Building community and excitement

The one thing I regret not including in this piece for Yonge Street Media--you can only fit so much in one story--is one of the triggers for Playing for Keeps and other programs designed to generate excitement about the Pan Am/Parapan Games. 

That is: Organizers, including some city councillors, attended the Pan Am Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, in 2011 and saw how excited people were about the Games. The city was abuzz. And Canadians started to worry that Toronto would look blasé by comparison.

So, a lot of the windup to the Games was motivated by fear of looking dull and boring.

Not an unuseful fear.

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.

What's really been in and out of the parade

There's been so much vigorous (acrimonious?) debate over whether the group Queers Against Israeli Apartheid (QuAIA) should be allowed to march in Toronto's Pride parade, there's been little I felt I could add. But it's dawned on me today that both sides have been making not-quite-right statements about the parade's history.

As someone who's watched every parade since 2000 from beginning to end (Oy! I know! I'll never get those hours back!), I wanted to add some facts to the mix.

Several times I've read city councillor Kyle Rae implying that the content in the parade has historically been queer-specific. "What they were doing is bringing in another issue into a queer community event," he told the Globe And Mail.

Well, in past parades, I've seen anti-meat signage, anti-fur signage, "Free Tibet" signage, anti-Catholic signage and anti-Pope signage (more on the Pope in a moment). Is it true to assume Pride messaging is always positive or, if negative, aimed only at those who oppress LGBT people? Tell that to the Latin American Coalition Against Racism that marched in 2000 or the people from Gays Liberation Against the Right Everywhere who, with Rae, founded Pride Toronto in 1981. Or the marchers in 1999 who chanted "Homelessness is a national disgrace."

The 2001 parade included Jewish Women Against The Occupation and people with signs stating "Bi Babes say screw the FTAA!"

All of these causes are debatable, some of them controversial. None are queer-specific. Neither is nudism, really--I've heard that even straight people are naked under their clothes--but nobody has questioned the desire of the group Totally Naked Men Enjoying Nudity (TNT!MEN) to march in the parade, even as they've questioned their right to. (As an aside: One of the criticisms I've heard levelled against QuAIA is that they're nothing but attention-seekers. Uhhh, it's a parade. Everybody who wants to be in a parade is an attention-seeker. It's the single common denominator of parade participants.)

The Toronto parade I've witnessed (endured?) has historically operated with the assumption that queer people who have what I'll call "generic" interests are permitted to, er, expose them in the parade. I haven't done a statistical breakdown, but I would bet that at least 25 percent of parade participants are queer people expressing generic interests, from their religion to their admiration for CBC radio to their distaste of the current government, whoever that might be. It's understandable that Councillor Rae has missed this; he's spent more time in the parade--and in the early days organizing the parade--than watching it. But the parade I've watched glide down Yonge Street year after year has never been a single voice speaking with a single unified message; it's a cacophony. If something in it doesn't make you uncomfortable, you're not paying enough attention.

Now, although the gayness of TNT!MEN's exhibitionist tendencies have not been questioned, their right to participate in the parade has. When Pride's executive director Tracey Sandilands talks about the words "Israeli Apartheid" making attendees "uncomfortable," she seems to be forgetting or ignoring the discomfort TNT!MEN's weenies have caused over the years. In the early 2000s, there were complaints about them almost every year. Prior to joining in the parade in 1999, then mayor Mel Lastman reportedly tried to pressure Pride organizers to get TNT!MEN to cover up. In the early 2000s, there were times when volunteer marshals at the staging grounds encouraged them to do so. Around that time, Pride adopted a semi-official hands-off policy with regard to nudity: organizers would pass on warnings from the police and inform participants that illegal behaviour would not be condoned. In 2002, police did arrest parade nudists, leading seven of them off in handcuffs, their asses still hanging out. The charges were eventually dropped and, as far as I know, neither the cops nor organizers have interfered with nudists in the parade since then. The nudists were never banned, but they have often been discouraged and, at the very least, were left to fend for themselves.

Which brings me to a not-quite-right claim I've been hearing from critics of Pride: that "Israeli Apartheid" is the first time Pride Toronto has censored something in the parade.

Actually, the kooky cult the Raelians were censored in the 2004 parade. They had brought signs that I believe criticized the Roman Catholic Pope, John Paul II, but I can't say for sure because the words on their signs (and they had a lot) were covered up with black tape and other makeshift coverings. The signs you could read said, "Not Allowed By Pride."

You could argue that the QuAIA case is the first time Pride has voted to censor a group, but, in a way, that's preferable to a last-minute crackdown because it opens debate prior to the event and allows the group time to challenge the decision. Also, at that time, Pride's board members, rather than paid staff, ran the festival. I don't know who called for or who approved the Raelian censorship, but I'm sure board members were either involved or close by. Nowadays, volunteers and paid staff can't be confident the board members will be on site to give such advice--the organic connection between community and organization has been severed by the professionalization of Pride, by money, so to speak--so the hands-on people obviously want these things settled before the event.

Regardless of whether a vote for censorship is better or worse than impromptu censorship, the bald fact of censorship has reared its head at Pride before.

Most of this information is available in the pre-2005 archives of Xtra.ca; my memory isn't that good.

The Tories & Pride

I swear. It's not like Ablonczy used any of the words in the LGBT lexicon when she was handing over the money. She must have some kind of plausible deniability. Can't she claim she thought Pride was a casino?

But seriously. Either there is a set of criteria for the federal tourism money or it is a pork-barrel program where MPs pick and choose who gets what. This kerfuffle, and the treatment of poor Diane Ablonczy, suggests that latter, which should be far more embarrassing for any legitimate government than the complaints of a few rightwingers.

If there are criteria--and I'm sure there must be--it would be hard to imagine Pride Toronto, with its size and economic impact, being excluded for any reason other than discrimination based on sexual orientation which, the last time I looked, was against the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Either way, it makes the Conservatives look very, very bad. Pork barrellers or anti-Charter discriminators. Take your pick.

AGO a go-go

It took me a long time and several visits to take in the newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario. Unlike my initial visits to the renovated Royal Ontario Museum--it should be apparent now that the do-a-bit-have-an-opening-do-a-bit-have-an-opening approach frittered away any sense of the magic of the place--it was a process of discovery, as each turned unveiled something surprising and usually delightful. There's already been volumes of commentary written, but here's my two-cents:
- The grand glass front and the Via Italia are great, but they are misleading in their architectural claims to be the main lure, which is actually the new contemporary galleries in the blue box hidden in the back. Only by approaching from Grange Park do you realize that it's the star attraction.
- With all the new floor spaces, they succumbed to the temptation to throw too much Cornelius Krieghoff on the floor. Habitant overkill.
- The themed exhibits find an ideal balance with chronologically arranged work--I think to organize things by pure theme would be too disorienting, but I can tell you that the work that was more contextualized held my attention for much longer. It's a much harder gallery to sweep through now.
- The new contemporary galleries remind me a little of the Whitney and it's a fun playing the "I remember where this was before" game in there.
- The new audio info devices look cool but the OS is not so intuitive as it should be.
- I want to host a party on one of the upper spiral staircases. This is one public building where the elevators will be seriously underused.
- The miniature boat collection in the basement seems random but, strangely, is a weirdly refreshing break from art history, per se.

It's already clear that in the tortoise-hare race between the AGO and the ROM that the tortoise has won the race.