Business, travel, culture, politics, city life and other things that tie the world together
Thursday, January 22, 2009
Travesties
Doing some research on an Eye Weekly piece on Soulpepper's upcoming Travesties, I came across this website concerning a recent Seattle production. Panic. You have to know all this to understand the play? But I think it was a bit of an overreaction on my part and on the part of the theatre group. I think Stoppard only really cared that we were familiar with the outlines of Stalin, Joyce and Tzara--the Che T-shirt image of them--to get the play. I think it's more about the joy of words and art than history. Or so I hope.
Slumdog Millionaire
About the Oscars--there are more invested people out there. All I can say is that Benjamin Button was much ado--and by ado I mean, star-power, running time, special effects and directorial willfulness--about nothing, a film that failed to even bother to examine its own main conceit (if you skip over the young-old person, you've passed up all our opportunities to say anything about aging; who knows what went through the old-young Brad's head?). But it's more bougeois, more liberal than its parent (older sibling--gentically, nothing's been added), Forrest Gump so why not? Slumdog is certainly an underdog, making up in chutzpa what it might lack in innovation. Dickens forever!
Monday, January 19, 2009
From Chandni Chowk to Canada

I've always had a thing for Akshay Kumar, whose Bollywood fame was taking off when I visited India in the early 1990s. So I didn't walk but ran to a downtown screening of his new film Chandni Chowk to China--the title phrase must be spoken a dozen times in the two and a half hour production. It's a funny picture for the studios to market as a cross-cultural crossover. On the surface--and this is a film that's little more than a surface of Chinese location shots, beautiful heroines, broad comedy and hand-to-hand combat--it's very accessible. At least it doesn't feature reincarnation as a plot point. But what the film does do is deconstruct Kumar's own life story. Like his Borat-like protagonist, Akshay grew up in Delhi's cacophonous Chandni Chowk and was a chef before transforming himself into a kung-fu fighting action hero.
His nerdy antics for the film's first two hours are only really funny for anyone over eight years old if you have a sense of his Bollywood reputation as a sex bomb. I guess that makes the film's grand conceit comparable to the use of Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button--we are engaged with the wrinkled old Brad early in the film partly because of our anticipation of eventually seeing the Thelma And Louise hottie that's idealized in our cinematic imagination. Without some kind of Kumar primer, North American audiences lose that layer of meaning (and God knows the film doesn't provide much layering).
My most vivid memory of Kumar is a Stardust magazine photo spread he did in the 1990s, one shot of which had him in a towel, narcissistically sprawled on a foggy mirror. (Sorry, haven't been able to find it online anywhere and I lost my copy years ago.) So in CC2C, the climax is not when our loser hero finally kills the bad guy, but when, after intensive kung-fu training, he takes off his shirt to reveal the Akshay we knew was there under the bad moustache and buttone-up shirt.
Greek and modern tragedy

Seeing Medea and Jerry Springer - The Opera in the same week demands some kind of comparison, if only just for fun. An immortal work versus temporal trash? The perennial entertainment value of high emotions? The bells and whistles theatre has accumulated over the years, culminating in JSTO's barrage of operatic, religious, television and musical conventions, served up with a wink and a grin.
But what really makes Medea a work for the ages is its irony. Seana McKenna's performance highlights the distance between what Medea is telling people and what she's thinking -- motivations, goals and public perception all operate on their own tracks. In my experience of the play on the page, I had always focused on the emotions she must have been feeling in order to act so brutally. McKenna totally turned her into a schemer--arranging for other people to carry out her killing and arranging her getaway, leaving no one any wiser until her plan kicks in (signalled by a burst of flame on the stage--is it possible to eliminate all the cheese from modern productions of Greek tragedies?). There is more "how" than there is "why" in Medea.
With Jerry Springer -- the opera and the TV show -- our ignorance of the motives of the actors/guests is part of the pleasure. We don't want to know how they came to be cheating, how they managed to coax their lover onto the stage. We want it to be a mystery, their participation on the show, the pleasure they derive from their compromising engagements (affairs and perversions--all the same, all the same). The audience can stay back, keep its distance and experience them as freaks. But because we can see Medea's mind at work, we become engaged in her intentions and their deployments, even though, child murderer she is, she's the biggest freak of all.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Springer into action

Jerry Springer - The Musical had its Canadian debut at Hart House Theatre last night, directed by Richard Ouzounian. It's the perfect show for a student production really: a great showcase for the leads and forgiving for weaker voices so long as the the performers really go for it--which they did.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Zona Pellucida
We think of dreams as fuzzy but there is always a precision to them: we may not know the make of the car my high school English teacher was driving to Vegas, but it was a very specific colour of green; it wasn't the current you running around and around the block but you circa 1995, wearing that red hoodie you wore that year. Zona Pellucida by 2boys.tv, on stage at Toronto's Buddies Theatre till Jan 24, is the kind of dream-as-machine concept that could only come out of Quebec. The soundtrack is the engine here, each syllable of silver screen divas demanding an exacting lip sync performance. Stephen Lawson does not struggle to keep up--the ease of the performance keeps it hypnotic--but he's merely a prop in the dream's forward momentum. There is a wolf/bear in pursuit. His growl is the only male sound. The rest is mouthed words from famous films (All About Eve, of course, and Suddenly Last Summer), which kinda funny, really, because the performance is so silent-movie, exagerated and mannered. Lawson moves from tableau to tableau that create mirrored worlds within worlds--one riff has him holding a dollhouse, the image of which is projected onto a screen, but the image contains a projection of his character, with whom he argues. By the end, the projectins and simulacrum pile on top of each other and you reach the point where you don't know if Lawson is actually on stage or not.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Kindness and hope: not worth the bother

I was immediately intrigued when I heard Adam Phillips, one of the authors of On Kindness (with Barbara Taylor), talk about his book on BBC Radio 4's Start The Week. Phillips suggested that we might actually limit our kindness to each other to make it more valuable and to keep our lives more manageable--being kind to everybody implies an intimate connection to everyone that would be impossible to maintain. But it became a perfect radio moment when Phillips put a question to Vikas Swarup, who wrote the book C&A upon which the current phenom film Slumdog Millionaire is based. The story, as you probably know by now, is flashbacked biography of a boy from the slums who, through his life's adventures, comes to know the answers to the questions on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
"It is optimistic," said Swarup of the book/film. "What it shows is is that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that hope and love can even take you across the most difficult barriers and that a flower can survive, even in a slum."
Phillips jumped in with: "Do you think that hope can be poisonous?...It offers people something to look forward to that can only turn into cynicism and bitterness. Hope is like cocaine. It lasts a very very short time and the very very long time afterwards is truly terrible."
Swarup stuck by hope.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Kermode does Hudson
My obsession with Mark Kermode is well known; this priceless mimickry explains why.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Favicon-con-con
I spend so much time on Google real estate, I find all the colours a little distracting.
Tweet-to-whoo
One of the strange things about communication technology as a field of consumer trends is how tightly woven together commerce and culture are. In, say, music and fashion, early adapters search and discover new trends when they're in the rough--an unsigned band or an unheard-of designer. If the early adapters were right, the band will get a record deal, the designer will set up a fashion house and eventually get copied by the likes of H&M. By that time the early adapters will have jumped ship, with counter cultural types rolling their eyes at the commercialization (watering down, corporatization, consolidation, suburbanization, cheapening) of the trend.
But with communication technology, the marketing and the trend are often the same thing--using Twitter to tell your friends about a product or to further your business interests comes as early in the trend as telling them about your hangover. Commercial applications and "style statements" are meant to go hand-in-hand. The early adapter is not counter cultural; they're just first in line at the cashier.
But with communication technology, the marketing and the trend are often the same thing--using Twitter to tell your friends about a product or to further your business interests comes as early in the trend as telling them about your hangover. Commercial applications and "style statements" are meant to go hand-in-hand. The early adapter is not counter cultural; they're just first in line at the cashier.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Duh
Loblaws bags nickel starting tomorrow: "'It's not convenient. What, am I going to carry around my own boxes in the car all the time?"
Friday, January 09, 2009
Theatre 'Next' to the heater
A theatre festival in the middle of the winter is a curious thing. Not quite the party of the Fringe, not quite the artsy break from beach time of Summerworks, Next Stage has its own log-cabin vibe. The bar/box office tent in Factory Theatre's courtyard provides warmth while you wait for the doors to open and a pleasant kind of forced socialization--you'd be shivering if you waited by yourself off on the sidewalk, so you might as well have a glass of wine. The performers I've recognized seem more likely to drop by the tent before and after shows. Conversation starters--"You're about to be dripped on"--abound.
As for the theatre--I've been impressed. The four shows I've seen are more developed than Fringe shows (though probably not as ambitious as many Summerworks productions). In its second year, Next Stage's identity isn't fully formed but, considering the black cultural hole this second week in January, there should be lots of room for it to grow.
As for the theatre--I've been impressed. The four shows I've seen are more developed than Fringe shows (though probably not as ambitious as many Summerworks productions). In its second year, Next Stage's identity isn't fully formed but, considering the black cultural hole this second week in January, there should be lots of room for it to grow.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
Sunday, January 04, 2009
There are two kinds of economists in the world

Having loved Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, I had an "if you like this, you'll like this" feeling when I saw Steven E. Landsburg's More Sex Is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics in a remainder bin. Three chapters in, it's as irritating a book of nonfiction as I've ever read, a reminder that economics, while it finds itself sticking its nose into all sorts of human affairs, is a rough tool.
The title essay is particularly vexing because the thesis is so endearing: If more people had sex, the spread of AIDS would be reduced. But of course, by "more people" he means one of two kinds of people: sexually conservative ones. If sexually conservative people increased their quantity of sexual partners, there would be more competition for partners and promiscuous people would have less sex. (More pure water in the stream dilutes the polluted.) He even gives these types names: shy Martin and sluttish Maxwell.
If only the two were so easy to tell apart! At what point does a sexually conservative person become a promiscuous one? Three partners a year? 50? What about people who are serially monogamous or go in and out of periods of promiscuity? What about luck--yes, promiscuous people are statistically more likely to become infected with a sexually transmitted disease, but, as individuals, they get infected by carriers. Carriers are impossible to detect unless everyone is regular tested, honest and upfront about their status.
Lansburg falls into the labelling trap: All his arguments rest on the accuracy of his labels and when you're talking about pure/impure, only a small percentage of the population fits cleanly into one label or the other. There's counter intuitive thinking and there's pretending that people are so easily categorized.
The "Be Fruitful And Multiply" chapter, which advocates that more people are better for the planet because it means more geniuses is equally troublesome. First, it presumes that geniuses are born, not made--a larger population living at greater disadvantage is going to produce fewer geniuses than a small one where people are presented with greater opportunities for learning and achievements. He also suggests that more people gives us more opportunity to choose a suitable partner, overlooking the problem of distribution and the crippling effect of too much choice.
UPDATE: This book continues to drive me crazy. With his jaunty tone and can-do attitude, Lansburg is a master at defining problems and forces as narrowly as he has to to be counterintuitive. Judges forbid juries to gather extra-trial information for fear they'll lose their jobs? Pul-leez. This ridiculous claims in this book are a testament to the small part rational thought plays in our behavioural patterns.
Thursday, January 01, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)