The Revival has been a part of Toronto’s Little Italy neighbourhood on College Street since 2002.  It’s housed in a seemingly century-old brown-bricked building on the southwest corner of College and Shaw Street; practically next door, on Revival’s east, is a tiny mall with a twenty-four-hour Metro and Tim Horton’s; Shaw Street, to the west, is a quiet residential street lined with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century houses and bike lanes that allow bicyclists to quickly travel from Trinity Bellwoods Park to Bloor Street West and the subway. College to the east sees more pedestrian traffic, particularly with the numerous Italian restaurants, eclectic independent stores, and neighbourhood cinema. Indeed, the seemingly larger Mod Club—which also opened on 2002, but on the north side of College, practically facing the Revival—seems to attract a larger audience, judging from the size of the crowds that often congregate outside the Mod on summer nights.

Yet the Revival’s website claims that it has attracted big names over the years, including Justin Timberlake, Robin Williams, Black Eyed Peas, Sara McLaughlin, and Conan O’Brien.  Revival is indeed large, with three floors that allow the venue to host separate events, including corporate events, trade shows, video shoots, and dinner parties.  Yet despite the big names and corporate events that Revival has attracted over the years, the Revival also hosts smaller events that allow many of Toronto’s lesser-known artists and performers access to an audience.  Notably, it has become a home of sorts to Toronto’s steady yet overlooked burlesque scene, having hosted in the past the Toronto Burlesque Festival, Imperial Burlesque Canada, Game of Thrones, and other smaller burlesque events.  “Burlesque factors large on our calendar,” Revival’s website claims.

It was on a cold and snowy Sunday night in January that I went to see a burlesque show called “Witching Hour: Ice Kween” at the Revival.  The show was on the building’s main stage on the ground floor.  After walking up a short flight of stairs at the north-end entrance, I stood on the main floor, with its beautiful brick interior walls and fully equipped stage at the south end that had a set of stairs to allow performers to walk on and off the stage to the wooden floor, which makes the main floor look like it could be a wicked dance venue.  The centre floor was otherwise empty of people, seats and tables, or anything else.  Along the east wall, there was a fully licensed bar, and along the west wall there were about five or so booths filled with seated people. At the northwest corner was a booth where the stage’s tech person sat, and behind him, at a table, was me, quietly taking the whole show in.

“Witching Hour” had two acts of two burlesque performers each; in between there were contests and striptease performances by two other performers who used mainly the floor and bar areas.  “Every edition is going to mean something different,” its host and producer, Miss Diamond (all burlesque performers in this article are referred to only by their performance names) a curvy woman who appeared to be in her late 20s, told the audience immediately after performing her own burlesque routine.  “This one coincides with January and the winter season and the issues that a lot of women deal with…All the ice queens tonight are here to show you that they don’t give a fuck what you think…We don’t care what patriarchy says.”  Diamond continued: “They will show you all the various different types of what it means to be a woman in here.  We write women with an asterisk because we don’t think that genitalia tells you who you are.”  (Diamond’s social media ads for “Witching Hour” spelled “women” as “wom*n.”)  Indeed, Diamond on her social media states that she produces principally QTBIPOC (queer, trans, black, indigenous, people of colour) events.

I was at the show at the suggestion of the evening’s last performer, burlesque artist Bellamie Beastly, who has been a part of Toronto’s burlesque scene for the past two years.  For perhaps around a year, I had been following Beastly on social media—primarily Instagram, where she’s a prolific self-promoter, posting photos—both selfies and professional shots—accompanied with sometimes long-winded monologues on her ethnicity, mental health, and queerness. Consider this October 11, 2019, Instagram posting that she used to promote a burlesque event at Oasis Aqualounge that she was scheduled to appear at the following night: The picture is of Beastly wearing a white tank top that says “Get ready to be Babashook” and a black top hat with plastic sunglasses.  Her face is covered in white makeup and a sinister black smile painted around her mouth.  She is holding a pompom, and she is accompanied by another person whose face is covered yet who is also wearing a black top hat while holding onto a rainbow pride flag. (The photo is designed to reference a 2014 Australian horror movie whose titular monster character is noted by online bloggers to represent the coming out process for queers.)

“It’s National Coming Out Day!” Beastly wrote. “If I recall correctly, I came out as bisexual to my parents ten years ago today, and since then I’ve been an unapologetically belligerent queerdo dancing through the struggles of not being regarded as queer enough, being regarded as too queer, being fetishized, and having assumptions made about my sexuality. However, I know that there are so many people fighting battles more taxing than my own; I have mixed feelings about this day because we shouldn’t be forcing people to come out if they’re not ready or if their surroundings are dangerous and unconducive. So instead, let’s look towards a future of living authentically and dismantling the structures that uphold that danger.” Or consider her other musing of her sexuality in a September 23, 2019, Instagram posting.  In it, Beastly is wearing muggle (non-burlesque, real-life) clothes—shorts and a t-shirt.  Beastly appears to be in a greenhouse housing trees, which surround her. “It’s Bisexual Visibility Day, so I might as well make myself seen in this very appropriate lighting from last month! I came out to my family when I was 15, and since then I’ve never felt truly ‘in’ even when meeting new people and providing this fact. I use both ‘bisexual’ and ‘queer’ to describe myself despite knowing that this is not the case for everyone, I define bisexuality for myself as ‘attracted to people with genders like my own and different from my own’ despite understanding the complex discourse behind this definition, and above all, I’m immensely proud to be the bisexual, biracial, belligerent bombshell that I am. I was recently involved in an argument about whether it’s as ‘necessary’ or remarkable to come out as bisexual as it is to come out as gay or lesbian, and to that I say: approach your sexuality the way that works best for you, regardless of obligation. If it helps, look up at some queer trees like these and realize how big this world is and how much room there is for you to navigate your own queerness.”

I asked Beastly about her in-your-face openness about her queerness at Toronto’s downtown reference library, where we met on a grey Sunday in November 2019.  “I think one of the reasons I’m so vocal about being bisexual now is I would have liked to have been when I was growing up,” Beastly told me.  “This is what a bisexual person looks like.  Just because you’re bisexual, it doesn’t mean that you have to feel conflicting feelings about being attracted to people of more than one gender.”  I was interested in Beastly’s perception on how her experiences discovering her bisexuality differed from mine, since she is both a woman (I am not) and almost a generation younger than I. Beastly, 25, continued: “When I think about middle school and high school, from the late 2000s to the 2010s, no one was really out.  We did have a gay-straight alliance, but the person who ran it was a really terrible person.  It wasn’t necessarily stigmatized, but a lot of people were like, ‘Why do you have to be out?’”  But Beastly, who attended an upscale private school, admitted, “I come from a different background—I think my graduating class was 69 people and very well-off kids—than a really big public school, where there would be more people who would be more vocal, and also more bullying.”  When Beastly came out to her parents at 15, they vocalized some initial confusion, although Beastly stated that “I never felt closeted, even throughout school, just because there was never any reason to bring it up.”  One thing that Beastly and I shared, despite our difference in age was an initial confused understanding of our bisexuality: “Something I struggled with when I was a teenager was that I thought that being bisexual meant being 50 per cent gay, 50 per cent straight.  That’s not the case.  Just because I’ve never had a long-term relationship with a woman doesn’t mean I’m not bisexual.  Just because I’m currently in a relationship with a man doesn’t mean that I’m not bisexual.”

I was curious about Beastly exactly because of her use of photos of social media that both emphasizes her burlesque persona, which accents Beastly’s sexuality and sexual persona—her derriere and breasts are abundantly present in her photos, sometimes centre stage—and her strongly held convictions on her sexual orientation, mental health, and her biracial background.  (I’ll touch more on those issues later.)  Beastly maintains that her ability and desire to pontificate on a deeper level go back to her education, for Beastly moved to Toronto from British Columbia in 2012 to study pre-medicine at the University of Toronto (U of T), eventually graduating with a degree in biology and philosophy and a minor in English.  On her burlesque persona, Beastly said, “One comment that I’ve gotten is, ‘Oh, you’re so articulate!’ and it’s not necessarily in a bad-handed way.”  She added,  “Some of it perks my interest when I receive feedback like this is because, especially when it comes to burlesque, it’s so visual on appearance and stage presence that we don’t necessarily see it as a platform for performers to express their thoughts or political ideas or things that might be controversial.”  But Beastly admitted that “one element I would say about myself is that it takes me a thousand words to say something about myself what it takes most people to say in ten.”

And that was certainly true when we met for our conversation.  Beastly arrived at the Toronto Reference Library for our tête-à-tête, her long, wavy hair in thick curls, seemingly appropriately unkept for a Sunday afternoon. Her slightly above-average height—she’s probably about 5’9″—was also striking.  She wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans.  She has a deep, somewhat husky voice and speaks with a distinct rhythm, often speeding up and slowing down her pace, sometimes mid-sentence.  She reminded me that we had previously met at Red Herring’s Toronto School of Burlesque, where we took Herring’s Burlesque 102 together.  (She finished the program and subsequently moved on to develop a burlesque routine; I didn’t.)  Beastly had graduated from the U of T in 2016, about at which time she first became aware of the Toronto School of Burlesque, which she attended initially because the school participated in the Class Pass app, which allowed her to attend burlesque classes for a flat fee.  Beastly was looking for an alternative to a gym because “staring at a treadmill TV screen for half an hour and then attempting to do lifts on a squat rack” didn’t appeal to her.  (She has since joined a gym, where she goes regularly.)  One of the first classes Beastly took was Red Hearing’s Bump and Grind, although, “I didn’t get much of a workout, and I didn’t get as sweaty as anticipated, I felt that something had unlocked itself in me.”

Although Beastly and I met so I could profile her prior to her upcoming January performance, she was, on the most part, protective of her privacy, particularly of her muggle life.  What I do know of Beastly, beside what I’ve written above, is that Beastly:

• Self-identifies as biracial, born to an immigrant mother from Vietnam and a white father;
• Is not yet out to her family about her burlesque activities or persona;
• Has long battled depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem;
• Currently has a romantic partner; and
• Lives on her own in Toronto, with her immediate family in BC and her closest extended family in Montreal.

By the time I saw Beastly perform at the Revival, she outwardly appeared to have sufficiently conquered her anxieties around her body image.  Yet, Beastly’s performance was different than other performers, many of whom predominately emphasized their curves and sexuality.  Although Beastly took off layers of clothing and showed plenty of skin, she seemed more intent on attempting to tell a story.  However, some of this may be tied to Beastly’s admitted limited dance prowess.  But more importantly, Beastly is a self-professed nerd, and this, in combination with her background and interest in science, seems to have set the tone of her act:  At “Ice Kween,” Beastly’s act drew inspiration from a hit HBO fantasy show.  With the lights on the stage dark, Diamond introduced Beastly: “This belligerent bombshell delights in bringing her fiery signature of fiery karma to every act that she brings to life.  Bellamie’s rendition of the Ice Kween resurrects a fantastic frozen creature from a Games of Thrones universe.  And she is excited to bring the coldest fires with this dragon.”  The crowd cheered her on as the lights come up and she appears on the stage.  Indeed, Beastly had attempted to appear dragon like: her long, black hair has been pulled tightly back; on top of her head are two long streaks of tinfoil painted blue, complete with a headband and fake flowers, made to appear to be a pair of a dragon’s horns.)  Her forehead is covered with blue make up, as are her cheeks; and the rest of her face is covered with white powder and sparklers.  She’s sporting a blue and black top, with ample extra material at the back of the arms to make it appear as if Beastly has wings. 

Her top is cut low on her chest, fully exposing her breasts, save for large pasties covering her nipples.  She has on a voluminous shiny blue dress, and black high heals with black straps that circle her legs up to her knees.  As she hit the stage and the lights came up, and Britney Spears’s “Break the Ice” played.  During the song, gently sung at a medium tempo, Beastly slowly works the stage, and slowly takes some layers off.  Yet considering that it’s burlesque, Beastly had little in terms of clothing to peel off: She took off her blue top, exposing blue straps that go from her breasts, over her shoulders and to her back; and stripped from her dress, showing off her transparent blue underwear that exposes her butt but is attached to darker blue material at the front that covers her genital area.  Beastly’s stage movements were not really about showing off her plentiful thighs and curvaceous breasts; rather, she was seemingly interested in creating a dragon character.  This certainly explains why she relied less on flirtation with her audience as she peeled off her outer layers.  As Britney Spears’s song faded away, Fall Out Boy’s “My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light ‘Em Up)” a more upbeat tempo song, began, her movements quickened, and Beastly got on her knees.  She detached the wings attached to her outer dress, which by now was lying on the stage, twirling the wings in her hands like a cheerleader with pom poms.  However, Beastly was clearly imitating a flying dragon making manic movements in the sky, her arms’ rhythms copying the staccato singing by Fall Out Boy.  And although I’ve never seen Game of Thrones—I am familiar with the premise, though—it’s clear that Beastly was acting out her love for the fantasy hit, which ended last year.  As Bellamie’s act ended, the lights on the stage darkened, and Beastly walked off the stage, down the stairs, and walked the entire length of the dance floor and out the doors leading to Revival’s main entrance. 

Beastly reflected on her burlesque creations: “I have a narrative every time I go up, and it’s gotten easier for me to portray a relatable character.”  Indeed, Beastly seems to have a sci fi and fantasy motif in her acts: “My first nerdlesque (burlesque that incorporates sci fi, fantasy, and nerd culture elements) performance was framed around Star Wars: The Last Jedi as Rose Tico,” a supporting character performed by Kelly Marie Tran, who, like Beastly, has a Vietnamese background.  “This actress was bashed to high heaven by a lot of this incredibly vocal misogynistic part of the Star Wars fandom by these purist rogues who thought that she was inserted into the Star Wars universe to make it more politically correct or that there was no point to her character existing, that she was useless.  And that really, really bothered me because they are terrible things to tell women.”  But, importantly, Beastly “saw a lot of myself in that character and that portrayal because of the struggles she goes through  and, honestly, because there aren’t a lot of famous Vietnamese people in the Western world. That is what drew me to the character, and that is what drew me to create the act…I do like to inject a little bit of myself or something close to me in every act.”

Beastly is philosophical about her Vietnamese heritage, saying that “I don’t look very Asian.  I would say I’m white passing, but the reason I’m white passing is because I’m half white.  I grew up very Westernized.  I don’t speak Vietnamese fluently: I can count to ten and order food; that’s it.  Even though I grew up very whitewashed, there’s another half of me that’s very relevant too.”  But as Beastly was growing up in B.C., despite her sheltered upbringing, she still felt, at times, different, beginning in grade school and “noticing that I was the only dark-haired person in my very white kindergarten class to looking at my high school graduation photos and seeing that I didn’t look like everyone else.  Sometimes I would bring Vietnamese food for lunch, and my schoolmates would be like these typical stories you hear from children of immigrants.  But I would say that [my biracial heritage] didn’t affect me negatively.  I treat it as a positive aspect of my life.”  Yet this feeling of being a little different has followed Beastly into adulthood. “I get a lot of people asking me that.  They are just coming from a place of curiosity.  Generally, the reaction I get is, ‘Wow!  I didn’t know that.  Cool!’  But it sometimes gets tiring answering.  And I hear that a lot from white-passing people.”  (Indeed, a pet peeve of Beastly is when men who hit on her choose to ask about her ancestry.)  But for Beastly, embracing her biracial heritage through her burlesque is empowering.  And she noted that “I have gotten to know fellow performers all over North America through social media who are in the same boat as I am.  They’re also biracial; they’re proud of who they are.  They may have acts that relate to their identities.  And that’s something that I think about a lot, and that’s something that effects me on a day-to-day basis is to be part of a community and being able to increase not only the visibility but also the diversity.”

Regardless, Beastly’s feels welcomed and embraced in Toronto’s burlesque community, where she has developed numerous close friendships. “I do spend more time with my burlesque friends,” she noted.  “But it’s not because I’ve grown apart from my first [university] friends in Toronto.  A lot of it is because my friends from undergrad have moved away or they’re busy with grad schools or medical school or other full-time jobs.”  She noted that her university friendships developed because of a common physical proximity—being at school—yet with her burlesque friends, it’s the common interest of burlesque that binds them.  But despite her burlesque friendships and burlesque’s seemingly embrace of people who are different, Beastly still noted that the burlesque community is still caught in mainstream culture’s preference of white beauty and slender female body shapes.  “Burlesque should be something where all bodies are accepted,” Beastly strongly asserted.  “There’s that societal stigma of that ideal body type.  Fat performers and performers of colour don’t have as many opportunities to get on stage as conventionally attractive white people.”  She observed that these attitudes are especially stronger is some parts of the world. “In Europe, burlesque is seen as very traditional and white driven, and it does deal with racism a lot more than in Canada and the Unites States.  You’ll still have white performers dressing as geisha dancers or voodoo queens.  It’s really uncomfortable.”  But even in Toronto, Beastly has noticed that “I’ve heard performers in Canada who look at the cast for an upcoming show, and it’s all conventionally attractive white performers, or there’s only one performer of colour, and they feel tokenized.”  But Beastly remains optimistic, noting that Toronto has queer burlesque shows, drag burlesque shows, and shows for people of colour.  She pointed to Les Femmes Fatales, an all woman-of-colour burlesque group, of whose members Bellamy noted are predominately queer identifying as well.

Despite the close circle of friends that Beastly has met in the burlesque world of Toronto and beyond, Beastly maintains an effort to separate her muggle life and burlesque life.  She worries about possible reactions from employers, and she has yet to tell her family, including her parents, about her burlesque, as she worries about their reactions.  “I want to tell my family about it because I want to, not because I feel like I have to.  I’m not pressured into it, because it takes so much of my time.  I don’t want to have to come out to them.  Eventually I might, but I’m not in a rush to.”  She has been open to a few of her muggle friends to her burlesque life.  “The women in my life or [people who identify] as non-binary are a lot more accepting of it than my friends who identify as male,” she disclosed.  “The reason my male friends don’t approve is because they don’t get it.  They don’t understand it as much.  It’s hard to draw the line between empowering and objectifying.  Or between burlesque and stripping.  Or between sex work and adjacent sex work.”  Few of her friends have seen her perform, more because of their busy schedules than a disapproval of burlesque.

Regardless of the wall that Beastly has between her burlesque and muggle lives, Beastly claimed that burlesque has been cathartic for her mental health.  “I do have generalized anxiety disorder.  I don’t take medication for it or for depression.  It’s been one of those journeys that I’ve had to flounder on my own and develop my own support system, mostly because my family didn’t think it was a big deal.”  Beastly cited that for children of immigrants, the stigma of mental health can be greater, particularly because some cultures view mental health as a sign of weakness.  For Beastly, it affected her ability as a kid to make friends.  “I didn’t grow up with a lot of friends until I graduated high school.  When I moved to Toronto, it actually felt kind of disorienting that people wanted to accept me and hang out with me for the weirdo that I am.  And this was even before I got into burlesque.”  Beastly sought out the help of the mental health services available to students while studying at the U of T.  But it’s the burlesque community where she has found a more impactful acceptance of her anxieties and depression.  “Burlesque brings together a lot of people who come from similar circumstances as me, who are socially anxious, who deal with anxiety, who had trouble making friends growing up, who don’t quite fit in.”  But for Beastly, that’s what makes burlesque so much more helpful than an anti-depressant: “In burlesque, you don’t have to fit in.”

I no longer in retail, and I don’t regret it.  But I do.

In October 2011, I began working at the Liquor Control Board of Ontario–widely known as the LCBO, for the full name sounds like it’s pulled out of the Prohibition Era that the LCBO was created to end–a job that started at 14 bucks an hour, offered no guaranteed hours, gave no benefits until after five years–and even then, they were a trivial minimum offered only on condition of working a stipulated amount of hours per year that weren’t guaranteed to you–and left very little room for mental stimulation.  My job involved working a cash register, bagging orders, tearing down the load in the warehouse, and stocking the shelves.  I did the job for seven years almost to the day, until I left it for my more satisfying current full-time position as an associate editor for a magazine. (More on this later.)

Government-monopolized booze

Unless you hail from Ontario, you’re likely not familiar with the LCBO.  The retail outlet can find its origin in 1927, when Ontario, realizing that the prohibition of alcohol was an impossibility, lifted the alcoholic ban, flooding the country with the booze that never really left in the first place.  (During its eleven-year experiment with Prohibition, Ontario’s wineries were allowed to stay open, light beer was allowed to be manufactured and consumed, and breweries and distilleries were allowed to remain open for the export market.)

The LCBO was opened as a government-owned and -operated distribution and retail operation, a compromise between people who wanted access to booze and the lofty ideals of the temperance movement, rooted in a 19th-century Canada in which men drank heavily and abused their wives and children.  (In fact, temperance, along with the its sister movement of women’s suffrage, were the two largest causes championed by early feminists.)  The chain initially opened with 16 stores, four warehouses, and 16 mail order departments; two-dollar liquor permits were required to purchase alcoholic beverages.  The permits weren’t abolished until 1961, and although the LCBO had expanded to hundreds of stores by the ’50s, they weren’t friendly places: Customers had to have an alcoholic passport in order to make alcoholic purchases.  The passport displayed all of their purchases, and staff was expected to judge if customers were fit to consume alcohol; the passports stayed in place until 1962.  First Nations Ontarians weren’t allowed to buy booze until 1959, and women and visible minorities were effectively barred from working at LCBO stores.  Merchandise wasn’t displayed in stores until the mid ’60s, and it wasn’t until 1969 that the first self-serve LCBO opened.  (Prior to that, you had to go to a counter and ask a staff member to retrieve bottles for you.)

As a kid in the ’80s, I can remember going into LCBO stores with my parents; the stores felt like dreary, sterile buildings with bare cement walls; the outlets were seemingly designed to make you feel guilty about buying booze.  It wasn’t until the late ’90s that the LCBO began opening their big-box, customer-first stores, complete with its sought-after complimentary magazine, Food & Drink, which ended up, in a round-about way, to be my ticket to a more satisfying career.

First Nations Ontarians weren’t allowed buy booze until 1959, and women and visible minorities were effectively barred from working at LCBO stores.

The unintended side effect of the LCBO was the enormous cash cow that it became; for its 2016-2017 fiscal year, the LCBO had $5.89 billion in revenues, had a profit of $2.09 billion, and sent the province a dividend of $2.06 billion.  It is the world’s largest purchaser of alcoholic beverages, and even with the expansion of beer, cider, and wine sales into grocery stores, the LCBO holds a tight control on the distribution across the province, for grocery stores are obligated to purchase their alcoholic products from the LCBO’s warehouses.  This is telling, for of its two corporate mandates–social responsibility and fiscal profits–the latter seems to be the more important.  And, critically, the LCBO reports to the Minister of Finance.  (This is not necessarily a criticism of the LCBO; rather, it should be a recognition of how the government monopoly has evolved over the past 92 years.)

I Felt Trapped

I have two university degrees, both of which for over a decade failed to get me a position that I could have gotten with a high school diploma. I earned a B.A. in sociology and history from York University’s Glendon campus and a subsequent film degree from York’s fine arts faculty, which has since been renamed.  I sought the film degree because part way through my liberal arts degree, I had an epiphany that I should pursue a career in the movie business, mostly because I spent my teens and early to mid-20s watching movies, initially borrowing them from the library (remember when VCR was king?) and then spending all of my free time at Toronto’s old neighbourhood theatres, which by the ’90s had been converted to second-run theatres.  I had fallen into this false thinking that because I loved movies so much, I could earn a film degree, leave school, and then somehow enter the film business.  But three things eluded me: first, that I should spend my school years building up a portfolio of creativity that represented me, second I should build up a network of colleagues and mentors with whom I could have possibly collaborated, and third, that to make it into the creative side of the movie or tv business, you have to have immense talent and dedication.   I put none of the above-mentioned background work into getting into the field and participated in no practical school events that would have developed my skills.  (I also subsequently later realized that I don’t have a skill set to succeed in film or tv, for when I had my I.Q. test done in my late 30s, I realized that I am extremely low in the spatial intelligence needed to be in the visual arts; however, I have a near-genius level intelligence in verbal intelligence.)

After I finished my second degree, I was lost.  I had no job lined up, no money saved up, and no way to begin paying back my student loans.  While I was in school, my parents had moved to Erin, Ontario, a small town an hour’s drive northwest of Toronto.  So that’s where I was headed.  For about four months, I couldn’t find a job.  I eventually applied to a few temp companies, who placed me in positions in various factories and warehouses, including Canadian Tire’s distribution centre in Brampton, Ontario; a small electronics warehouse in Mississauga, Ontario; and various juice factories scattered across the Greater Toronto area.  I was even placed at a plant that processed chickens arriving from the slaughterhouse; luckily, the temp agency failed not only to tell me that it was a processing plant but also to wear appropriate clothing, so when I arrived, I wasn’t allowed do that job.  My longest placement with the various temp agencies was the Walmart distribution centre.  Walmart contracts out its distribution centres; they in turn contract out their hiring to temp agencies.  It’s a tactic that many large companies do, for they don’t have to go through the expense of hiring people, and if they want to get rid of somebody, the temp agency “reassigns” you to another client and never calls you back.  I was essentially working forty hours a week there but had to wait everyday for the temp agency to call me to assign me a shift.

Things Get Worse Before They Get Better

But temp jobs aren’t designed to last, and none of these did.  Nor did they provide me with enough income to be able to plan into the future, not that I had developed a plan at this point.  (If I had had the skill to plan for myself, I would have more effectively used my university days.)  So I picked up a few different jobs, including mucking horse stalls and working at Canada’s Wonderland, essentially a summer job that should have been for a high school student. 

All of these low-paying jobs were interrupted by months-long stretches of unemployment.  While still living in Erin, I drove to Guelph, Ontario, where I would get a non-profit agency to help me write my CV and come up with effective plans to pump out my resume.  At this point, I had no special skills and was still pumping out vague resumes intended for anybody who would hire me.  All this time, my mother urged me to apply to the government for disability payments.  I quite possibly could have qualified, if I had claimed a developmental disability, but going through the prospect of the difficult application process didn’t appeal to me, especially considering that I would have essentially been living the rest of my life on welfare.  I knew I was able to something; I just didn’t know what.

However, I wasn’t above using non-profit agencies dedicated to helping those with disabilities getting people into jobs; unfortunately, these jobs were entirely unsuited to me.  The first job was selling conference phones to businesses.  I have zero ability to sell, so that job lasted a mere six months.  Job number two was working at a call centre for RBC, the country’s largest bank; unfortunately, I’m not good at multitasking and quickly absorbing information, so I was unable to pass the training program.  At this point I was living on my own in Port Credit, Ontario, and had no job and rent to pay.  I quickly applied for EI and began pumping my CV out again.  I didn’t even have my own computer at this point–they were still somewhat expensive at this point–so I spent hours at the library, where I used the free computers to email CVs.  It took eight months, but I found a job.

I’m No Good at Talking on the Phone

The job: working at the call centre for the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the city-run agency that operates Toronto’s public transit system, including its buses, streetcars, and subways.  I was hired on a contract; the job was part time with no guaranteed hours, no benefits, although each shift was guaranteed to be eight hours, with a one-hour paid lunch.  I was hired to take calls in the TTC’s information centre, giving people routing information.  The routing information was easy for me (reading maps and understanding directions is one of my strengths), but I was stressed by the job: I was given only a minute and fifty seconds to give routing information to anxious people who would really slowly write the info down and then repeat it.  And people would yell at me, insisting that I was giving them wrong information.  I was kind of glad I didn’t get my contract renewed.  However, I was able to use that job to get into GO Transit, Toronto’s regional agency, where I would be doing public relations.  The majority of the job involved writing apology letters to people when their trains didn’t show up; however, after I was hired, I learned that about a quarter of the job involved talking to people who chose to phone in their complaints rather than email it in.  I lasted for almost eight months, when it became apparent to GO that I couldn’t deal with disgruntled people.  By this point, I was living on my own in Toronto, with no way to pay the bills, when, close to a year later, I landed a job, another contract, working at the YMCA, where I enrolled kids into YMCA summer camps.  It lasted seven months, and at the end, I was able to get another contract position at the YMCA: The YMCA had a government contract to place university grads into paid internships with non-profit environmental agencies, and I screened the applicants and filed their paperwork so they could work.  The job was great, but the  contract lasted only three months, and by January I was out of a job yet again.  I went a few months without another job, when I landed a job working the fall months at York University’s bookstore, stacking shelves with textbooks.  And it was this job that landed me the job at the LCBO.  It was my first time transitioning almost immediately form one job to another.

J’aime le LCBO

I got the job because I speak French; LCBO stores located in neighbourhoods with a certain threshold of francophones are required to have French-speaking staff.  So after going through the interview process at the LCBO’s flagship Summerhill store, I had an interview with a French translator, who rated my French as intermediate plus, which, at the time, was good enough to get you hired as French-language staff at the LCBO.  I was placed at a large LCBO store near where I live in midtown Toronto.  The store was ranked as the third- or fourth-busiest LCBO in the province; still, my shifts were rarely longer than five hours–occasionally they were six-and-a-half hours, and the only way to get enough hours was to work everyday–six months into the job, I was doing just that. (I even had to supplement my income by modelling for art classes. Read the blog!)  But the stress of working in a busy store every single day got to me, so when I found out that my store needed four people to work the midnight shift–come in at 11PM, break down the load, and stock the shelves–I jumped at it.  I didn’t have to deal with customers, I could listen to CBC on my phone while working, and I could keep to largely to myself.   And most importantly, I got my weekends off.  And I got forty hours a week.  And apart from being kept up on world events by listening to so much CBC, I enjoyed our lunches; we would take an hour and watch movies.  But working midnights is tough: by the end of the weekend, my body would be back to days, forcing me to nap on Mondays during the afternoon, it was hard to sleep during the summer, and during holidays, my family was unable to understand that I was having a hard time staying up to their schedule.  After nine months, I had to rebid for the midnight shift, and I lost.  I was back on days, with unpredictable hours.  I was working seven days a week and getting maybe 30 hours a week.

I Formulated a Plan

It was a Saturday in May 2013, and Toronto was having its annual Doors Open.  I was working a five-hour afternoon shift at the LCBO, so I didn’t have to be at the LCBO until 4PM.  I knew I was working Sunday too, so this day would be my only day to enjoy Doors Open.  I looked up some of the buildings that were open and decided to go to three buildings on Queen’s Quay: the Redpath sugar plant, the Corus radio building, and George Brown College’s then-brand-new campus.  I went to Redpath first, then off to Corus, and then off to George Brown.  

I walked around the first two floors of George Brown’s building but wasn’t all that impressed by it.  As I was walking down the stairs, I saw a stack of its calendars for continuing education, and, on a whim, I picked it up.  The first page I turned to was in the communications section, and it listed the department’s certificates.  I immediately noticed that it offered an editing certificate, consisting of classes in grammar, copy editing, and structural editing.  And best of all, it offered an internship class, where I could apply my skills and develop my resume.

Unfortunately, classes weren’t scheduled to begin again until September, but it gave me four months to research how I was going to pay for my these classes.  And I figured it out: Although I had almost no benefits at the LCBO, I discovered one that I could use.  It was a benefit that not too many LCBO employees took advantage of, but I decided I would.  The LCBO offered to pay for employees to take continuing education courses that could benefit their current position or could help them move into a position that they could reasonably expect to move into.  So in September, I filled out the forms, and in the section where the LCBO asked me to justify the benefits to the LCBO, I indicated that could move into the communications department, or, better yet, copy edit for Food & Drink.

I saw a stack of calendars for continuing education, and on a whim, I picked one up. The first page I turned to was in the communications section.

I was excited when they approved my initial two classes, and over the course of a year and a bit, I completed my certificate. My last course was the internship–again paid for by the LCBO–and after much arm twisting on my part, I was able to do a four-month internship copy editing for the LCBO’s much-loved magazine devoted to alcoholic beverages. (I actually did a second internship for a non-profit dance organization that also padded my resume and helped give me a deep appreciation for watching dance, despite the fact that I have two left feet.)

What’s Next?

I thought that once I had my certificate, I’d quickly become a sought-after freelance editor, and I would never have to worry financially again. It turns out that people aren’t hiring editors like they should, and although I had a couple of one-off clients, freelance editing never panned out. I quickly realized that were I ever to become employed in communications, I would have to market myself not only as an editor but also as a writer. (It actually makes sense: you can’t be a good editor unless you’re a good writer.) But I had no idea where to start, other than to start my own blog–you’re reading it write now–and submit pitches to magazines. The established magazines never replied to my pitches; however, I eventually started writing on other people’s websites. And although these websites–including a film website that was able to send me to major studio’s press screenings and the Toronto International Film Festival–didn’t have the money to pay me, they helped me pad my resume, so for the five years I applied to in-house writing jobs, I was able to pad up my portfolio to make somebody decide to take the bite and want to hire me. I never pictured myself writing for a magazine published by Ontario’s engineering regulator, nor did I really understand what engineers did before I took this job, but in a roundabout way, I owe it to the LCBO, who provided me with a job that barely paid the bills but also helped me get into a career. It wasn’t easy getting to this point, but I got here. So to the young man I worked with at the LCBO who, on my last day working at the LCBO, said, “Hey, do you think you can get me a job writing there? I like writing essays in school,” the answer is no. I didn’t put out all this effort for you. I did it for me.

Last year, close to 33 million Americans had their TVs tuned to the Oscars and watched in shock as presenters Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty flubbed the presentation of the Oscar for Best Picture.  Dunaway and Beatty, who were given the wrong envelope by the TV producers, hesitated before declaring La La Land the winner.  As that movie’s producers began their acceptance speech, the Oscar show’s producers came to the stage to announce that the film Moonlight was actually the “Best Picture” of 2016.  It was an odd yet compelling moment that was quite possibly the only real moment of drama in award-show history.

Although the fiasco kept people talking for days, it shouldn’t be overlooked that two more drastically different movies couldn’t be nominated for the Best Picture award.  La La Land, which was actually the most-nominated film of the year’s Oscars, was a cinematically extravagant musical harking back to the Hollywood of the ’50s; while Moonlight, a socially conscious tale of race and sexuality, told the story of a young queer Black American.  And although Moonlight was a noble tale, it was a small picture that lacked the pizzazz of the more exquisite La La Land.  But it may not be surprising that Moonlight won the biggest award of the night, for last year was the year that many in both Hollywood and the media expressed disappointment and regret that few people of colour were being recognized in the world of film.  Interestingly, Dunaway and Beatty had 50 years earlier stared in the legendary Bonnie and Clyde, a violent biopic that helped to usher in the New Hollywood era.  And although it was tied for the lead of Oscar nominations for 1967, it actually lost the Best Picture award to the much different In the Heat of the Night, a Norman Jewison exploration of racial bigotry in the American South.  The late ’60s were a time of racial uprising in the United States, particularly in the South, and the Oscar award show for the 1967 season aired just two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.

I mention this allegory not to draw criticism at Hollywood’s attempt to address race in the movies but rather to note how tricky and naïve it is to attempt to define a Best Picture when politics enters the equation.  Or should I say marketing, for the Academy Awards were founded in the late ’20s by the major studios as an attempt to promote their products — movies.  (To this day, movies that win the big Oscar awards see an upswing at the box office after the awards show.)  And politics may be a factor in this year’s Oscars ceremony, given the #MeToo movement.

The history of the Oscars have left many people scratching their heads.  How did Citizen Kane, long heralded by many as the best movie to ever come out of Hollywood, lose the Best Picture Oscar to How Green Was My Valley, a lesser-quality John Ford picture?  (The answer lies possibly in the meddling of a disgruntled newspaper mogul.)  How is it that the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, never won a competitive Oscar?  And somebody explain to me how the mechanical Crash earned the Best Picture over the more artful Brokeback Mountain and suspenseful Munich.  And then there’s the year 1977, in which Annie Hall, a masterful comedy and possibly Woody Allen’s best cinematic effort, won the Best Picture Oscar over Star Wars, George Lucas’s sci fi opus that sourced ancient myths and epics to reimagine the ’40s and ’50s low-budget shorts that Lucas idolized as a kid.  Both movies are spectacular, yet forcing them to compete within the same set of artistic aesthetics is absurd.

But that’s not to say that the Oscars always get things wrong.  Take the case of Francis Ford Coppola, who directed, produced, and wrote The Godfather, Part II while editing The Conversation at night.  Both movies were nominated for multiple Oscars for the 1974 Oscar season — one of them winning Best Picture — and both have since been hailed as well-received masterpieces.

I’m thoroughly amazed how seriously people take the Oscars, for I’m confused as to why people watch it.  Do people watch the show to see who wins the awards, or do they watch to see what the female actors (why do people still say “actress”?) are wearing?  Do they watch to hear the jokes the host will say at the beginning?  Or do they watch because they want to see celebrities act as themselves?  Or perhaps they want to see moments as real as the Dunaway and Beatty Oscar flub.  I’m not sure.  I’ve sat through Oscar shows, and they’re three- to four-hour bore feasts: awards are given periodically, while in between, songs are sung and other unrelated topics explored.  It’s not something I enjoy, and it’s an approach that has been expanded to other award shows.  I have never seen the Grammys, I would be shocked if anybody watches the Canadian Screen Awards, and the Golden Globes are dull.  I now see award shows like the Oscars as the original reality TV shows: People enjoy watching them in the hopes of seeing the kind of unscripted drama that happened during last year’s Oscars.  Oscar spectators, in a sense, aren’t all that different than people who watch sports on TV.  It’s just the venue that’s different.

As I finish writing this article, the Oscars have probably finished, and I have no idea who won what.   Nor do I care.  Instead of watching the Oscars, I streamed a horrible movie and listened to a podcast.  But I think I share my lack of Oscar enthusiasm with George C Scott, who died in 1999.  A respected and intense thespian of both the stage and screen, Scott may be best remembered for his roles in Dr. Strangelove and Patton.  And when he was nominated for his performance of the titular character in the latter movie in 1971, he warned the Oscar committee that were he to win, he would reject his award on philosophical grounds.  “The whole thing is a goddamn meat parade,” Scott was reported to have said.  “I don’t want to be a part of it.”  Surprisingly, given his lacklustre attitude, Scott won the award anyway.  (His performance was good.  He put a tremendous amount of effort and research to create an effective portrayal.)

At the time his win was announced, Scott was asleep at home.  I admire Scott for his attitude.  He made Oscar ennui cool.  You have my back, George.

I started going to the gym 15 years ago, when I was an overweight university student.  At the time, I applied for a summer student job at the Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), who required me to undergo a physical before offering me a position.  In his report, the TTC’s doctor wrote, “Healthy but clinically obese.”  That same summer, my family doctor advised me to have a cholesterol test, as heart disease runs on both sides of my family; it was borderline high.  Since then, through a combination of a relatively healthy diet (I do occasionally eat badly) and regular exercise, I have maintained a healthy weight and lifestyle.  It includes biking (almost) everywhere, doing a lot of outdoor activities during the warm months, and, of course, going to the gym, where I go 4 to 5 times a week.  At the gym I do a combination of strength training and cardio, but one day a week, I take a low-impact class.  I’ll rotate between either yoga, Pilates, or barre; quite often, I’m in room full of women.  At first I felt out of place, being the only guy in the room.  But as I did more classes, I stopped caring and decided to embrace the benefits of the classes.

I’m not sure why more men don’t do these low-impact exercises, but studies have shown that men who work out are far more likelier to focus on building larger upper-body muscles and strength, while women likelier to focus more on losing weight and sculpting their lower bodies, especially their behinds.  I’m certainly not going to try to tell women what they should do at the gym, but I do think more men should do a low-impact class at least once a week.  Below are three reasons men should incorporate classes like yoga, barre and Pilates.

They Exercise Your Core

Studies have show that men will focus on their upper body, especially their arms and chests while ignoring their core and lower bodies.  Don’t get me wrong: building muscle mass is an important part of being healthy, but it shouldn’t be at the neglect at other types of exercise, including cardio-vascular exercise (like running) or core exercises, which target your abdominal muscles, back muscles, and pelvic muscles.  Yoga, barre, and Pilates target your core.  In fact, each of these classes have overlapping exercises,  including the bridge, quadruped, and plank, which strengthen your core and target muscles that you may not be targeting when you’re lifting heavy weights at the gym.

Plus, you have the added benefit of having an instructor who can correct your movement and offer suggestions to improve your performance.  This is an benefit, since most gym memberships include fitness classes — instructor included — with the regular membership rate but charge more if you were to have a fitness instructor help you in the weight room.

They Improve Your Posture and Coordination

Because yoga, Pilates, and barre emphasize breathing, alignment, and strengthening your core, you develop a better posture and coordination.  Yoga, for example, challenges you by forcing you to develop strength by holding poses while breathing regularly; and barre, which is very similar to Pilates but with the added element of a ballet barre and some ballet movements, encourages you to develop a better balance by exercising one side of the body at the time.  Additionally, you’ll quite regularly hold one- or two-pound weights while exercising, encouraging you to build strength on a different level than in the weight room.

Get in Touch with Your Feminine Side

There is more to exercise than building muscle and having a macho physique.  Remember that exercising is also about feeling good.  And health is more than physical — it’s also mental.  And most men can improve their mental health by getting in touch with their inner woman.  I’m not saying that classes like yoga, Pilates, and barre are designed exclusively for female participation, but for whatever reason, these classes attract a largely female audience.  I had been doing Pilates for over a year on a Saturday at the YMCA.  The class right after was barre, and I would watch the class sometimes.  I noticed that the class participants were solely women and that many movements involved dance.  And the instructor used dance music.

I wanted to do the class because it offered the challenge of doing something new and different, and a healthy part of exercise is adding variety to your routine.  But I avoided it for months.  But once I made the decision to plunge in, I was accepted by the instructor, who introduced herself to me after the class (she seemed excited to have me add spice to what was until then an exclusively woman’s class); and the women in the class either ignored my presence or smiled at me. (No, I don’t think they were smiling to pick me up.  I suspect they thought it was neat that I was there.  It’s never even crossed my mind to use an exercise class as a place to attempt to pick up women.)  But I do think that in our culture, which is still learning to embrace a more female-minded perspective, men do need to embrace their inner woman.  Just sayin’.

A Real Conspiracy

On a May 16, 1997, gathering at the White House, then-U.S. President Bill Clinton made an apology to victims of a top-secret forty-year study that left lasting scars.  Speaking directly to the handful of living survivors, including a 110-year-old man, Clinton acknowledged that the U.S. government “…did something that was wrong — deeply, profoundly, morally wrong … The people who ran the study at Tuskegee diminished the stature of men by abandoning the most basic ethical precepts.  They forgot their pledge to heal and repair.  They had the power to heal the survivors and all the others, and they did not.  Today, all we can do is apologize.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an arms-length agency of the U.S. government, details the events of the Tuskegee study.  By the mid-1920s, 30 per cent of adults in reproductive age were infected with syphilis (this stat presumably reflects the United States).  Most infected people do not progress beyond the disease’s secondary stage, which involves a horrible outbreak of skin rashes and mucous membrane lesions; however, if the disease is left untreated, it can progress to more serious symptoms, including paralysis and dementia.  Internal organs can also be damaged, leading to death.  By 1929, doctors were treating the disease with mercury and bismuth; it had a success rate of less than 30 per cent and could cause toxic or fatal side effects.  So in 1932, a program called “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” began.  Although the study was run by the Public Health Service, the Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), an historically black-American college, co-sponsored it in hopes of employing black American doctors and receiving the study’s credit.  Set in Alabama, the study found 600 men, all black American, to volunteer.  Two thirds had syphilis; the rest did not.  The volunteers were told they were being actively treated for various diseases, including syphilis; however, they were only monitored for the progress of syphilis.  Despite being designed to run six months, the study ran for four decades, and even though penicillin became an effective treatment for the disease by 1945, the men were never treated.  The study didn’t end until 1972, when the Associated Press caught wind of what was happening.  In subsequent years, the government was forced to pay the volunteers millions of dollars in compensation and to provide free lifetime medical care to the volunteers, their spouses, and their children.

The events in Tuskegee prove that actual conspiracies have taken place.  Most people, when pressed to think of a conspiracy, think of over-the-top, extra-ordinary events such as the JFK assassination, dead alien bodies in Nevada, or the 9/11 Truth Movement.  However, provable conspiracies have taken place around the world and across history, and although some have had some degree of outlandish detail, the vast majority are much more grounded in reality than alien-lifted military technology at Area 51.

The Cambridge Dictionary defines conspiracy as “the activity of secretly planning with other people to do something bad or illegal.”  By definition the above-mentioned Tuskegee saga is a conspiracy.  And other historical events, such as Watergate, which covered up a U.S. president’s criminal activity; and the Manhattan Project, which developed the nuclear bomb, are conspiracies.  Some, like the Nazi’s Final Solution, are even more breathtaking in scope.  But they all did real, measurable damage and became public knowledge in relatively short times.  But most importantly, they all have an ending.  That is to say that they became a part of history.

Conspiracies Are the New Religions

The world’s major religions, such as Christianity and Islam, developed at a time when people had no idea where the sun went at night or why people got sick.  So stories of Jesus curing lepers or God sending plagues and famines to punish people could be seen as ways of explaining what was then unknowable and scary.  But in the four-and-a-half centuries since Copernicus’s observations of the solar system sparked the Scientific Revolution, people like Newton, Darwin, and Einstein championed the Scientific Method as a way of understanding the world and the universe through observation and experimentation.  Today’s luxuries — heated homes, global travel, modern medicine — were all developed through modern scientific understanding.  Intuition has given way to deduction.  Spirituality has given way to rationality.  And religion has given way to secularism.

In developed countries, most people have at minimum a high school-level math and science education.  Yet people are still susceptible to irrational beliefs and superstitions.  These modern irrational beliefs — for example, chemtrails and crop circles — indeed cloak themselves with a scientific facade, but they have much more in common with religious dogma than science.  Like religion, they offer a universal explanation riddled with faulty logic and little evidence.  Their believers dismiss any evidence that disproves their explanations.  And like all religions, they are conspiratorial in nature.  (If you don’t think that religions are conspiracy friendly, consider that the Abrahamic religions are named after a prophet who plotted with God to sacrifice a baby.)

Flat Earth Theory as a Religion

On November 27, 2017, 61-year-old Californian “Mad” Mike Hughes was prevented from launching his homemade rocket by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.  The limo driver, who once told the Associated Press, “I don’t believe in science,” had reportedly spent over $20,000 (U.S.) to build a rocket that would blast into space with the aid of a rocket launcher made from a used motor home.  The government apparently didn’t take too kindly to Hughes’s use of public land to soar his amateur rocket at 500 miles per hour in Amboy, California, in his quest to prove that the Earth is flat.  Hughes, who wasn’t fazed by the immense odds stacked against him, said that aerodynamics and thrust are “…not science, that’s [sic] just formula.”  Hughes is taking the setback in stride, telling NPR that he would be launching shortly on private property near where he originally intended to launch.

What would cause somebody to discount thousands of years’ worth of observation and evidence?  Many scholars believe that the ancient Greeks probably understood that the world was round six centuries before the Common Era; Ancient Greek philosophers like Plato and Aristotle offered observations of stars and lunar eclipses to prove the spherical shape of Earth.  And as the Greeks’ observations spread throughout the Mediterranean and beyond, Indian mathematician Aryabhata accurately calculated the circumference of the Earth to within 100 kilometres a millennium before the Age of Exploration.  And Columbus used the ancient Greeks’ observations when he “discovered” the Americas.  But most importantly, in the last six decades, countless satellites and people have taken pictures of Earth from space. Who can deny the haunting pictures of the earthrise taken from the moon’s orbit by the crew of Apollo 8?

Hughes is apparently financed by Research Flat Earth, an organization that has barely an online presence, save a YouTube channel featuring videos that, although they are created to appear scientific, are more amateurish than true.  The videos offer scant evidence and little justification for their conclusions.  They are neither peer reviewed nor validated by any scientific research.  Yet if their evidence is refuted, it is further proof that they are right.  And how does knowledge of a spherical Earth hurt anybody?

Then there is the strange Twitter reply to Telsa and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who, after tweeting “Why is there no Flat Mars Society!?” received the following tweet back from the Flat Earth Society: “Unlike the Earth, Mars has been observed to be round.  Have a nice day!”   The society’s webpage, which doesn’t identify who the society is or how to contact them, is a barebones site that offers little concrete proof or scientific evidence, yet it includes basketball star Shaquille O’Neill as the biggest (pun intended) proponent of flat earth theory.

Why It Matters

To give flat earth theory any more attention would be a distraction from the victims of actual conspiracies, like the men in the Tuskegee study.  The people who buy into flat earth theory are not too different from those who send money to televangelists, for just as TV viewers cling to hope that televangelists can cure cancer, proponents of flat earth theory cling to a fantasy in which the pain of the real world is suspended.  They believe in a truth that, if revealed, would make the world better.  They fear those things for which fact and science cannot presently provide an answer.  It’s an unprovable concept that will never make the world better; consequently, it’s the hope that makes them happy.  But let’s not give these people much attention.  Let them be wrapped up in their own personal religion, the religion of the fake conspiracy.  Instead, let’s remember real victims of harmful conspiracies: the victims of the Holocaust, victims of the two atomic bombs, and the loss of innocence from the Watergate fallout.  For when people do conspire, bad things almost always happen. It’s not about a flat Earth.  It’s about the victim.

I don’t think that I’m inherently conservative, so it’s interesting that many songs I listen to are older.  I’m certainly not opposed to listening to new releases, and I do keep up to date with trending bands and the newest fads, but when it comes to songs that I play on repeat, they’re hits that have proven the test of time.  Maybe it’s because I grew up listenting to them on the radio, and the background noise ingrained on me; I’m not sure.  So here are five songs that I find myself gravitating towards time and time again.

“God Only Knows” by the Beach Boys

I’m not necessarily a huge Beach Boys fan, for I find their early stuff overly juvenile and simplistic.  But Beach Boys leader Brian Wilson made his masterpiece when he recorded Pet Sounds, which was released 1966.  Wilson had actually retired from touring over a year before going into the studio to record the album with many of Los Angeles’s leading sessions players, who were informally known as the Wrecking Crew.  Wilson effectively left his band mates out of the creative process and brought them into the studio only at the very end to record their vocal tracks.  (His fellow Beach Boys, understandably, were frustrated, and as a result disagreed with Wilson’s creative focus.)  Co‐writing with lyricist Tony Asher, Wilson produced a collection of introspective songs that had harmonies and structures that were unusually complex for pop music then or since.  The album had an immediate and powerful impact, going so far as to inspire the Beatles to record Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Wilson effectively left his band mates out of the creative process and brought them into the studio only at the very end to record their vocal tracks.

And who can deny the power of an album that contains classics like “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Sloop John B,” and the album’s title track.  But perhaps the album’s true classic is “God Only Knows,” which opened the album’s second side. A gentle, three‐minute tune that begins with french horns, viola, and cellos, instruments typically found in an orchestra, the song is a sweet love song in which the singer speaks about not wanting to be apart from the love of his life.  It has a consistent tempo throughout, but towards the end the song increases in volume, with more complex vocal harmonies and heavier instrumentation adding a melodic and symphonic element.  Yet the song has a simplistic and upbeat message, and as a result, the song has been featured in multiple movies, including Love Actually and Boogie Nights.  It was also the theme song for the TV show Big Love.

“Northern Sky” by Nick Drake

Nick Drake may not be a household name, and that’s a shame.  In his short life (he died aged 26 in 1974) Drake produced only three albums, all of which sold extremely poorly in his lifetime.  Indeed, it wasn’t until a decade after his death that well‐known musicians, including R.E.M.’s Peter Buck and The Cure’s Robert Smith, spoke of how influential Drake had been to their musical education.  And around the same time, The Dream Academy released their hit song, “Life in a Northern Town,” which was inspired by Drake and his tragic life.

Drake remains an enigma, for his music was simultaneously inspired by and hampered by his severe depression.  Drake lived his entire life with his parents, who towards the end were worried enough to hide pills from their son.  When Drake’s music label dropped him, causing him to lose his small weekly retainer, he was unable to buy a new pair of shoes.  Drake had a small network of friends, who all reported that Drake would sleep on their couches and then disappear for weeks at a time; and a week after Drake’s closest female friend ended their relationship (she couldn’t cope with his depression), Drake died from an overdose to anti‐depressants.

Indeed, it wasn’t until a decade after his death that well‐known musicians, including R.E.M’s Peter Buck and The Cure’s Robert Smith, spoke of how influential Drake had been to their musical education.

Yet this doesn’t explain why Drake’s music didn’t get wide attention until his song “Pink Moon” was featured in a Volkswagen internet commercial in 1999.  After all, other musicians achieved fame while experiencing illness and hardship.  Just look at Brian Wilson.

But thanks to that commercial, more people became aware of Drake’s music, which often relied on nothing more than voice, with guitar and piano (though his first two albums had some orchestral arrangements).  His beautiful melodies, augmented by his unusual guitar tuning and cluster chords, are quite hypnotic.  Take in point the song “Northern Sky,” a gorgeous melody with lyrics that equate love with images of nature.   “Would you love me for my money?/Would you love me for my head?/Would you love me through the winter?/Would you love me ’till I”m dead?” illicit a hope from nature. “I never felt crazy magic like this/I never saw moons knew the meaning of the sea/I never held emotion in the palm of my hand…”  I get the sense that Drake isn’t singing to a particular person but rather to the northern sky itself.  And his guitar and piano in the song sound like the wind.  Indeed, many of Drake’s songs are about his observation of nature, seemingly hinting that Drake was more attached to inanimate objects than to people.

“Song in My Head” by Martha and the Muffins

All artists have that one song that defines them: for Queen it’s “Bohemian Rhapsody,” for The Police it’s “Roxanne,” and Corey Hart it’s “Sunglasses at Night.”  And while they produced other amazing songs that I enjoy listening to, I dislike their biggest hit.  Maybe it’s because I’ve heard it one too many times.  And Martha and the Muffins is no exception.  This Canadian group, started in the late ’70s by art school graduates, hit it big in 1980 with their one international hit, “Echo Beach,” a song I’ve heard one too many times on Canadian radio stations (thank you Canadian content rules!)  But that doesn’t mean that the band didn’t have other songs that are thoroughly enjoyable, including “Black Stations/White Stations,” about the implicit racism in the recording industry at the time; “Cooling the Medium,” a wickedly fun song that was accompanied by a bizarre video that only art school graduates could have dreamed up; and “Song in My Head,” a great mid‐1980s pop song that actually has a cool video.  It’s an up‐tempo song, complete with a funky bass riff, a quiet guitar, and loud horns and synths playing throughout.  It’s ultimately about the singer breaking up with her romantic partner because, “You started to give me that old refrain/I never wanna hear that song again,” so realistically it shouldn’t be a fun song to listen to.  Yet it is fun precisely because the song is so self‐referential about being a song.  The chorus repeats the lines “There’s a song in my head going round and round/There’s a something in my heart that I never found.”  But for more fun, watch the song’s video, which is readily available on YouTube.  In it, group singer Martha Johnson is in a sound stage (wide shots reveal it to be a sound stage, with a working film crew) while a wardrobe crew dresses her and applies makeup to her face.  She’s standing on a rotating stage as different background scenery and people spin around her.  Get it?  As Johnson sings in the song, “There’s a song in my head going round and round.”

“Give a Little Bit” by Supertramp

Many would argue that Supertramp’s artistic triumph was their 1974 album, Crime of the Century, a collection of songs that share closely related themes of despair, isolation, and ennui, causing group writers Rodger Hodgson and Rick Davies to comment that the album was not a conscious attempt at writing a concept album.  It’s a thoroughly enjoyable album to listen to from beginning to end, but Supertramp’s true anthem came later in the decade with “Give a Little Bit,” a song that Hodgson wrote when he was about 19 but didn’t record with the group until after achieving success with Crime of a Century.  The song is pure pop, with Hodgson’s unique singing voice blending nicely with his 12‐string guitar.  The song is pure anthem, and yeah, it’s a love song, but it’s not necessarily about romantic love.  The song is more about the desire to connect with other people.  Hodgson could probably have retired on the earnings of this one song alone, for it’s been in countless commercials.  It’s in Amazon’s 2017 holiday commercial, and a few years ago Coca‐Cola used it in their brilliant ad, playing the song over video surveillance images of people doing acts of kindness.  It is a feel‐good song, and who doesn’t play air guitar to it?

“Burning Love” by Elvis Presley

I’ve never been a huge Elvis fan.  I know that saying this is as blasphemous as saying the Beatles were overrated (they were, except for George), but Elvis was nothing more than a good‐looking face with a good voice.  He sang songs he didn’t write, barely played guitar, and stole his shaking‐hips routine from black rock ‘n’ roll singers who had spent the previous decade perfecting their acts.  But Elvis brought it into the mainstream, and for that he should be thanked.  But he paid a heavy price, for fame was horrible to him, forcing him to retreat in later years to his palace, where he turned into a bloated drug addict who died tragically young.  Yet it’s from Elvis’s later period‐‐1972 in fact‐‐that I find one of my latest song addictions, “Burning Love,” an amazing song written by Dennis Linde and first recorded by Arthur Alexander, whose original cover of the song came out just months before Elvis’s version.  (Do yourself a favour and listen to Alexander’s version on YouTube; it’s an interesting blend of country and Motown.)  Elvis’s version, which was propelled to fame by his 1972 Hawaii special, is a kinetic song with a cool guitar riff played by Linde and a manic drum beat that actually strengthen Elvis’s already strong vocal performance.  For three minutes I’m an Elvis fan and thoroughly enjoying this song.  I’ll even forgive Elvis for that hideous outfit he wore in Hawaii.

When news of Playboy founder and publisher Hugh Hefner’s death broke three days ago, I mentioned it in passing to a woman about ten years younger than I.  “I didn’t realize it was still cool to keep a harem,” she quipped sardonically.  She was, of course, referring to the fact that Hefner, right up to his dying day at the age of 91, maintained an entourage of young “girlfriends” seven decades his junior.  Hefner’s plethora of lady friends, a long parade of tall blondes smeared in makeup, high heels, and artificially enhanced breasts, were physically indistinguishable.  Hefner kept his girlfriends at his Playboy Mansion, yet if any of these women saw another man (like maybe somebody closer to their own age), they would be reportedly sent packing.

‘I didn’t realize it was still cool to keep a harem,’ she quipped sardonically.

It’s this image of Hefner in his later years that helped damage his facade, further cementing his status as a has been.  But it was an image he put considerable effort to maintain.  From the onset of Playboy‘s initial publication in 1953, Hefner tried to class up pornography: He presented himself as a sophisticated, well-spoken, pipe-smoking gentleman in a tailor-designed house robe.  Just watch this old clip of Hefner’s 1959 episode of Playboy’s Penthouse, which was broadcast on TV.  But given the contempt that people at the time viewed porn and burlesque, Hefner’s effort is understandable.

Hefner began his publishing career writing for U.S. military newspapers during the Second World War.  After supplementing his undergraduate degree in psychology and creative writing with some graduate courses in sociology from the University of Illinois, Hefner became a copywriter for Esquire.  He then borrowed $8000 from 45 investors, including his mother, and started Playboy; the first issue featured nude pictures of Marilyn Monroe taken in 1949.  And Hefner dressed up his publication to match the classy image of himself: nude pictures, including the infamous Centrefold, made up only a small fraction of the magazine.  Most of the magazine matched the literary prowess of The New Yorker or The Atlantic, with a who’s who of literary figures.  Over the years, writers such as Margaret Atwood, Kurt Vonnegut, Arthur C. Clarke, Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow, and others published their short stories in Playboy.  People actually read Playboy for its interviews; in fact, its January 1981 issue, which featured an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, was on the newsstands the night Lennon was killed.

Hefner liked to place himself in the middle of the social changes of the 1960s, often claiming that it was he who helped spark the changes.  Historian Alex Haley interviewed both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King for the magazine, cementing Hefner’s defense of racial equality.

People actually read Playboy for its interviews; in fact, its January 1981 issue, which featured an interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono, was on the newsstands the night Lennon was killed.

And in 1955, Hefner stirred controversy when he published Hugh Beaumont’s short story “The Crooked Man,” about a future in which a majority homosexual society formed mobs to persecute a minority of heterosexuals.  “If it was wrong to persecute heterosexuals in a homosexual society,” Hefner said, “then the reverse was wrong too.” 

Despite his own claims of sparking the Sexual Revolution, it was the Sexual Revolution, in combination with women’s liberation and technological changes, that saw the downfall of Playboy.  The November 1972 issue sold over 7.1 million copies; one quarter of college men supposedly had a subscription.  Yet in 2016, the circulation was under 700, 000.

I was born after the Sexual Revolution.  By the time I appeared on the scene in the 1970s, Second Wave feminism was at its peak.  So Playboy to me was something old, something some old sexist man would gawk at in a barbershop.  (I actually went to a barbershop about eight years ago and saw a Playboy on the barber’s desk.  I felt out of place, not that it stopped me from taking a peak.)

When I first hit my teen years in the late 1980s, there was no internet porn.  There was no pay-per-view porn on TV.  And because I had no older brother whose room I could sneak into to take a peak at stag magazines, I would periodically go to magazine stores to stealthily look at nudie magazines, but it would be at something more hard core, like Hustler.  Even when I turned 18 in the mid 1990s, and I bought my first and only copy of Playboy, it was kind of a disappointment to me, in part because the pictures of women were too perfect, but mainly because I realized that the Playboy era was antiquated.  Besides, by the ’90s, more exciting porn was easily accessible at the local video store.  Yet as I’ve gotten older, I can reflect on how immature my taste in porn was in my 20s.

So if you peel away Hefner’s classy image, if you peel away his social activism, he was a pornographer who objectified women.  Gloria Steinem, in her 1963 essay “A Bunny’s Tale” for Show, wrote about going undercover at a serving job at the New York Playboy Club.  Steinem noted that during the audition, women with unattractive legs weren’t invited to stay.

And Steinem noted that the costume, a tight corset with a bunny tail attached, “…push[ed] all available flesh up to the bosom.  I was sure it would be perilous to bend over.”  Additionally, dry cleaning bags, gym socks, and silk scarves were used for padding.  The Bunnies, if they weren’t already fit, certainly became fit by bringing drinks up and down the steep stairs for their minimum wage pay.  The club, which lasted until the ’80s, gave ordinary men the chance to fraternize with extremely attractive women.  As Steinem noted, the customers were often lewd and abusive.

And of course there was the famous 1970 debate on the Dick Cavett Show between Hefner and feminist activist Susan Brownmiller, who accused Hefner of not seeing women as fully human.  Brownmiller quipped, “The day you’re willing to come out here with a cottontail attached to your rear end?” It’s a shame that Hefner could never quite admit that sexual objectification has historically been one sided.

As I reflect on the changes since Playboy‘s heyday, I realize that there has been a lot of positive developments, thanks in part to Hefner but also to the efforts of feminists.  More and more women are less likely to allow themselves to be undervalued, unequal to men, or treated as sex objects.  More and more men are more sensitive to sexual objectification of women.  But that’s not to say that we’re in an ideal world.  The gender gap has lessened considerably but hasn’t disappeared.  And sexual violence, which counts women and children as its most bountiful victims, still exits.  But Hefner, and the controversy that surrounded him, deserve credit for helping to bring these issues to the forefront.

As for the younger woman who made that initial sardonic quip to me?  Well known on Toronto’s burlesque scene, she was able to make that joke to me in part because the age gap has made her more insightful than I, but I also suspect that a large part of it is because she has dedicated her living to displaying her body with female empowerment and a female gaze looking back.

How times change.