Free Time: What to read, watch and listen to this week | Canada Voices

We are all starved for time. My calendar, like yours, is stacked as thick as Tetris – don’t even ask about the kids’ schedules.

But we also live in a golden era of entertainment. And embracing it, however much time you have, is what this column is about.

If you have …

3 minutes, 10 seconds: Mustafa at the Junos in 2022

Singer-songwriter Mustafa’s latest album, Dunya, is a must-listen, filled with music for a grief-stricken world.

Take three minutes on YouTube to revisit his performance of Stay Alive at the Junos in 2022. Every detail of this staged awards show melts away as Mustafa’s voice lifts you, high as a “plane in the sky, the only starlight on this never-ending street.”

In this performance, the Toronto-raised, Sudanese Canadian musician is joined by a big crew of friends and fellow artists. When they create the pure joy of an anthemic singalong, will you cry or goofy-grin?

Mustafa performs “Stay Alive” – Juno Awards 2022

3 hours, 51 minutes: Sweet Bobby podcast

What the hell is up with catfishing?

The basics of this modern violation involve tricking a victim into falling in love, using internet tools to fake an identity.

The question isn’t how but why? You will be opened up to a world of swirling questions when you listen to the Sweet Bobby podcast from Tortoise Media. Originally released in 2021, it’s the story of Kirat Assi, a British Punjabi-Sikh radio presenter targeted in an elaborate catfishing scheme for nine years.

When she went to police, she was dismissed. When the podcast was released, public attention led to her case being reopened. The fallout for Assi is a continuing mess, documented in the new Netflix doc Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare.

Revisit the original. Pop in earbuds and weekend chores will fly by. You will match every last sock in the laundry pile. And when you emerge, you’ll see the world differently, the mark of every great podcast.

Sweet Bobby podcast by Tortoise Media

3 days (give or take) – All Fours by Miranda July

The best feeling is when you have a book you can’t stop reading, whether it’s in your pyjamas (preferred) or sitting in your car in an industrial parking lot while your child bounces for two hours at a trampoline birthday party (not preferred yet doable).

Try this work of autofiction by Miranda July, which I read compulsively.

All Fours is the story of a 45-year-old woman who embarks on a road trip from Los Angeles to New York. She doesn’t get far, creating an elaborate deceit a mere 20-minute drive from the family home she shares with her husband and child. As every day of her planned trip ticks by, things go further off-the-rails.

While I recommend this book as a rumination on aging, ambition and fantasies (sexual and otherwise), I did not like this main character. I found her selfish and unserious. And yet, the book, which surfaces every little detail of a perimenopausal, upper middle-class, professionally successful, modern female character’s inner monologue, was compelling. Funny, too, and likely different from anything else you’ve read all year.

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