Tuesday, October 26, 2010

Built Ford Tough

Progressive Torontonians are freaking out about the election of Rob Ford as mayor, not just because they're worried about what he'll do to the city. They're also disturbed by how many of their fellow citizens voted for a man with track record of bigoted speech about gay and lesbian people and Canadian newcomers--or just about anybody else who is not a car-driving, home-owning middle-class straight married person. Is this what my neighbours/people in the 'burbs think of me? they wonder.

It's true that these attitudes are part of the Ford package. But I think other less worrisome (though no less desirable) factors played a part in Ford's election.

The biggest factor is star power. Torontonians love to vote for a strong, sharply defined character. Exhibit A, Mel Lastman. Rob Ford ran as himself, a classic love-em-or-hate-em character, right out of The Family Guy. Even David Miller, with his stylish hair and upright appearance, had a Soccer Dad/Dudley Doright persona that was immediately understandable on an emotional level. Ford's main rival, George Smitherman, had been a "character" in the past, but ran a campaign where he tried to quash his established persona of Furious George and failed to adopt a new persona along the lines of "gay dad." Voters wondered who Smitherman was and, ergo, if he was hiding something. Torontonians will vote for a big, authentic personality, no matter what policy it's offering them.

As well, David Miller's mishandling of the 2009 garbage strike meant that even moderate voters were keen to punish anyone who seemed gutless in seeking efficiency and, especially, seeking efficiency from the unions. They wanted guts. Pantalone was too closely associated Miller--and too pro-labour--to answer this need. Smitherman, bizarrely, considering his past track record, wasn't able to position himself as someone who could be a tough bargainer. The one thing you know about a loose cannon like Ford is that he won't back down (even when he should). Will it he be effective? I doubt it. But voters wanted someone who acknowledges the problem and will try to solve it.

For better or, more precisely, for worse, it's shallow perceptions, not what runs underneath them that will win or lose you an election in this city. Ford ran a great one-note campaign that capitalized on voter frustration: stop the gravy train, stop the gravy train, stop the gravy train. Ford's specifics--tearing up the streetcar lines or defunding Pride celebrations--were not, I think, a big part of why people voted for him.

Fingers crossed.

Monday, October 04, 2010

Ennui Blanche

So many of the complaint about Nuit Blanche are hard to remedy.

The biggest one--the crowds and their increasing obnoxiousness--could only be solved by something vaguely fascistic. A survey might be distributed: "Which do you care more about: art or getting drunk on the street?" and those who chose the latter might be imprisoned inside their homes for the duration of the evening.

One of the charms of the early days of Nuit Blanche was to look around you and see a panorama of Torontonians exercising their curiosity about their city and what was happening artistically in it. Some of those people were even drunk, but they were engaged. Now one looks around and sees people delighted only that the streets are closed and that there's food for sale on the rutted asphalt.

There's something sad about people so disconnected from their city--so shut out of urban spaces--that they'll turn up in droves to eat corn on a stick in the middle of Yonge Street. You have to wonder why we don't have more permanent pedestrian streets, period. But that desperation is not their fault. And so, as annoying as they are, I would never deny any peaceful folks the pleasure of doing whatever they want to do in the middle of major downtown intersections. In this, Nuit Blanche felt something like a G8/G20 healing session, though my heart did skip a bit when a posse of masked all-in-black young people went by. It took me a moment to realize that there outfits were too tight to do anything but writhe and gyrate.

There have also been complaints about the art, that it was dull. Personally, I keep my expectations low. I'd rather be pleasantly surprised by paper swans hung from trees behind the Eaton Centre than spend all night looking for the "big thing." Nuit Blanche needs to creep up on you, not slap you in the face. Besides, the bigger the "thing," the bigger the crowds. Jeff Koons could land a spaceship on the roof of city hall and any non-masochist would know the most pleasant place from which to watch it would be eight blocks away or some inaccessible perch in the sky like Canoe.

What got me frustrated was the incredibly high percentage of "stuff on screens." I know that there are lots of people doing video art who should not be denied access to Nuit Blanche's exposure. And not all of it was inappropriate--the Holt Refrew "smile" thing was okay, partly because of the irony of the luxury store hosting images that were so folksy. But we live in a culture where so much of our quotidian existence is dominated by screens: our computer screens at work and home, the information screens in the subway, our television screens at home, our phone screens in our pockets. When the goal is reshaping our perceptions of the city--of life--I want something physical, I want something that's real, even if I can't touch it. I want something that has gravitational force.

The moment that just killed me is when we broke from the crowds on Yonge Street and went down McGill to a little parkette, perfectly sized for a perfect surprise. The piece, "Meeting Point: After a planner whose search for new forms pays tribute to existing and familiar places, 2004," by US artist Iman Issa was described as an installation. The image in the program shows a large platform-like object on the grass in a park-like space. We come around the corner and see, not a platform-like object or any "structure" at all, but a screen with an image of a "structure." The screen probably took much more effort to set up than the structures depicted would have taken. I wanted to move around something, to feel it change the world around it. Instead, I got a picture on a screen. They might as well have emailed it to my BlackBerry and saved me the trip.

Give me paper swans in trees, giant clown heads between buildings, loops of tape held aloft by fans (much freakier to see than it sounds reduced to mere prose). If the pieces aren't crowd friendly, put them behind a fence, if you must. But don't give me anything I could easy get on the interwebs.