Midrange Weekly Nov 30
Your Round Up Of What’s Got The Midrange Staff’s Attention This Week
Back when we could be in the same room together. And when Mickey had a hair bun?
Midrange Staff @midrangeyvr
Welcome to Midrange Weekly and congratulations on another week of pseudo lock down here in British Columbia. As we entertain a longer stretch of our current pandemic purgatory than any of us likely cared to, we hope you are staying safe and finding ways to keep busy and fulfilled. This was admittedly easier when we could get wasted in a park. Read along for some thoughts from the Midrange team on the week’s events as well as some stuff from the internet we liked.
Some thoughts on the Grammy Nominations
Via The Fader
Look, I don’t really care about the Grammy’s and neither should you. They haven’t had their finger on the pulse of anything remotely close to music since Radiohead was still a rock band and any politicking for a nomination is an exercise in vanity. To those interested in institutional accolades within the medium I recommend checking out nominees and winners of the Polaris Prize in Canada or The Mercury Prize in the UK- both represent far more thoughtful considerations on the best of music in its ever evolving and current forms. Nevertheless, Jamie has imposed a draconian deadline on me for some thoughts regarding the recently released Grammy nominations. Please bare with me.
First and mostly visibly, wow is The Weeknd pissed for not getting nominated. Apparently cosplaying as Jack Nicolson before he goes full Joker in Batman, his snub for his 2020 album After Hours is apparently an egregious enough insult for him to call the whole institution corrupt. While this is perhaps correct form a purely specious perspective, making this his current hill to die on is a very petty and annoying thing for the Weeknd to do. His album was fine, I guess. That’s it. The fact that he is this mad is affording The Grammys an institutional gravitas they have long since forfeited.
Beyoncé has been nominated for record of the year. Beyoncé did not release an album this year. I like Beyoncé- a lot. But she released one single this year, Black Parade. It’s rather good if by no means her most defining work. If they want to nominate it for song of the year, fine. Beyond the fact that a record category, in addition to song of the year and album of the year is pretty redundant, this seems more endemic of just how institutionally lazy the governing body of The Grammys are. That she can do pretty much anything and get nominated shows how little they are paying attention to what else is out there.
To further prove this point, that Billie Eilish was nominated for song of the year for her single Everything I Wanted is a further symptom of just how perpetually behind the times these people are. Eilish had a huge and well earned year in 2019, and then released a forgettable single in 2020. Her nomination in this case illustrates how checked out the nominating body is. Basically “a person we have heard of and who appears to be trendy” are the only two boxes being checked off at this point.
Speaking of behind the times. Kaytranada and Phoebe Bridgers were both nominated for best new artists. They are both truly excellent and deserving of many accolades. They have also been around for several years at least and are not new. What the fuck? Unless the nomination process only acknowledges those that have had major label debuts, which would be a dispiriting case of elitism and gate keeping that should further convince us all to relegate the Grammys to the trash bin of obsolescences and irrelevance.
My personal preferences are not important here, but they are going to get absolutely dragged for not nominating Fetch The Bold Cutters by Fiona Apple for album of the year.
RTJ4 was not nominated for best rap album. I am absolutely done here. -Tristan
Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program Reeks Of Slavery
CBC - Fifth Estate
On Sunday, the CBC’s Fifth Estate published a damning expose on Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Workers Program (SAWP). In it, authors Mark Kelley, Karen Wirsig and Virginia Smart detail the poor and restrictive living conditions many migrant workers are now facing due to the coronavirus pandemic.
With that, I’d like you to read the following quotes. Tell me if what you read does’t sound an awful lot like slavery (emphasis mine).
“Because of the rules under which Ben is working in Canada — and which “everybody is criticizing,” McRae said, the migrant worker is like a “captive worker” without many options.”
“He’s saying that we are going to put his farm at risk of spreading COVID. But at the same time, that rule is not applied for the Canadian workers…. they can leave, go home … they can go wherever they want. They interact with whomever they want, but we can’t do it. That rule doesn’t apply for them. Only for us.”
“…he can be expected to work up to 17 hours a day. He could also be asked to work six or seven days a week. For that work, Ben earns $14.25 an hour, Ontario’s minimum wage. Under Ontario law, he isn’t entitled to daily and weekly limits on hours of work, daily rest periods, time off between shifts, meal breaks or overtime pay.”
“The program allows Canadian farmers to recruit the workers they want to hire and retain them by limiting job transfers between farms. It’s difficult under the program for workers to quit a job on one farm and move to another. Farmers can also send workers home mid-season if they are unhappy with their performance.”
“At the end of the day, we’re feeding people. What’s wrong with that? Are you really worried about … how it gets done?”
When Clinton John arrived at a Norfolk County farm in May 2019, he was shocked to find he would be living in a furnished garage with two other workers from Trinidad. The garage didn’t have a stove, heat or running water. The toilet was a porta-potty. It was one room, with chairs, beds and hanging sheets for privacy.
“You cannot speak. If you see something that you don’t like, you cannot talk about it. You keep it to yourself because any time you talk about it, for sure the next year they will not request you.”
“These guidelines only require a minimal amount of living space per worker — the size of a small eight-by-ten foot bedroom — and beds can be as close together as 1.5 feet. Only one toilet and shower are needed for every 10 residents.”
“…insisted that they were unable to change the situation because of their employer’s control over their housing, their ability to stay in Canada or their ability to return in the future.”
There’s so much to unpack here.
First, I’ve never been a fan of this program. If you go to the Canada.ca website and look up its specifications, the first sentence you’ll read is this one.
The Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program (SAWP) allows employers to hire temporary foreign workers (TFW) when Canadians and permanent residents are not available.
Okay, so how is this enforced? You’re telling me we have zero interest from Canadians in this field? This is the first issue I have here. I realize my liberal ideals need to get with the times and with how true global capitalism works, in that cheap labour is exploited wherever possible. We have rules and laws with how Canadians are to be treated in Canada, but hey, we have these handy loopholes for cheap labour where we can fully exploit immigrants from poor countries who have come here with limited options. Yeah capitalism!
I digress.
Then you read the many quotes from this expose, and well, it’s really hard not to come away with a sense that how we harvest our food in Canada is by slavery. Yeah we pay them — the lowest wages possible. But we force them work long brutal hours, with no benefits, time off, overtime or paid breaks. We essentially skirt every labour law just so we can keep the price we pay for apples the same it was in 1997.
I keep telling myself that I know the following to be true.
These workers are just trying to make a living. These farmers are just using a system set up for them. Canada is just trying to stay competitive in a global market. Big corporations are just trying to make a profit for their shareholders. Shareholders are just trying to save money for their retirement.
Ugh…globalism at its finest just sucks ass sometimes.
The coronavirus exposed a great truth we all need to recognize. When a lockdown happens, the only people expected to still work are the lowest paid in our society. Amazon workers, grocery store employees, food pickers, etc…
Give your head a shake the next time you complain that your apple is a quarter more expensive.
- Jamie
ALTTP Randomizer Season Three….. it’s a thing.
Well it’s almost December and this fall has already given us a pretty dang entertaining season of Zelda: A Link To The Past Randomizer league play. You look confused so let me catch you up.
The online gaming community has been growing exponentially over the past decade or so with the rise of video game streaming platforms like Twitch and bi-yearly gamer charity and cash events like Game Done Quick, Evo and Capcom Cup. Aside from the (fairly lame?) First Person Shooter and Fighting Game crowd, one super awesome byproduct of this gaming renaissance has been the rise of the speedrunning community. “Randomizer” as an off- shoot of speedrunning (beating a video game as fast as humanly possible using mainly unintended glitches in the games code) focuses on developers essentially hacking classic games and re-arranging the contents. The result? A brand new way to play all your favourite games!
So If you are a fan of NES/SNES games but the initial allure has lost its lustre, check out the really insane shit these runners are doing. You can catch up with all the shenanigans by heading on over to Twitch and following Speedgaming channels 1-5 as well as Zeldaspeedruns 1-3. Get ur nerd on. - Mick
Inconvenient Canadians Still Live Among Us
Last Monday I came across a startling — but not surprising — report on the CBC of the wrongful arrest of a Native grandfather and his granddaughter while trying to open a bank account. This happened at a Bank of Montreal in Vancouver last December. It’s the kind of story which perplexes, frustrates and causes one to throw their hands up in defeat that such instances can still occur in 2020.
What transpired here is just awful on so many merits. Staff called the police because he had a large sum of money in his account. Why is that a crime? Do they do that with other clients? What type of service is Jim Pattison afforded when his accounts are looked at?
The fact that the manager referred to them as being “south Asian” is disgraceful. Did he not look at their Indigenous status cards? Do they look Asian in anyway?
A human rights complaint has been filed but I doubt much will come of it. This event reeks of racist behaviour and a fundamental lack of decency towards two individuals looking to gain, and have the same amount of respect afforded to them as any other client the BMO serves, rich or poor.
Irritated sniping aside, how we treat Natives should no longer be tolerated with passing apologies of “that’s regretful” and nothing else. This isn’t some type of incident where you send your friend a shrug emoji for being late to dinner. These actions bring about irreparable harm that’s extremely hard to reverse. Years and years of this eventually causes one to feel as if they don’t matter. Can you imagine what mark that incident left on that young girl? How she might forever be altered in how she sees the world.
“No matter how you frame Native history, the one inescapable constant is that Native people in North America have lost much. We’ve given away a great deal, we’ve had a great deal taken from us, and, if we are not careful, we will continue to lose parts of ourselves — as Indians, as Cree, as Blackfoot, as Navajo, as Inuit — with each generation. But this need not happen. Native cultures aren’t static. They’re dynamic, adaptive, and flexible, and for many of us, the modern variations of older tribal traditions continue to provide order, satisfaction, identity, and value in our lives. More than that, in the five hundred years of European occupation, Native cultures have already proven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.”
Thomas King — The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America
They shouldn’t have to be.
- Jamie
Gaming Out The Next Four Years Of Trump
via Getty Images
To those of us with a semblance of tethering to reality, the glorious finality of Trumps’s Orwellian-but-stupid four years in the White House is upon us. There has been much speculation on what he would do during the 11 week interregnum between his ignoble defeat and getting evicted on Jan 20th. Indeed a great deal of petty and downright seditious bridge burning is already underway both in terms of America’s nebulous foreign entanglements and domestic affairs such as his final attempts to rat fuck the EPA into oblivion. The vexing truth of the matter though is that even after Trump is unceremoniously kicked out of D.C. he isn’t going anywhere. With that, a quick round up on the consensus on what the next four years of Trump could look like seems useful in a depressingly perfunctory kind of way.
Exile In Mar-A-Lago: Amongst the increasingly theatrical hypotheticals focused on under what circumstances would Trump actually exit the White House compound (the fun money was him being dragged kicking and screaming by the Secret Service), NY Mag reporter Olivia Nuzzi had by far the most reasonable prediction. She surmised that Trump would simply depart for Mar-A-Lago in December or January for a weekend sojourn, like he always does, and then simply not come back. This assertion sets the stage for one of the likeliest post president scenarios. Trump holds up in his Florida estate and conducts his affairs almost entirely through his invective twitter feed, delusionally proclaiming himself as something of a president in exile. His base would likely play right along. From there he leans into his arm chair authoritarian persona being insufferably annoying in his critiques of anything and everything the Biden admin does from the insulation of his Florida home. Trump in theory may have to be careful with what he says moving forward on Twitter, however. Trump has demonstratably violated Twitter’s TOS in the past; he has been granted an exemption from such account locking consequences because Twitter views his screeds- no matter how incoherent or incendiary- as integral and news worthy due to him being a head of state. This is a designation that will not hold up to scrutiny once he is a mere private citizen. Should he continue to spew his noxious bullshit, he risks loosing his account. Unless Twitter was just looking for an excuse not to punish him and will continue to do so as Trump keeps Twitter in the news which is good for the bottom line and they really don’t care about hypocritical PR issues. That being a very likely possibility, get ready for Trump to get real loud and real dumb on twitter for years to come.
Trump TV: Conventional wisdom among everyone up to and including Trump, even if they won’t admit it, was he never planned to actually with the election in 2016. His whole campaign was merely a cynical ploy to juice his floundering brand in hopes of launching a nascent media empire in the mold of Fox News. A narcissistic nexus of conservative and sycophantic commentary on the days events with him at the centre of it all. Becoming president kind of got in the way of that. With Trump soon to be unemployed, he may revive the old dream of kick starting his own media empire, especially considering the widening schism between him and Fox News due to the heretical scandal of the network actually acknowledging that he lost. Trump may view the time is perfect to enter the world of production and punditry as he has actively peeled viewers away from Fox in favour of fever dream fringe outlets like Newsmaxx and OAN. Complications may arise however. As Trump has fractured and fragmented the audience of his preferred delusional discourse he may find he has helped cultivate a media land scape which a scattered demographic, and therefore one that is hard to fully capitalize on. In his bolstering and shunning a myriad of contemporary networks he runs the risk of being just another option in an ocean of crazy. Furthermore with Trump’s finical situation somewhat perilous due to his ruinous amounts of debt, it’s unlikely he can finance this himself and he may have trouble finding investors that want to go anywhere near him.
Broke With Expensive Lawyers: This brings us to our next plausibility- Trump spends the rest of his life in court fighting off a cascade of indictments and civil suits. It’s extremely likely Trump will be indicted at a state and possibly even federal level once he leaves office. The SDNY attorney has basically said as much for campaign fraud and election finance violations dating back to 2016. The 2019 Muller report laid out 10 potential criminal offences he could be indicted for but demurred on the basis it was not the Office of Special Counsel’s role to recommend prosecution or not, merely to present the facts to the Attorney General for consideration. The problem with such a nobly anodyne and non partisan approach is the AG is Bill Barr, who’s astonishing depths of corruption have deformed the DOJ into Trump’s personal law firm. Furthermore any potential charges against Trump are basically nullified as long as he is president as it is the DOJ’s legal position that a president is inoculated from any kind of prosecution. That all changes once he is a private citizen. A Biden pardon is unlikely (at least it fucking better be). The constitutional validity of a self pardon- as Trump has floated- is dubious at best, and a risk that can only be measured after the fact. He could get really sketchy and resign early, installing Pence as a puppet president for a few weeks for the sole purpose of getting a pardon from him. It’s hard to imagine Trump’s ego allowing him to step aside, even for a few weeks though. Furthermore, the idea that Pence would spend what little political capital he has- after all he is likely a 2024 aspirant- on such an unscrupulous move is questionable. In other words, Trump’s options aren’t great. Were Trump to be indicted he likely he has enough lawyers at his disposal to tie things up in courts for years, maybe even decades, putting aside that this guy may not even have a decade of life left in him. But that won’t come cheap, and as the recent NYT reporting reveals Trump is deeply in debt to the tune of over 400 million. Much of that debt, owed to unknown parties still, is due to be collected in 2022. Again, were Trump to still be president at that time he would likely be protected from such collections. It’s this plus the impending prosecutions that suggest why Trump was so desperate to cling to a position he showed little interest in actually executing. He may still be desperate to be president if only to stave off these impending sources of existential doom, which brings us to…
Trump 2024: Oh god, this could happen. Constitutionally speaking, there is nothing preventing Trump from running again in 2024. He has a lot of incentive to do so, due to the aforementioned legal and finical troubles that would be obviated were he back in the White House. He also would be largely successful from a Republican primary perspective. The 70 plus million that voted for him is a sobering indication of just how firm his grip on much of the electorate will remain. Also, were he to run, it would be political suicide for anyone to go against him. Who does the Republican Party, now ideologically defunct, even have to call upon? Nikki Haley? Pence? Fucking Ted Cruz? These people all suck up to him relentlessly, they aren’t going to challenge him in the future. Remember how that went last time? The only thing that could potentially stop Trump would be the aforementioned indictments. To what extent can in process prosecution be put on hold or nullified should Trump run and win the presidency again? What if he is convicted but wins the election durning the interim between his verdict and sentencing? Is he still inaugurated? Is his jail sentence put on hold until what, 2028? Are we still going to have to be talking about Trump in 2028? Sad!- Tristan
Things From The Internet We Liked
Akira: Animation The Hard Way
In doing research for an essay on thematic and aesthetic connections of Akira, Tristan came across this video detailing the insane technical merits that went into animating the iconic film. Definitely worth a watch
Riker Googling
To our twitter friends out there, we want to highlight an account that theorizes on what Star Trek’s Commander Riker would google, giving access to the search engine. To those that have been raised by the show, you’ll likely agree it’s absolutely spot on.
Yves Tumor’s Video For Kerosene Is A Hell Of A Thing
From his excellent 2020 album Heaven To A Tortured Mind, the ever enigmatic Yves Tumor has released a video for the track Kerosene. Rather than go into the details just know it’s a terrific track and the video is hella NSFW.
Julie Byrne & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma Gaze - Folk?
Julie Byrne has long been one of my favourite minimal indie-folk women and its always lovely to see a music collaboration take an artist out of their perceived lane. For this latest single she teams up with Ambient producer and co-founder of Root Strata records Jefre Cantu-Ledesma to execute a natural transition from Minimal Folk-Americana to Super Shoe-Gaze. Julie’s subtle vibrato sits atop the walking baseline just perfectly with the mirrored, swimming guitar lines and while they couldn’t have made a more straightforward melody or an anymore “shoe-gazey” track, the repeat factor is VERY high on this one. Listen closely and you can hear the subtly mixed in bit-crushed drum loop (insert heart eye emoji here).