Thursday, December 03, 2009

Pilot Automatique


There's something just so French about Nathalie Claude's one-woman, three-robot show Salon Automaton, which had its English-language debut at Buddies this week.

Claude's introductory monologue, with its polite bluster and assertive indirectness, has a Proustian quality, as does the very idea of a Friday night salon where the The Dandy Poet, The Cabaret Artist and The Drinking Patroness gather to entertaining their obliging hostess, who serves them champagne and cucumber sandwiches, whether they are able to eat it or not.

For the first hour of the two-hour production (which is about 30 or 40 minutes too long by my nodding-off measure; the original French version is apparently a bit shorter), this circuitousness is something of a theatrical strategy, a distraction from what the audience is seeing on stage. Which is an overeager woman talking to three seated robots, each with a moving mouth, a soothing voice and a set of proscribed movements which include emphatic gesturing but, alas, not eating. While the hostess chatters away--sometimes about human existence, sometimes about nothing particularly memorable--we're unsure whether she knows her company is spring-loaded, whether the guests themselves know they are robots or what kind of world has created this situation.

The reveal is slow, much too slow, and somewhat beside the point. The show has far less to say about the "why" of how humans find themselves turning to mechanical companions than "how," which is to say, with apprehension and naive optimism. When you've created an illusion designed to protect you from the vagaries of human behaviour, anything less than perfection might very well drive you bonkers.

The production works best when it's showing, not telling. We see Claude as all-too-human, blathering over-dramatically like a nervous hostess filling gaps in the conversation, so when the automatons (voiced by Clinton Walker, Moynan King and Leni Parker) offer up their scripted, banal cliches, they come as something of a relief. Their speech and motion are restricted, but fascinating nonetheless. They're playing to type because they have been created as types and there's theatrical pleasure in having our own perceptions of the world mirrored back to us, confirmed as accurate, even if that accuracy emerges out of our own manipulations.

Claude's core idea is a spot-on critique of our increasingly personal relationship with technology, even as it suffers from the very human trait of overkill.

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

'Moon' child


Kristen Stewart? How has an actress so sullen, so dour and unemotive managed to steer the Twilight franchise into the hearts and pocketbooks of movie audiences worldwide?

So visibly awkward, it's like she's been coached not to hunch but keeps forgetting. Her chin juts like she's on edge even as her eyes zone out. Wear-wolfs? Vampires? Stewart's Bella seems ready to doze off any second or go stand in the corner and sulk.

Her very particular talent made sense in, say, Adventureland, where her character was the same sort of sullen beauty. But, setting her performance aside, we constantly hear the other Twilight Saga characters--from the vamps to the wear-wolfs to the cafeteria kids--obsess over her. They keep telling us she's special as they orbit around her like she has some special power. There's a tremendous disconnect but Stewart must be doing something wright. New Moon made more than $150 million domestically in its first weekend, quite an achievement for a film that, judging by the look of it, cost a fraction of the cost of other members of the $100-million-plus club.

I think it's because she's so utterly replaceable in the viewer's imagination. Any viewer who wants to imagine themselves as the focus of New Moon's very sexy love triangle--and that would be pretty much anyone who went to the film on their own steam--can banish her from registering on their cerebral cortex, leaving a blank spot onto which they can project themselves. She's not a star--someone who's inherently watchable--and she's no character actor either. We can essentially place our thumb between us and her face and let ourselves take part in the fantasy that her Bella doesn't really deserve.

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

Tuesday, October 27, 2009

CBC rebranding

You have to applaud the effort to go for a younger, more contemporary look, but there's something about the relaunch of CBC's news departments that feels like old wine in new bottles. On radio, Peter Armstrong makes a much more relaxed, casual anchor, but the stories are still policy-wonky with a dose of recent death tolls. If the Corps is going to try to skew young, it's got to have a broader and more vibrant news agenda.

The National's facelift is even less successful. All you have to do is click a few times here, a few times there--nobody said it would be easy to find, baby--and you can watch a 10-minute web-only broadcast of the flagship show. That's where anchor Peter Mansbridge, not content to just walk around a studio reading the news, as he now does on TV, takes off his jacket, revealing his paunchy tummy, and stands in a hallway reading the news. You can see the direction they're headed. If they don't skew as young as they'd like this time around, Peter will be reading the news in his pajamas--or worse--perhaps while taking a leak or between rounds of flossing. That'll lure the tweens.

About the new name for Newsworld, CBC News Network--this must have been decided solely on the basis of how it looked on the screen, not how it would roll off the tongue or abbreviate: CB...CNN. Or maybe they are that desperate and cheesy, like a donut shop calling itself Country Time to cash in on the confusion with Country Style/Coffee Time.

I realize the emphasis is on the brand "CBC News" but did they fail to notice that that phrase was contained in the old name?

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Dressing for the ladies

I've been a reader of men's magazines (make that men's style magazines) for a long time. I was especially obsessed with the early 1990s incarnation of Esquire and then Details and more lately Men's Health, which shows you where my interest have gone as I have gotten older. Despite their differences, which show themselves mostly in their feature articles (art auctions or war? Mr. Mom or CIA conspiracies? toxic meat or George Clooney?), they all have the same kind of simultaneously snobby-chummy tone throughout their service sections.

The men's magazine snobby voice is the kind of know-it-all who would be insufferable if he wasn't so helpful. (I realize he's in a newspaper, not a magazine, but The Globe's Russell Smith is an current best-practices standard of this genre.) And then there's voice of the ordinary Joe who, like you, starts out knowing nothing about fragrances or high-end watches but through a process of discovery is, by the end of his 250-word blurb, able to make very specific recommendations for every reader. These two modes of conversation are quintessentially guy-magazine-y, and they're anchored in the two ways guys talk to other guys.

So when Men's Fashion (published by the equally generically titled women's fashion magazine Fashion, which is published by the slightly more specific Toronto Life) fell out of my Globe last week, I was intrigued. (Notice the ordinary-Joe lead-in to the topic at hand; perhaps I should have thrown in a "Gee whiz.") Here was a men's style magazine edited and written mostly by women, perhaps in their spare time while they were waiting for Fashion's proofs to come back from the printer. Of the four men shown on the contributor's page, two had worked on the magazine's sole photospread--shutterbug and stylist--one had written on grooming ("Men may prefer washing up just once a day..." starts the article but not on the page cited by the contributor's blurb) and one wrote a feature article on defective sperm.

The rest was pretty much written by women. As someone who believes that anybody can write about anything, the strange thing was--I could tell without looking at the bylines.

From the sexual connotations of the cover headline, "Playing Around With Justin Timberlake"--it would be hard to believe a straight man would have produced the same text--to the first-person lecture on sharing a bathroom--"Do men even want this space?"--there was something of a nagging wife/girlfriend throughout the magazine's pages. Even the cover line for the sperm article pointed an accusatory finger at the reader, "Actually It Is You." Hard to image a buddy, or even a know-it-all, speaking that way to a friend.

There were moments when long pent-up stereotypes about men seemed to have finally found a place to be joylessly unleashed: "For many men, shopping is a necessity rather than a hobby--something that needs to be done when old clothes no longer fit or look right." And moments when men were merely afterthoughts: "In the world of perfume, a great name is worth its weight in gold. So if women enjoy Pleasure and Joy, guys now have an outlet with Play and Play Intense."

It dawned on me that this wasn't a magazine for men but a magazine for women about men. They're the ones the editors are assuming are doing the clothes shopping, so the editors have merely cut out the middleman and gone straight to the decision maker. It makes sense. That's why the "That girl" pin-up is so modestly dressed; she's been styled threatless to the core readership.

But then there was advice about avoiding zits by showering regularly. And the spotlight on cars emphasized little other than power. Power, muscle, power. Wouldn't these female readers who are so eager to get their husbands to spend money on Ben Sherman coats and John Varvatos sweaters want to rip out these gasoline-fueled pages before their significant others saw them and were tempted to siphon of some of the disposable income slated for Harry Rosen?

That's when the light went on. There are no readers in mind for Men's Fashion. Only advertisers. Once the thing is sold by the sales team, it hardly makes a difference what fills the gap between the Audi ads and the Paco Rabanne, neither of which would be interested in buying into a catalogue that's just that, a catalogue.

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

The new season looks a lot like the old season

I know that in some circles, Soulpepper can do no wrong. But, really? Four remounts, including two shows, Glengarry Glenn Ross and Billy Bishop Goes to War that were highlights in the season we're just three-quarters of the way through.

Then we have works by David French and Joe Orton again, admittedly different ones. Sure, they're great plays by great playwrights but there must be others kicking around. Is the modern theatrical canon that Soulpepper loves so much really that tiny? Obviously, they made money off these plays--last season was exceptionally strong--but what does it say to subscribers, who would have seen Billy Bishop less than six months earlier? In some ways, it's less a theatre season, closer to a Broadway run, with shows running until all the available audience has seen them.

There are a few interesting and surprising choices. Sharon Pollock's Doc gets a little female can-con in there, and A Raisin in the Sun much needed colour. The academy pieces, especially Daniel Brooks' non-traditional mounting of The Cherry Orchard also look promising.

Thursday, September 17, 2009

Flame wars on Craigslist

Suddenly fire-eating is an in-demand skill. Here's the first ad:

Photog looking for fire breather (GTA)
from craigslist | tv/film/video/radio jobs in toronto
Hello,

I'm looking to do a portrait of a fire breather for my portfolio (and for fun:) Please check www.fordphoto.ca for examples of my work. As compensation I will provide a sweet 8x10 or 11x14 fully re-touched print as well as a DVD of some of the "out takes". Lets do this!

Thanks for reading

Mike


And here's the second:
looking for fire breather paid gig 150 (toronto)

just like the guy below I will supply a print and a dvd with the images plus the pictures will be way better. Also I will pay you for your time. I know that fire breathing is very dangerous ( burns or to your heath). This is a incredible talent and you should be paid something for your time, giving it away for free when the other guy will use it to further his career is stupid. 150 is not a lot of money but I will do it on your time. If you have any other fire skills please list them with a simple photo of your self. It might even be cool to have more than one person at a time.

cheers

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Changing the world with music


Picking favourite bands when you're young is a little like betting on a horse race without even knowing it. Pick someone like the Eurogliders, and the horse doesn't even make it out of the gates. I loved the Thompson Twins and figured they would be around for a long time--I remember some music magazine calling them the future--but they barely stumbled into the 1990s. If you backed U2, you never stopped counting your winnings. Whitney? It's still up in the air.

Then there was Prefab Sprout, a band with an obscure name that never charted very high, never broke into America despite the exuberance efforts of 1988's From Langley Park to Memphis to take the world by storm. That single-filled album, with a candy-store of production tricks by Thomas Dolby, was their best bet and, still, they remained a cult act. Under pressure from the record company, they had even shelved Protest Songs, the more forlorn album they had recorded before it, in order to break into the charts. Their last release was a 2001 concept album about cowboys, though not country music, except a reworked version of the "Streets of Laredo." Which is all to say that Prefab Sprout are an unlikely endurance runner. To cite them as one of my favourite bands has been to invite a scrunched face and a "Who?" It is to end a conversation about music. I wouldn't have guessed that would change in the late noughts.

If great philosophy is untimely, so is great music. It's been funny over the last few years to hear younger bands like Stars cite Prefab Sprout as an influence, to have them name checked in the New Yorker and The Guardian. It's the world that's changed, moved itself a few degrees closer to the sensibility of the Paddy McAloon, the man at the heart of the Sprouts. The release this month of Let's Change the World With Music, an album slated for release in 1992 and then shelved, is the ultimate vindication. Its contents were placed in a time capsule, let sit for 17 years and, voila, it's something fans of Beirut might enjoy.

It's easy, from the commercial point of view, to see why this album was not released. Each of the songs touch on the idea of music, which seems indulgent, and God, even more so. With its Irving Berlin and Ira Gershwin flourishes, its grandiosity and genre-less-ness would have seemed out of place in the era of grunge. But while the definition of hit music has narrowed--aren't a handful of producers responsible for most of the songs that chart nowadays?--the definition of pop music has relaxed. Even the 1990s production values of this reworked demo don't come off poorly compared to, say, Cut Copy or Lily Allan.

At the core of Let's Change the World With Music is McAloon's song-writing skills, which produce melodies which worm their way into your head after only a few spins. "I Love Music" sounds at first like a half-hearted Frank Sinatra parody, but gets you with its genuineness, its coy phrasing, those little pauses in lines like, "Who's my hero? The unnerving, unswerving Irving Berlin." In another homage to tunefulness he yearns for sweet gospel music to "carry this boy away from danger." If movies about movies aim to show us how our visual landscape is created, then music about music shows us how our emotional landscape is renewed and regenerated.

McAloon has gotten flack for the pomposity of some of his themes; one UK critic said the album title was worthy of U2. And though he he's not being sarcastic with songs like "Earth: The Story so Far" there is a humility that's inherent in the Prefab Sprout enterprise, which started at as definitively anti-romantic with a faux-blues song like "Cruel," which always struck me as a celebration and critique of feminism ("Cruel is the gospel that sets us all free, then takes you away from me"). McAloon has matured since then, realized that celebrating love without deconstructing it is part of what music does. But no matter how much he wants to change the world with music, he's well aware of his own limitations and that of art. It's not a choice between self-aggrandizement and irony, it's a choice between giving up and pressing on. And if digging through their vaults for these gems is pressing on, I figure I've backed the right horse.

Sunday, September 06, 2009

Mutual exclusivity

An ad in The Globe and Mail for the Bloor-Yorkville shopping area has one bubble with the text, "We're cultivating a greener bloor with wider walkways & greener spaces" and the next one with "Over 7000 parking spaces." I suppose, they may be parking the cars on the walkways and green spaces, but aren't these contradictory promises? It's that whole promise of "you can be environmentally sensitive and not change anything about your life, you can reduce your carbon footprint and consume material and energy at the same rate you've always consumed them."


Ah, no.

Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Craigslist posting of the day

I would have posted the link but it's since been flagged and removed.

Get Paid To Destroy Objects, and Take Photos, Shoot Video (N/A)

from craigslist | art/media/design jobs in toronto

Okay, here's basically it; I enjoy watching people (Women, specifically) destroy a wide variety of objects - electronics, glassware, what-have-you; Rates vary and are negotiable, paid upon delivery of the Photo / Video set, or webcam session. This position will be on a strictly virtual basis, and payment is delivered via Paypal.com.

Work is intermittent, so don't expect a regular income.

Monday, August 31, 2009

Monetizing music

I actually don't think levies on memory is a terrible solution to the collapse of the music industry.

Let's play with some rough numbers, just for fun. Let's say you had a music consumer who used to spend an average of $150 a year on music--10 albums annually at $15 a pop. Now a compulsive downloader, he doesn't spend anything but his annual music downloads have a retail value of $4,000.

Right now, the music industry seems to think it's entitled to the $4,000. But if illegal downloading were to end tomorrow, so would his massive music consumption so he's soon be back to the $150 of spending again. So the question is not how to prevent this guy from downloading every song ever recorded, but how to extract $150 or more annually from this guy, no matter how much music he gets. It would be better if he paid more for more music, and there are probably ways of doing that, but for the moment we're just trying to restore an acceptable level of financial remuneration to the system. I think "the same as before" is more acceptable than zero.

But I'm not even sure "the same as before" is possible when your starting point is zero. So let's be even more realistic. I've read reports that artists have make as little as 30 cents per album, that $1 per album is a good deal. So under the new business model, why don't we give the artist $3 per album. With downloading as part of the new distribution model, let's keep marketing and administration costs to another $3 per album. Now our music fan is paying $60 for his 10 albums. Pro-rated as a fee applied to media that can hold music files, that's not an outrageous amount of money.

How do we get a little closer $150? License file-sharing services that meet certain criteria. Better search function, better speeds, fewer ads and spyware programs and less bogus files would lure people from illegal file-sharing to legal file-sharing. Or, because those terms are a little moralistic, unlicensed file sharing to licenced file sharing.

Even someone obsessed with "free" would give serious consideration to a monthly fee of $7.50 to legally download all the music he wants in a way that's as convenient as iTunes and that actually gives money directly to the artists he likes, much like how libraries pay fees to the creators of works that circulate. In fact, in paying for high-speed Internet access, he's already accepted the premise that downloading media files is going to cost him something each month. Why not 10 or 10 percent more, especially if he's getting value for it and is no longer a "criminal"?

The thing is to keep the price low. $7.50 montly is a much less dramatic departure from zero than, say, $30. Again, the industry is obsessed with the $4,000 worth of songs on his hard-drive, but they've got to let it go and focus on the conversion rate, rather than on their idea of justice.

By charging a (mandatory) fee on storage devices and by charging an (optional) monthly high-volume file-share fee, we can bring the same $150 a year back into the music industry. But, with online distribution and a de-emphasis on corporate systems, we've eliminated many of the "suit" and retail positions, giving the more of that money to artists instead. We give indie bands comparable access to larger acts, if they can do a good job of getting their name into the memories of music-searchers. If we have a system of licensed file-sharing services, we can keep track of who is getting downloaded and split the storage fee and monthly fee in a fair way. The distribution/marketing system becomes the finance department.

The corporate suits, though, are not interested in exiting stage right and so obsess over the $4,000 in "lost revenue," not realizing that that money is never going to be available to them, no matter how many court cases they launch. They've got to start with zero and build up, not start with "He's got our whole catalogue on his hard-drive!" and seek revenge.

Turning the Pages


I remember before I moved to Toronto, I had a friend who lived there who was (and is) a great enthusiast of the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. He'd swing by Pages bookshop on Queen West with astonishing regularity to see if new Deleuze stock had arrived. Pages is where such intellectual capital could disperse itself beyond the dusty halls of academia. He would take note that, say, three copies of Capitalism and Schizophrenia had arrived and, a few days later, note with equal or greater joy that one had been sold.

He successfully passed on the Deleuze meme to me. When I came to live in Toronto, I would also monitor the Pages' Deleuze collection as something of a guide to the rise and fall of his popularity, of a way to feel that there were other people out there who shared my interest. I would also browse the art books, first looking for naughty bits, then architectural porn, which I'm not sure is any more wholesome. I'd also track the books of people I knew. And end up buying a few magazines or remainders. Or the occasional splurge.

So it was a sad moment when I swung Pages by on closing day. I must admit my motivation was predatory. I felt a moment of personal disappointment; I was hoping for a better discount than the 35 percent off they were offering. Then I took a look at the empty shelves, the oddball handful of remaining stock and I was a little choked up. The bookstore at the beating heart of the city is no more. It makes it much harder, and much less fun, to take our collective cultural pulse.

Sunday, August 30, 2009

All in a Heap


Funny where naiveté can leave you. When I had seen the name of the musical entity Imogen Heap in print, I had, in my head, pronounced it "Ih-MOE-gen Heap" and visualized some nasty punk band, referencing toxic waste. So I didn't care when their song appeared on The OC. Of course, Imogen is pronounced more like "Emma-Jen" and the "heap" is a last name, not a metaphor. And she sounds more like Sarah McLachlan produced by Enya, with bursts of Bjork kookiness and Tori Amos indulgence. Actually, the songs on her new album have more shape than Sarah's, Bjork's (well, late Bjork) and Tori's. She's a much more grounded eccentric, musically speaking.

In fact, I think Imogen has taken over the sleek and emotional pop ship Dido abandoned after her debut album (well, she abandoned the "sleek" and the "pop" part).

Anyway, Ellipse is a lovely album, especially the first single.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Electro Calvinism


As much as I loved "I'm Not Alone," the first single from Calvin Harris' new album Ready for the Weekend, I knew there was trouble on the horizon when I read an interview with him talking about how, at 25, he was starting to feel old, wondering about the merits of club life. Oh God. The man who sang, "I like all the girls" is getting philosophical and world-weary. Most young turks manage to get a couple of albums to market before they consider themselves codgers.

But maybe there is a finite amount of energy in each of us and Harris front loaded most of his. His fantastic debut album I Created Disco was the kind of pure deadpan chutzpah only the British can get away with. Each song contained such audacious and catchy ideas, the execution hardly mattered. "I've got my car and my ride and my wheels, when I go to Vegas," he sang, glorying in the stoned redundancy. The songs on I Created Disco may not merit a place in the immortal canon of pop music, but they grabbed you immediately, gave you a laugh on the dancefloor and stayed with you for weeks, at least. Call it vapid, the album knew it was vapid and let you in on the joke.

The songs on Ready for the Weekend aren't so starved for attention. The world, it seems, is a more serious place and Harris has had to impose some structure in order to survive. The humour, which had made Harris a peer of LCD Soundsystem and Daft Punk, is notably absent.

It's like Harris is pacing himself. Each of the songs has its role to play, sometimes dance-y, sometimes more--it freaks me out to say this--reflective. "Burns Night," for example, is a loping late-night instrumental jazz jam, seemingly designed to encourage drunk patrons to roll home, while "Limits" is full of robotized regret.

Ready for the Weekend is simultaneously a more utilitarian and more serious album. Its 90s aesthetic aims to please with its piano chords and house-soul backing vocals. "Stars Come Out" reminded me of nothing less than the dancey tracks from Moby's Everything is Wrong, which I'm quite sure Harris wouldn't take as a compliment.

But when you're self-consciously producing a retro album, I suppose that effective emulation is an accomplishment. There are four tracks here that would not drive me from the dancefloor and two more--"I'm Not Alone" and "Dance Wiv Me"--that I would scramble across a crowded room to turn up. It's a far cry from I Created Disco but it's still a better batting average than most pop-dance albums (though I suppose that one could say that Lady GaGa had raised the bar in this regard).

It's the future I fear for. The best track, "Dance Wiv Me" an electro-hip-hop collaboration with Dizee Rascal, predates the rest of the album. Harris' more methodical direction seems to be taking hi further and further away from what made him such a lovable sod.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Drinking & driving


The LCBO has finally decided where to put its Roncesvalles liquor store. This comes a year--a full year--after they told me that they were close to picking a location. And the new location won't open till next summer. It's great to see how quickly this retail monopoly works.

Now, they could have had a role-model store on Roncey. Something cute, storefront and pedestrian friendly. But no. The LCBO's passion for huge parking lots won out. They're putting it in the the plaza currently shared by the city's saddest Loblaws and a contender for the city's saddest Zellers (the latter category is a very competitive one, I know, thus the qualification). It's a dying plaza. There used to be a dollar store or two there, but they're gone now. It's certainly close to Roncey. It's walkable, yes. But it's really meant for driving to. The LCBO's suburban car-oriented mentality again trumps all other factors.

Wednesday, August 05, 2009

Coasting through

The Toronto Star's continuing grudge match against cyclists raises some interesting questions.

Firstly, while their reporter was watching 138 cyclists fail to come to full stop at a Stop sign, how many accidents did they cause? Judging by the story, it seems they caused none. Secondly, while the experiment was being conducted, how many cyclists elsewhere in the city--say, along nearby College or Dundas--received an injury because a careless driver opened their car door into their path? That number is harder to guess at--the Star's experiment certainly required less effort--but I figure there were a few. A few weeks ago, I nearly missed being car-doored three times in the two-minute ride along Dundas between Dovercourt and Brock.

This obsession with the letter of the law rather than general traffic safety made me think of harm-reduction strategies when it comes to drug use. Sure, you could arrest every junkie in Vancouver's downtown Eastside for possession, but who does that help? The junkie's illegal behaviour creates a situation where she's the primary victim. As a society, we've parsed out a drug-use strategy that, while it could bear improvements, at least acknowledges that treating everybody by the same standard to the exact letter of the law does nothing to achieve the goals that the standards and laws were created to achieve.

Good traffic policy and good policing should be about results, not making jealous Star-reading motorists feel vindicated in their contempt for cyclists.

If I thought that encouraging all cyclists to come to a full stop at all Stop signs would reduce accidents and create a situation where drivers were not so careless about opening their doors without looking, I'd be on that bandwagon in a second. But it is not cause and effect. The most lawful cyclist in a city full of lawful cyclists still takes her life into her hands every time she passes a parked car.

Cities need to stop treating cyclists like thin, slow cars and come up with policies and infrastructure that reduce harm. By that I mean, saves lives and prevents accidents and more broadly, reduces gridlock, toxic emissions and the urban-heat-island effect. Because I think you could stand at the corner of Beverly and Baldwin for weeks, counting rolling-stop cyclists and never see an accident. So what's the point?

Tuesday, August 04, 2009

Game-changing moves


Depeche Mode had been around for a decade when it released 1990's Violator album. It turned out to be a game changer for the band and for electro-pop/Brit pop in general. The Pet Shop Boys' masterpiece Behaviour was a response to it, an album that placed the PSB on a track that has kept them relevant to this day. Depeche Mode had shown how versatility and depth could be wrung out of a preexisting sound and image. Shania Twain performed a similar kind of magic when her Come on Over album showed how country music could be loosed from its genre, how production techniques could re-purpose songs for different markets.

(As an aside: During DM's recent Toronto concert, the first time I've ever seen them live, I was surprised how theatrical the show was, how much closer it was to glam rock than to knob-fiddling; as someone who does most of his music-listening through headphones, who thinks of Depeche Mode as a studio band, the energy and the spectacle was totally unexpected, helping me understand how the band's longevity and success has been nurtured on the stage as much as in the CD player. It's hard to imagine, say, New Order selling millions of concert albums and tour T-shirts.)

When it first came out, I thought Beyonce's "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" video was brilliant. Well, of course, a lot of other people did as well. But it wasn't until I saw Shakira's "She Wolf" that I realized that "Single Ladies" was a game changer.

Dance has always been integral to the music video genre; early videos were often merely shots of people dancing. As some contributors to the recent outpouring of retrospection about Michael Jackson have argued, dance was an integral part of Jackson's talent tool-set long before the "Thriller" behemoth. But, with due respect to Paula Abdul, "Single Ladies" is a particularly provocative waypoint.

Where music-video dancing had, even at its most profound and eye-catching, usually been relaxed and accessible, with moves the viewer might want to casually try out at a nightclub, Beyonce introduced a particular kind of aspirational precision coupled with a choreographic specificity. If you have mastered these steps in "Single Ladies," you will not be muddling through them to an Ashlee Simpson song, you will be tied to a very singular notion of what those moves are--your success or failure at mastering them will be obvious to any observer.

Not only are Beyonce and her posse tight and polished, the steps they are dancing are innovative, adding contemporary dance tropes to refined hip-hop moves. And they're shot in a way that the dancing is the video, not just something to cutaway to, from closeups of an emotive singer or some vague storyline. The presentation is relentless. Even in her regimented "Rhythm Nation", Janet Jackson doesn't stay so intently in choreographic character, breaking from shot-to-shot to swaying-and-facing-the-camera mode. The group dancing in Janet's video also allows the camera to break away from close-ups, allowing any potential flaws to be edited away.

Which brings me to Shakira, who has recognized the athleticism and the precision of Beyonce--well, she's even recognized the hair styling and posture of Beyonce--and met the challenge with a style that's both exact and--her own contribution--loopy. Her flexibility is aspirational. Her choreography is as unnerving as some of the most cutting-edge contemporary dance. Her delivery is clean and confident, as it it is perfectly natural to arrange your knee above your head. Her spider pose, for example, would be a little circus-show freaky if it was not delivered with a playful wink. Shakira has shown that she can match Beyonce move for move, that she can suffer the glare of an unforgiving camera and also--her trump card but also the twist that might obstruct her way to international domination--that she doesn't take her Olympian performance skills so seriously.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Hardly surprising

Strange how it's not legal to discriminate in law but in cash, well, the Tories run a slightly more segregated ship. Can anybody say "sponsorship scandal"? The key difference seems to be that the Liberals showed preferential treatment to certain Quebec ridings while the Conservatives show contempt for LGBT Canadians.

Or perhaps it's just that my sense of smell has deteriorated

When the Toronto garbage strike started, I told my housemate, who is relatively new to Canada, that the last one in 2002 went on forever and that the city was a total disaster.

"How long?" he asked.

"Oh, it must have been six weeks, eight weeks."

The 2002 strike, in fact, lasted 14 days. My memory, festooned with torn plastic bags and coffee-cup lids, had stretched with time.

Now we're 30 days into this strike and I realize that, in my estimation anyway, the city is just approaching the state of disrepair we achieved in 14 days last time. I think the green bin program and the expanded recycling program has made it easier--garbage is only picked up every second week, even when things are working correctly.

Also, although the union has really been calling the shots--why doesn't this issue erupt in January when a layer of ice can protect us and there's no tourists to scare away?--I think the city's doing a better job of handling things this time around. Touristy areas are being targeted by private cleanup crews. Overflowing bins are being cleaned up. The use of parks as temporary dumps--as horrifying as it is for the neighbours--was implemented in a quick and efficient way. There has been less illegal dumping.

In the seven years between the two strikes, we've learned something about garbage. Mostly that it ain't going to take care of itself.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

We're here, we ride, get used to it

Though I'm a fan of considerate and safe cycling, there's something about this list of suggestions that reminds me of the old-school approach to gay and lesbian defusing hatred against them: pretend you're just like them, no, pretend you're better than them. That way, they can't possibly hate you.

Women were told to wear skirts and makeup; men were supposed to be masculine. It was all about keeping your head down and praying for toleration. The goal was to fit in and to deny whatever part of yourself made that difficult. That didn't work, of course--it took radicals and subversives of all kinds to effect social change. So I'm not sure why cyclists would expect the same.

Sure, don't be an asshole. But a bike isn't a car and each of us is responsible for our own publicity. Just because one driver cuts me off or opens their door into my path doesn't mean every motorist is a danger to cyclists (though some times it feels like it). By the same token, cyclists should avoid falling into the trap of expecting each other to "represent." We shouldn't have to be popular to expect not to be killed when we go out.

Plus, the whole "drive your bike, don't ride it" doesn't really jibe with common usage. Bikes, I'm afraid, are ridden and motorists are going to have to live with it.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Was BrĂ¼no mostly filler?


Was it just me or was there something desperate about Sacha Baron Cohen's BrĂ¼no?

Baron Cohen and his producers devised mis-en-scène after mis-en-scène to entrap the squeamish and the homophobic (and I don't think they're automatically the same thing--the movie was as much about our fear of sex and eccentricity as it was about homosexuality). But his chosen victims were, for the most part, so controlled, so on message, so "I'm out of here as fast as I possibly can?" that he only managed to squeeze a few brief moments of discomfort out of each of them.

I mean, the setup for Congressman Ron Paul was spectacular--the hotel room, the champagne, the photos, the disappearing act with the pants--but the man did get out of there in the least embarrassing way possible. It was all build, build, build--then the person fled or, like the hunters out camping, turned silent and uncooperative, cinematically speaking.

(Which may be why so much of the movie felt set-up--the spider couldn't attract enough flies into his web. Possible exceptions: Paula Abdul taking about human rights work while, ahem, sitting on a person and the penultimate set piece, where the grudge-match fans cheered on the violence but freaked out on the same-sex kissing. But then, as if to offer an anecdote to all the hate of that scene, BrĂ¼no sings a song with celebrities he should be deflating, a set-up that had obviously been negotiated and constructed, which retroactively makes you reevaluate all the "real" incidents you've already seen.)

To fill up the holes in running time, the "plot" was pushed to the forefront with many scenes of Baron Cohen "acting" rather than "intervening." But without an audience, Baron Cohen's flamey performance is something a drag queen would do at home in front of the mirror: overwrought, self-indulgent and self-congratulatory but deeply unconvincing. When people complain that the move made them squirm, I wonder if it's Baron Cohen's interpretation of BrĂ¼no, rather than the world around him, that made them feel that way. Who'd want to watch a scripted movie performed this way? I blame the bad acting, though it could be that some audience members have not spent enough time in the underbelly of the gay world in order to set their flamboyancy meters to appropriate tolerance levels.

Even as a stereotype, Baron Cohen was one-note. Where was the defeat, the sliding of the mask in the face of the humiliation of "failing" in Hollywood? Where were the tantrums, the acting out? It's true that gay men construct studier and more ostentatious public personae than others, but it's also true that these constructions frequently falls apart. In this, Baron Cohen was very much a straight man putting on "gay face," afraid to deviate too far from his shtick for fear of striking a wrong note and alienating gay and gay-friendly audiences.

Part of the problem, I suppose, is the success of Borat. And I suppose reality TV shows in general. Even if people don't know it's Baron Cohen, they see the cameras, imagine a scenario where they will be humiliated and pull back.

Success seems to have made Baron Cohen pull back, too. It's the worst mistake a satirist can make: wanting people to like you. You can unflatteringly impersonate a Kazakhstani journalist without ever winking at the audience, because, I'm pretty sure, Kazakhstanis don't buy a lot of movie tickets. Who cares if you hurt their feelings? But the queers--cross them and they can bring you down. With BrĂ¼no Baron Cohen has tried to have it both ways--social criticism and conciliation. They are not compatible modes of expression.

Friday, July 10, 2009

Botton deprived of an 'undo' button


As petty and embarrassing as Alain de Botton's web post was, dressing down Caleb Cain for his teeth-baring review of de Botton's new book, you have to admit that it takes a big man to own it. What he might have lost in a bad review, he might very well have gained in publicity (of the "no such thing as bad" sort).

The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work sits on my bookshelf right now. The topic makes me less eager to get to it than de Botton's previous efforts; I do think the further he strays from matters of the heart and one's inner life, the more difficulty he has framing his subject. I must also say that the Canadian and British editions come wrapped in are the weakest book jackets he's ever been subjected to (not that I'm judging). The U.S. cover is more compelling, conjuring de Botton's twee persona more aptly than the jet-setting internationalist photos.

Wednesday, July 08, 2009

The Tories & Pride

I swear. It's not like Ablonczy used any of the words in the LGBT lexicon when she was handing over the money. She must have some kind of plausible deniability. Can't she claim she thought Pride was a casino?

But seriously. Either there is a set of criteria for the federal tourism money or it is a pork-barrel program where MPs pick and choose who gets what. This kerfuffle, and the treatment of poor Diane Ablonczy, suggests that latter, which should be far more embarrassing for any legitimate government than the complaints of a few rightwingers.

If there are criteria--and I'm sure there must be--it would be hard to imagine Pride Toronto, with its size and economic impact, being excluded for any reason other than discrimination based on sexual orientation which, the last time I looked, was against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Either way, it makes the Conservatives look very, very bad. Pork barrellers or anti-Charter discriminators. Take your pick.

Saturday, July 04, 2009

More Fringe notes

We're almost at the end of the "debut days" at the Toronto Fringe Festival--I have just one more show Saturday afternoon and I'll have done my reviewing duties. A few thoughts.

* The techies are an unforgiving bunch. Says one in the beer garden. "There was this one show today and they asked me for chairs! Chairs! What do they think this is? Are they going to be asking me for costumes next?" Then she started talking about what techies would do if they ran the world. I expected it to sound like Fascism, but it was more about some kind of automated lighting system.

* Most obvious piece of dialogue today: "Life is so... alive."

* Thursday's best line: "Nobody likes the aging divorcee but everyone loves a widow."

* If there is a choice between a no-name act that seems to come from a place of passion and an act with a few "professionals" on its roster--references to L.A. or London in the program bios, for example--always take the amateurs. Big egos spell indifferent work ethic and you have to wonder: If you're doing so well in L.A., why are you in the Fringe?

* In a similar vein, I am often left wondering about what it takes to make something "entertaining." I've seen plays that have been workshopped, dramaturged, workshopped again, performed and directed by trained theatre professionals that have been vastly less entertaining that somebody just hopping on stage and telling funny stories. I suppose if Hollywood hasn't figured it out, the chances I will are slim.

* Past Fringe success is an unreliable indicator of what this year's show will be like. The best expectations are no expectations.

Thursday, July 02, 2009

Fringe phrasing

I just had to share the best line I've heard so far in the Fringe, though I think its hilarity was inadvertent.

Gansta to his high-school-attending sister, while giving her drugs to retail (The sister happens to be prostituting her best friend): Let me pimp the bitch!
Sister: I'm not comfortable with that.

Eye Weekly's Fringe review site is here and my review of Lockdown is here.

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Way to go Waawaate


I must admit, when I first interviewed Waawaate Fobister, I walked away somewhat distressed by the nagging feeling I had that his first solo show could all go very wrong. I mean, he was smart and had the wisdom of someone who had lived an interesting life in his 24 years. I knew that Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and his director/dramaturge Ed Roy had great confidence in him.

But really.

He was 24. He seemed like he was painfully shy. He seemed unsure of himself. He was going to be writing and performing a mainstage, full-length show based on a short personal (and traumatic) anecdote he had told on a youth performance stage. He was performing multiple characters, solo. He talked about making last-minute changes to things. Buddies was opening its season with something so untested? Really?

As I wrote up my piece for Eye Weekly, I wondered if too many expectations had been placed on somebody much too young and inexperienced--and what the fallout would be.

Boy, was my pessimism misplaced. Fobister's Agokwe took six Dora Mavor Moore Awards this week, teaching me never to underestimate what comes out of talent and hard, hard work.

Monday, June 29, 2009

Pride notes

A few quick thoughts on this year's Pride celebrations in Toronto.

* Major parade trend: So many cops marching. You only have to go back a few years to the time when it was just the LGBT police liaison officer and her girlfriend driving a single car, unable to find any other officers to join them.

* Queers Against Israeli Apartheid had a large, colourful contingent. So did the pro-Israeli group. Neither overwhelmed the parade. Nobody seemed particularly shocked or upset or distressed. Guess what: Free speech works.

* The recession cast a shadow over the parade's fabulous quotient--many of the floats looked makeshift. Major sponsor TD had a lot of bodies in the parade, but the float was very basic. No lavish spending in sight. At least two entries looked to have recycled old Christmas decorations.

* I only saw one Michael Jackson look-alike all weekend.

* Yet again, the Sunday night Wellesley Stage lineup--which hosts the biggest acts-seemed designed to kill as much buzz as possible. There was talent there--Kelly Rowland, ABC and Divine Brown, for example--but the strange sequence, long gaps between acts and sleepy interstitial soundtrack cleared the air of any sense of build or excitement. I don't know if this is a contract-management problem or if Pride organizers purposefully want to drive audiences out of the venue in order to bring in fresh supplies of drinkers. Regardless, poor talent curation hurt the mood more than the rain.

UPDATES:
1. QuAIA organizer Andrew Brett gives his take on the issue here and clarifies that the pro-Israel contingent was the Kulana Toronto group. My comments on this issue are regarding the appropriateness of these two groups carrying the messages they carried in the parade--I think it was all perfectly appropriate and any debate their participation generated has been positive all around--not on whether Israel is more pro-queer than the rest of the Mideast (a fact so obvious it's not worth debating). In the last few years, Pride Toronto has increasingly taken on a global human rights agenda. In doing so, the organization has opened the door to giving a platform to groups who have things to say about what's going on in countries beyond our own and, while I think it will take some finesse to manage this evolving role (check out how Pride handled the anti-Catholic Raelian entry in 2004), the increased relevance makes the effort totally worth it.

2. I did like the parade this year; sorry if I gave the impression I didn't. Though many floats wore their budgets on their flatbeds, there was a lot of creativity and many small touches that turned what would have been dull marching contingents into something special. It's amazing what energy and splash can be accomplished with a sequined hat, a tinselled pompom and a genuine smile. When I see pictures of the beefy go-go boyed parades of, say, Paris or Sao Paulo, I am proud that Toronto's Pride parade is filled with such a diverse cross-section of this city's (this province's? this world's?) citizens who are there because they want to be, not because they're paid to be there and look good. We may not have the flashiest Pride in the world, as defined by cookie-cutter standards, but we have the most engaged and real one.

Friday, June 26, 2009

Waiting for an inspiration


When I got a review copy of Moby's Play album in 1999, it was a revelation. The tension between the sombre chords he had picked up during his classical training and archival recordings of gospel and folk music created something simultaneously fresh and obsessive--I couldn't stop playing it and neither could Madison Avenue.

Deep Forest had done something similar with samples of pygmy songs on its 1992 self-titled debut, but there was a more straight-forwardly colonial smell to Deep Forest's cultural appropriation, perhaps because the cultural gap was so wide. Moby's use of sampled vocals--clipped short and repeated incessantly--was perverse enough to turn them into something other than themselves without insulting the emotions of the original performance.

Play was also, unlike his previous efforts, a smooth album, free of tracks that would make a dinner-party host hit the Next Track button. The manic punk influences were gone; Moby's restlessness infused itself into each individual track, rather than dashing across the entire album. But Play's breakout success and its resulting ubiquity was both a blessing and curse for the shaved-headed New Yorker. Its ingenuity was retroactively rewritten as a formula, a formula Moby has struggled with ever since.

2002's 18 was an unapologetic retread--Play's lost tracks--right down to its sampling strategies and its mix of poignant ballads and dance tracks. But the freshness was lost in a post-9/11 gloom.

2005's Hotel abandoned sampling, and any dance-oriented throwaways, leaving the songs to stand on their own as pop; only a couple, like "Life Me Up" and "Raining Again" were up to the job. The beats returned for 2008's Last Night, which was a semi-successful attempt to capture the disco exuberance of Go and the lighter parts of Everything is Wrong.

Just a year later, we have Wait for Me and you have to wonder if money was the main motivation for rushing this undercooked, world-weary album to market. This is Moby at his most mopey.

Wait for Me is his most intensive purging yet, eschewing both samples (except for one spoken-word speech in "Study War") and dance jams, leaving us with little more than the minor chords that have always formed the foundation of his music. It's little more than aural wallpaper. High hats and synth chords wander freely but timidly from beginning to end. Melancholy vocals visit once in a while but fail to give the tracks bite, cohesion or resonance.

Some of Wait for Me sounds like an electronic version of prog rock, but, even then, there's no journey, no build. Abandoning random play for in-order listening does nothing to take us deeper inside. It's too coolly pretty, too empty and much too smooth. Moby has claimed Wait for Me is more personal and experimental. I don't know about personal--unless it means lack of concern for creating material that will engage listeners--but if this is experimental, then Enya is an alter ego of Arthur Russell.

Moby's post-Play albums, mistaking an abundance of tracks for artistic generosity, have start strong (or, at least, sturdily constructed) before trickling out into a Muzak wankfest. (Hotel came with an entire album of ambient fiddling and you have to wonder if Wait for Me might have, setting financial incentives aside, been conceived in a similar vein.) Wait for Me is a lube-driven affair from its opening track to its last.

Monday, June 22, 2009

Must every public space turn into Yonge-Dundas Square?


At the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man, I fired off this letter this morning to the mayor, Toronto's parks department and Councillor Adam Vaughan. What I should have wrote was that I actually enjoy the city's culture of festivals, just not on every square inch of city property.


To Mayor Miller, Councillor Adam Vaughan and the Parks Department,

When HTO Park opened two years ago, I started telling people, “Finally the city gets it. Not every public space has to be overprogrammed. Not every public space has to be full of people selling things. See, they have finally built a public space where you can just sit and talk and read or stare at the water or tan or watch kids play without a constant barrage of commercial messages and programmed activity.”

I spoke too soon.

Over the weekend the Toronto Waterfront Nautical Festival took over HTO park. It totally destroyed the character of the place. Some of the seating had been appropriated for commercial vendors. There was somebody using power tools. There was someone banging metal on an anvil. There was someone shouting about a pirate treasure hunt every five minutes or so. There was Shopsy’s selling BBQ animal parts and drinks. The beer garden—clearly demonstrating this city’s deep abiding love affair with the ugliest kind of temporary fencing—took up a significant chunk of the beach, blaring music at varying volumes throughout the afternoon, powered by a gas or diesel generator. There were 13 non-staff people in the beer garden when I looked, a number dwarfed by the people who were using the park for their own non-festival purposes and who could have certainly lived without the music or the beer garden This was totally a festival without an audience, primarily serving its own participants.

Three questions:
* Is it not possible to provide a public park in this city without filling it up with programming and, worse, obnoxious commercial activity? Is the highest and best use for all our public space always the Yonge-Dundas Square model?
* How much in fees did the city collect renting out HTO to the event organizers and the for-profit businesses who disrupted the vibe of this gem in order to sell their wares?
* Is there some kind of evaluation process that contrasts the city’s material gain (if any) from such events against the degradation of public space and the destruction of “the vibe” citizens have come to expect from a given public space?

Thanks for answering my questions. I’m just wondering, especially following the park’s occupation by Cirque Du Soleil a week earlier (which I had written off as an extra-special occasion), if it’s worth trekking down there any more or recommending HTO to others if loud (and, might I say, badly DJed) music, power tools and retail is now the vision for the park’s use.

Thanks for listening to my complaint and answering my questions.

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Never trust anyone who works for a phone company

As we all suspected--cell phone companies won't hesitate to play consumer ignorance to their own advantage.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Motorists versus Cyclists

Somebody has figured the cost who pays how much for our roadways, comparing a motorist to a cyclist. I have a feeling the difference is much greater than illustrated here.

Tuesday, June 09, 2009

Broke planet

When This American Life, broadcast on NPR in the U.S. but I listen to it via podcast, announced its series on the global financial crisis, I was a little skeptical. The show's quirky existentialism seemed better suited to stories about a guy who couldn't commit to buying a sofa or a mother who had lied to her daughter about being swapped with another child at birth. They shouldn't be doing... business stories.

Boy, was I wrong. Their coverage of what went bang on Wall Street has been fascinating and devastating. This week's edition (you can listen to online or download it free for a week, then it goes pay), The Watchmen, had me swearing aloud while I listened at the gym. What other show would call financial regulators all over the world looking for the one that was responsible for the AIG collapse?

Monday, June 08, 2009

Picnic & Splendor


The selection of DVDs on an given day at a branch of the Toronto Public Library is quirky to say the least--it's how I came to discover Sister Wendy. It was because of this random availability I came to watch Picnic (1955 with William Holden and Kim Novak, directed by Joshua Logan, who critic Roger Ebert describes as "among the worst filmmakers of his time") and Splendor in the Grass (1961 with Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood, directed by Elia Kazan) in quick succession.

They're both about the traps that sex set for women. Picnic is simplistic and overwrought: a hunky Holden shows up in town one Labour Day weekend, awakening sleeping desires among the women of a small Kansas town. Sparks fly between Holden's Hal Carter and Novak's Madge. She's a 19-year-old beauty queen courting the town's rich boy; he's an older drifter (Holden was 37 when the film was made and I imagine his character was meant to be mid to late 20s). Madge's younger sister is a brain. Her family's lodger is a prim but loopy old-maid school teacher, played with over-the-top vim by Rosalind Russell. Each of them falls for Holden, whose shirt is off or ripped for much of the movie. He's all sex, all the time, which seems so much more appealing than the chore of finding a husband and looking good in the eyes of the community, but the likes of Hal Carter can offer no permanent solution, just an exciting weekend that, hopefully, won't ruin the rest of your life.

Splendor is overwrought too, but stranger and more willing to try to break open the rules of the game. The good rich boy and the sexualized hunk are the same person--Warren Beatty playing Bud Stamper in his first starring role. He's dating Deanie, played by Wood, who is a good girl but who recognizes her beau's urges--the opening scene is a front-seat sex negotiation. No, you don't have to import an older out-of-towner to introduce sexual danger to a small town. Her choice is not between sex and security but whether to risk using sex to obtain security. It doesn't go well for her. She cracks up and ends up in a mental institution. She didn't have the skills to negotiation between good girl and whore. Though both films are melodramas, Splendor internalizes its perversity, making the heroine partly responsible for the trap that she lets society put her in.

Besides their lessons in sexual deportment, the other contrast that's interesting between the two films is the female leads. Novak is a cold beauty with all the charisma of a dish rag. There are moments in Picnic where she looks like a feather-haired 80s singer trapped in a rock video by a director who's bullied her into submission. But Wood! I hadn't paid attention to her before. In Splendor she's raw and alive and so contemporary, you want to reach out and comfort her when she's suffering. You can imagine if she had been teleported to Hollywood in 2009, she'd be taking up so much space, the likes of Scarlett Johansson and Natalie Portman would be relegated to the B-List.

Thursday, May 28, 2009

Who speaks for Pride?

I was mildly distressed when I read this piece in the Jewish Tribune in which a lawyer equates the critique of Israel's treatment of Palestinians as "Anti-Israel" and "Anti-Semitic." But the fact that he describes Pride's traditional freedom-of-expression stance--a stance that should come as no surprise since it comes from a group that has been silenced for centuries and has been labelled obscene and offensive too many times to count--as having "very eerie parallels to Nazi Germany" struck me as so outlandish to be laughable. Who could take this complaint seriously?

Well, the National Post could, headlining its story "Toronto Pride organizers ban anti-Zionist group." The story freaked me out because it goes against so much of what Pride is all about.

I would be the first to say I don't like a Pride parade to be a series of political and commercial messages. Entrants should concentrate on being fabulous and celebrating their sexuality. But the overlap between sexual politics and all kinds of other politics is tremendous. Politicians, the most political and partisan species known to earth, clamour to be in the thing. Queer vegans shout their message. So do queer pagans. Some political causes may seem like a stretch, but I don't think anybody has any right to start drawing a line. Pride restricts groups that participate in hate speech and discriminatory behaviour, but that, traditionally, has to be clear on the face of it. If it's a matter of debate--and you'd have to be deluded to think that the relationship of Israel and the Palestinian people is not a valid debate--Pride should step back and let it happen.

(And, with Israel's boasting about its LGBT track record, it is inviting criticism from queers on other aspects of its domestic policy. There's no obligation for gay and lesbian people to shut up and play the part of window-dressing when there are other serious issues to address.)

No individual or group "speaks" for Pride in the parade or outside of it. There are occasions when I don't think Pride organizers themselves actually "speak" for Pride. Pride is a spirit or, if that's too flaky for you, a social movement that manifests itself in a formal organization, but it is not a formal organization itself. The organization creates a platform for "Pride" but it is the participants who mount it, creating the content upon that platform. There is no finely tuned message that comes out of it. Lawyerly niggling about liability and not-for-profit tax status misses the point. Take away the sponsorships and the street closure permits and there will still be Pride.

Pride organizers have struggled with this role. I remember in 2004 the Raelians being told to cover up signs that said nasty things about the Pope--"Official sponsor of AIDS... The homophobic religion that kills!"--but they were not kicked out of the parade. (B'nai Brith Canada take note.) Organizers have not always performed as valiantly as they could, for example, not kicking up a stink when police arrested a small group of men for going naked in the parade in 2002. But they have mostly stuck up for the anarchy of voices that are at the heart of Pride.

Anyway, I found the Post story a little troubling. This morning, I was interviewing Pride executive director Tracey Sandilands for a feature story about Pride for the Toronto Star. I couldn't resist asking her about the Post story. She did not claim the Post misquoted her--thank goodness or we'd be veering close to boy-who-cried-wolf territory--but said the story was wrong.

"We have never said we weren't allowing political viewpoints," Sandilands told me. She said the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid has not been banned from this year's parade. Or at least, not yet because they have not yet applied to be in the parade. When and if they apply, it's the declared message and intent that would be evaluated for possible hate speech and discrimination that would see their application denied. Otherwise, they would be welcome.

"There so much pressure on us to take a side," Sandilands told me. "But it's not our mandate or our purpose. We don't intend to be bullied into taking a side....We are not going to take a stand on any rights or causes other than global queer rights."

If hate speech occurs in the parade without warning, Sandilands says it's up to the police to deal with it.

"We won't make that determination," she says.

I'm sure some people will find any participation of Queers Against Israeli Apartheid uncomfortable and provocative. But those two words should be considered synonymous with any bone fide Pride parade.

Monday, May 25, 2009

The Star invents a transport war


When did the Toronto Star decide to wage war on cyclists?

First it was the invented issue of whether cyclists should pay to register their bicycles. The implication was that cyclists aren't paying their way, which is ridiculous. I pay federal and provincial sales and income taxes, as well as municipal property taxes. These sums are much larger than car registration fees. But, since I do not own a car, I can't enjoy the free use of the province's motorized-vehicle-only highways. Neither do I get a rebate for all the saved maintenance costs of my biking, rather than driving, on the city's battered streets, nor do I get any credits for reducing air pollution and traffic congestion. It's drivers who are getting the free ride--only by polluting the environment do they get "full" use of the roads and highways built by our collective tax dollars. As a society, we have come to accept subsidizing mass transit for the greater good, but when it comes to the much cheaper option of making Toronto a more bike-friendly city, suddenly it's a case of us-versus-them. Yes, there are bad cyclists out there. But there are far more dangerous car drivers. Cars can kill cyclists. I've yet to hear of an incident where the opposite occurred.

Now the Star's come to the defense of the existing five-line version of Jarvis. Jarvis is a scar running through the heart of downtown, a fake expressway from moneyed Rosedale to the Gardiner. The fifth lane contributes little to the flow of traffic. Measuring the increased emissions from the presumed increase in idling when the lane is gone is to measure only a small portion of the impact of the lane reduction. In the long run, fewer people will chose to drive down Jarvis, more will choose to walk or cycle. And that means fewer emissions overall.

Reducing pollution and congestion is going to take a carrot and stick approach. Driving will be made more inexpensive and inconvenient. That cycling is to be, at the same time, made more convenient and safer is not a slap against drivers. It's a carrot for them, show them that there are other options.

Friday, May 22, 2009

A figgy pudding

How strange is it to be delighted by a documentary about AIDS activism?

Inspired, sure. Provoked, of course. Overwhelmed, probably. But it was delight that most infused my feelings about John Greyson's Fig Trees, which played at Inside Out this week. I was skeptical going in: I heard it was an opera. But the moment I saw the narrator was an albino squirrel--sometimes a real squirrel, sometimes a puppety one and sometimes a boy dressed as one--I knew that opera wasn't going to be taking itself serious.

Fig Trees juxtaposes the lives and works of two AIDS activists, Tim McCaskell in Toronto and Zackie Achmat in Cape Town, South Africa, through interviews, opera arias and experimental film techniques. Having admired McCaskell for a long time, I loved that the film found in him and Achmat two subjects who could embody some of the heroism of the personal side of social change but also two subjects who are critical of an individual's role, knowing that there there is so much more to be achieved by collective action. And they're both so forward-looking, neither have ever seemed tempted to say, "That's it, honour us now for all the work we've done." The film shares this resistance to self-congratulations.

So I loved the two people profiled. But I also loved Fig Trees' ingeniously eclectic style. There was AIDS and opera and an albino squirrel, yes. But there was also Gertrude Stein, palindromes, train sets and satirical music videos. Some of it was out of left field but none of it was random. I've seen a few things lately where their makers' tendencies to throw a lot of "stuff" at audiences seemed aimed at covering a lack of rigour in the writing process, as if a first draft was rushed into production. While I would not claim to understand all of the connections Greyson makes in the film, they are asserted with such inventiveness and purpose, I feel I have put my emotions and thoughts in the hands of someone who has thought things through. Fig Trees is frequently silly, but never shallow.

Even if audience members left with new (or renewed) disgust with corporate and government complacency in the face of HIV/AIDS, a deeper sense of the daunting task of the fight against HIV/AIDS, I don't think Fig Trees left any room for despair.

Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Search culture

I can't imagine who these people are who use Microsoft's Live search. I don't advocate for anybody's monopoly, not even Google's, but I've never gotten any satisfaction from Live. Is Google, or even Yahoo, blocked from their computers? Or do people really follow the cues of their Microsoft desktop and Microsoft browser with such cow-like deference?

Book of Judith could have used a little more Snow

When writing about a play that's about the making of a play, I figure it must be all right to write about writing about it. In the case of The Book of Judith, which plays till the end of May in a tent on the lawn of the Centre for Mental Health and Addiction on Toronto's Queen West, that also might be the appropriate approach. Being self-reflexive also gives me the chance to violate a couple of other rules I try to maintain: not writing about what's not on stage but could have been (under normal circumstances: what's the point of coulda, shoulda, woulda?) and not pulling apart the production's intentions from its execution.

Let's start at the beginning. I met the show's creator Michael Rubenfeld for an interview for Eye Weekly and found him totally likable and smart. My first questions, as they often are, were about how the show came to be and he had a compelling narrative. As we talked, I realized that this creation narrative--how he met the play's subject, Judith Snow, a quadriplegic who is an international advocate for the inclusion of disabled people, how they started working on a play, how it fell apart and how he pulled it back together again--was the spine of the play. Interesting enough. It got me wondering what the play itself was going to say about the experience. If the play was about his journey from seeing Snow as little more than a freak to seeing her as a person whose very existence in the world challenged our views of it, I was curious what it was about Snow that triggered this awareness and what it was about Rubenfeld that was different now.

The resulting play is difficult to write about without sounding like an asshole. I think there was a lot of talent on the stage, including the choir. I think we need more art--more dialogue in general--on concepts around disability and inclusion. I think Judith Snow is a worthy subject of hagiography. I think the play's heart is in the right place. I think the play will make people think more about disability and, because Rubenfeld is more connected to Toronto's artsy scene than its disability community, it will touch a lot of people who may not have otherwise thought about disability.

But I was surprised how wafer-thin the play's thinking was. Rubenfeld introduces Snow as an "oddity and an inspiration," someone defined by her disability, her physical dependence on other people to help her get through her life, and then talks about how, through the process of creating the play, he discovered how she is so much more than that. But he doesn't give that "much more" to us. The play, for all its whole-person thinking, still focuses on Snow's disability. We don't get a sense of her as a person or a sense of her intriguing views of the world except in the quotes from her contained in the beautifully designed missal. I would have liked to have had much more Snow--what are her hobbies? if she wants to get laid, what kind of a man is she interested in?--and much more of how specifically she changed Rubenfeld. But the show only skims the surface. Rubenfeld performs the piece in evangelical revival-tent style and it's almost as if this approach prevents him from digging down: What was Snow before this project? What was he? What are they after? We're told over and over again how she changed him, but, aside from the fact that he's doing the show itself, he doesn't really show us. The audience is kept on the outside and, for a show about inclusion, I think that's a shame. It's like the process of the play and his emotional journey through that process--the government funding, his girlfriend breaking up with him partway through--overwhelmed the play's original mission: to show what Judith Snow, in particular, brings to the world.

So that's what I thought the show should have been: more Snow, less belly-button gazing. But I also think that, despite my qualms, the show is an important one to do, about a theme that deserves more attention.

Was what's there interesting enough? Mostly. The music by Andrew Penner was great and fun. Rubenfeld is a compelling performer but the preacher-style felt one-note. The audience participation was a nice touch, as was the surprise almost-ending. As for the ending itself: There wasn't one. The Book of Judith is a worthy production offers breezy entertainment and feel-good sentiment. But if you want to have a sense of the emotional journey of Snow and Rubenfeld, you might have to produce a play yourself.

Saturday, May 16, 2009

CBC calls my four-star review of Anne of Green Gables 'unkind'

So the CBC has published a story claiming that Toronto theatre reviewers were "unkind" to Anne of Green Gables - The Musical, which is in Toronto for a couple of weeks.

There I was girding myself for attacks on why I praised it and gave it four stars out of five--I'm an Anne fan and I don't deny it--and, out of left field, I'm held up as an example of a meanie Toronto critic who trashed it.

The irony of the whole thing is that theatre artists are always complaining, "You should get rid of the star ratings. People just look at the stars and don't read the reviews which are often a better indicator of whether they themselves will like the show," an argument I totally agree with. But here's a case where the rating has been discarded in the writer's attempt to dig up the dirtiest parts he can.

I've submitted this comment to the reader comments on the story:

I'm Paul Gallant, the critic who wrote the review for Eye Weekly that is quoted here.

I've always laughed at movie adverts that take a review phrase like "an astonishing achievement in boredom" and turn it into "Astonishing achievement!" For the sake of a sharp headline--and presenting Toronto as a snobby place, I guess--this CBC piece has done the opposite, quoting 50 of the most negative words--the only negative words, really--of my 670-word mostly positive review.

I gave Anne of Green Gables - The Musical four stars out of five, which is a far more important indicator of my feelings about the play than the qualms quoted in here. Please check out Eye Weekly's website to read my full review.

The politics of cleaning the bathroom

I suspect that the care workers hired by Canada's most glamorous MP, Ruby Dhalla, and/or her family were underpaid for the hours of work they put in, which is of ethical and perhaps legal concern. People should get a fair hourly wage. But I have a problem with the class warfare spin on the story. Newspaper readers are supposed to be shocked by revelations that the two women hired to care for Dhalla's mother were expected to shovel snow and clean the bathroom. And they had to live in the basement! Can you imagine!

Well, lots of Canadians clean bathrooms for a living and lots live in basement apartments. This may not be their dream situation, but I don't think we should assume its a horrific freak show of a life either. I once had a part-time job as a residential care worker in a house occupied by two mentally challenged people. I got paid about $20 an hour. I did have to clean the bathroom and kitchen each shift and I will say that I would have needed a lot more than $20 an hour if those two activities made up the bulk of my work. But most of the time I just hung out, drank coffee, watched television and made sure small problems--meat past its expiry date, undone laundry--didn't turn into big ones. Averaging the unpleasant tasks with the pleasant tasks, I don't think $20 an hour was a bad wage. How do you take care of someone if you're not willing to do the the everday things that person is unable or, in the case of someone with behavioural problems, unwilling to do. Exploitation is about not properly compensating someone for their labour. It is not about expecting someone to do labour that middle-class newspaper readers find distasteful.

Friday, May 15, 2009

Tamil mania

When Toronto's Tamil community shut down Toronto's University Avenue to protest at the American consulate, I thought, oh please, you silly people. Not only were the Americans unlikely to do anything but waving the flag of the Tamil Tigers, considered to be terrorists by the Americans, seemed to be an invitation for them to view their pleases in a negative light. Then they marched on the Gardiner Expressway and I thought, now the commuters will hold them in contempt, too.

I forgot the cardinal rule: Any publicity is good publicity. Through their peaceful yet annoying protests, the Tamils have everybody in Toronto talking about them. Some of it's negative, sure, but that doesn't affect the long game: getting people who didn't even know where Sri Lanka was to have a sense of the violence that's going on there. It may not translate into immediate political action--I'm not really sure what Canada or the U.S. could do anyway--but it has planted seeds that may bloom at a time when we might want to be more involved in the country. Smart!

Thursday, May 14, 2009

Muldoon's tears

Although I wish Canada could leave the 1980s in the distant past, I have to say I am in awe of former prime minister Brian Mulroney's mendacity. It's not just the theatrics, which are fantastic. It's how invested he is in them. I think he totally believes that it was okay to not admit during questioning in 1996 that he got money from German-Canadian businessman Karlheinz Schreiber. Well, he got money, of course, but it wasn't Airbus money and the questioning was about Airbus so he wasn't really asked. That hairsplitting helped him earn $2.1 million of taxpayer money in his lawsuit over an RCMP leak that implicated him in shady dealings. Sure, there were shady deals, but not the shady dealings they were talking about. Rock on, Brian! Rock on! You could have taught Bill Clinton a thing or two.

Green goggles

Islanders have a strange relationship with Anne of Green Gables--the musical and the book more than the TV movie, though that, too, gives us ambivalent feelings. Early exposure embeds the story deep in our DNA. "Ice Cream" might or might not be a better show tune than "You Won't Be an Orphan for Long" from Annie (which debuted 13 years after Anne, I'll have you know) but that's like a left paw wondering if life would be better if they were right-handed. You just don't know. We grew up proclaiming, "School again! School again!" every September, which was enough to cue giggles. It's not much of a song, really, but everybody knew the dance number that was being invoked.

Provincial minds can overrate their own marginal distinctions, but Islanders have the hard data to prove Anne's more than a local obsession. The provincial population is about 140,000 but 3.3 million people have seen the musical. Summertime on the Island sees a flood of Japanese tourists, mostly female, many wearing to dress up in frocks and wear braided red-haired wigs as an ode to their heroine. Anne has turned much of the province into a Victorian-era theme park, which Islanders resent, but it generates lots of cash, which we like, a lot.

At the opening of Anne of Green Gables - The Musical at Toronto's Elgin Theatre, P.E.I.'s Minister of Communities, Cultural Affairs and Labour was on hand for opening remarks. Carolyn Bertram was a total charmer, but the effect was to turn the whole show into a living, breathing tourism advertisement. One suspected the P.E.I. government might have underwritten Dancap's partnership with the Charlottetown Festival. Liked the sets? See them rendered in water, soil and sand as you drive from Cavendish to Brackley Beach! Liked the picnic scene? Try Cow's handmade ice cream next time you're in Charlottetown!

As a critic, you have to push aside nostalgia in order to set the script against the expectations of nowadays, the acting/directing against past productions. Though the musical has been tinkered with over the years, the current incarnation is a back-to-its-roots effort, with the original 1960s sets and choreography. Does that make it a museum piece or is it an artistic decision that has some contemporary resonance?

It's been at least 15 years since I last saw Anne of Green Gables and this time I was surprised by its imperial themes, particularly the strange school pageant where depictions of Eskimos and Indians flirt with racism. I had forgotten the cavalier treatment of teen pregnancy--treated with more levity than, say, school teasing. I had remembered Anne and Diana's platonic love song "Kindred Spirits"--it's the name of a fan magazine. But I had forgotten that it was the visit to the horrible Mrs. Blewett--we know she's horrible because she doesn't hang her laundry to dry sorted by colour and size--that made Marilla change her mind about keeping Anne. It's a funny scene, but there's no song in it and the Blewett character doesn't recur, so it didn't penetrate into my psyche. But the moment I saw the laundry, I knew exactly what was coming. Mrs. Blewett was there in my brain whether I knew it or not.

I can say this about the current production: Amy Wallis is probably the best of the four Anne's I've seen. And I always get excited when they start the egg and spoon race which is, strangely, more thrilling than the three-legged race that precedes it. But I didn't cry when... you know who... you know whats. A ritual is supposed to provide satisfaction each time, but get one ingredient wrong and the spirits will ignore you.

Sunday, May 10, 2009

Girlfriend/The first Obama era blockbuster


My favourite moment in the new Star Trek movie is near the end when Kirk and Spock are standing side-by-side in front of a screen image of the baddy they have just defeated. Spock, played by Zachary Quinto, who is now my new favourite young Hollywood star, is standing there and he has the look of an aggrieved girlfriend who, having called the offender on his misdeed, is prepared to let her boyfriend do the rest of the work and take pleasure from it.

Okay, well, that was a particularly perverse favourite moment. But the new Star Trek was full of them. It actually managed to answer so many of the complaints I feel I am perennially making against Hollywood blockbusters.

Firstly, there was talking and there was action but you never felt like it was happening in two different movies (I'm talking to you, George Lucas). One scene followed another, mostly made sense and what explaining had to be done was done with subtly and discretion. The story had flow.

Secondly, I could follow the action. Unlike, in, say, The Dark Knight, Star Trek seemed to have both a lighting budget and an editing budget. They actually let me see the fancy interplanetary metropolises for more than a few seconds. Yes, I could take them in. I've never understood why Hollywood filmmakers spend all that money making computer-generated worlds and then don't show them to us. I felt I had made a real visit to the Federation's universe.

Thirdly, it seemed to be about something: friendship. It wasn't heavy or thoughtful and didn't devote long monologues to the subject. It just showed how friendships can happen and how important they are. To ask for a movie with a little bit of meaning isn't to ask for a philosophical treatise. Just pick a piece of life you have something about which to say and shine a light on it.

Fourthly, the characters were likable and I don't think even someone who hadn't seen the 1960s version would disagree with that. Simon Pegg was a little too heavy handed as Scotty, but the rest of the cast walked right up to the fence that said "camp impersonation" and then took one step back. Which brings me to my fifth point: Star Trek proves that you can make a sci-fi film full of explosions and fist-fights and "red matter" gobbledygook and still have fun. There was genuine suspense without everybody being dirty and bitter and overwrought. It was a space adventure--not yet another retread of the apocalypse filmmakers think is necessary to get us excited.

And yet, I will likely see Terminator: Salvation and will likely see all these neurotic tendencies thrown upon the screen with desperation and grim sadism.