#USElection2020 | U.S. Long National Nightmare Will Soon Be Over

November 2, 2020News, PoliticsRaymond Tomlin

The old tricks aren’t working. The October Surprise surprised no one. Junior says nobody’s dying. And the low whine of panic emanating from Trump, and his terrible children — Don Jr. mansplaining the pandemic, while Ivanka’s campaign “tea parties” try to convince suburban women that daddy doesn’t want you to die, just everyone else — well, it’s all coming to an end, perhaps as early as 7:30pm Pacific time Tuesday night, when all the Florida votes — including mail-in ballots — will have been counted.

The graphic above was published by MSNBC two weeks ago. For the past two plus years, American activist Emma González — the high school senior who survived the horrific February 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida — and her fellow Parkland student, David Hogg, have joined with tens of thousands of other youth across the U.S. to change gun laws, and work to vote Trump and the Republicans out of office.

In 2015, young voters by the millions across Canada cast a ballot for Justin Trudeau, in numbers previously unimagined, driving overall voter turnout across Canada from 60% in 2011 to 70% in October 2015. In the process, the overwhelming youth vote turnout gave Trudeau a majority government.
As pollsters tend to under count young voters — because, as can be seen in the 2016 MSNBC figures in the graphic above, more often than not those 18 – 29 years of age don’t get out to vote — given that in 2016 Donald Trump won the Electoral College (but not the popular vote) by the mere combined vote of 107,000 American votes in just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — out of a total combined U.S. Presidential vote of 128,838,342, with 65,853,514 votes cast for Hillary Clinton, and 62,984,828 for Donald Trump — and given the unprecedented strength of the 2020 student Get Out the Vote campaign, dedicated to mobilizing the largest early vote and the largest overall student and young persons vote in American history, and given their success to date in driving the vote of young people across the U.S., in every state, by anywhere from ten to fifty times their number in 2016, and given that pollsters haven’t properly accounted for the young vote — young people are notoriously difficult to reach by pollsters — the youth voter turnout in the 2020 election will prove the difference maker, and come the late evening of Tuesday, November 3rd, it’s gonna be a rout, and not just a nailbiter, for Democrat Joe Biden.

Don’t take VanRamblings word alone, though — listen to what seasoned political operatives, strategists and journalists in Canada, and across the U.S., have to say about Tuesday’s consequential Presidential election.

Slate’s Political Gabfest is my favourite American political podcast — every Thursday is a joy, when the podcast is published late in the afternoon.
The podcast is hosted by the cantankerous and recently divorced American journalist, David Plotz — the former CEO of Atlas Obscura, past editor-in-chief of Slate, longtime co-host of the Slate Political Gabfest and founder of City Cast, who lives with his three children in Washington, D.C. —&#32and Gabfest co-hosts, Yale University professor and legal scholar, and writer with New York Times Magazine, Emily Bazelon, and correspondent with CBS’ 60 Minutes, the humble, good-natured, engaging and oh-so-erudite John Dickerson — who in the embedded podcast below of their latest Political Gabfest episode weigh in on the U.S. election, in an informed, easy-to-listen-to and accessible manner that will give you a greater insight into what is likely to occur tomorrow night than you’ll hear anywhere else.

The members of The Herle Burly podcast — left-of-centre federal and provincial Liberal Party strategists, David Herle and Scott Reid, and former four-time Stephen Harper Conservative party campaign manager and right-of-centre political strategist (a supporter and advisor to U.S. President, Donald Trump) — also weigh in on the November 3rd, 2020 U.S. election.

The PBS Newshour’s regular Friday political panel, moderated by Newshour anchor Judy Woodruff, the panelists, moderate Republican, sober New York Times columnist and acknowledged Trump-disparager, David Brooks, and 83-year-old, left-of-centre American political columnist and commentator, Mark Shields, together discuss tomorrow’s inductive 2020 U.S. election.

Now, it would hardly be fair if VanRamblings didn’t allow you to hear from FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, the most trusted aggregate pollster in the United States. Up until 2008, Silver was a statistical sports analyst, whose track record predicting team and tournament wins garnered him an almost startling following among bookies, bettors, and those in the sports field.
As a lark, in 2008 Nate Silver decided to apply his statistical methodology to the U.S. election, both the Presidential and the congressional elections. Long story short, come election night, Tuesday, November 4th, Nate Silver’s prediction that Barack Obama would become the next president — having broken down the predicted vote in every county, in ever state across the U.S., and predicting with 100% accuracy, transformed Silver from a full-time sports analyst (an activity in which he and his colleagues on fivethirtyeight are still engaged) — and transformed him into the most trusted pollster in the United States. Here’s a bit of Silver on the election.

Nate Silver's aggregate polling website fivethirtyeight predicts an 89% chance Biden wins the U.S. Presidential election

Just click on the graphic above to be taken to fivethirtyeight’s 2020 election forecast

Today, we’ll leave you with this Joe Biden campaign ad, on decency …

Music Sundays | Sorrowfulness | Burt Bacharach & Elvis Costello

November 1, 2020Music, Pop Culture, VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

The perfectly matched, heartbreaking, heavenly collaboration between Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, Painted from Memory, the pop-music masterpiece, was released on the 29th of September 1998 — slightly old-fashioned, yet insistently clear and capable of flooding the heart with all the awful beauty of love’s highs and lows … mostly lows … “In the darkest place,” it all begins, “I know that is where you’ll find me” — remains to this day one of my favourite albums ever, one I go back to again and again.

The people we meet on the album who move through these 12 perfect pop songs aren’t teenagers tasting first-love tears.
They’re grownups who know what they’ve done to themselves, their hearts broken, who are now enveloped in a realm we’ve all visited from time to time, a dimension where time ticks away just a bit more slowly and the world passes by at a remove. They are displaced and disconnected, seen only in fine silver frames, distant cities or watching from afar. They live in empty houses, waiting for sleep to come to take them somewhere else, and all this they do to music meticulously crafted by two experts of the form.

Neither producer Burt Bacharach nor composer Elvis Costello is a stranger to collaboration, but together they are a singular pairing, as Costello brings discipline and edge to Bacharach’s lush melodic outpourings, while Bacharach returns the favour by setting Costello’s exacting progressions and taut wordplay in soundscapes that are both intricate and silky smooth.
Take, as a spectacular example, the gorgeous ballad What’s Her Name Today?, a Costellian pondering on the ruin brought about by those in pain that’s not so much backed by Bacharach’s purposeful grand piano as admonished — you’re a fool it declares, before sweeping up the whole affair into a whirlwind of strings and human wreckage.

Other times, they’re more sympathetic, deploying Bacharach’s famous mellow trumpet to harmonize with the vocals on the tricky tale of infidelity Toledo, or winking at the conceit of The Sweetest Punch by threading the tune with chimes, a lovely instrument you have to hit, with mallets.

In the song above, the horns say a little prayer, below … the bells chime.

The sum of this artistic one + one is more than strictly musical. By coming together when they did, each man underwent a kind of recalibration whereby the sheen of kitsch acquired by Bacharach’s body of work since his ’60s heyday was stripped away, and Costello, then in his mid-40s, shed the last lingering remnants of his image as an angry young man.
In turn, Painted from Memory itself became a bridge, connecting classic works of love and loss — think Frank Sinatra’s ninth studio release, 1955’s concept album, In the Wee Small Hours — to the wave of pop-jazz new schoolers (Norah Jones, Michael Bublé) that followed closely in its wake.

Costello and Bacharach know that opening yourself up to the sentimental side of life exposes you to its cruelties as well; it takes courage, so Painted from Memory concludes with a plea for fortitude and grace.
God Give Me Strength — which they wrote over the phone lines — is the first of the pair’s dual efforts and it remains one of the best, an achingly gorgeous last-stand waltz through the end stages of grief. “That song is sung out,” it concedes, “this bell is rung out.” Except that it isn’t, because there’s something in all of us, the part Painted from Memory renders so well, that will always wait for the bell to ring. That damned, beautiful bell.

Stories of a Life | The Ties That Bind Daughters and Fathers

October 31, 2020fixin to die rag, Jude and Megan, Stories of a LifeRaymond Tomlin

When Megan Jessica Tomlin was born on a Saturday night, March 26th, 1977, at Burnaby General Hospital at 10:26pm, given that she was a breach birth, the hospital room was filled with a harried collection of nurses and doctors & an anesthesiologist who’d been called to assist with the birth.
As a medicated Cathy lay peaceful, laying stock still on her white-sheeted hospital bed — given that she was infused with anaesthetic drugs to aid in the birth, to keep her sedated for what turned out to be her second, very difficult birth — upon delivery, a nurse gathered my new daughter, Megan, and brought her over to me, as I stood to Cathy’s left, just behind where her head lay, and handed my hushed newborn daughter into my arms.
For the 10 minutes that followed, a seeming lifetime of remembrance and love, Megan her eyes all blue peered directly into my eyes and deep into my soul, and for those few brief moments I into hers, as my daughter imprinted on me as the father who would become in her early years, and in succeeding years through to her late teens, the single most transformative person in her life, a father she trusted & loved with all her generous heart.
In the weeks that followed Megan’s birth, the wheels began to fall of the bus that was my marriage to Cathy, as Cathy seemed to lose herself, quitting her job at the Ministry of Human Resources office, drinking, staying out all night long, and otherwise engaging in self-destructive behaviour.
Why?

Given my position as the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation Learning and Working Conditions Chair for the Interior, and my long years of work previous with the Federation, and the great relationship I’d developed with Linda Shuto — working with her to form the first Status of Women office within an NGO anywhere on the continent — as well as BCTF President Jim McFarlane and, more especially with BCTF VP Don Walmsley, as you might well expect from a Federation comprised of mainly older members, Executive plans were afoot for Federation generational leadership change — and I targeted as the person who would become a future BCTF President.
Don Walmsley visited Cathy and me multiple times throughout 1977, in our newly acquired Interior home, to advise the both of us that plans were in process to, at the spring BCTF AGM in 1978, run me as a second vice-president of the Federation, with an eye to soon becoming BCTF President.
Here’s how the Federation saw it, Don explaining to the both of us: my organizing bona fides in the Interior had gained provincial attention, Cathy and I were a young couple “from the Interior” (the left on the Federation liked the idea of running candidates from rural areas), Cathy was a professional, was sophisticated and presented well, we had two children — we were, as far as the Federation was concerned, “the perfect couple”.
Here’s what Don Walmsley told Cathy and I …

“Next year, Raymond, we’ll run you for 2nd VP. Cathy, you can run as a Board of Education COPE trustee candidate for Vancouver School Board. Raymond, we’ll find you a job in Vancouver, find you a house, and Cathy we’ll make sure you’re employed, as well, finding you a job in the city similar to what you’re doing up here. Next year (1978), once you’re on the Executive, Raymond, and have moved down to the city, you’ll be closer to the Federation offices. In 1979, we’ll run you for 1st VP, and depending on how the election goes for President of the Federation, if our candidate loses, we’ll run you for President in 1980. If our candidate wins, and serves a three year term, we’ll run you for President in 1983.”

Sounded good to me — and not so good to Cathy, as elucidated above.
Once Don had left our home, Cathy told me that she had no intention of having the next 20 years of her life being planned by the teachers’ federation, nor was she enamoured of the idea of living in my shadow.
Understandable.
You know how when you’re watching an awards show on TV, and the winner is (almost invariably) a man, the first person he thanks, whom he gushes over, is his wife, saying ardently, “I couldn’t have done it without her — she’s been my rock, and has stood by my side throughout the entire journey that has led to tonight. I will love you for always, my beloved.”
Believe me when I write: Cathy was having none of that arrant palaver.

Long story short, by early 1978, I had been awarded custody of both Jude and Megan, Cathy was off gallivanting around the globe with a drinking & carousing rock ‘n roll band — and I was left to raise two infant children.
From the outset, Megan was a bright and engaged child, far ahead of her milestone maturational markers — walking at 9 months, speaking at age 1, reading at 18 months — and by the time she was two years of age, as in control of her environment as any 11-year-old child of my acquaintance.
Where Jude — 21 months Megan’s senior — wanted to be out and about all the time, one of the friendliest, most gregarious and social children you’d ever want to meet, Megan was quiet, reserved, pensive and thoughtful, as big a “daddy’s girl” as could possibly be imagined, by my side throughout the day, and separated from me only when she was in daycare, or asleep.
As Cathy and I often remarked to one another as Megan was growing up, “Whose child is this, anyway? Megan certainly can’t be ours — she’s just so much brighter & more capable than either of us, or both of us combined.”
For me, there has never been anyone to whom I have been closer, who has understood me and “had my number”, with whom my relationship has proved more loving & honest than has long been the case with Megan & I.

We acknowledge — as if we have known each other across many lifetimes — that we have found one another on this Earth, in this lifetime, and as I josh Megan by referring to her as her very own diety, in this life the two of us take succour in the knowledge that we love one another, know one another, that as we live lives that are separate, Megan now married with children, and me in my west side home spending hours each day writing stories just like this, that as we run across one another from time to time, as we often do in my Kitsilano neighbourhood, that the first words each of us will utter will be, “I love you” — as we set about to continue our day.

</ br>The knowing glance tells you everything you need to know about fathers & daughters

Arts Friday | Animation as An Expression of Human Experience

October 30, 2020A & E, Arts Friday, Pop CultureRaymond Tomlin

All animation, whether it depicts a whistling mouse, a walking dinosaur, or a leaping superhero, is a kind of magic trick. It’s right there in the name of one of the earliest devices used to project slides: the magic lantern.
If you take an image of an open hand and an image of a fist and project the two in sequence, you’ll convey the illusion of a clench.

“What happens between each frame is more important than what happens on each frame,” Scottish-Canadian experimental animator, the late Norman McLaren — a director and producer with the National Film Board of Canada (NFB), and a respected pioneer of hand-drawn animation and drawn-on-film animation — once explained, stating that ‘Animation is the art of manipulating the invisible interstices between frames.”

Arising from VanRamblings’ coverage this week of the meaning behind the majority BC NDP win in the recent provincial election, we failed to make mention of International Animation Day — which occurred this past Wednesday, October 28th — celebrated by the National Film Board of Canada through the streaming of 12 films, all of which are permanently available now – for free viewing – on the National Film Board website.
As Mercedes Milligan wrote this past Tuesday in Animation Magazine …

Now in its 14th year, this annual NFB event gives Canadian audiences the opportunity to explore a host of new works by Canadian and European filmmakers working in the National Film Board’s cutting-edge, internationally renowned studios. The rich 2020 selection puts women in the spotlight — both female directors and strong female characters — and features a wealth of different animation techniques.

</ br>Vancouver-based animator Ann Marie Fleming’s new animated short, Old Dog

Made by world-renowned animators, the outstanding animated films in this year’s International Animation Day programme have won prestigious awards and screened throughout the global festival circuit.

Long one of VanRamblings’ favourite arts and culture writers, Katja De Bock is now a publicist with the NFB (lucky, lucky them!). Here’s what she wrote to VanRamblings earlier in the week on one particular film she cherishes …

Old Dog, the latest film by Vancouver’s Ann Marie Fleming, started off as a way of talking about aging, inspired by Ms. Fleming’s namesake, Ann-Marie Fleming, whom she often gets mixed up with in Internet searches.

Ann-Marie has a company in 100 Mile House, B.C., that makes technologies for aging dogs, and also for their humans. Animator Ann Marie was struck by the compassion her namesake has for these vulnerable animals, as she helped them to navigate the latter stages of their lives, and by how much dogs have to teach human beings.

The COVID-19 pandemic made Ms. Fleming (the animator), whose elderly parents live overseas, reflect on how we take care of our elders and how our global values are being put to the test.

According to Ann Marie, animation is the perfect medium to tell this story. It makes the experience of the human and the dog more universal and helps us understand the unbearable lightness of being.

Now, as it happens Ms. De Bock informs us — and now, you — Old Dog is also featured at this year’s SPARK Animation Festival in Vancouver — which, by the way, began yesterday, and is set to run through Sunday, November 8th, and in addition to films will feature workshops, panels and talks by the world’s most talented artists, directors, and studio luminaries.

This year’s SPARK Animation Festival pass is only $25 — which will give you access to the dozens of films SPARK has on offer in 2020.
Guess what VanRamblings is going to be doing for the next nine days!
On Arts Friday, VanRamblings will leave you with this special treat …

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Ann Marie Fleming’s Old Dog, a presentation of the National Film Board of Canada