Beggars, choosers, and the new media

I just finished reading a piece in The Globe and Mail by an unemployed graphic designer who is now on welfare and struggling to regain her dignity. "Curious, powerful, capable; pushed down, scolded, reduced," is how she summarizes her current state.

The pathetic irony of this article is that The Globe and Mail, a highly profitable newspaper jointly owned by Canada's wealthiest family (the Thomsons) and the BCE conglomerate, states in its essay guide, linked at the top of this woman's article: "There is no payment if your essay is published."

And there you have it. A media professional whose job was outsourced to India, a single mother on welfare, writes about her plight in Canada's newspaper of record, which does not pay her a cent for her work. Thus continues the cycle of this "curious, powerful, capable" professional being "pushed down, scolded, reduced."

This practice is not unique to The Globe and Mail, though. The paper is only adhering to current market rates for talent, which is zero. It never used to be this way. Blame the internet, I suppose.

I was first exposed to this practice while working as a magazine editor in Singapore. I thought it was abhorrent, but at the time I thought it was just the ethics of media in that region of the world, and I'd have to suck it up until I returned to Canada. The first time I was asked to solicit contributions for our magazine while offering no compensation, I was mortified. I countered to our publisher that no half-decent writer would contribute a travel article or a personal story without being given at least a token payment. And even if they did, I simply had a problem with the ethics of being an editor for a lucrative magazine and not even offering a token honorarium, especially when we're the ones asking for the work.

But what did I know? The publisher informed me that this was the way it had been done since long before I arrived, and she wasn't about to submit to my idealism. As it turned out, my call for submissions yielded a small flood of decently written pieces. What was in it for the writers? The chance to see their names in print and show it off to friends. That was enough.

When I took sole editorship of the company's travel guide that year, a huge chunk of it was made possible not only by generous writers, but by semi-professional photographers who were happy to donate their work. When I needed, say, a photo of an impecunious little girl selling postcards in a Cambodian market (to go along with a story that one of our scribes had related), Flickr came to the rescue when our own stock photo sources failed to deliver. In every such case, I would contact the owner of the photos for permission, and to my surprise, they were always (with one exception) enthusiastic and thrilled. I would offer a free copy of the magazine as compensation.

The irony is that the "old media" (printed magazines) that we were publishing would not have been possible without the advent of "new media". Digital cameras made it possible for our writers to take their own quality photos while on assignments. The internet made it easy to solicit writers who were happy to get exposure for no pay. Blogs also made it simple for good writers to make themselves known to us, who didn't want to get caught up with sticky matters like invoices and cheques. Google and Wikipedia made it easy to check facts and perform research in a matter of seconds or minutes, whereas such tasks would have once required a trip to the library. And while we paid our graphic designers, technology like Adobe InDesign made it easy to crank out multiple titles a month using a couple of overworked design grads, especially when editors such as myself were giving them a head start by doing some basic layouts of our articles in advance.

The reliance on donated labour and DIY technology was even more dramatic in my next position, where I was editor-in-chief of a free custom publication that was distributed to members of a Singapore social club. Where in my previous job we relied chiefly on staff writers, at this new job I was the sole full-time staff member. The only other employee, our graphic designer, was half-time (though often worked full-time hours). The modus operandi here was to never pay for anything, ever. (I exaggerate: we did throw a few bucks a month to a stock-photo agency, which we used sparingly.) When the publisher wanted me to stock up on "stand-by" articles that might never be published, I drew a line and said that it was necessary to offer the writers something if we couldn't stroke their egos by publishing their work in a timely manner. After all, they were only doing this to build a portfolio and see their names in print. If we were going to sit on their contributions for six months or forever, then the least we should do is offer a gift certificate donated by an advertiser. No-go, the publisher said. Didn't want to set a precedent.

The trick to getting people to submit free articles and photos was to be overwhelmingly nice and gracious. Promise a prominent layout, a byline in large typeset, and a free copy of the magazine. And when their work was good enough to ask for more, then I'd pay a huge compliment: "Wonderful article, very poetic and descriptive. Thanks for doing this. I'd be happy to print your next article if you can keep them coming." For the most part, this relationship-building worked well. Until the publisher wanted me to be more demanding and less nice; then I knew my position was untenable.

Here's the thing. There were many significant experiences I had in Singapore where I'd shake my head and say, "That would never happen in Canada." Yet I came home only to find that nothing was really that different here, either.

The way media talent has been devalued is one such example. I started to hear stories about print media in North America relying far more heavily on unpaid internships, with some even charging their workers a fee for the privilege. I accepted the new reality and I pitched my own essays to Huffington Post and The Globe and Mail. To no avail, but I kept trying. Being on the other side of the equation now, I too would have been happy to see my name in print and build a portfolio with some major-media clippings.

I eventually caught a small break when an editor for a local newspaper found my blog. He liked one of my posts and wanted to put it up on the paper's website. No compensation, of course. I agreed, hoping it would lead to paid assignments. It didn't. Some months after the article went public, I had a change of heart, as I was anticipating the necessity of looking for work in Asia again, and some of the opinions I expressed could be a barrier to employment in certain parts of the world. I contacted the publisher and asked if the article could be taken off the site. (I realize that the accepted wisdom is that once something is on the internet, it's there for good. But the article hadn’t been reproduced elsewhere, as far as Google told me, and I expect the cached version to disappear over time.)

The editorial team said, "Our policy is to not remove content," but after a couple of polite exchanges, they said they would delete the article. However, I got a little lecture in the final e-mail. This "represents a waste of our time, money, and energy to devote to something which then gets deleted."

How soon we forget about the days before the internet, when time, money and energy would be devoted to putting something in print and then get thrown in a recycling box and completely disappear from public view after a day or a week. Not only that, every single word in those pages was paid for. Now we're in an age when someone gives us an article for free to distribute on a world-wide network forever, and publishers get their shorts in a knot when the author asks for the delete key to be struck after several months of availability.

The final note concluded: "We will make an exception in this case. However, this would preclude you from writing for us again." That kinda rubbed me the wrong way. Not because I want to write for them again, but because they asked me for the piece.

I think back to the gratitude I showed our volunteer contributors in Singapore, because, really, they kept me employed. The more of their work I stuffed into my magazines, the better I looked. "Here's the quality work I can produce on zero budget." If one of my volunteer writers had asked for an article to come off our website, I would have happily complied. After all, their part in enhancing my profile was done, and if my company had been so concerned about time and resources being wasted, then I'd think we could have prevented that by paying a token amount for the work and agreeing to ownership ahead of publication. In the end, we had gotten far more than we paid for.

I do realize how fortunate I was. I'm aware that if I had been dealing with a major organization like The Globe and Mail, my request likely would have been ignored. But this is the thing that gets me: This particular weekly is a left-wing paper that continually challenges the behaviour of major conglomerates, including their competition. This paper helped shape my values when I started reading it as a young adult, and all of the ethics that I carried into my media work were developed by years of reading principled journalists – including the ones in this newspaper, which remains one of my favourites. So to be given a little bit of lip and banished as a future writer, over work that I volunteered to them at their request, just made me shake my head in sadness to realize that this is what all media has been diminished to. Even this paper, which has been a steadfast supporter of labour movements, can afford to alienate contributors over minor matters because they probably have no difficulty finding other unpaid correspondents.

The lesson I've learned from this is that it's not worth it for any writer to give away free content that ends up on the internet. There was a time when a journalist, photographer or fiction writer could break into the industry by donating work to publications. Nowadays, you're not really breaking into anything but a competition with bloggers and Flickr members who will be happy to undercut you to see their name pop up in search engines. Besides, if you're never paid for your writing and you're not one of the lucky ones who gets offered a movie deal for your blog, you'll have to make a living somehow, and whatever you're writing about will only be open to judgment by HR personnel and managers who Google your name.

I've had another thought about that welfare recipient who donated the story of her plight to The Globe and Mail. Maybe she was being clever. Perhaps this was her grand, last-ditch effort to get noticed, and possibly someone will take pity and give her a job. We think that beggars can't be choosers, but the reality of the new media is proving that cliché wrong. So if an unemployed graphic designer is going to take advantage of that to do some begging herself, then good on her for playing the game.

But I have to say, if this is the new paradigm in the freelance racket, where begging and choosing is turning into a defeating feedback loop, I'm not that keen to fight my way into it.

Update, Oct 16, 2013: I am aware that my story is just one tiny drop in a very large, quickly filling bucket. The pattern of writers being insulted and shunned for putting some value on their work is endemic throughout all hemispheres and various levels of media. Here's just one example (Academic calls Philip Hensher priggish and ungracious for refusing to write an introduction to his guide on Berlin). If widely respected authors are enduring this, there's no hope for freelancers or those trying to make a name for themselves.

Dear Taiwanese friends; here's why we can't pronounce your names

It's easy for us in the West to take for granted that Asians feel compelled to assume English names when immigrating to our countries. In fact, our culture demands it. While we're accommodating to all the Diegos and Stanislavs and Gethsemanes who come from other distant corners of the world, for some reason we refuse to cut any slack to Dong Hyun, Zhen Yi, or Yusuke. "Can I just call you John?" is what most of us would ask.

I've generally been sensitive about the names I use for my foreign friends. When I become close to someone, I'll ask what their native name is. Half the time, my acquaintance prefers his English name. "Don't ever call me Ming Han. Only my mom calls me that, and usually when she's mad." The other half the time, I get a response like, "I love my Chinese name. I only picked an English name because I felt I had to, so I'm really happy if you call me Wei Cheng."

"Patrick" and "Alan"

There was a telling moment when I was staying in Taiwan. My friend from Malaysia, Shen Siung, came to visit me and my friend Tzuching. These were the names I had always known them by. Yet when they met, they called each other Patrick and Alan. Here I was trying to respect their culture by using their proper Mandarin Chinese names, but even with each other, these two Chinese men reverted to English names. I was astounded. I looked at them both and asked what was going on.

Shen Siung said, "You Westerners don't know how to pronounce our names properly." But you guys aren't Westerners, I replied. After some more probing, I got what he meant: Western culture imposed on them spellings that even they couldn't understand. The confusion was borne out of the antiquated and byzantine system of romanization that Taiwan and Malaysia had adopted. During the discussion, I came to realize that I had been mispronouncing their names since the days when I first met them, and they were too polite to correct me.

Learning Chinese in Taipei

The method of romanizing Mandarin Chinese used by the Taiwanese was invented in the mid-1800s by academics named Wade and Giles, and thus it was unsubtly christened the Wade-Giles system. However, the system recognized by the International Organization for Standardization is a creation from the mid-1950s called pinyin. Because it was developed by China's Communist government, the Taiwanese shunned pinyin to distinguish a separate identity from the mainland. Fully adopting pinyin would have been seen by many as a form of linguistic treason. (Pinyin has been used to some degree in Taiwan for the past decade, but more about that later.)

Consider the grief that this stubbornness causes. Coming back to my friends Shen Siung and Tzuching, here are their names in pinyin: Shan Xiong and Zi Jing. Actual pronunciation: Shan Shee-ong and Dz-Jing. Neither Wade-Giles nor pinyin represent an exact phonetic transliteration (the linguistic term for "translating" a character-based language into a phonetic alphabet), but which one do you find more accurate?

Learning pinyin, a writing
assignment from week-one
of Chinese class.

To be frank, there is actually no single perfect system of transliterating Mandarin Chinese into our Roman alphabet. That's because there are subtle sounds in Mandarin that don't have an English equivalent. (In linguistics, these sounds are called phonemes.) For instance, our ch phoneme comes from placing the tongue on the roof of the mouth, coming out like chuh. In Chinese, there are two ch phonemes – one similar to ours, and another made with the tongue extended closer to the teeth, sounding like chee. It's the same with sh – one from the front of the mouth, another from the back.

The challenge in romanizing Chinese is to imagine new letter combinations that represent these different phonemes. Between Wade-Giles and pinyin, the most accurate in many people's opinion is the latter.

Many aspects of Wade-Giles resemble a bit of a linguistic joke. Take, for instance, Peking. That was the old spelling of China's capital city before the nation formally adopted pinyin in the 1970s. (Peking was actually a French-missionary spelling, not Wade-Giles, which would have been Peiching, but still an interesting example.) I had always been curious as to why China changed the name to Beijing. But, in fact, bay-jing has always been the pronunciation. 

In Taiwan, however, they continue to insist on phonetic spellings that often bear no relation to actual pronunciation. The city of Kaohsiung is one good example. Kow-see-ung is how I always spoke it. In fact, it's closer to gao-shee-ong. And did you know that Taipei is actually tai-bei? In fact, there is a method to the Wade-Giles madness, a formula to explain how "k" becomes "g" and "p" becomes "b", but it's not worth explaining here, as it remains understood only by academics. The Taiwanese layman generally has no clue as to the workings of the nation's transliteration system.

This is not to say that pinyin is flawless. With the example of Kaohsiung, the pinyin spelling is Gaoxiong. The "x" would throw off native English speakers. It's not easy to intuit that it represents a sh phoneme. However, here's what pinyin does to make the learning and intuition of the system easier: it makes use of redundant Roman letters to represent phonemes that aren't replicated in English. While the letter combination "sh" in pinyin represents its English equivalent, "x" represents the softer sh with the tongue extended. Similarly, "ch" is self-explanatory, but "q" is the letter that represents ch with the tongue moved toward the teeth.

Wade-Giles is misleading by taking common letters and changing their vocalizations. Let's look at Kaohsiung again. The sound of the letter "k" in English is made with a burst of air but no vocalization. The letter "g" is like "k" but with a vocalization. Why should the "g" phoneme end up being represented by the letter "k"? Again, we can look at Peking (Peiching) and Taipei – the "b" phoneme (made with vocal chords) ended up being represented by the letter "p". You will find this replacement of vocalized and non-vocalized letters and phonemes all throughout the Wade-Giles system.

When pinyin needs to use a letter to represent a phoneme not found in English, it uses letters with similar English phonemes, making the pronunciation of a word easier to intuit. With that in mind, look at the difference between Tsingtao and Qingdao, the same Chinese city before and after pinyin was adopted. Neither has a completely intuitive spelling for native-English speakers. But the former version uses "ts" for a soft ch phoneme, and "t" (non-vocalized) for d phoneme (vocalized). In pinyin, the temptation might be to pronounce Qingdao as king-dow, but once you learn that the "q" is a soft ch, it's not as hard to wrap your head around that as it is to think of "t" forming a d phoneme. The old spelling of Tsingtao has the potential for a reader to misunderstand two phonemes, whereas the pinyin Qingdao only offers one misleading phoneme. It's not perfect, as no language system is, but it does the job more efficiently.

So that explains the problem Westerners have pronouncing names that use the Wade-Giles system. We meet Mao Tse-Tung and we pronounce his name phonetically. In fact, it's not t-see-tung but dzeh-dong. (Wade-Giles even changes the phonemes of the vowels by using tung for dong.) The pinyin spelling, Mao Zedong, is more likely to elicit a correct pronunciation, making Mr. Mao less likely to say, "Just call me Dave."

Try it with this Wade-Giles name: Hsien Chiu. Did you say huh-see-en chee-oo? Now in pinyin: Xian Jiu. I bet you're closer to the actual pronunciation: shee-an jee-oh.

I am not a linguist and I have not done any studies or serious readings on this subject. I am in no way an expert. However, I think my layman's observations are probably more relevant than an expert's opinion, because you shouldn't have to be an academic to pronounce the name of the street you see on a map, or a city you want to visit, or to greet a new friend or employee.

I should also state that I have simplified Taiwan's linguistic predicament in this post for the sake of clarity. It's actually more of a mess than I let on. Taiwan did adopt something called Tongyong Pinyin between 2002 and 2008, which was a sort of compromise that would have allowed Taiwan to ditch Wade-Giles while not conforming to mainland China's system. Standard pinyin (called Hanyu Pinyin) has since been adopted officially, but the government continues to abide with a jumble of systems – in Taipei (Wade-Giles) you can find Jhongjheng Road (Tongyong Pinyin) and visit the Xindian district (Hanyu Pinyin) or take the train to Tamsui (Wade-Giles). Birth certificates and passports in Taiwan, as far as I can tell, are still being issued mostly with Wade-Giles transliterations.

All of this just creates unnecessary stumbling blocks for those of us who are learning Chinese and must use some form of romanization to grasp pronunciation. Westerners living in Taiwan can regale you with stories about the inanity of signs being replaced and re-replaced, and systems being adopted, modified and reverted, depending on which party (the pro-China KMT or the pro-independence DPP) is in power, which county or city you're in, or which constituency is most vocal about its preference at any given time.

In the meantime, here's my advice for any Chinese person dealing with Westerners. If you absolutely want to ditch your Chinese name, by all means, take an English one. If you like your Chinese name and you have a Wade-Giles spelling, adopt a pinyin rendering (or even something more phonetic if necessary). And if we still can't pronounce it, teach us. After all, if you took the time to learn our entire language, we can take the time to learn your name.

A return to yesterday

I'd always had a hard time letting go of the CBC. Like a first relationship, I always remembered this job as my first and fondest. Bouncing around various departments on temp contracts for eight years was a wondrous experience. You see, the CBC was a vital part of Canada's identity for its first 60 years or so, and growing up in this country meant being influenced by the broadcaster in some shape or form. Even when the CBC wasn't being Canadian, it was not Canadian in a very Canadian way. The fact that we could watch British sitcoms and arty US films on a major network, for instance, set us apart from the Americans. And when we watched Sesame Street, we knew if we had tuned into an American channel or CBC based on the second-language skits – Americans had Spanish-speaking puppets, we had Kermit le Frogge.

During my broadcasting course at BCIT, I started to feel more disinterested and unresponsive to commercial radio, and my dial drifted toward CBC Radio more frequently. CBC Radio, unlike the TV side, was one of those things I had neglected pretty much my entire life. It was such a revelation just to hear interesting people talk every day without obnoxious commercials and loudmouthed sportscasters. When I mentioned to my BCIT instructors about my choice of station on my drives to and from school, I was told, “Get your mind off CBC right now. You'll never work there. They're unionized, and they do things very differently from the stations you're going to work at.”

Upon graduation, I submitted only one job application – to CBC Radio. As luck would have it, they had a temp opening in their "tape supply" room. Now, where else would anyone get a job splicing used, heavily edited recording tape into fresh product? Or spooling new, un-encased tape into empty reels? Or fast-forwarding miles of used tape through a reel-to-reel to check for quality? Twice a day, I'd make my rounds, through the newsroom, the current-affairs studios, producers' offices and edit suites to collect used tape. It was a surreal job, and I got to take my breaks hanging out with David Wisdom as he produced his uber-cool after-midnight show Nightlines, or in the back of the Studio 5 control room on my lunch hours watching Fanny Keefer host Almanac.

When that temp contract ran out, I was shuffled into other jobs as vacancies demanded – program assistant for Vicki Gabereau for a year, music programmer for a few shows, and even picking up freelance production work on weekends. But the one area of CBC Vancouver where I was assigned the most was the record library.

While the work in the library could be tedious and wearisome (lots of data entry and re-shelving), it was also one of the most stimulating parts of the building. The library was a salon of sorts. Production staff from a wide variety of shows, from current affairs to pop to classical to news, would randomly flit in and out of the library, roping us into a wide gamut of conversations. There'd be the Afternoon Show producer who'd come down and say, "We're interviewing a UFOlogist, so, can you think of any good songs about flying saucers?" Or the news guy who practically busts the door down in a panic: "Jim Henson just died. Where are the muppet records!?" And the languid Gabereau music guy who never needed any help, because the show was pre-taped and no one was in a panic there.

The library was the heart of CBC Radio. It was our community centre, our church, our confessional. It wasn't where the shows were made, it wasn't where the action happened, but it was the only place in the building that brought everyone together, and always in random, serendipitous ways. When someone had something to get off their chest, whether office politics, world affairs, union politics or just a bit of gossip, it was we librarians (and whoever else was in earshot) who became their sounding boards.

And there was music around. Always. Whether it was a producer skimming tracks in a listening booth, or head librarian Judy sampling the programming in her office, or soon-to-be-head librarian Johnny pulling out an old easy-listening record at the end of the day, this library was not a shhhhhh zone.

Fast forward through 15 years. I'm laid off due to deep government cuts. I land work with Health Canada and become the accidental medical case manager (work I never imagined doing, let alone being good at, but it broadened my mind while paying the bills). Ten years after that, an itch to get back into media and do some travelling found me working as a magazine editor in China and Singapore, with a brief stint studying in Taipei.

You'd think that with all that life experience, now being in my 40s, I would have put the CBC of my 20s well into my past. But there was something about the place that always called me back. During my work for the feds, I freelanced on-air for the occasional pop-music show. When the feds went on strike a couple of times, I found some work back in the library covering for holidays. When I came back for the Olympics between jobs in Singapore, I got a couple of days of grunt work for some of the live special programming. I could have thought, “Magazine editor, overseas resident … why am I running to Staples to buy Jian Ghomeshi coloured file folders?” Because I never, ever got over that CBC feeling from when I was 21. The CBC still felt, as it always had, like a very egalitarian place, where people (for the most part) worked collectively on projects they were proud of, and less like a hierarchy of individuals.

When I returned from Singapore for good in 2011, word got out that I was looking for work, and Johnny (now the lone librarian after several years of cuts chipped away at the large staff) called me up with an assignment. The good news – he needed someone in the record library for a few weeks. The bad news – the job entailed dismantling the collection of records and CDs, and archiving the valuables before auctioning the rest of it off.

These few weeks were full of emotions surreal, beautiful, sad, and poignant. From the time I left the CBC at age 29 to being called back at age 45, I was certainly a changed person. Not just more mature and with enhanced skills, but having been both scarred and bettered by new careers and exposure to different parts of the world. This part of my past should have been well behind me. Coming back to work amongst the stacks of records and compact discs, doing the work of my youth – it should have felt like one grand backward step. Instead, it felt otherworldly. This institution was deeply embedded into my identity, seamlessly flowing through childhood, my student years, and my working life. Of course it was devastating to see the library taken to pieces, just as most of the CBC building on Hamilton Street had been transformed through the years. Yet, no matter how much of a mistake I believed it was to dispose of the library, I'm glad I was back for its final days.

How much this place, this room, had haunted me. Stepping back into it, after all I had been through in my life, was almost illusory. There was my handwriting still on the signs and shelf-tagging. The desk, a bulky thing probably handmade by the TV stagecraft department, still had all the same scratches and pen marks indelibly etched into it. The chairs hadn't been replaced. The clutter in the drawers and cubby-holes hadn't changed. The same tattered recycling box was still under the desk. Funny how things like scrapes or dents or recycling boxes are not meant to make any impression whatsoever, but the memories that come back when you see them again after 20 years! Even the phone still had my voice on the outgoing message, back from the day in the early 90s when voicemail came to the building.

A couple of my friends in Singapore responded to my Facebook posts that I was demeaning myself by doing menial labour, or "janitor" work, as one of them put it. Of course, they knew me as the well-off magazine editor. Now they were seeing me sitting on the floor, sorting through stacks of musty records. But their comments only underlined the reasons why I left that country. The Singapore work culture is ruled by kiasu, a local term that roughly means "fear of losing face". Meaning, if you're a professional, you're not caught dead doing minor tasks or manual labour best left for a secretary or cleaner. For instance, going for lunch with sales staff at one magazine I worked for, we could not find an empty table at the food court, except for one cluttered with dirty dishes. To their horror, I picked up the dishes and wiped the table with a napkin. "Don't do that!" one of them said. "Let's find another spot," said another. Although we ended up with a clean table without waiting, one colleague said I had made a spectacle by doing "the uncle's work". That's just one of many illustrative stories of kiasu that I came home with.

I was not the only former employee to be brought back for the library project. Two retired producers were also brought on board for their expertise, both of them well-regarded not just at the CBC, but in the local arts community. So here we all were: a former librarian, one of the city's top recording engineers, and a respected jazz producer, all using our respective expertise in pop, classical and jazz to select prime specimens for archiving, mucking about in stacks of records and having a blast. This is how my work abroad enhanced my appreciation for life in Vancouver – I was now back in a place where I didn't have to fear for my social status based on the job I did or how I appeared to others. Sitting on the floor of the library, rummaging through old records, not only was I happy to be back "home" in the CBC, but I was also relieved to be amongst familiar colleagues who could be both professional and laidback.

Our jobs required us to look at every single record on the shelves, a collection going back to the early 1960s. You can imagine, all of us music lovers, finding massive distractions amongst our work. I ended up volunteering a few hours or days here and there to make up for the time spent listening to weird discoveries in one of the listening booths.

All of us who worked on this sad project lamented the mistake of disposing of such a massive library, yet our attitude was: "If it's a done deal, then glad we're the ones doing it." On the one hand, I could see the corporation's reasons. With so much of the library's contents digitized and accessible to studios across the country on their Virtual Music Library, the physical libraries were becoming largely redundant. On the other hand, it was only the compact discs, dating back to about 1990 or so, that had been ripped into the VML. It wouldn't have cost the corp much to have a librarian spend a year digitizing some of the rare vinyl. Instead it was boxed up and shipped to CBC Toronto, where, we surmised, the collection might likely sit untouched for several years.

The value of this "redundant" library was underscored while I was boxing up a stash of local discs by Vancouver bands. There was some labour trouble brewing in our transit service, and a producer came down looking for a particular song he remembered about a bus strike in the 1980s. A few North Vancouver kids had released a single called "Stranded in the Park", sung to the tune of Bruce Springsteen's "Dancing in the Dark". (Flip side: "Born in North Van".) I just happened to have that single by Boss and the Bandits in pile in a listening booth, after having given it a spin myself. The occasion prompted one technician to grab some of the collection and digitize it himself before our local treasures ended up in an inaccessible box a few thousand miles away.

The items we selected to save barely scratched the surface of the entire library. When we finished our project, the reason for the corp's haste became apparent – after the collection was auctioned off to the highest bidder, the library was converted to retail space. When the CBC Vancouver “bunker” was built in 1971, it was on the far outskirts of downtown, where there was no demand for real estate. Today, it's on the edge of trendy Yaletown, and every part of the building that can be sold off or rented out has been converted and parceled out. The parking lot is now a condo called TV Towers. The library was just the latest casualty. One day soon, I suspect, as programming continues to get cut and become centralized in Toronto, the entire building will be gone.

But where the parking lot was not missed – nor the plaza that became a sandwich shop, nor the cafeteria replaced by private offices – the library was the unofficial heart of the radio operation. Now that it's gone, I can finally put the CBC behind me. While I would go back if I had a chance, I no longer feel any calling or attachment to the place.

After all the transformations made to the building and the culture of CBC Vancouver, the loss of the record library is the last straw that renders the place unrecognizable to me.

The pen and where the buck stops

Every journalist knows to do a bit of research before heading out on the beat and covering a story. My shortcoming as a magazine writer was not doing my research on the industry I was getting into before delving into it. I knew well enough that it was advertisers who paid the piper, but I was naïve about the little bones that publishers would throw to their patrons.

Depending on the magazine and its own ethics, some of those bones would be small and insignificant (say, a product mention in the tech pages), or they could be quite large and meaty (a two-page article extolling the quality service at a dental clinic in exchange for a free emergency root-canal, which actually happened at one place I worked). I was aware that many magazines operated this way. Where I was oblivious was in thinking that there were many other publications that didn't scratch the backs of its advertisers in one way or another.

Much of this back-scratching happens in those "About Town"-type of items you see in the front of publications – 100-word blurbs about celebrity sightings or interesting factoids that don't warrant a full-blown story. This is where even the most ethical of magazines usually spit their loads after servicing their paymasters. For instance, that photo of J.K. Rowling at a book fair sponsored by Borders isn't really a celebrity sighting, but a little sucking up to the book chain, which is a "preferred advertiser".

I was fortunate enough to do my internship at that's Shanghai magazine, which, at the time, kept a firm line between advertisers and content. But even they had their "about town" pages, and one of my first assignments was to head into the city for a cocktails event one night.

This is what I filed:

City Scene

Caran d’Ache product launch party

146 Words

When the invitation for the Caran d'Ache product launch at the Shanghai Concert Hall landed on our desk, we were intrigued. If we hadn't known that Caran was the Swiss producer of absurdly expensive pens for those who wouldn't be caught dead with a Bic, we might have assumed they were watchsmiths. It was that vague.

We showed up for the mystery event promptly at 7:30 and were treated to an empty, flood-lit runway for 50 minutes. We passed the time wondering, how do you launch a pen on a runway? Finally, three sumptuous models took the stage to play air-violins to loungy classical chill-out tunes.

After their little dance-and-dash, we were again left with an empty runway and cocktails. Ten minutes passed before our curiosity was snuffed and we decided it was time to go. Life’s too short, and after all, it's just a pen.

Needless to say, my snide little masterpiece was not printed. It's worth noting, though, that it passed in silence and I continued to get assignments. I would have been fired had I filed that kind of piece with the Singapore magazine I worked for the following year. Although I had wised up somewhat, I found my non-consumerist mindset to be my Achilles heel in the magazine business. When I edited my company's annual Travel Guide in Singapore, I was tickled that the weak economy prevented the sales team from lining up enough advertisers to turn a profit for the publication. With hardly any ads, I got to stuff the glossy journal full of articles and photos with wanton abandon, and there were no PR hacks on my case to cut the Cambodia article in half so they could paste in an ad for diet pills. It was a dream come true – Conde Nast meets Foreign Affairs.

I sense now that my overall nonchalance toward the people who made my paycheque possible is what spoiled my relationship with that publisher, who ran the company's magazines like advertising catalogues. It was not my job to sell ad space, of course, but my indifference must have been palpable. The previous year, I had written an article about Singapore's cycling culture and quoted a bike-shop manager as part of my research. During that issue's post mortem, the editor questioned why I was giving free publicity to a non-advertiser. Perhaps if I had said, "Sorry, next time I'll check with sales first," that would have smoothed things over. What I did say – "I was just trying to write a good article" (with a shrug of the shoulders and face that probably combined puzzlement with disgust) – set me up for harsher consequences when my naïveté stirred trouble.

My aversion to advertising probably stems from spending my formative working-years at CBC Radio from age 21 to 29. When media is unmolested by the agenda of advertising dollars, its power to bring communities together and stimulate meaningful dialogue is unparalleled. Once you're a part of it, you never forget it. So when I had the chance to shape the content of my own magazines, my only goal was to make them as stimulating and interesting as possible. By the time I was working in Singapore, my ethic was so embedded that I had blinders on. Not only was this my first time working in private media, but also a first for me to be in non-union environments. Combined with the lack of labour laws and the different ways of doing things in a new land, these were more significant elements of culture shock than dealing with day-to-day minutiae in a foreign country.

Back to that's Shanghai. After my little disaster with the pen company, the section editor sent me on another City Scene mission, this time for a TV network. She gave me some gentle counsel: "Be nice to these people. They’re connected with the government."

The event was in a little tea-house, where a table setting had a card with my name on it … and a delicate red envelope containing three 100-yuan bills. Perhaps I’m the type of person who needs things spelled out for me, because, reminiscing on this particular instance, the little bribe made this bit of marketing feel so effortless. I even enjoyed making up the quotes!

The butcher on Hastings

As the owner of more than one hard-to-find Beatles record, I know a good deal (or a bad one) when I come across it. But rarely do I come across a deal that's blatantly suspicious. For instance, the other day, when I found myself staring at one of the rarest LPs in the world – one I have seen stickered at $4,000 and had to travel all the way to Tokyo to see – for $34.99. Yes, the decimal was in the right place.

There it was as I strolled into Beat Street Records on Hastings Street, the legendary "butcher cover" staring at me from the front of the Beatles rack. I knew something was fishy even before I saw the price tag. First of all, anyone who owns one of these doesn't stick them for sale in a record bin. You hold onto it at home and advertise for the highest bidder. And if you're the owner of a record shop looking to show it off to customers, you keep it locked in a glass case behind the counter. And if your shop is on Crack Row (Hastings Street), around the corner from Blood Alley (real name), you don't keep it in the shop at all.

So it was no surprise when I saw the "cheap" price tag, because I had already surmised that this was a reproduction. The only question left: was it an official repro or a fake?

This was the first time I had encountered any form of the butcher cover in Canada. In Japan I saw three. Strangelove Records in the Shinjuku district had a butcher cover behind the counter. It wasn't for sale, but the clerk took it down and let me hold it. That alone was a thrill. Vinyl Records nearby had a prime specimen on the wall, going for C$4,000 (the shopkeeper wouldn't let me photograph it). The RecoFan outlet in Shibuya had one with a big rip through John Lennon's face (pictured), a sign that this was a "bad peel job", as they call it in butcher-collector circles. Some of the butcher covers had been "corrected" by Capitol records by pasting the new cover over the old one. Those who bought a paste-over inevitably would try to steam or peel it off, usually ruining the product altogether, but not to the point of making it worthless – this "peel job" in Shibuya was being offered for C$2,500.

Capitol's recall letter; click to enlarge

I should back up and tell you what makes this cover such a prize. To begin with, this wasn't even a formal Beatles record. The group had always taken great care in sequencing the songs on their British LPs, giving good value for money with 13 or 14 tracks. However, the American label that had rights to the songs on this continent – Capitol Records – would issue the LPs a few tracks short, then collect the missing songs onto compilation records, of which this was one. When Yesterday and Today was ready to hit the American marketplace in June 1966, Capitol called up the group's management to request a cover. This is what they got. The fact that Capitol even used the image was out of character, as the American label had a habit of tarting up and dumbing down the arty British covers by adding garish colours and simple-minded photos to make them more consumer-friendly. Capitol realized their "mistake" on this one and recalled the album after only a day on the marketplace. The fact that some retailers refused to stock the record helped them with the decision. Those who actually bought this one-day-only record landed themselves a rarity.

The album was re-released the following week with a new, innocuous cover, one showing the boys huddled around a steamer trunk.

Many fans theorized that the submission of the original cover was the Beatles' way of protesting Capitol's "butchering" of their records. That would have made a great story had it been true, but sadly this wasn't the case.

At Beat Street Records, I approached the gangly, middle-aged clerk at the cash desk. I don't want to knock the guy personally, but, although he fit right in with a Hastings five-and-dime, this wasn't the font-of-all-knowledge used-record-store-clerk I was familiar with. I'm used to bantering with record-shop clerks who regale me with stories about whatever piece of vinyl I approach them with. Sometimes these guys are entertaining and informative. Sometimes they're pricks. (See the film High Fidelity for some hilariously piercing portrayals.) Either way, these guys know their stuff.

Except at Beat Street.

"This is a reproduction, right?" I asked.

"Uh, yeah. That's part of the catalogue re-mastering they just did."

No, the recent catalogue re-issues comprised all the British LPs, not the American ones, and certainly not with this out-of-commission cover. So I explained the history of this particular record.

"Yeah, I can see that," he said, starting to grimace. "I never really looked at it, but yeah, it's kinda weird, right? Like, what does all that have to do with the title? Like, Yesterday and Today and slabs of meat? That's just demented, man."

I took the LP out of the sleeve for examination. Not only was it in beautiful condition, without any evidence of being pre-owned, it was on 180-gram, marble-blue vinyl – the kind of refined touches marketed specifically to collectors. So, for the moment, a seed was planted that this might be an official re-issue of some kind. Bootleggers would never go to such lengths, would they?

Despite how much I loved the record, though, I was apprehensive. I put it back in its place and left to do some online research. No official pressing for sale on Amazon. Nothing on the Beatles collectors' websites. Googling "butcher cover re-issue" and such came up with evidence of a limited re-pressing in Japan (on red or sky-blue vinyl, not the marbled light blue I saw), but this was just unofficial chatter on message boards, and others were replying that the Japan pressings were unofficial. Regardless, I figured I'd go back to Beat Street and pick it up. The mystery made it more appealing.

A different clerk this time, someone more High Fidelity and less straight-outta-rehab, but still not all that up to speed on his stock.

"What's the deal with this record?" I asked. "Who re-issued it?"

"I dunno," he shrugged. "It was in the last shipment from the distributor."

"Yeah, but is it an import? Did it come from Japan, or what?"

"I dunno. It was in the box the distributor sent."

I was taking the evasiveness as a sign that I was likely about to purchase a fake. But it's a beautiful fake. Despite the flawless sound, there is one giveaway upon playing the record that this is not a genuine article. The sound mix is in mono, as the label states. However, the manufacturers of this piece used the stereo mixes and folded them down into mono, rather than using the original mono tracks. (The backwards guitar on "I'm Only Sleeping" differs between the mono and stereo version, a noticeable tell for collectors.) An unfortunate oversight, as the mono tracks have been readily available on CD since 2009.

I'll chalk it up to kismet that I discovered this just a few blocks from Vancouver's east-side institution, Save-on-Meats – an ideal locale to find a butcher cover for only $34.99.

~~~~~~~

Here's what to those who knew best had to say about the most infamous album cover in pop-music history (quotes from Anthology, published in 2000, with a wee bit of paraphrasing):

George: An Australian photographer called Robert Whitaker came up to London. He was avant garde. He set up a photo session which I never liked at the time. I thought it was gross and stupid. Sometimes we did stupid things, thinking it was cool or hip when it was naïve and dumb, and that was one of them. It was a case of being put in a situation where one is obliged as part of a group to co-operate. Quite rightly, somebody took a look and said, "Do you think you really need this as an album cover?"

John: By then we were really beginning to hate photo sessions. It was a big ordeal and you had to look normal and you didn't feel it. Robert Whittaker was a bit of a surrealist and he brought along all these dolls and pieces of meat, so we really got into it. I don't like being locked into one game all the time, and we were supposed to be sort of angels. I wanted to show that we were aware of life, and I really was pushing for that album cover, just to break the image. It got out in America. They printed about 60,000, and then there was some kind of fuss, and they were all sent back or withdrawn. Then they stuck on that awful-looking picture of us looking deadbeat.

Paul: We'd done a few sessions with Robert Whittaker before and he knew our personalities. He knew we liked black humour and sick jokes. I don't know really what he was trying to say, but it seemed a little more original than the things the rest of the photographers were getting us to do.

Ringo: I don't know how we ended up sitting in butchers' coats with meat all over us. The sleeve was great for us because we were quite a nice bunch of boys and we thought, "Let's do something like this." What was crazy about that sleeve was that, because it was banned, they glued the new sleeve over it and everyone started steaming it off. They made it into a really heavy collector's item.

The Eno record I owned without knowing

Brian Eno changed the way I listen to music. His 1974 record Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) was my first foray into his large body of work, and music hasn't been the same for me since. (Must be said that this introduction came in the early 1990s; someone as avant garde as Eno wasn't exactly on every teenager's Walkman when I was in high school.) 

What makes Eno such an engaging figure, and what makes his music so inventive and inimitable, is that he pays attention to the way music is changed by elements not related to the music itself. That could mean the shape of the room it was recorded in, the mood of the artist creating it, the mood of the listener, the quality of equipment the record is being played on, accidents and happenstance with the instruments being used. Even the titles and the album artwork affect our perception of the sounds inside the package. Eno is known as the pioneer of ambient music, but even in his straightforward pop compositions, there's a sense he's more interested in the sonic nuances rather than the craftsmanship. Eno once offered up a method of jerry-rigging "surround sound" before the concept was even marketed, except his technique only involved a third low-fi speaker and a bit of wire. The instructions he gave on the back of his album sleeve were simple to follow and I still use his method today.

We know how certain songs are coloured by our memories of the times and places where we first heard them. What if someone could record an album that has those discretionary emotions built into it? It's that sort of question that Eno would ask and then attempt to pursue in his music.

Here's how Interview magazine put it: "If humans were able to hear light and parse the poetry of the spectrum, then perhaps there would be no need for Brian Eno, who seems to do it effortlessly. While the rest of us are generally content to hear sound, Eno can clearly see it. How else to explain the elaborate sonic color fields and glowing soundscapes that he creates, which feel as much like floating shapes and waves of light as they do music?"

It's not that I was never aware of these qualities in music, but now I was thinking about them in more active ways. Getting acquainted with Eno gave me a deeper appreciation for other artists who pursued music with a similar ethic – The Beatles, for instance, when John Lennon asked his engineers to make him sound like the Dalai Lama chanting from a Himalayan mountaintop in "Tomorrow Never Knows", or Brian Wilson trying to capture the mood of lost innocence on Pet Sounds. While Eno's approach to music isn't entirely unique, he's been able to pursue his ideas further than any other pop artist by eschewing commercial expectations. (As inventive as The Beatles were, for instance, they still had to churn out singles for radio airplay and abide by contractual obligations.) You listen to Eno's body of work over the past 40 years and it's hard to find anyone comparable who's created such a wide-ranging catalogue of music that is exhilarating in its invention, both cerebral and unpretentious, all of it having miraculously found its audience with no mainstream radio airplay.

And I heap that praise without really liking most of his work. The albums I do enjoy are just that much more special, because I approach them with no expectations, ready to be grabbed (or sedated) in unlikely ways. The albums of his I don't particularly care for are regardless full of wonderful ideas that are likely to be inspirational to someone else with a different perspective.

I vaguely recalled that Eno pulled the name Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy) from the English translation of a famous Chinese opera, which brings me to the ostensible point of this post. Having held this and other Eno albums in high regard, it was hard not to smile when I serendipitously discovered that I have actually had the original Chinese opera in my collection for the past six years – and I had, in fact, written about it on my blog a few weeks ago, completely unaware of the connection. A friend, with my previous blog post fresh in his mind, sent me a link to a record-collector website where he had been browsing for Eno rarities. My pal stumbled upon an LP that looked a lot like one from the collection of Chinese revolutionary operas I picked up in a Shanghai antiques market.

While the covers were distinctly different, the painted figures on both were alike, with their capes and pistols and feisty poses. The title, though, took me aback:Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy: Modern Revolutionary Peking Opera. Looking carefully at the Chinese writing on both this cover and my own, it looked like I had a match. I just had to figure out if the writing was indeed the title, and not something generic found on all Chinese records at the time, such as, "Another fine platter of clanging and caterwauling presented to you from Chairman Mao's personal collection," or "Stereo, also playable mono."

A bit of crowdsourcing on Facebook confirmed it. A couple of the translations offered up by friends were Taking Tiger Mountain by Wisdom and Taking Mighty Tiger Mountain by Wit.

Realizing that I now had both Tiger Mountain records, I pondered that aspect of Eno that makes him and his work so admirable – his authenticity. His own experiences and dreamlike perception of the world are at the heart of all his music, and I like to imagine that his own story of coming across this title might be as memorable as my own. 

One video, two songs: "Under" (1993), "Taking Tiger Mountain (by Strategy)" (1974):