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.

Thursday, May 07, 2009

Cups floweth over


I've spent the last couple of days taking in the City of Wine festival, a cycle of seven plays by Kingston playwright Ned Dickens about the mythical city of Thebes, which I wrote about for Eye Weekly. The whole shebang gets two performances, the first of which is a preview and therefore not for review.

But for a theatre writer, the experience has been enlightening. It's not every day you get to watch seven plays by the same writer played in quick succession. You start to notice Dickens' quirks that would have become lost with larger gaps between performances. It's not every day you get back-to-back performances by students at some of the country's top theatre schools, directed by seven different directors. You see real talent amidst confused direction--and vice versa. Students from Studio 58 at Vancouver's Langara College, for example, stood out as particularly naturalistic in their technique, while the Humber students were thrown into a production that was more experimental and fussy. Every class, it seems, has a big lug performer willing to play the clown for laughs and every class has more women than men.

Although the cycle has some kinks to work out in the amount of repetition necessary to connect the stories, what's remarkable is the structure of the whole project. The first show is full of gods but by the third one, it's humans talking about gods. The stories become more layered and ironic, with the actions of later generations resonating against what happened before.

A confession: The first four plays took up about 11 hours over two days so I needed to take a break, which meant I missed the cornerstone play, Oedipus. But I figured that I knew how that one ended.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009

Go west

This idea appeals to me for purely aesthetic reasons. There's a church--it's not a fantastically beautiful church, but has a certain austere drama just the same--at the western end of Adelaide and it's always struck me as a waste that cars drive away from it, never toward it.