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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.