Tuesday, October 07, 2014

Vital Signs in a divided city

It's always interesting to be part of the team that reports for the Toronto Star around the Toronto Foundation's annual Vital Signs report. This year my main mission was to seek out residents from six corners of the city to find people who had vastly different experiences with transit, housing and employment depending on where they lived. In just 100 words each, I tried to provide snapshots illustrating that where one lives dramatically affects how one lives--and vice versa.

I really appreciated how candid some of the interviewees were about their life experiences. A seemingly simple question like, "Tell me about your commute," can reveal many personal challenges and triumphs.
 Where you live affects how you live.
Where you live affects how you live.

Monday, September 15, 2014

Is illiteracy hurting your bottom line?

This spring I produced this up close look at how poor literacy among employees may be hurting your business. What was amazing to learn was how many Canadians have poor essential skills, and how even a little training at math, reading, writing and computer skills can make people so much more competent at other tasks. The full report is here.



Thursday, August 28, 2014

You can wash and wash Gap’s black denim, but the Film Noir blood just won’t come out

It’s funny that Gap, with its new David Fincher ads, has had to go back to the 1940s and ’50s to find some semblance of “normal” for our stylistically fractured age.

In fact, Film Noir, from which Fincher lifts the Drive ad’s aesthetic, could be defined as a classic movie genre about people who are pushed far outside their normal—crime, sex and mayhem. But then nobody ever said fashion advertising makes sense. Wholesomeness and sleaze are hinted at in equal measure, as if the concoction averages out to achieve some predetermined sales metric.

“The uniform of rebellion and conformity,” declares the text on the screen, after the lithe young women in the Drive ad takes off her jeans and throws them into the front seat where two other handsome young people are sitting, looking quite serious. Not only do the words contradict each other, they don’t connect with the images, either. Disposing of the evidence after disposing of the body of a murdered lover in a river, as a noir heroine might do, hardly counts as “rebellion” (or conformity, for that matter). The image here is all desperate depravity, playing against the words of modern marketing.

Then the lightness of Fincher’s Stairs conjures all the sexual charge of a 1980s Sprite commercial done in ’50s jazz style.

The Fincher commercials create a mystery which is then answered (but not solved) by the celebrity endorsements of the print ads. The familiar faces of Anjelica Huston, Elisabeth Moss and Zosia Mamet provide recognition in lieu of meaning; they are talented actors filling in the holes of a dodgy script with their performances. You can sell tickets to any unholy mess if you have the right cast.


All the murk disassociates Gap’s “normal” from the normcore trend of hipsters dressing in unedgy clothing, even as the campaign capitalizes on it. “Normal” has insider meaning to those who follow style trends, but, at the same time, can be interpreted as an opportunity to be stylistically lazy, old-school "normal," for those who don't.


No wonder Fincher’s Gap ads retreat into history. Like a sci-fi time traveller who goes to the past to change the present, Gap must scour other eras to dislodge “normal” for the purposes of selling black denim. They have to make “normal” mean exactly nothing…. And, therefore, everything.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

The problem with art and news is not that they should be centrally planned

Taken together, Alain de Botton’s two latest books, Art as Therapy (with John Armstrong) and The News position the writer and philosopher as a consumer advocate, lobbying the monolithic institutions of art and—if “art” wasn’t broad enough for you—the news media on behalf of underserved customers who are not nearly as articulate as de Botton, a thinker whose writes with a fluidity that, for better or worse, makes common sense seem fresh and the ridiculous seem appealingly obvious.

Both projects are worthwhile enterprises. The visual arts, on which Art as Therapy dwells, have a marginal role in contemporary western society, despite the rich archive of beauty and longing, and the talent of current practitioners. A few minutes with a piece of visual art can evoke many new feelings and ideas, so you could argue that there’s bigger bang for the buck in it than our current obsession with TV shows, which require dozens of hours to absorb. The huge auction bids that go towards top artist brands (Is Gerhard Richter the Prada of the art world? Is Jeff Koons the Dolce and Gabbana?) are a testament not to the relevance of visual art, but its lack of centrality; collectability shifts the value from the meaning and emotional effect of a work to the market surges it creates, that is, to buzz.

And the news? As the highly formalized formats of TV news and newspaper stories are shoved aside by the cacophony of free online content (articles and charticles, rants and puff pieces, tome-like critiques that would never have been read if not for Facebook, video responses to video responses to non-official music videos chronicling news events), established profit-oriented media are desperately flailing for something that would make it stand out from a crowd composed of every literate and semi-literate person with access to a data plan. With news in such a deeply existential crisis, any advice is worth listening to.

For de Botton, the purposes of both visual art and the news are remarkably similar. In fact you could imagine the two books combined into a single volume: How media (plus nice buildings and furniture) can make a better, happier world through happier and more introspective people.

“Alongside its usual focus on catastrophe and evil, the news should perform the critical function of sometimes distilling and concentrating a little of the hope a nation requires to chart a course through its difficulties,” de Botton writes in The News. “While helping society by uncovering its misdeeds and being honest about its pains, the news should not neglect the equally important task of constructing an imaginary community that seems sufficiently good, forgiving and sane that one might want to contribute to it.” In Art as Therapy, de Botton and Armstrong propose that “art (a category that includes works of design, architecture and craft) is a therapeutic medium that can help guide, exhort and console its viewers, enabling them to become better versions of themselves.” Media can make us better. And can make us feel better.

I can’t disagree. A way forward is badly needed. De Botton’s intentions are worthy. Yet these two books seem simultaneously condescending and naïve. You admire de Botton for getting his ideas out there—the Art Gallery of Ontario is currently offering a show built according to his principles—and still shake your head about this unhelpful rabbit hole he has led us down.

In the case of art, the singularity of expectations set out in Art of Therapy ignores what most people find most delightful about the visual arts—surprise, open-endedness, transmutability. It’s a domain where effect in the heart and brain of the observer can separate itself entirely from artistic intent and critical interpretation; unlike in literature, you can ignore the voice telling you what it’s all about. But de Botton and Armstrong argue that discourse about art should focus on its effects on the human spirit and psyche, providing a balm—or perhaps a cure—for our anxieties about love, nature, family, work and politics.

The authors are right in attacking the dry art-history text that accompanies most art displayed in galleries—birth dates, historical events, formal artistic influences. No one can deny the art world is full of bad writing. But at least these curatorial insights are, for the most part, based on facts, even if they’re not particularly helpful in letting a piece of art work its way into our psyches. What de Botton and Armstrong suggest in lieu of dry, impersonal analysis of art is to insert an interpretive voice directly between the work and the viewer. They want to tell you exactly why they think a piece of art is good for you.

For example, the current description of Christ Appearing to His Mother in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York reads, in part: “This picture is the right panel of [Queen] Isabella’s triptych and can tentatively be attributed to her court artist Juan de Flandes on the basis of documentary and technical evidence. The center and left panels remain at Isabella’s burial site, the Capilla Real, Granada, where she bequeathed the triptych upon her death in 1504.”

Art as Therapy would substitute this historical tracking with something more like this: “This is an image of a loving mother-son relationship. But it does not avoid conflict or grief: these are precisely what the picture says are central to love. It is a very restrained image. They do not embrace. He will soon leave. How often has this scene been re-enacted. The picture makes the claim that such moments of return (and of survival), though fleeting and rare, are crucially important in life. It wants men to understand—and call—their mothers.”

That’s a fine approach for a newspaper column or a blog that is not official or definitive, text that does not claim to buttress the power of art in our lives. Critics can say what they want about art, no matter how wrongheaded or eccentric. But, as a comprehensive way of looking at art, de Botton and Armstrong’s approach makes not one but two wild assumptions. First, they assume what the artist’s intention was—did de Flandes explicitly try to paint that conflict and grief are central to love? Who knows?! I doubt he would have expressed it that way if he had expressed it at all. But worse, de Botton and Armstrong assume what’s going on—or what should go on—in the viewer’s own head. They have banished the viewer’s own imagination from the equation.

I have been a fan of de Botton for a couple of decades now. His early novels, especially, are brilliant at mapping the brain’s neuroses, the unique connections an individual’s experiences create. “Lucy lacked confidence in her intellectual capacities,” he writes in Kiss & Tell. “Afraid a conversation might grow beyond her comprehension, she had a habit of deflating matters to levels obviously below her. To discuss the politics of the Prime Minister would lead her to wonder how he combed his hair, consideration of a recent novel would elicit remarks on how the jacket cover matched the author’s eyes.” De Botton’s depictions of the idiosyncrasies of an individual’s emotional wiring is the opposite of universal. Lucy needs a counsellor for her problems, not a generic self-help guide. Yet in both Art as Therapy and The News, he plops his very specific expectations on us all.

There are times in Art as Therapy when I thought the authors were having me on, positing art as a propagandistic pharmaceutical: get the dosage right, take it with the right sort of criticism and you get a better life. I kept waiting for the joke to be unveiled: But of course art is not a drug! Of course our emotions are trickier than that! The punchline never came. They are dead serious.

The authors go so far as to commission an artwork according to an Art as Therapy-style brief: “Many couples have painful conflicts that break out over dinner. The spark often looks quite small, such as the way someone asked, ‘How was your day?’ which what feels like a sarcastic or sceptical intent….We would like an artwork to carry indications of an underlying but frustrated longing to be happy together. Perhaps the table is beautifully laid…. Can their suffering gain in dignity and be less catastrophic and lonely because of a work of art?”

Sounds like something Stalin might write if he cared more about matters of the heart than the grain harvest. But this is not satire, it’s sincere. As proof, there’s a photo by Jessica Todd Harper delivering on the brief’s dictates. Good for her, though you wonder if, while producing the piece, Harper wondered: Why don’t de Botton and Armstrong just go do this themselves? Besides, she didn’t quite get the RFP right: her table is not beautifully laid. Marshall McLuhan, who argued an artist’s power is discerning the environment we can not easily see—and seeing the future before others do—wouldn’t be impressed by this all-request-Friday approach to creativity.

The very appeal of visual art is that the space between the work and the observer is wide open. There are parameters, sure. But de Botton, more than anyone, should know how quirky human responses can be. Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire is both a gateway to the indescribably sublime and a provider of ideas for a new paint colour for the living room walls. Henri Matisse’s Dance (II) may conjure hope for some, but, in a certain mindset, it can conjure futility and desperation. The effects differ not only from observer to observer, but from day to day in a given observer. History changes the meaning of a piece of art more than any piece of critical text accompanying it. “Art,” declare de Botton and Armstrong, “has a powerfully therapeutic effect. It can variously help to inspire, console, redeem, guide, comfort, expand and reawaken us.” So true. But having someone guess how it should do so hurts rather than helps the process. Some of the text accompanying the show at the Art Gallery of Ontario seemed literally random, as if the authors had concocted a compelling meditation—a bit of chicken soup for the soul—and then rapidly chosen a work that might fit. You could easily imagine the therapeutic advice applied to another painting—or another hundred paintings—if the one on display hadn’t been brought to their attention. The specificity of any given piece vanishes in a wash of generic self-help.

The assessments laid out in The News seem less ridiculous, in part because de Botton doesn’t adopt a newly patented one-of-a-kind, super-duper self-help strategy in order to fix the mainstream media’s many problems.

He picks apart the failures of foreign news, cultural news and financial news with great astuteness. Foreign news and financial news, especially, are often stripped of all humanity—body counts and share prices reported without any sense of who’s dying and what’s been manufactured. “The financial news organizations have journalists embedded in some of the world’s most remote economic outposts. There are correspondents monitoring the wheat harvest in Saskatchewan, Canada, the progress of oil exploration off the coast of Brazil, the extraction of niobium and zirconolite in Malawi, the development of the next generation of commuter trains in the Ruhr Valley, Germany, the weaving of carbon-fibre aerospace panels in Chubu, Central Japan—and yet in spite of their extraordinary and privileged vantage points, these journalists are required to maintain a pinpoint focus on only such information as will help investors to answer one lone question: ‘To which companies should we commit our money?’”

But in an effort to produce a critique that is technologically neutral—de Botton focuses strictly on content, not delivery systems—he seems to ignore the established media’s current upheaval (I say “established” rather than “mainstream” because The New York Times and alternative weeklies are equally affected). It’s as if he’s talking about a time (perhaps an imaginary time but one that stands as a sturdy stereotype) when a citizen primarily got his or her news from a single newspaper, some hourly reports on the radio and an evening TV newscast. Even then, it’s as if magazines, weeklies and other news sources don’t exist in de Botton’s world. Sure, the daily financial news focuses on the bottom line, but Bloomberg Businessweek, say, is full of kooky characters and compelling narratives on which we can draw inspiration. The Economist may also be obsessed with data, but its writers often give us a quick snapshot of the people and places in which these trends and supply chains exist. It is certainly piecemeal. An idealist might suggest that instead of hourly updates about, say, the kidnapping of school girls in Nigeria, a 4,000-word piece about the country, the terrorist group doing the kidnapping and the lives of women there would be much more engaging and enlightening. But the fact that such hourly updates exist do not preclude that long feature. There are many journalists who dedicate themselves to such work.

In the chapter on photography, de Botton demonstrates his failure to see the mechanics of how news is produced. As a cultural critic, he does a great job of pointing out that great images communicate reams of information about their subjects, while poor images merely break up the text on a page. But it’s not like news organizations don’t want great images. It’s about talent, resources, timing and access. News organizations could wait until they get a compelling image of President Barack Obama before they publish one—but that could be weeks or months. Meanwhile, the Twitterati and blogosphere continue to talk about him, citizens still wonder what he’s up to.

There are indeed publications that wait for the right photo, the right story, the right writer, that try to rise above the 24-hour news cycle. Again, magazines seem to be something that deliver just what de Botton is asking for, but seems never to have encountered one he could cite in this book (he does quote a particularly bad piece of writing from The Economist, which seemed a little unfair. How about this as a way to improve the media: write better!). He seems to call for news to have some sort of codified system—perhaps not unlike the education system—but he ignores that the marketplace has created a system. Visual cues, language, venue and reputation guide gossip-seekers toward Us magazine and TMZ, thoughtful types toward the New York Review of Books and local shoppers toward their weekly flyers. Online publications like Slate and Salon have been particularly adept at blurring the line between highbrow and low brow, thoughtful and sensational, topical and enduring. In the west, we don’t rely on a single or handful of news organizations to surprise us and tell us what we want to know. We navigate between trite and deep as we see fit. Could the offerings be better? Oh yes. But that’s often an economic problem, not one of a commitment to quality or lack of thoughtfulness on the part of editors and producers.

The thing about de Botton as a consumer advocate is that he seems to lack faith in consumers themselves to bring their own insight to what they read and see, to know their own needs when they seek out and consume media and art. Certainly there are some consumers that take in only the loudest voices. But they have been with us always. And they are sometimes the consumers who also want a refined experience. Centrally planned art and news worlds can’t anticipate who wants what when. There’s no one door in.

This piece originally appeared on Suite.io.


Monday, June 30, 2014

Somebody's gotta do something about Toronto's Pride "Parade" (and what I think they should do)

Like dinner guests too polite to say the chicken's overcooked and the potatoes are inedible, Torontonians cheerfully show up year after year to see the city's annual Pride parade. But after this year's six-hour WorldPride non-spectacle, it's time to pull the hosts into the kitchen for a few words.

WorldPride, on the whole, was great. Pride Toronto promised big and delivered big, with a panache that seemed almost effortless. It takes amazing talent and dedication to pull off an event of this size and the Pride Toronto team has both. As to the locals who said things like, "WorldPride doesn't seem that much bigger than a regular Pride," I would point out that they probably had failed to change their own Pride habits to take in the whole 10-day festival. There's only so many people you can fit on Church Street; those who wandered off it were bound to be impressed. Every visitor I talked to had nothing but good things to say.

As someone who has followed the planning of WorldPride from the beginning, I can also say that it's astonishing it happened at all. There were several changes in Pride Toronto management and board approach and philosophy since the idea first emerged in 2006--yes, eight years ago. The fact that the WorldPride idea outlasted politics, both internal and external, tells you how good an idea it was. Unlike in other cities, Toronto's Pride celebrations always seem to transcend back-room drama, Any factionalism seems to, in the long run, produce a better event.

I will write more about these WorldPride successes in the future.

But back to the WorldPride parade. Or should I say the WorldPride march.

Having watched almost every parade, from beginning to end, since 2000 (I missed it two years ago when I was at WorldPride in London--let me tell you about THAT some day), I can tell you that Toronto's parade has been dull for some time. For budgetary or other reasons, the quality of the entries peaked in the early 2000s and has dwindled ever since. Few floats, not enough music, not enough planning in the entries, not enough inspiration and flair. Some much perfunctory, so little perfection.

Although there are always some spectacular exceptions (I won't risk leaving someone out by naming any of these stars), the bar has become quite low for creativity and craftsmanship (as a gentleman, I won't name these offenders either). For most entrants, a marching contingent with flags and Mardi Gras beads seems to be enough. God bless their hearts, but I have to say that as a spectator, standing in the hot sun, forgoing many other fun Pride activities, it's not enough.

It's nice that entrants are proud LGBTTIQQ2S or straight people supportive of the same. I love good intentions. But a parade is a parade, not a petition. It's a show! It's theatre! It's sensation and glitz! It's brazen and bold! It's emotional! It's quite possibly shocking! And, despite some exceptions, the Toronto parade is none of that. It is a march, punctuated by an occasional float and an occasional burst of music. It is a march that's bigger than the Trans March and less exhilarating than the Dyke March. But it's a march. The grand marshals, international guests and PFLAG have earned the public good will to get away with merely marching. For everyone else, it's just not enough.

And this year's WorldPride "parade" was... drum roll... more than six hours long. I gave up early. Most spectators did. It was hot. There are lots of other things to do. And, after a while, one union waving rainbow flags looks like one group of politicos waving rainbow flags. Unless you know the individual people marching--and most spectators do not--it's boring, boring, boring. A show of popular support and mass mobilization? Sure. But a show of how fabulous queer people are? Not quite.

When organizers promised an "enhanced" parade this year, I got my hopes up. But it seems "enhanced" was just code for "unbearably long."

The march of nations was a great idea. But the activists from around the world marched in silence, as if the only appropriate tone was reverent awe, not the joy Pride is supposed to foster. Where was the "Rise Up" theme song? As international delegation was followed by more and more marching contingents, their presence did not stand out as much as it should have. It was a missed opportunity.

But I am not a critic without suggestions. Here's how to fix the parade.

Each parade applicant--corporate or community, big group or small--will be asked to to have at least one "feature" in their entry. What a "feature" is is up for debate (some people might include "shirtlessness and sex appeal" but I wouldn't be so crass). But I would suggest a list that starts something like this:

- A float, that is, a decorated elevated platform on which participants can perform (note the word "perform" as opposed to, say, "stand listlessly")
- Live or recorded music, ideally chosen to represent the spirit of the entry
- Choreography
- Creative and/or matching costumes
- A novelty performance (eg, clown on stilts; drag queens acting out comedic vignettes) or novelty object (eg, confetti canon)
- Etc.

But wait, you say! You can't stop people from going in the Pride parade! Just because someone hasn't an ounce of creativity or the budget for a couple of dollar-store pompoms doesn't mean they can't show their pride! That's censorship! That's uninclusive!

But Pride applicants who don't have 20 minutes to come up with a little dance or a group cheer or some little joke that might provide delight to spectators, can indeed participate. Under my rules, they just follow all the groups who made a special effort to have a "feature." Their march will seamlessly immediately follow the actual parade. If spectators drift away after the transition, they have at least seen the best of the community.

For participants who don't like this two-tiered arrangement, it's an easy fix. Make an effort.

Under my system, if the real parade is 20 minutes and the march is five hours, that's fine--it'll be a great 20 minutes. And if it's six hours of parade and no marching contingents at all, then, at last, that's an afternoon well spent.

A successful parade isn't about body count. It's a demonstration of the vibrancy and creativity of a community. Numbers matter in elections, not in fabulousness.

Wednesday, May 14, 2014

Catching up with my spring output


After a particularly demanding contract as publications coordinator at Hot Docs, I am finally focusing on writing again.

Which isn't to say I haven't published quite a bit so far in 2014.

In the past couple of months I've published the long feature "How Bombardier’s experiment became ground zero for Mexico’s economic revolution" in Canadian Business magazine, "13 Things You Should Know About Customer Service" in Reader's Digest, "How to Sell to Foreign Governments" and "One Way to Trade (and Get Paid) Faster" for Profit magazine and, further afield, an essay about PEI's tourism industry for National Geographic Traveller India (the piece isn't available online, but this link provides a sampler of the April issue in which it's contained).

I've also continued working as a contributing editor at IN magazine, covering gender non-conformity (it's a bit of a head-spinner, but I have to say that everyone I talked to was exceptionally nice and had a sense of humour) and gay life in three Indian cities. I have a few fun projects coming up for IN mag, including one heart-string-tugger.

Monday, February 24, 2014

Seat mates from hell... maybe not so bad?

I've just started blogging over at Suite101.com,the Vancouver-based blogging site which is currently going through a rebirth. My first piece is about travel: The horror and the value of sitting next to some who is so uniquely awful they might actually be the highlight of the trip. You can read the whole thing here.