My nom-de-guerre.
14 April 2017 [link youtube]
IT'S IN ENGLISH, NOT FRENCH. If I added "nom de plume" to the title, it'd be even worse, hm?
Youtube Automatic Transcription
my father died just about a month ago
now and this video is my occasion to talk about the crossroads in my life wanted to started to change my own legal name and talk a little bit about the fact that I knew my father that I really knew and understood who he was because very very few people live on this earth did it's not so much a video about my father himself is that because I'm censoring myself I really made an aesthetic decision when I started this channel aesthetic rather than ethical or moral that this channel was for me to tell my story and not to tell my parents story knocked on my ex-wife story not to tell anyone else's story of them in mind and I still do feel both aesthetically and morally that in many ways his story is not mine to tell now relationship with my father was dramatic we had our differences but you know first and fourth I gotta say I really did know the man I did appreciate the man I appreciated the good things and bad about him I understood how his mind works and I had a huge advantage over all my other brothers and sisters because I stayed at home all the way through high school and all the way through University during university I didn't eat meals than three times a day I would talk to him a couple times a week but still that meant that during the adult years of my life I was talking to him several times a week man-to-man as two adults and during those years he really did talk to me as an equal and we talked about history and politics and his philosophy of life and his view of the world and his business and his views on the arts what have you I mean it is a real credit to him that he could basically set aside the fact that I was his biological son and talked to me as a friend and during those years he did talk to me as a friend as an equal as another adult I don't have a whole lot of compliments to give up in this video but that is one and both of us benefited from it during those years my father did not have many four and you may have one or two in distant parts of the world who we talk to once in a while but in many ways he was alone and he needed that friendship also now the contrast for me is I have so many brothers and sisters my father had nine children with quite a number of different mothers to those children and in general all of my blood relatives whether they're brothers sisters cousins aunts and uncles might be they really seem to view my father as a myth rather than a man I was talking to one of my brother's once and he said to me that my father could have been a great poet if only he had chosen another woman to be his wife my brother had this fantastic narrative in his head about how my father was you know really in his soul a poet and painter and artists and political extremists don't forget that but that my father had made a terrible mistake in choosing my biological mother to be his next wife and that only when he when he turned this corner when he changed paths then he gave up all his dreams and aspirations to be a poet and threw away his bright future as you know whatever one of the greatest poets of Canada yeah grandiose so much that they did himself may have been he would have never once claimed that he could have paid the rent with his poetry that he could have made that his exclusive you know career or means of income and you know he could have chosen to spend more time writing poetry especially in his old age obviously he could have published more books of poetry and his poems are not all bad but what struck me about this example was my brother was really deeply indulging in this myth-making mentality about my father both both in regarding him as hero and villain most of the people who knew him that was really healthy someone thought of as a larger-than-life hero and a smaller than life villain and never really just appreciated him for the man he was all-in-all um I turned to my brother and said to him simply oh yeah you know his poems had have you read them like have you read the books of poetry Ashley poke my brother looked at me astonished it never as if it had never entered his mind to actually get the book out of the library but he said to me no have you said yeah you know no and again I could say good and bad but he had a few good poems in there now that he's deceased I'm actually asking my mom maybe they can get a copy of that book one of the books of poetry that I'm thinking of in particular and hold on to it as a memento of my father I remember once as a school project I actually memorized and read aloud one of the poems because I think the school project was to memorize and read one poem from any published Canadian poet so I chose my own father as the published name thought it was good poem in this way I've said this to my father directly in the last used as I said several times said to them look I'm not like your other sons and daughters I don't think of you as a great author I don't think of you as a great businessman I don't think he was a great political figure I don't think he was a great poet or a painter quite right you know I think of you as the guy who fell asleep on the couch watching baseball I think of you for the man you really are not for who you pretend to be and not for any of the larger-than-life roles hero or villain what have you that other people kind of project onto you or ascribe to you the roles they expect you to play and I think he did appreciate that about me that I was maybe the only person in his life who really talked to him man-to-man and who knew who I was talking to and I knew when he was lying to me you know I could tell like I said I could read him like a book most people never figure it out but I figured it out um you know I think he did appreciate that but on the whole it's obvious that he enjoyed the other game I think he enjoyed rather more changing hats and having different people who regarded him as the hero as the villain as the poet as the political extremists or as the businessman because in his career very often he just he really just literally put on a different hat and he had people who regarded him in a totally different way until the different context he just stood around talking to architects and businessmen it would have you and and bureaucrats and there's another side of his life where they didn't they didn't know at all I mean I see apparently nobody uses Google they just even look up the books he publish which did indeed include both both poetry and and political extremism so [ __ ] I mean so far I'm smiling and laughing a lot you know nobody wants to speak ill to dead it is true though there was a kind of traumatic turning point in my life which is when I changed my legal name now it's interesting I do not think of it as a negative thing in my life I don't associate it with oh stick with the same word I don't think of it as a trauma I think of it as kind of a joyful wonderful thing that I turned this corner and changed my legal name and took on this new direction other things did not turn out quite as planned I mean I can talk about it kind of before after enduring when the decision was made and how the outcomes were a little bit unexpected for me in some ways my change of name it relates negatively to my father's legacy and in some ways it really positively reflects the upbringing I had and he could recognize that also so I grew up very much being immersed in the world of modern art of painters and art galleries and our history and a very politicized view of the significance of Modern Art as that was my father's own taste and the art world even more than the world of say science fiction writers or poets or philosophers is indeed full of people who adopt a nom de plume or a nom de guerre who use you know a outrageous second name who adopt a different identity in their role as creator author or artist so actually in the months prior to my making the decision changed my legal name I was already thinking about that really seriously for quite a number of reasons and it's interesting if I had done it then if I'd done it just a few months earlier then the whole way it would have been presented to my parents and the significance of within the family might have been quite different and they did accept it in that same way too they did say okay they recognize there were other people in the family who had adopted you know different names to live under as authors or in one case as an athlete actually I have one uncle who was a professional boxer and he made his his name as a boxer his legal name also so he didn't have to have been a me was he was born and raised with but it is true that at the particular time when this happened I had already ill during those years my university I thought I knew everything good bad and ugly about my father already and there was a lot of bad and there was a lot of ugly and I thought we had gotten to the point in our relationship where I knew he would lie to me because he lied all the time he'd lied to everyone so I say most people never really knew the man they really did not know who he was I think whatever was he thought about him the reality is he was a kid who grew up playing baseball and he would have never gone to university and never would have dreamed of having the career he had if only he could have made it into the lowest level of you know triple-a Sandlot baseball that was his passion in life don't let him tell you other projects you know sure he took on other passions but you know it's really easy to misrepresent who he was and what he was about is that he delighted in that he delighted in the misrepresentation and in looking in the twisted mirror the funhouse mirror of how other people perceived in misperceive oh that was a delight all his life from his teenage years to a dying days I don't know if he loved to deceive others so much as he loved the feeling of being deceived themselves but to be caught up in a story and to be a protagonist in a story was much more important to him than any sense of honesty integrity or authenticity things keep us he was in his way specially it was but severely lacking it okay look um I got to a point with my father or I thought I knew all the dirt that obviously when I was a child had been hidden under a rug and there I was I basically finished University but university had not actually issued my diploma yet so bureaucratic reasons basically there's this considerable delay between what I really finished my university courses and I hadn't actually graduated on paper yet admitted issued as graduated during that time there were shocking revelations of other things in his life that really did impact my life that had been kept a secret from me and that he had been lying to me about you know even that year so he had never admitted to me how many brothers and sisters I had it was only the tip of the iceberg it was a long sordid story a whole bunch of revelations and again I was just praising him before for the extent to which he had speak spoken to me as a friend man-to-man as equals for years so although there might have been some justification or some excuse and I found this out when I was 12 years old they might have said well come on how could we have told you this this stuff the shocking horrible sorted stuff the secret that our life when you were eight how do we a billion here they're all right but this is at the end of my university diploma but when I wasn't just a fully grown adult but we've been spending a lot of quality time together as we're going to talk and again I knew him I didn't have any kind of hero worship of him I didn't idolize him during those years I regarded him as a deeply flawed character I knew about some tremendously immoral unethical things he both did and just things he believed in preached you know in the abstract but that I considered utterly unforgivable but you know we could we could get along you know we had we were copacetic put it that way in those years we had these unbelievable revelations and included among them several brothers and sisters the existence of which I had never heard of before and still to this day he went to his grave you'll know if you look at this everyone else's obituary said something like proud father of three children or father you know proud father of two sons or something she's obituary does not admit does not mention how many sons autocracy anybody lived his whole life that way yes with me of something with that and he went to his grave his obituary still does not admit I already said the daughters yet what a guy anyway at that point it was interesting because my own thought about adopting a new name formerly were really attached first and foremost to what I saw as my own role as an author in the future it would be a whole different video I mean I could talk about it now would be really likely what books I was planning on writing at the time what role I saw myself as an author in the future but I did think look publishing under my name this is going to be a big part of my life how am I going to approach that now that I'm finishing University and I had very at that time a very specific plans to pursue a career path quite separate from my research and humanitarian work so in many ways they had a very clear vision of myself becoming an author and what kind of research I wanted to do but I was going to do that outside of academia which to some extent heads for meeting the Kagan you know I did already at that time I had my eyes on Cambodia at my eyes in a certain kind of humanitarian work a certain kind of you know social political research and research like the Buddhism a lot of those interests were already in place but then how was going to approach that how was going to write up that and who I was going to be what the name was these of those were questions I really to ask myself and already before those revelations I was thinking I had a heavy heart every time I sign the name that he gave me it was really loaded it was really something negative for me to look at in part because it was linked to him in part because was linked to a particular political meaning but the name had both the first name in the last name and then after the shocking revelations happened all of that was made dramatically worse because now all of a sudden I looked at this this name and it was attached to a real sense of shame much greater than I felt before a real sense of revulsion for the shame for the family I came from and for who my father was and again it's to his credit this wasn't a secret I mean I talked about this with him man-to-man without either one of us screaming or throwing a book across the room maybe being a B that's true but it's a bit flattering not to say that it's his responses were entirely you know philosophical I remember one conversation he and I had where he did break down crying which is totally totally understandable if anything makes him more human and then when we talked about it years later he has this habit of mind he absolutely insisted he could not admit that he had broke down crying friendly that was a strange sad and immature thing if you're on me I'll just digress from that narrative for a moment you know at one point I took my father aside because my mother complained to me she said look you know your father he started drinking booze Oh whose oh is a type of liquor or a type of alcohol it tastes like a nice it's terribly hot Susan yes talk him out of it if they would go to these parties and social events and business meetings and so on and they would be meeting which refined and highly educated people and my father had started ordering booze out ashes drink of tripe at these events and this was simply regarded as unsophisticated this is regarded as a drink for frat boys not something becoming of elderly refined gentleman sheer snobbery sheer snobbery but my father had started drinking my mother appealed to me she implored me to look you got to take this up because this is messing up our social calendar and possibly negatively impacting our business okay so I took them aside and again we're I'm fully grown adults here I'd already quit drinking for many years but I knew about alcohol and I said look I'm going to break this down for you this over here is ouzo this over here is Pastis do you want to know what the difference is the difference is the cultural perception of you and what kind of guy you are when you drink one rather the other was a long conversation and I poured him you know some shots and tasted them and explained to him at that time I knew where Pastis came from and how it was made and you know and he learned he adopted it so I had this bizarre meeting to discuss his drinking habits and I explained to him why he had the upgrade from you so to Pasties after that we didn't talk it felt like two years but maybe it was a year and a half or something I forget we didn't talk for quite a while we I didn't see him we didn't see each other for a while and then I saw him again under strange circumstances and we were standing at the same table where we had the earlier conversation whatever was a year earlier would have and at the exactly the same table he was pouring himself Pastis and I said to him as a joke I said oh you know so I see you're not drinking news though anymore because this is obviously my influence from the other conversation and he looked at me and we're saying they're face to face and he categorically denied he refused that I had ever talked him about this that this was something and he told me the same story the same narrative as if this was something he had invented himself but he and I had never talked about he was telling that he was basic with other the same information of a Pastis and at the difference from ouzo and why he drinks best easier than ouzo as if I had never heard before I kept saying to him I told you this this is like I taught you this was a memorable father-son moment in our lives why are you doing this why you lying to me and he couldn't couldn't get him shaken out of it maybe 10 years after that we talked about the same episode again because I was rating them not to beat them over there with it not to you know emotionally you know make a little more anything for the saint don't look you need to understand you don't tell lies the same way people do most people lie to you when they have a clear ulterior motive they're trying to conceal something or they're trying to affect an outcome or manipulate us I said to them your problem is you lie all the time and you don't have it under control and you can't stop even when I can see it in your eyes that you do remember he didn't have a veterinarian he had a remarkably good memory you know I was same as him you remember I taught you this he can see his eyes he knows it's true he knows he's lying but he just can't stop so he was a he was a nymphomaniac I would say I mean these are small and harmless examples but the vast majority people did not understand the way his mind worked they did not know who he was as a man and so all kinds of acrimony and misunderstandings a mutual hatred grew out of it because sometimes he was doing things that really hurt other people hurt their feelings or negatively impact their lives and he felt no sense of responsibility and he didn't even know he was doing it and that's not to expel pay them I mean I myself was in situations where he made decisions that had terrible terrible impacts on my life and you know you could spend years trying to explain to them you made this decision you did this thing here were the consequences for me it was very very hard to get him to take responsibility or just to admit that he said that or he did that but he did sometimes I mean if you if you spent ten years there were there were some examples where ten years later he apologized me for something after I'd explained it to him five times so I'm you know he had a human heart he had you know he was not he was not lacking in the normal human sentiments and emotions and he did love me he really did and he did appreciate me and whether that wasn't the level of asking my advice or opinion about things when you really appreciated my opinion or in a more you know sentimental conventional sense of father to son you know during the last years of his life he was reading the essays I was writing about history of politics when I was a University of Victoria appreciation for that the appreciation for the man I became and above all else I mean he had appreciation of the fact that I was able to do a lot of things that he was not able to do a major turning point in his life you know was that when he was quite young he decided to learn Sanskrit when he finished his BA and he couldn't do it making a long story short here but even being in a university where he had access to dictionaries and textbooks and a professor to teach him and help him and so on a professor on a tutor he could not do Sanskrit 101 he couldn't learn the basics of Sanskrit and I by contrast taught myself Palli the ancient canonical language of tera vaada Buddhism an ancient Indian language cognate with Sanskrit very similar to Sanskrit I taught myself Bali with no textbook and no teacher and no university while simultaneously learning to speak loshon and doing humanitarian work and living in very rough Terkel conditions of life so you know he got to see with time you know he got to see just how sharp I was he got to see how sharp I was because he saw me doing the cutting put it that way so there were there were ways in which I can say we had positive relations but he knew that my decision to change my name at the time that had happened it really did reflect a lot of sorrow and agony you know that that was his fault in brief and look there are many many ways in which I feel very positively about my change in name I'm going to talk to other people who come from show us a troubled family background I often suggested to them that they should do it also to me it was tremendously positive and liberating that whenever I signed a check at the bank or sign government paperwork I didn't have to look at that name I didn't have to be attached to that family I didn't have to remind it of who my father was and what he did and those particularly terrible revelations or what have you you know or all the unforgivable things you know my parents did to me that we tried to address and you know I've moved past I have gone on with my life I'm not psychologically burdened with them anymore but that had terrible terrible effects in my life for many many years you know for me it's actually a really positive and joyful thing now on the other hand I was not planning in Toronto to live under that name at the time I made the change I did think of it as being like many of the modern painters modern poets modern authors who you know had a name they published under the name they used when they published books what-have-you but they didn't expect their own mother to use that things they didn't expect their brand mother would use that name or I assume the social circle of people who went to primary school with them they didn't call them by that name either and there were a lot of ways in which I mean elements of my channel starting with us a friend of mine a few days ago are really still kind of painterly and that really is the education my father provided me with in Modern Art the fact that this channel is named abolish yell it's really very painterly the fact that my name is eyes'll massarde and if you google it find out where that name comes from what it really is that also is really very painterly and it connects to for me I'd say above all else you know data ISM the data period more than surrealist or modern abstract expressionist or what-have-you but you know across the board there is this kind of reckless creative sense of picking out such an arbitrary and provocative name and making it work for you as an author as a creative person but you know I was indeed in have the other steps in my life planned what ended up happening was on the one hand against my wishes because I told my parents explicitly I respect you to call me this name I also have my grandmother to come to this name I'm not gonna live under it here in Toronto and it's psychology I don't know why they did the opposite they forced me to do exactly that they went to my grandmother and spoke to her they decided to force me to transition to using that name all the time everywhere in Toronto and again I'll never get an explanation them because that was the exact opposite of my intention I thought this would be the name I publish monographs under but that I wasn't going to use it face to face people my life especially not them and you know I ended up leaving Toronto and not just geographically suddenly I mean the way my life turned out living in Cambodia Laos Thailand Taiwan all these other places I lost all contact with the people who had known me by the name that my father gave me then the name was born too so my nom de guerre became the only name I lived under aside from the fact that had Asian names on top of it so I can Laos you know some people call me sound perk you know actually in the office in Laos it was called I Seoul and I song two variations of the same nickname you know here in China I'm dying and so on and so forth I had I had names in Asian languages oh yeah in Cambodia was is Erick so you know I had another layer of pseudonyms so to speak on top of my legal name everywhere I lived in everywhere I went which is also very interesting but all the people in knew me personally girlfriends you know but also just friends they all knew that about my family background they knew that I you know I biological family but I've broken from them and adopted a different name and you know it really just depends on their level of interest and what seemed appropriate how much they wanted how much they want to know about the reasons for that but yeah overall I mean when the simple fact of my legal name change was shared on YouTube it amused the hell out of me to see different people latching onto it and constructing different stories about it and you know wild conspiracy theories what-have-you and to me I thought great if that's just what that just what a name exists war you know the story grows in the telling you know because for me also I mean all these decisions like you know the decision I made to move to Laos when I did in some ways that was a really sorrowful decision I could talk about you know sad aspects of that and it was you know having to face up to some of my dreams in life seemed to be impossible career aspirations and educational aspirations and have a face of the fact that in a Canadian university there was no way I could study the things I wanted to study well what do you want to do do you want to go back and get a masters degree that you hate in a subject you have contempt for with a professor you don't respect studying something you don't want to study in the wrong language you know and still doesn't Lee do a job and maybe leads to you to be in debt or daddy you know do you want to go back and most do that every day or do you want to make a bold break from your current circumstances go up and live on the Mekong River I can still remember the first time I saw the Mekong and the magical sense you had just in my mind it was something I would never live to see and here I was living every day on the banks of the Mekong River and try to find your own way oh you don't have a textbook for Palli write your own textbook you don't have a teacher for parallely take the appendix out of the textbook memorize every single word in the appendix do your own thing make your own fortune you know that same sense of being bold and creative and finding your own way that's an aspect of my character that's there in that name too you know so for me it's something really positive and even the connection to my father as much as the change of name is linked to unspeakable things that's still in this video I'm not really going to talk about hanging my father it's also connected to a positive memory of my father what she loved about the arts and the role of the artist in society including taking on a new name taking on a new direction and not just challenging social expectations but I guess we can say a challenging expectation of yourself
now and this video is my occasion to talk about the crossroads in my life wanted to started to change my own legal name and talk a little bit about the fact that I knew my father that I really knew and understood who he was because very very few people live on this earth did it's not so much a video about my father himself is that because I'm censoring myself I really made an aesthetic decision when I started this channel aesthetic rather than ethical or moral that this channel was for me to tell my story and not to tell my parents story knocked on my ex-wife story not to tell anyone else's story of them in mind and I still do feel both aesthetically and morally that in many ways his story is not mine to tell now relationship with my father was dramatic we had our differences but you know first and fourth I gotta say I really did know the man I did appreciate the man I appreciated the good things and bad about him I understood how his mind works and I had a huge advantage over all my other brothers and sisters because I stayed at home all the way through high school and all the way through University during university I didn't eat meals than three times a day I would talk to him a couple times a week but still that meant that during the adult years of my life I was talking to him several times a week man-to-man as two adults and during those years he really did talk to me as an equal and we talked about history and politics and his philosophy of life and his view of the world and his business and his views on the arts what have you I mean it is a real credit to him that he could basically set aside the fact that I was his biological son and talked to me as a friend and during those years he did talk to me as a friend as an equal as another adult I don't have a whole lot of compliments to give up in this video but that is one and both of us benefited from it during those years my father did not have many four and you may have one or two in distant parts of the world who we talk to once in a while but in many ways he was alone and he needed that friendship also now the contrast for me is I have so many brothers and sisters my father had nine children with quite a number of different mothers to those children and in general all of my blood relatives whether they're brothers sisters cousins aunts and uncles might be they really seem to view my father as a myth rather than a man I was talking to one of my brother's once and he said to me that my father could have been a great poet if only he had chosen another woman to be his wife my brother had this fantastic narrative in his head about how my father was you know really in his soul a poet and painter and artists and political extremists don't forget that but that my father had made a terrible mistake in choosing my biological mother to be his next wife and that only when he when he turned this corner when he changed paths then he gave up all his dreams and aspirations to be a poet and threw away his bright future as you know whatever one of the greatest poets of Canada yeah grandiose so much that they did himself may have been he would have never once claimed that he could have paid the rent with his poetry that he could have made that his exclusive you know career or means of income and you know he could have chosen to spend more time writing poetry especially in his old age obviously he could have published more books of poetry and his poems are not all bad but what struck me about this example was my brother was really deeply indulging in this myth-making mentality about my father both both in regarding him as hero and villain most of the people who knew him that was really healthy someone thought of as a larger-than-life hero and a smaller than life villain and never really just appreciated him for the man he was all-in-all um I turned to my brother and said to him simply oh yeah you know his poems had have you read them like have you read the books of poetry Ashley poke my brother looked at me astonished it never as if it had never entered his mind to actually get the book out of the library but he said to me no have you said yeah you know no and again I could say good and bad but he had a few good poems in there now that he's deceased I'm actually asking my mom maybe they can get a copy of that book one of the books of poetry that I'm thinking of in particular and hold on to it as a memento of my father I remember once as a school project I actually memorized and read aloud one of the poems because I think the school project was to memorize and read one poem from any published Canadian poet so I chose my own father as the published name thought it was good poem in this way I've said this to my father directly in the last used as I said several times said to them look I'm not like your other sons and daughters I don't think of you as a great author I don't think of you as a great businessman I don't think he was a great political figure I don't think he was a great poet or a painter quite right you know I think of you as the guy who fell asleep on the couch watching baseball I think of you for the man you really are not for who you pretend to be and not for any of the larger-than-life roles hero or villain what have you that other people kind of project onto you or ascribe to you the roles they expect you to play and I think he did appreciate that about me that I was maybe the only person in his life who really talked to him man-to-man and who knew who I was talking to and I knew when he was lying to me you know I could tell like I said I could read him like a book most people never figure it out but I figured it out um you know I think he did appreciate that but on the whole it's obvious that he enjoyed the other game I think he enjoyed rather more changing hats and having different people who regarded him as the hero as the villain as the poet as the political extremists or as the businessman because in his career very often he just he really just literally put on a different hat and he had people who regarded him in a totally different way until the different context he just stood around talking to architects and businessmen it would have you and and bureaucrats and there's another side of his life where they didn't they didn't know at all I mean I see apparently nobody uses Google they just even look up the books he publish which did indeed include both both poetry and and political extremism so [ __ ] I mean so far I'm smiling and laughing a lot you know nobody wants to speak ill to dead it is true though there was a kind of traumatic turning point in my life which is when I changed my legal name now it's interesting I do not think of it as a negative thing in my life I don't associate it with oh stick with the same word I don't think of it as a trauma I think of it as kind of a joyful wonderful thing that I turned this corner and changed my legal name and took on this new direction other things did not turn out quite as planned I mean I can talk about it kind of before after enduring when the decision was made and how the outcomes were a little bit unexpected for me in some ways my change of name it relates negatively to my father's legacy and in some ways it really positively reflects the upbringing I had and he could recognize that also so I grew up very much being immersed in the world of modern art of painters and art galleries and our history and a very politicized view of the significance of Modern Art as that was my father's own taste and the art world even more than the world of say science fiction writers or poets or philosophers is indeed full of people who adopt a nom de plume or a nom de guerre who use you know a outrageous second name who adopt a different identity in their role as creator author or artist so actually in the months prior to my making the decision changed my legal name I was already thinking about that really seriously for quite a number of reasons and it's interesting if I had done it then if I'd done it just a few months earlier then the whole way it would have been presented to my parents and the significance of within the family might have been quite different and they did accept it in that same way too they did say okay they recognize there were other people in the family who had adopted you know different names to live under as authors or in one case as an athlete actually I have one uncle who was a professional boxer and he made his his name as a boxer his legal name also so he didn't have to have been a me was he was born and raised with but it is true that at the particular time when this happened I had already ill during those years my university I thought I knew everything good bad and ugly about my father already and there was a lot of bad and there was a lot of ugly and I thought we had gotten to the point in our relationship where I knew he would lie to me because he lied all the time he'd lied to everyone so I say most people never really knew the man they really did not know who he was I think whatever was he thought about him the reality is he was a kid who grew up playing baseball and he would have never gone to university and never would have dreamed of having the career he had if only he could have made it into the lowest level of you know triple-a Sandlot baseball that was his passion in life don't let him tell you other projects you know sure he took on other passions but you know it's really easy to misrepresent who he was and what he was about is that he delighted in that he delighted in the misrepresentation and in looking in the twisted mirror the funhouse mirror of how other people perceived in misperceive oh that was a delight all his life from his teenage years to a dying days I don't know if he loved to deceive others so much as he loved the feeling of being deceived themselves but to be caught up in a story and to be a protagonist in a story was much more important to him than any sense of honesty integrity or authenticity things keep us he was in his way specially it was but severely lacking it okay look um I got to a point with my father or I thought I knew all the dirt that obviously when I was a child had been hidden under a rug and there I was I basically finished University but university had not actually issued my diploma yet so bureaucratic reasons basically there's this considerable delay between what I really finished my university courses and I hadn't actually graduated on paper yet admitted issued as graduated during that time there were shocking revelations of other things in his life that really did impact my life that had been kept a secret from me and that he had been lying to me about you know even that year so he had never admitted to me how many brothers and sisters I had it was only the tip of the iceberg it was a long sordid story a whole bunch of revelations and again I was just praising him before for the extent to which he had speak spoken to me as a friend man-to-man as equals for years so although there might have been some justification or some excuse and I found this out when I was 12 years old they might have said well come on how could we have told you this this stuff the shocking horrible sorted stuff the secret that our life when you were eight how do we a billion here they're all right but this is at the end of my university diploma but when I wasn't just a fully grown adult but we've been spending a lot of quality time together as we're going to talk and again I knew him I didn't have any kind of hero worship of him I didn't idolize him during those years I regarded him as a deeply flawed character I knew about some tremendously immoral unethical things he both did and just things he believed in preached you know in the abstract but that I considered utterly unforgivable but you know we could we could get along you know we had we were copacetic put it that way in those years we had these unbelievable revelations and included among them several brothers and sisters the existence of which I had never heard of before and still to this day he went to his grave you'll know if you look at this everyone else's obituary said something like proud father of three children or father you know proud father of two sons or something she's obituary does not admit does not mention how many sons autocracy anybody lived his whole life that way yes with me of something with that and he went to his grave his obituary still does not admit I already said the daughters yet what a guy anyway at that point it was interesting because my own thought about adopting a new name formerly were really attached first and foremost to what I saw as my own role as an author in the future it would be a whole different video I mean I could talk about it now would be really likely what books I was planning on writing at the time what role I saw myself as an author in the future but I did think look publishing under my name this is going to be a big part of my life how am I going to approach that now that I'm finishing University and I had very at that time a very specific plans to pursue a career path quite separate from my research and humanitarian work so in many ways they had a very clear vision of myself becoming an author and what kind of research I wanted to do but I was going to do that outside of academia which to some extent heads for meeting the Kagan you know I did already at that time I had my eyes on Cambodia at my eyes in a certain kind of humanitarian work a certain kind of you know social political research and research like the Buddhism a lot of those interests were already in place but then how was going to approach that how was going to write up that and who I was going to be what the name was these of those were questions I really to ask myself and already before those revelations I was thinking I had a heavy heart every time I sign the name that he gave me it was really loaded it was really something negative for me to look at in part because it was linked to him in part because was linked to a particular political meaning but the name had both the first name in the last name and then after the shocking revelations happened all of that was made dramatically worse because now all of a sudden I looked at this this name and it was attached to a real sense of shame much greater than I felt before a real sense of revulsion for the shame for the family I came from and for who my father was and again it's to his credit this wasn't a secret I mean I talked about this with him man-to-man without either one of us screaming or throwing a book across the room maybe being a B that's true but it's a bit flattering not to say that it's his responses were entirely you know philosophical I remember one conversation he and I had where he did break down crying which is totally totally understandable if anything makes him more human and then when we talked about it years later he has this habit of mind he absolutely insisted he could not admit that he had broke down crying friendly that was a strange sad and immature thing if you're on me I'll just digress from that narrative for a moment you know at one point I took my father aside because my mother complained to me she said look you know your father he started drinking booze Oh whose oh is a type of liquor or a type of alcohol it tastes like a nice it's terribly hot Susan yes talk him out of it if they would go to these parties and social events and business meetings and so on and they would be meeting which refined and highly educated people and my father had started ordering booze out ashes drink of tripe at these events and this was simply regarded as unsophisticated this is regarded as a drink for frat boys not something becoming of elderly refined gentleman sheer snobbery sheer snobbery but my father had started drinking my mother appealed to me she implored me to look you got to take this up because this is messing up our social calendar and possibly negatively impacting our business okay so I took them aside and again we're I'm fully grown adults here I'd already quit drinking for many years but I knew about alcohol and I said look I'm going to break this down for you this over here is ouzo this over here is Pastis do you want to know what the difference is the difference is the cultural perception of you and what kind of guy you are when you drink one rather the other was a long conversation and I poured him you know some shots and tasted them and explained to him at that time I knew where Pastis came from and how it was made and you know and he learned he adopted it so I had this bizarre meeting to discuss his drinking habits and I explained to him why he had the upgrade from you so to Pasties after that we didn't talk it felt like two years but maybe it was a year and a half or something I forget we didn't talk for quite a while we I didn't see him we didn't see each other for a while and then I saw him again under strange circumstances and we were standing at the same table where we had the earlier conversation whatever was a year earlier would have and at the exactly the same table he was pouring himself Pastis and I said to him as a joke I said oh you know so I see you're not drinking news though anymore because this is obviously my influence from the other conversation and he looked at me and we're saying they're face to face and he categorically denied he refused that I had ever talked him about this that this was something and he told me the same story the same narrative as if this was something he had invented himself but he and I had never talked about he was telling that he was basic with other the same information of a Pastis and at the difference from ouzo and why he drinks best easier than ouzo as if I had never heard before I kept saying to him I told you this this is like I taught you this was a memorable father-son moment in our lives why are you doing this why you lying to me and he couldn't couldn't get him shaken out of it maybe 10 years after that we talked about the same episode again because I was rating them not to beat them over there with it not to you know emotionally you know make a little more anything for the saint don't look you need to understand you don't tell lies the same way people do most people lie to you when they have a clear ulterior motive they're trying to conceal something or they're trying to affect an outcome or manipulate us I said to them your problem is you lie all the time and you don't have it under control and you can't stop even when I can see it in your eyes that you do remember he didn't have a veterinarian he had a remarkably good memory you know I was same as him you remember I taught you this he can see his eyes he knows it's true he knows he's lying but he just can't stop so he was a he was a nymphomaniac I would say I mean these are small and harmless examples but the vast majority people did not understand the way his mind worked they did not know who he was as a man and so all kinds of acrimony and misunderstandings a mutual hatred grew out of it because sometimes he was doing things that really hurt other people hurt their feelings or negatively impact their lives and he felt no sense of responsibility and he didn't even know he was doing it and that's not to expel pay them I mean I myself was in situations where he made decisions that had terrible terrible impacts on my life and you know you could spend years trying to explain to them you made this decision you did this thing here were the consequences for me it was very very hard to get him to take responsibility or just to admit that he said that or he did that but he did sometimes I mean if you if you spent ten years there were there were some examples where ten years later he apologized me for something after I'd explained it to him five times so I'm you know he had a human heart he had you know he was not he was not lacking in the normal human sentiments and emotions and he did love me he really did and he did appreciate me and whether that wasn't the level of asking my advice or opinion about things when you really appreciated my opinion or in a more you know sentimental conventional sense of father to son you know during the last years of his life he was reading the essays I was writing about history of politics when I was a University of Victoria appreciation for that the appreciation for the man I became and above all else I mean he had appreciation of the fact that I was able to do a lot of things that he was not able to do a major turning point in his life you know was that when he was quite young he decided to learn Sanskrit when he finished his BA and he couldn't do it making a long story short here but even being in a university where he had access to dictionaries and textbooks and a professor to teach him and help him and so on a professor on a tutor he could not do Sanskrit 101 he couldn't learn the basics of Sanskrit and I by contrast taught myself Palli the ancient canonical language of tera vaada Buddhism an ancient Indian language cognate with Sanskrit very similar to Sanskrit I taught myself Bali with no textbook and no teacher and no university while simultaneously learning to speak loshon and doing humanitarian work and living in very rough Terkel conditions of life so you know he got to see with time you know he got to see just how sharp I was he got to see how sharp I was because he saw me doing the cutting put it that way so there were there were ways in which I can say we had positive relations but he knew that my decision to change my name at the time that had happened it really did reflect a lot of sorrow and agony you know that that was his fault in brief and look there are many many ways in which I feel very positively about my change in name I'm going to talk to other people who come from show us a troubled family background I often suggested to them that they should do it also to me it was tremendously positive and liberating that whenever I signed a check at the bank or sign government paperwork I didn't have to look at that name I didn't have to be attached to that family I didn't have to remind it of who my father was and what he did and those particularly terrible revelations or what have you you know or all the unforgivable things you know my parents did to me that we tried to address and you know I've moved past I have gone on with my life I'm not psychologically burdened with them anymore but that had terrible terrible effects in my life for many many years you know for me it's actually a really positive and joyful thing now on the other hand I was not planning in Toronto to live under that name at the time I made the change I did think of it as being like many of the modern painters modern poets modern authors who you know had a name they published under the name they used when they published books what-have-you but they didn't expect their own mother to use that things they didn't expect their brand mother would use that name or I assume the social circle of people who went to primary school with them they didn't call them by that name either and there were a lot of ways in which I mean elements of my channel starting with us a friend of mine a few days ago are really still kind of painterly and that really is the education my father provided me with in Modern Art the fact that this channel is named abolish yell it's really very painterly the fact that my name is eyes'll massarde and if you google it find out where that name comes from what it really is that also is really very painterly and it connects to for me I'd say above all else you know data ISM the data period more than surrealist or modern abstract expressionist or what-have-you but you know across the board there is this kind of reckless creative sense of picking out such an arbitrary and provocative name and making it work for you as an author as a creative person but you know I was indeed in have the other steps in my life planned what ended up happening was on the one hand against my wishes because I told my parents explicitly I respect you to call me this name I also have my grandmother to come to this name I'm not gonna live under it here in Toronto and it's psychology I don't know why they did the opposite they forced me to do exactly that they went to my grandmother and spoke to her they decided to force me to transition to using that name all the time everywhere in Toronto and again I'll never get an explanation them because that was the exact opposite of my intention I thought this would be the name I publish monographs under but that I wasn't going to use it face to face people my life especially not them and you know I ended up leaving Toronto and not just geographically suddenly I mean the way my life turned out living in Cambodia Laos Thailand Taiwan all these other places I lost all contact with the people who had known me by the name that my father gave me then the name was born too so my nom de guerre became the only name I lived under aside from the fact that had Asian names on top of it so I can Laos you know some people call me sound perk you know actually in the office in Laos it was called I Seoul and I song two variations of the same nickname you know here in China I'm dying and so on and so forth I had I had names in Asian languages oh yeah in Cambodia was is Erick so you know I had another layer of pseudonyms so to speak on top of my legal name everywhere I lived in everywhere I went which is also very interesting but all the people in knew me personally girlfriends you know but also just friends they all knew that about my family background they knew that I you know I biological family but I've broken from them and adopted a different name and you know it really just depends on their level of interest and what seemed appropriate how much they wanted how much they want to know about the reasons for that but yeah overall I mean when the simple fact of my legal name change was shared on YouTube it amused the hell out of me to see different people latching onto it and constructing different stories about it and you know wild conspiracy theories what-have-you and to me I thought great if that's just what that just what a name exists war you know the story grows in the telling you know because for me also I mean all these decisions like you know the decision I made to move to Laos when I did in some ways that was a really sorrowful decision I could talk about you know sad aspects of that and it was you know having to face up to some of my dreams in life seemed to be impossible career aspirations and educational aspirations and have a face of the fact that in a Canadian university there was no way I could study the things I wanted to study well what do you want to do do you want to go back and get a masters degree that you hate in a subject you have contempt for with a professor you don't respect studying something you don't want to study in the wrong language you know and still doesn't Lee do a job and maybe leads to you to be in debt or daddy you know do you want to go back and most do that every day or do you want to make a bold break from your current circumstances go up and live on the Mekong River I can still remember the first time I saw the Mekong and the magical sense you had just in my mind it was something I would never live to see and here I was living every day on the banks of the Mekong River and try to find your own way oh you don't have a textbook for Palli write your own textbook you don't have a teacher for parallely take the appendix out of the textbook memorize every single word in the appendix do your own thing make your own fortune you know that same sense of being bold and creative and finding your own way that's an aspect of my character that's there in that name too you know so for me it's something really positive and even the connection to my father as much as the change of name is linked to unspeakable things that's still in this video I'm not really going to talk about hanging my father it's also connected to a positive memory of my father what she loved about the arts and the role of the artist in society including taking on a new name taking on a new direction and not just challenging social expectations but I guess we can say a challenging expectation of yourself