were very relaxed about requiring a prescription. Their legality was questionable, but they were mostly discreet, and the police didn’t pay them much attention. But then Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party won the 2015 federal election, after promising to legalize marijuana across the board. Suddenly the cannabis suddenly industry exploded. Nobody cared about discretion anymore.

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Although pot legalization is good for the “nice and easy” Canadian brand, Trudeau is not interested in making Canada a party destination, like the Netherlands. He’s mostly interested in making money. While there will be additional healthcare costs due to increased marijuana use, legalization is expected to be very profitable for all levels of government. Government revenue from the control and sale of alcoholic beverages was C$11.9 billion in 2016/2017. Government revenue from tobacco sales was an estimated C$8.4 billion in 2016/2017. Cannabis is expected to be taxed at C$1 per gram, or 10 per cent of a product’s price, which may earn the federal government C$100 million in the first year. But there will also be revenue from sales tax, government distribution profits, licensing and property taxes, leading some to speculate that various levels of government could make C$2 billion annually from pot.

Will crime go up or down? Right now, most crime in Canada related to marijuana are connected to its sale and use. About 58 per cent of police-reported Controlled Drugs and Substances Act offences in 2016 were cannabis-related (the rest were for offences relating to the importation, exportation, trafficking, production and possession of other drugs). Of course, these marijuana-related “crimes,” 54,940 of them in 2015, will disappear off the books when marijuana becomes legal. Even then, cannabis-related offences have decreased over the last five years, maybe because the police aren’t even trying to enforce them any more. The rate of drug-impaired driving is low (8.5 incidents per 100,000 trips), especially compared to the rate of alcohol-impaired driving (186 per 100,000).

Although legal pot is a new frontier, it will probably look a look like a combination of existing alcohol and tobacco regulation. Canada’s 10 provinces and three territories will be in charge of distribution, just like with booze. The provinces and territories will also make rules about who gets to sell (in some cases, just the government; in others, government and private stores) and under what conditions. Municipalities will be able to create their own rules, and may be able to prohibit the sale of marijuana altogether—some Canadians may have to buy their legal dope online from government websites. Better than striking a deal in an alleyway from a dealer who’s a friend of a friend, I suppose, but not as convenient as popping by one of Amsterdam’s coffeeshops.

Actually, when you look closely at the provincial laws, there will be very few places outside the home where Canadians will be able smoke marijuana; there’s been a debate about whether it should be allowed in places like seniors’ homes. Smoking tobacco isn’t allowed inside most public buildings, including bars and nightclubs, and, so far, it looks like pot will be treated the same way. Though some provinces will allow “public” smoking, there are rules to keep it away from where children might be.

Just weeks before the official legalization date, there is a tremendous uncertainty about how things will unfold. Alberta, the province with the most liberal liquor laws, will allow as many as 250 retail locations, some private, some government, to open in 2018. Ontario first planned to open government-run stores. Then the provincial government changed and declared that pot will be sold only through a government website until April 1, 2019, when a plan for private retailers will come into effect. Most provinces will allow consumers to grow as many as four plants at home for personal use; Quebec, usually seen as a liberal province, won’t allow it.

“Where we are going to be on October 17 is going to be vastly different from where we’ll be five years from now,” says Westcott. “One of the aspects of this whole thing is that there’s almost no medical research. Almost zero, partly because it’s been illegal.”

The reforms are a dream for medical, sociological and crime researchers, who will finally be able to conduct experiments, and observe how legal access to marijuana plays out in various jurisdictions. Will violent crimes go up or down? Will productivity at work go up or down? Will there be more health problems or fewer? Will the black market shrink and disappear? Will more people smoke more pot in the provinces where pot is more freely available? What we do know already about marijuana is that it’s less harmful than alcohol, at least in the short term.

“When it’s legalized, it’s likely that cannabis will in many cases substitute for alcohol,” says Tim Stockwell, a professor of psychology at the University of Victoria and director of the Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research. “[For example,] although cannabis is not a good thing to use while driving, people tend to go slower, while people who are drinking tend to go faster. There is some evidence that impaired driving and road crashes could be reduced. That may also apply to violence…. There are 60 ways that alcohol can harm you; there are only two or three ways cannabis can.”

It will take years to collect statistics on how legalized pot will transform Canadian society. But the most dramatic change has already been taking shape on the business side. Because the provinces will be the main distributors—and they’ll want to buy in bulk—the playing field will be skewed toward big players that can cut deals to sell to uniform-quality pot to populations of millions. This new industry, perhaps one that will eventually rival alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceuticals, intends to go global. Although nine U.S. states now permit the sale and use of marijuana for recreational purposes, and 36 permit it for medical purposes, the drug remains illegal in the U.S. nationally. Federal enforcement officials in the U.S. have let the pro-pot states do their own thing—within reason. That’s kept their industries small, more local and less corporate. In Canada, companies like Canopy Growth (WEED.TO), Aurora Cannabis (ACB), Aphria Inc. (APH) and Cannex Group Holdings Inc. (CNNX) are listed on the Canadian Stock Exchange. Investors have already made millions on this industry, which, in the U.S., still has difficulty accessing traditional financing.

This summer, Corona beer maker Constellation Brands invested C$4 billion into Canopy Growth, which already had an estimated value of C$10 billion. Just last year, Constellation Brands had made a C$200-million investment last summer to help Canopy produce a non-alcoholic cannabis-based beverage (which will not be legal in the early days of legalization). Canopy predicts as many as 30 countries are likely to allow medical marijuana in the near future. Its chief executive, Bruce Linton, says the company is targeting C$1 billion in overseas acquisitions over the next 12 months. With the right strategy, Canada could become to pot what Hollywood is to movies or Silicon Valley is to tech.

Although great fortunes await, the pot business still carries risks. Some employees at legal-in-Canada cannabis companies have been turned away at the U.S. border and banned for life from entering the U.S., deemed inadmissible because they are considered to be living off the profits of the drug trade. Going global might be trickier than some investors think. Unlike in California, one of the nine U.S. states where recreational marijuana is legal, medical marijuana outlets may not get preferential treatment in getting licences to sell. The provincial and territorial governments that will be doing the licensing are unlikely to issue licences to businesses that broke the law during the Wild West period. Mark Emery, for example, by being a pioneer, may have shut himself out of the legal pot business. There have been calls for a “marijuana amnesty” to clear the criminal records of people convicted of past marijuana offences. Considering that the government apologized last year to LGBT Canadians for past laws against homosexuality, you have to wonder if the government might apologize to potheads for past government persecution.

After three Wild West years, it may be hard for the government to restore Canadian-style law and order. Businesses that have made big profits in the last few years may be reluctant to close, even if they don’t get licences. Potheads who have grown accustomed to smoking up wherever they want may not want to limit their use to their own home. Police officers who have spent years turning a blind eye to marijuana use will have to again become diligent, arresting black-market dealers, people who are smoking in the wrong places and people growing more plants than they’re allowed. Sounds like a real nuisance.

Habits are hard to break. This month I dropped by the fifth annual Karma Cup, a cannabis trade show held in a parking lot on Church Street in Toronto, across the street from where Cannabis Culture did its booming business. Crowds packed in to sample the wares of dozens of booths selling “elite cannabis products” that were judged for quality. There were lots of Guns N' Roses T-shirts, leather jackets and dreadlocks. Many of the products—edibles, for example—probably won’t be legal after October 17, but at this point who cares? I didn’t see police anywhere, even as the clouds of marijuana smoke wafted down the block.

Yet now there is a multi-billion-dollar industry with lobbyists and the power to create thousands of jobs and fortunes for investors. Industry demands for a level playing field will put the police and the government under much more pressure than worried parents, priests and school teachers ever did. The stakes are much higher than a few joints in the school playground. Canada has created a new industry and the world is watching.

Pop que sueña que está soñando/Paddy McAloon’s sad, beautiful Taj Mahal

My friend Wenceslao Bruciaga recently asked to write an essay for the Mexican music magazine Marvin, to run as a companion piece with his own on the songwriting of Paddy McAloon. One of the foundations of our friendship has been the icon position we reserve in the pop canon for McAloon/Prefab Sprout, so it made sense to share a space reserved for their praise.

As the piece has only been published in translated Spanish, I offer it here in its original English version.


***


As a teenager, I would not only take command of the family car’s stereo system, but would purposely play music I thought would irritate my parents. If a song failed to do so immediately, I would offer up incendiary commentary.

“This is a criticism of Bruce Springsteen,” I told my father one day, when he seemed to be grooving to Prefab Sprout’s “Cars and Girls,” a hit from their third and most radio-friendly album, From Langley Park to Memphis.

“Why would they want to do that?” asked my father, scowling at the thought of a (supposedly) posh Brit insulting a working-class hero.

“Because life’s more complicated than cars and girls!” was my answer.

In the intervening years, I have personally softened on The Boss. And I’ve come to understand that the lyrics of “Cars and Girls” flatter Springsteen as much as they scorn him. Prefab Sprout’s chief songwriter and lead vocalist Paddy McAloon starts off, “Brucie dreams life’s a highway/ Too many roads bypass my way.” But by the three-minute mark the contempt dissolves: “Brucie’s thoughts, pretty streamers/ Guess this world needs its dreamers/ May they never wake up.” Brucie might be naïve, but perhaps that’s the best way to get through this life.

From the very beginning, McAloon seemed intent on subverting love-song clichés, finding uncharted anxieties in dark corners of the human heart. In “Cruel,” from the audacious 1984 debut Swoon, he celebrates feminism while lamenting the predicaments it presents for straight male lust: “If I’m troubled by every folding of your skirt/ Am I guilty of every male-inflicted hurt?” The sentiment is repeated three albums later in “Nancy (Let Your Hair Down for Me),” which depicts an emasculated office worker who accepts his wife as his boss, but pleads for her to show her feminine side at home: “Nancy let that fall off your shoulders/ I’ll be your husband once again.”

These are not the lyrics of a man who believes in an eternal love that washes away all problems, or that eternal love is something attainable at all. Prefab Sprout’s discography is filled with the polished tune-smithing and the sly sauciness of McAloon’s heroes George and Ira Gershwin. But the best songs are too loaded with frustration and disappointment to sit easily as cheerful standards in the pop canon, even when the breathy melodies are busy conjuring shimmering summer days. McAloon seems determined to thwart listeners who want to love his music for purely sentimental reasons.

Though Prefab Sprout is undeniably a pop group (these days comprised solely of McAloon), individual pop songs alone haven’t been able to contain McAloon’s anti-sentimental romanticism. They’re an album band. Loosely connected song sequences allow McAloon sift through the stages of infatuation, entanglement and heartbreak from multiple points of view. On 1990’s ambitious Jordan: The Comeback, the seduction of an “Ice Maiden” leads to the birth of Baby “Paris Smith,” followed by apologies from a hapless protagonist incapable of dancing “The Wedding March.” On 1985’s brilliant Steve McQueen, the confession of an affair in “Horsin’ Around” (“I was the fool who always presumed that/ I’d wear the shoes and you’d be the doormat,” a line seemingly designed to make Cole Porter smirk) is answered with the rueful, bitter fallout of the next song, “Desire As:” “So tell me, you must have thought it all out in advance/ Or goodness, goodness knows why you’d throw it to the birds.”

His favourite characters, from Jesse James to Lucifer, are haunted by past mistakes, yearning to make amends, but somehow held back from redemption. Even at McAloon’s most rapturous, there’s sand in the ointment. “Love is the Fifth Horseman of the apocalypse,” a line from 1997’s dreamy Andromeda Heights, does not conjure an evening spent cuddling. The devil (who appears in Prefab Sprout’s songs almost as often as cowboys do) may have the finest tunes, “but of course it’s always over much too soon.”

What makes McAloon a legendary songwriter, though, is his ability to seed grace amidst all this futility. There’s the companionship of being “one of the broken,” one of “us poor cripples” or with someone “behind enemy lines.” There’s the impulse to search, regardless of whether it ends in love or redemption (it probably won’t). And there’s the power of music. It took McAloon until 2013’s Crimson/Red to make the baldest declaration of his artist thesis, the five-word song title, “Grief built the Taj Mahal.”

Revisiting the albums of my youth: I’m Your Man

In my university years, my musical tastes started to stray from the pop charts, but mostly on a quest for the newest thing, and what was fun to dance to. The Sugarcubes, The Pogues and The Smiths, house-y hits like Inner City’s “Big Fun” and the slick delights of Black Box. If the band was British, like Fine Young Cannibals, or from Narnia, like the Cocteau Twins, so much the better. This was before Canadian music went global with the likes of Alanis, Shania and Celine. National acts like Glass Tiger, Corey Hart, Doug and the Slugs, and Haywire were starting to feel uncomfortably provincial. National treasure? I’d probably have said Anne Murray with an ironic laugh.

I had a roommate who played a passable guitar and I have to admit that I did not find his rendition of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” compelling, no matter how many times he played it. Hippie Canadiana from the 1960s. Ugh. Even my admiration for Joni Mitchell leaned toward the overproduced Dog Eat Dog and the guest-laced Chalk Mark in a Rain Storm (Peter Gabriel! Don Henley! Billy Idol! So many indicators of global hitdom!) over Blue, which seemed like a quaint artifact (history loves proving people wrong). 

“Suzanne” was driven by little more than a plink-plunky guitar; no Thomas Dolby in sight. The voice was whiny. The lyrical imagery, I felt, was something between Medieval and “White Rabbit,” far beyond my experience and interest. I think my roommate also played me “Who by Fire,” which I found repetitive and naively romantic (not a good thing when you're in your early 20s). I have no memory of hearing “Hallelujah” in those days, which has come to be a song that I, along with the rest of the world, love. But if I had, I imagine I would have dismissed it as quickly as something by Gordon Lightfoot or any singer my dad might like.

So when Cohen’s 1988 album I’m Your Man started to filter into my consciousness, I was initially resistant. “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” the first song from it that I remember, had radio-friendly production—a little meh. But its chugging bassline reminded me of John Waite’s “Missing You (I Ain’t Missing You at All),” which I had liked a few years earlier. Yes, I am framing my discovery of Leonard Cohen, one of the last century’s towering artists, by way of a one-hit-wonder. But that’s how the process of musical discovery works.

The black and grey album-cover design was decidedly of the moment. But what was he doing, dressed in a suit and wearing sunglasses? Eating a banana? He was definitely an old guy. That was a strike against him. I wasn’t totally dismissive of music that was sought higher meaning and deeper emotions, that sought to qualify as poetry. I loved Bruce Cockburn (always timely). I loved Suzanne Vega (and still do). But Vega was only 10 years older than me, a wise older sister, really, whose sharp observations could be applicable to my own life. Cohen was definitely of my dad’s generation, though definitely not to my dad’s taste.

On I’m Your Man, the voice that had irritated me on “Suzanne” had grown deep, growly and menacing. The voice was so deep, it almost seemed capricious, like he was doing it on purpose, like Prince using his falsetto to bring other characters into a song. Now that kind of playfulness and pretence was appealing! I loved the band Shriekback for their tribal rhythms and primordial imagery (“We drink elixirs that we refine/ From the juices of the dying”) and The Cocteau Twins for their perverse avoidance of any lyrical sense. As an over-caffeinated student in my early 20s, I welcomed any sort of audacity.

It was probably “First We Take Manhattan” that sold me and built the foundation of my future Leonard Cohen fandom. The churning bass synth sounds seemed dated—but, I was realizing, knowingly so. The violins, the choir in the background, the fluttering sci-fi sounds were all apocalyptically over-the-top, allowing for another reading of Jennifer Warnes’s otherwise MOR vocals. This was like the devil’s misjudged attempt at huggable that ends up scorching its recipient.

Digging into the album, “Jazz Police” seemed to confirm my suspicious that the whole thing was a dark joke. (I remember being at a party and forcing people to wait in silence while I cued up the song over and over again on cassette, perhaps in an effort to drive my fellow students crazy.) The cheesy drum machines sounded as if someone was gleefully testing out how many beats their new Yamaha Portasound could jam into each measure. The silly high notes of the background vocalists, the lyrics about being mad about turtle meat. Here was an old geyser pulling a Sigue Sigue Sputnik.

In hindsight, I can see that only a couple of the songs were that wacky (Cohen took the grand apocalypticism even further on his 1992 follow up The Future), though it’s what got me hooked. Pushing past the leftfield production and getting used to the voice, I started to appreciate the lyrics. Oh, man, the lyrics. These days, I love Cohen’s poetry as much as his music. I chuckle at it. I memorize it. I try to learn from his poems even as they cleverly thwart any attempt to marshal them into a fixed world view, ideology or something you’d see on an inspirational poster.

Where the lyrics of “Suzanne” had seemed like a rambling chore (I’m still not a fan of it), every line on I’m Your Man was a potential quotable quote. There was built-in irony: “Everybody knows that you've been faithful/ Ah, give or take a night or two.” But there was knowingness a listener could bring along too. You can chuckle or feel wise at how a lover’s declaration of “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” mixed the sacred and the shallow.

That very line is one I put to use back in my university years. “I love your body and your spirit and your clothes” is what I once said in reply to a classmate’s tender confession of a growing attraction for me. I sang the line a few times, warbling on “clothes.” At the time, it seemed like both a way forward and a way out. A sly reciprocity. Now I realize it was a way of being an ass without entirely betraying another person’s vulnerability.

Leonard Cohen’s I’m Your Man was simultaneously of this world and beyond it, a love letter to the human condition and an escape hatch from it. It's an album that divides his career into two halves, the first of which was, for me, merely a sketch for the masterpiece of the second. 

Revisiting the albums of my youth: Super Trouper

Released in 1979, ABBA’s Greatest Hits Vol. 2 was, in my home, generally acknowledged to be my father’s album, though anybody in the family might open the gatefold and crank up “Does Your Mother Know” or “Take a Chance on Me” to summon a quorum in the living room. It was perhaps the first album I recognized as a family endeavour, like Disney World or cross-country skiing. Until then, my father listened mostly to country music, which I hated.

Jump ahead two years and ABBA’s The Visitors was most emphatically my album (returned twice because it kept skipping during “One of Us.” But Super Trouper, the biggest selling album of 1980, was the album that my father bought and seldom listened to, while my sister, three years younger, and I ate it up like roast beef after a famine. To this day, I can easily lip sync most of it, even the songs I disliked.

Super Trouper was not my favourite ABBA album. That was, you guessed it, The Visitors, ABBA’s mic drop, their last waltz, something to decode and obsess over. Having discovered Super Trouper among my father’s collection rather than buying it myself, it took a while for it to work its way into my consciousness. I was first pulled in by the cover. Dressed all in white, Benny, Bjorn, Freda and Agnetha were circled by an array of moody circus performers, swathed in dim amber light. The superstars had come off stage to be worshipped and to cavort with their adoring, though much lesser, co-performers. The young man holding the torch in the foreground seemed ready to lead everyone to darker places. It wasn’t quite sinister or sexual, but hinted at both.

The first single was “The Winner Takes It All,” but this was the era of albums, where you made up your own mind what the best tracks were. Plus “The Winner Takes It All,” about a divorce, had mature subject matter. Adults seems to get tense when it played. It was not “fun” ABBA the whole family could share, though eventually we discovered that campy enactments of the lyrics could be quite delightful.

As a family, the consensus that the best song was “On and On and On.” Its chorus and honky-tonk piano were grounded in rock and roll, which my parents appreciated. But the story-telling lyrics that gave me great joy caused them some consternation. The word “Hell” was not appreciated by my mother. I can see now that the words painted too vivid a portrait of urban moral contingency. The party where the world unfolded was not one you’d want your kids at. “I was at a party and this fella said to me/Something bad is happening, I’m sure you do agree/People care for nothing, no respect for human rights/Evil times are coming, we are in for darker nights.” But at 12, I was starting to appreciate the idea of a cold, smartass comeback. “I said I was not exactly waiting for the bus” seemed like the perfect answer to “What’s our situation, do we have some time for us?” even though the sexual connotations of the question went way over my head.

The title track, too, was alienating to someone who wasn’t a global citizen. The chorus’s chugging bass was fun to crank loud, but who wants to listen to the complaints of a planetary superstar?

The Super Trouper song that totally alienated my parents was the one my sister and I loved the most. Or, I should say, most loved to perform. “Me and I” was not just a song, but a theatrical production. The opening synths seemed like explicit instructions to a stage manager where to direct the spotlights, which we, as super troupers, could walk in and out of as we pleased. The relentless beat made it easy to synchronize our moves, the wobbly bass created it a sense of suspense that covered missteps and unsuccessful improvisations.

Growing up in a rather sheltered rural environment, I had little awareness of mental illness until I was in my late teens. So my pure delirium at lines like, “Part of me is acting while the other stands beside/Yes, I am to myself what Jekyll must have been to Hyde” was independent of the cultural presentation of split personalities. But I must have heard the Bee Gees in the “Hy-y-Y-Y-HYDE!” My parents must may have been turned off by the song’s disco influences, too far from country or rock and roll, in it. Or maybe it was just the silly behaviour it brought out in their kids that made them tell us to turn the song down and stop making the whole house shake with our jumping.

Four of Super Trouper’s 10 tracks are ballads, the spinach of a 12 year old’s musical taste. “The Way Old Friends Do” was something you’d hear at a wedding dance you didn’t want to be at. My sister loved “Andante Andante,” but it put me to sleep. I didn’t even know what the title meant. I liked the clever, hook-filled songs that were for and about nightclubs, not the ones set in a meadow. Their “pretty” songs have always left me cold.  

With its jet-setting ennui, Super Trouper was not an album for kids, nor was it an album for adults who considered “Mamma Mia” the pinnacle of ABBA’s achievements. But for a 12 year old yearning for something to expand his world, it was worth rooting through the kitsch to find something unapologetically modern, cosmopolitan and curious.

Travel as nostalgia

This piece, which I wrote for National Geographic Traveller India, about revisiting places after a long time away, had been floating around in my head for a while.

Getting older, I realized that, as well as seeing new places, I wanted to remind myself where I had been, the places that had shaped me and my world view. But I often found that when I went back, I would mostly fixate on what had changed, which would bolster my memories about how things had been. It was like a spot-the-difference puzzle.

The intersection in Galway where, so many years ago, I called home to discover my granddad had passed away. I'm sure it's a different phone in front of the old stone building, but standing there conjured the same emotions.

What I left out of the Nat Geo Traveller India piece was that on my 2015 trip to Ireland, where I revisited the site of where I received news of my granddad's death, I also visited, for the first time, the port where the Irish side of my family--my granddad's family--left Ireland for the New World.

Maurice and wife Catherine Riley left Tralee County on the Brig Martin in July 1820, according to Prince Edward Island history. At Tralee's historic Blennerville port, I wasn't able to find records of their departure; it was before peak Potato Famine migration. But in revisiting a piece of my own past in Galway, I was able to go on and act as a proxy for my ancestors, who, never having returned to their birthplace, made me a Canadian.

It's hard to imagine a ship capable of crossing the Atlantic loading up passengers in this mucky spot in Blennerville, Ireland.