We took a walk around the island. John showed me the water seepage problem he is dealing with, something practical and quietly alarming, the sort of issue that waits patiently until it cannot be ignored. I was glad to see the paintings by Sybil Goldstein hanging in his space. They found the right wall. There is a good life being made out there. The showing up, playing and leaving went by quickly, Burritts Rapids, and yet I felt that I knew John better than I had before. We talked about his father’s life as a writer, about moving cities, about Jews, antisemitism, dementia, and his sister\u2019s jazz record. We spoke, too, about that familiar experience of being judged unpleasant by others for holding critical views, as though skepticism itself were a kind of rudeness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You could sense a kind of gratitude in the room, the understanding that events like this do not happen by accident. John and Annie made it happen. The crowd reminded me of country types, the way people once did when I lived in Clanbrassil in the nineties. There were hipsters too. The mixture worked. They took no money for the trouble. They cooked dinner. They gave us a nice place to sleep. It made the contrast harder to ignore when I thought about how Eventbrite takes two hundred dollars off the top for essentially existing as an app. The work is done by people like John. The thought stayed with me longer than I would have liked. It is something I should solve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We took a walk around the island. John showed me the water seepage problem he is dealing with, something practical and quietly alarming, the sort of issue that waits patiently […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"Layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["entry","author-rockbob","post-9263","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-touring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9263\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bobwiseman.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}