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.

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.

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.

The horror beneath the dining room

What is it with the state of Toronto's restaurant washrooms?

If you've dined out in the city, you know what I mean. Not all establishments are guilty. You usually find the classic example in a storefront dining room, maybe on an established commercial street like Queen or Yonge or Dundas. Long narrow spaces in older buildings. Not a lot of elbow room. Owners, like any smart business people, want to maximize their seating area and their revenue.

So what to do with a non-monetized space like the WC? Well you stick it in the basement, of course.

Being in the basement is not an inherently awful thing. I have been in a considerable number of nice basements in my life. But in Toronto, it's like there's a bylaw that requires stylistic neglect of all subterranean rooms containing or purporting to contain running water. These facilities are treated as if there's not a part of the establishment at all. Perhaps they are contracted out to property managers in the developing world.

The other day I was at Soos, a Malaysian fusion restaurant on Ossington, Like many of its Ossington-strip peers, it's a fashionable spot, with attention to every dining-room detail. One wall is painted with evocative red lanterns. A big spiky lighting fixture in the centre of the room is set off against funky mechanic's lights hanging over the tables. A vintage-looking wooden screen separates the front room from the bar. It's all exceedingly tasteful. There was a huge table of fashion-retail types there the night I was there, every hair in place, making me feel like I should be drinking a cosmo.

The food was pretty, too. Not to mention tasty. Especially the pork belly pancakes.

The stairs to the loo, worn wood, were not out of character from main room. No, you had to make the full descent. Stepping onto the basement floor was like pulling back the curtain at a vaudeville theatre. It was an alternative universe, perhaps lorded over by an ornery junkyard owner for whom aesthetics are both offensive and cumbersome.

Bulkheads in the hallway, bulkheads over the sink where I bonked my head. The tile and fixtures were so dated, so cheap and blah, they might have been purchased at a fire sale in 1979. They might have been given away by a low-end contractor. The paper towel dispenser would not have been out of place in a prison.

It was not dirty. Everything worked. I won't compare it to a gas station washroom. But not a smidge of attention had been paid to its appearance and comfort. So it was comparable to a very clean, well-maintained gas station washroom. Except it was underneath a trendy restaurant.

Soos is not unusual. I have been in the washrooms of nice Toronto restaurants where non-functioning urinals have been covered with garbage bags, where mops are left standing by the sink, where soap coats a cheap plastic soap bottle, where the toilets are baby blue, where the caps on the sink's taps are missing.

None of this is the end of the world. But why on earth, when a restaurant is trying to create an environment for which $50 a person is the starting price for a decent meal, do Torontonians put up with it?

Is it because no one wants to admit they go to the bathroom, not even restaurant owners?

Bothering billionaires

Having worked on a project for Canadian Business magazine a couple of months ago that involved chasing down retired CEOs, I can tell you that contacting billionaires for the Richest People in Canada feature was much much harder. I didn't talk to a single one, though I did chat with the son of one of them.

My billionaires mostly made their money on real estate development, food retail and franchises. Aside from that, it's hard to generate advice based on their successes. Some started poor, some were born into money. Some have been impressive philanthropists, others not so much. Some are highly social, others more reclusive and/or belligerent.

All of them, by the time they're worth billions, are pretty hard to get access to. Although there is no record that Louis Reichmann, for example, the most reclusive of the Reichmann brothers, has passed away, I had difficulty finding evidence he is still alive. So writing the simple sentence, "Paul Reichmann is survived by three brothers" was not so simple at all.

My response to Sky Gilbert's critique of my IN Toronto piece on celebrities coming out

It's always flattering when someone you admire takes issue with something you said, since, at the very least, you were worth responding to. 

So I'm glad Sky Gilbert took umbrage with my piece in this month's IN Toronto magazine, which asks the bratty question "Does coming out even matter anymore?"

Sky's critique is here.

I responded to Sky directly and wanted to share my response here, for the record.
---

Hi Sky,

I appreciate your thoughtful essay and feel delighted and honoured that you took the time to respond to what I wrote.

My piece was meant to be a playful riff on a series of ideas around coming out. (It all started when a friend of mine complained that there were too many out actors and not enough out scientists, which was a weird notion I wanted to unpack.)

It might have been hard to figure out what I was saying in the piece because I was deliberately trying to be non-prescriptive--evasive even. I didn't want to tell anybody what to think or do with their lives, nor give a thumbs up or thumbs down to different celebrities. Rather, I was throwing some ideas and stereotypes into the air to see them crash into each other, hopefully provoking readers into examine their own feelings about famous people coming out. I purposely eschewed answering the headline's question so readers could answer it themselves. And you've done so yourself quite forcefully and I'm glad of that.

But I hope I was clear, especially when I write about the "enduring value of coming out"--that's the bit near the end where I laid my cards on the table--that, despite my cavalier approach and the provocative headline, I still think coming out is very important. Perhaps I buried the lead.

I just think coming out publicly has a very different social meaning than it did a decade or 20 years ago. That's progress, though not the end of our labours.

Rob Ford's substance abuse problem

People love to quibble over "addiction." It's a term that suggests a medical condition with specific symptoms (for example, you start to shake if the substance is withdrawn) and specific treatments (methadone, AA meetings).

That's why I much prefer talking about drug and alcohol problems. A problem is something an outsider can determine without knowing the biochemistry, thoughts and feelings of the person in question. A problem doesn't presume to know what's going on inside a person, only how the person is doing in the world.

Toronto mayor Rob Ford has said again and again that he's not an addict--it's something he's entitled to say. It could be true. But his addiction or non-addiction is irrelevant. That's why councillors need to focus on his drug and alcohol problem--Ford undeniably has one.

Ford might not crave a drink or a fix. Ford might use only occasionally. But if drugs or alcohol (or drugs and alcohol, as seems to be the case) harms his work and personal relationships, it's a problem. It may not be a problem for Ford himself--I've known some users who have had a great time drunk or high--but it is is for the people around him who have to respond to his doped up behaviour. Those who are affected decide if there's a problem, not the user.

It's a problem if someone's missing time at work. It's a problem if it hurts performance. It's a problem if someone become belligerent and abusive. It's a problem if the lies needed to continue using drugs and alcohol create headaches and heartaches for the people around the user. Falling asleep on the job, spending chunks of the workday meeting up with  an alleged drug dealer friend, showing up at public events drunk--all problems, regardless of whether Rob Ford is an addict or alcoholic or not.

The salacious drama of the crack video--the video! the video! the video!--has distracted people from the central issue. Yes, it's shocking that the mayor of Toronto has smoked crack, that he was in such a drunken stupor that his memories of the experience are vague. I'm sure the video, if we ever get to see it, will be both hilarious and troubling.

But I'm more interested in the problems created by what Rob Ford did in that seedy room. Where should he have been? Conducting city business? Spending time with his kids? How did he get home afterwards? What actions did he take, if any, to obtain and/or destroy the video or punish its owners? How much trouble has six months of his lying about the video caused for his friends, family, co-workers and the citizens of Toronto? How much trust has been destroyed?

It doesn't really matter if it was crack or meth or pot or tobacco in Rob Ford's pipe if troublesome things came of his smoking it.

Ford's opponents like to throw everything they don't like about Ford into a big bag, shake it and offer it up as evidence toward removing him from office. That includes his policies (the man ripped up bike lanes!), his sleazy populist tactics, his slovenly appearance, his crassness, his violation of council rules, his negative attitudes toward LGBT people and other minorities, as well as his substance abuse problem. For these opponents, the crack video is just another embarrassing, frustrating thing, like the "subways, subways, subways" mantra.

This "He's awful and needs to go" generalization confuses the issue. It distracts as much as Rob Ford's own "I am not an addict" shtick.

No matter what you think about the direction Rob Ford has taken the city in, his competence in doing so or his personal style, these are things for voters to decide. We are allowed to vote for incompetent people, even addicts, for that matter. But it is clear from all kinds of evidence, not just the video and the expansive police files, that the man has a substance abuse problem that needs to be addressed. And it needs to be addressed by the people around him who are most affected. His family, his staff and, on behalf of the citizens of Toronto, his fellow councillors.

Toronto councillors can't force Rob Ford into treatment, but they can refuse to stop cleaning up his mess.

How a children’s film out-bleaked the season’s three anxiety-causing hits

A note: This piece contains spoilers.

This season’s three runaway critically acclaimed hits—Gravity, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave—have all leveraged that classic piece of advice about good dramatic writing. Tie the audience to a relatable protagonist, competent yet not inherently heroic. Put that protagonist in jeopardy. Keep him or her there. Put them in more jeopardy. Repeat until the audience can't take it anymore, then go further.

Mortal danger is usually most effective in getting audiences to tense their muscles, clench their jaw and  prepare themselves to look away from the screen if need be, though a filmmaker might go further than that and inflict pain, humiliation, self-doubt and dark pasts upon our worthy avatars. Only when they have totally brutalized us will we accept we’ve seen a great film.

The lightest of this season’s three masochistic masterpieces (which is saying something), Gravity focuses on danger that taps into space-age existential angst. Its harrowing threat is getting lost in infinity, a surprisingly claustrophobic place, more like suffocating in an endless wash of molasses. If Sandra Bullock’s Astronaut Ryan Stone is not attached to something—anything—she will drift into space die. EM Forster probably never imagined so literal a depiction of his maxim “Only connect.”

Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave are more layered and topical, not surprising since both are based on true stories. That’s some reassurance going in—you know they lived to tale the tale. 12 Years even gives you a time limit. Both films lack the technologically produced astral beauty that makes Gravity so watchable. They provide no distraction from their assault.

Tom Hanks’s Phillips, captain of a cargo ship that must pass through Somali pirate territory, faces down humanized blowback from the inequities of abstract global capitalist systems. We in the Western world thought we could hoard the world’s wealth, but, no, the losers in our divided world will find a way to grab something for themselves, putting people who don’t even consider themselves to be on the front lines of this class war in harm’s way. Not of this is spoken. You just pick it up from the setting and the expressions on the characters’ faces.

12 Years a Slave, about a free black man in the US North who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in the South pre-1865, is even more deeply engaged in social criticism, giving an innocent and naïve free man a dehumanizing guided tour of the savagery that was necessary at all levels to maintain the savage system of slavery. At first Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) suffers under a somewhat sympathetic plantation owner played by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have no recollection of his character’s name is nor do I think I was meant to have one—Cumberbatch is a mere amalgam of everyone who presents themselves as good and kind yet blames “the system” for their failure to act on these supposed virtues. Michael Fassbender, who plays Northup’s second owner is a much more singular character. Who can say whether slavery turned him into a sociopath or whether it merely lured his already warped personality into its horror-filled kingdom?

In all three films, Stone, Phillips and Northup find inner courage and tenacity, if not always to get themselves out of their predicaments, then at least to make the best of it, practically and soulfully. These films’ power comes from their relentlessly sharp focus—the filmmaker’s decision to cut away most of the padding that usually goes into building a world, building characters, explaining context, creating a framework of relationships the audience can grab onto. For directors Alfonso Cuarón, Paul Greengrass and Steve McQueen, it’s all peril from the word go.

Unlike last year’s Life of Pi, for example, which also dropped its protagonist into mortal danger and kept him there, there’s little time spent on the characters’ lives before or after the story’s crisis. Gravity’s biggest flaw was the tacked-on feel of Stone’s backstory (thank God there were no flashbacks to her daughter before her death) while Captain Phillips’s misstep was the perfunctory and clichéd introductory scenes of Phillips’ home life (and Catherine Keener’s bad hair). 12 Years a Slave’s quick introductory sketch of Northup’s family life was certainly the most treacly part of an otherwise unsentimental film, though director Steve McQueen’s worst decision was to cast Brad Pitt as the Jesus-y looking Canadian who “saves” Northup; that role should never have been deified by star power. The films work best when they keep the audience in the moment. Gravity and Captain Phillips, especially, operate almost in real time; 12 Years a Slave just felt like it was that long.

As tough as these films were to watch, their makers realize the pleasure of viewer masochism comes not in the torture itself, but in the release from it. And release they did. All three films deliver short, sharp and astonishingly uncomplicated happy endings—Disney could hardly do better.

Once adrift, Stone returns to Earth’s loving pull; the mud virtually hugs her. Phillips, once he calms down, will go back to his messy haired wife, his cleverness acknowledged and respected, his uptightedness vindicated. When Northrup leaves his slave labour and hops in the carriage that has come to rescue him, we know in that moment that he is free because his white friend has a bigger hat and a more steely-eyed gaze than crazy, crazy Fassbender. We gasp in relief. The momentary worry that Northrup’s wife may have remarried—that his family may not want him back—is quickly pushed aside. Like Hanks in Captain Phillips’ final scene, the audience finally exhales and shudders like a panic attack has just ended.

Tense films, but their happy endings betray their intentions. They want the audience to leave satisfied. Case closed. Our surrogate is home safe. None of them as bleak as Ender’s Game, which messes with the recipe to deliver a darker message that should follow filmgoers home. Yes, darker than slavery because its ideas inform slavery and world history before and after slavery.

Based on a 1980s novel, Ender’s Game is not a well-made film. It had the rushed, clunky feeling of a work that compensates for overcompression of the source material with clunky overexplanation and uneven pacing. Its effort to attract both younger and older audiences leaves it satisfying neither. Many of the performances are laughable—the talented Viola Davis looks like she had no idea what movie she’s in.

But the film’s ending—the revelation that concludes young Ender Wiggin’s (Asa Butterfield) tests and torments as a trainee to lead the Earth’s forces against possible alien invaders—is as far from Hollywood happy as you can get. Most films are about love, courage, strength and trueness to oneself. This one’s about power, tactics and deceit. It nod to empathy as a virtue, but it doesn’t have a heart. Perhaps it hopes the audience has one, but even that’s not certain.

Despite his savvy in combat both personal and intergalactic—perhaps because of this savvy—Ender is bullied by his brother, his peers and his handlers in the future Earth’s military-industrial complex. He’s been recruited as their saviour but, like Harry Potter, is left to figure out the “how” on his own. Excessive violence usually works.

Unlike Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers, though, which reveals itself to be a satire of fascism, and which attempts (unsuccessfully, one might argue) to make its audience feel bad for cheering on the humans in their aggression toward the enemy, Ender’s Game’s POV on its fascistic future society is not so clear—are we to despise or admire it?

As a good messiah should, Ender cleverly navigates through all the obstacles put before him and even wins allies. But then, in startling reveal, discovers he’s been had—the obstacles were not what they seemed. What should be a triumphant Hollywood movie ending—he and his team of misfits succeed in a computer simulation of a war against their insect enemies—turns into something radically different. The simulations were actually real. He was not playing an elaborate videogame, he was waging real war. In demonstrating that he could, theoretically, destroy an enemy planet, Ender does destroy an enemy planet. And is filled with not with joy, but remorse. There were other ways of winning, he suspects, that would not have caused so much harm.

The Ender books have been criticized for depicting a protagonist who commits violence but who remains innocent because harm was not his intention. But just because the saviour is untainted, culpability doesn’t vanish. It moves elsewhere. It moves onto the system which lied and manipulated him. The systems humans create are perfectly capable of destroying us, even if those pulling the strings have created technicalities that depersonalize that culpability. Tactics wow us but they are not our humanity.

In Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave (Gravity doesn’t think so much about these themes—how we wreak evil on ourselves), our protagonists are reborn merely by escaping the trials the system has thrown in their way. Once Phillips and Northup are happy, we’re happy.

Ender’s Game doesn’t let us off the hook so easily. If we’re uneasy with a child being manipulated into genocide, the manipulation itself must be unpacked, even if the peril faced by the child has ended.

By delivering their heroes to such clear safety, Captain Phillips and 12 Years a Slave relieve of us of our worry for the individual we have bonded to. They allow us to put their peril behind us, even though the world that created their troubles continues. Domestic contentment is restored in the foreground.

For all their seriousness, this kind of thrill isn’t so different from what you might get from a roller coaster. Once it’s done, it’s done. In Ender’s Game, we still have much to work through.

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.

A loyalty program only for the affluent and tech savvy

About 56.4 per cent of Canadians have a smart phone, which is a lot of Canadians. But that means 44.6 per cent don't have them. And that 44.6 per cent might as well forget about engaging in the Loblaws PC Plus reward program.

Launched in March, one of Canada's highest profile retailers has created the lowest profile loyalty program.

Admittedly, there are signed offers in stores. I found three points offers after about 45 minutes of searching around the Loblaws at Dundas and Bloor in Toronto. For example, I could earn 400 points buying $5 worth of bottled curry. That's about 40 cents worth of shopping when I hit a points threshold--20,000 points get you $20 in groceries.

But the real action is on your phone. Each week I get supposedly customized offers in an online account. There, the point accumulation can be impressive. 1,000 points for each $5 spent on fresh produce--that's about 20 per cent off. Buy $100 worth of produce and get $20 back. Or 1,000 points for a $2.29 bottle of flavoured water--that's 40 per cent off. The digital offers are far superior--and far more abundant, from what I can tell--than the bricks and mortar offers.

But unless you a master memorizer, you must carry a smart phone with you to exploit the rewards. Otherwise, you'd have no idea what your offers are as you wander the aisles.

Which raises the question: who is PC Plus for? Not for everybody. Lower income Canadians can't afford cell phones. Seniors often don't have them. And even then, who walks around a grocery store flicking through items on their phone to see if they match up with what they might buy? Probably not parents with their kids or people in a rush.

It is certainly following a trend. PC Plus is a step toward gamefication--it makes shopping like a treasure hunt, where you must match the items you're sent with what's available. But it's needless complicated. The threshold to entry is way too high.

Technical glitches make things worse. When I bought my $6.02 worth of produce, I saw that I hadn't received my points. I was told that "digital produce offers" (ask someone from 1992 to parse that term) sometimes don't register properly. So I had to call customer service which, moments after I went through the checkout, was able to call up my receipt to see that I had bought more than $5 in produce. They promptly issued me my points and I thought, wow, he exactly what I'm having for dinner!

Obviously, chasing loyalty points is something you need money to do. But introducing a loyalty program that serves only the most diligent and connected Canadians seems ridiculously exclusive for a mainstream retailer. It's almost as if Loblaws is saying: If you can't afford a smart phone, you can't afford to shop here.

The devil in disguise

My first official piece for Canadian Business magazine just went up, about the arms race between Canadian pharmacies and their illicit imitators. 

Last problems standing

When I hear the "Oh no, the US is going to meddle in the Middle East again" reaction to the discussion about intervention in Syria, I think of something one of my professors said in a lecture during my first year of journalism school.

One of the reasons we're so obsessed with cancer and AIDS (this was 1989), he said, was that modern medicine had eradicated most of the other diseases that killed us. They were the last killers standing and so we ascribed them with special meaning and special status.

When you look at how many conflicts there were in, say, Latin America or Southeast Asia and the many US interventions, for better or worse, in those countries right up to the early 1990s, the metaphor seems to apply to geopolitics, too.

Not that we're at the The End of History. But it does feel like the clash-of-civilizations trope that feeds Middle Eastern fatalism is shortsighted. All we know for sure about Middle Eastern problems is that they have so far last a couple of decades more than serious conflicts in other regions. A couple of decades is not much in the span of human history, though it certainly is horrific when measured in a lifetime. The immediate cost of these problems is awful, but that does not mean they are different category of problem.

FaceTime? Maybe if you put the phone down for a minute

I find the new iPhone ad sad and lonely. You want to take the phone out of the hands of the supposedly real people in the ad and tell them, "Live in the moment for a moment and maybe talk to the person who's next to you."

Or I could be less charitable. Like my thoughts about the people who run into you when they're striding down the street with their eyes glued to the screen of their phone. I always imagine a careening truck just around the corner.

Slugging it out

I wonder how bad Toronto traffic will have to get before slugging takes off here?

The Like-ification of journalism

Bert Archer has a point here as he decries the outrage over Rolling Stone magazine's Dzokhar Tsarnaev cover, which, in an earlier era, might have been lauded as audacious, not criticized as offensive.

But I think the problem is more specific than a general decline in media literacy. People's expectations of how a story should make them feel--of their range of possible reactions--has narrowed dramatically.

I blame Facebook and its Like button.

Social media is a great way to pass stories around--and a great way for publishers to build audience. But the main circulatory system is Facebook's Like. People tend to Like things they agree with, that they think are interesting, attractive or aspirational. But a well-written story about villain or social evil--or especially stories that are morally ambiguous, that leave the reader uncertain about who is right and who is wrong and how they feel about it--doesn't fit into the structure of Like. People don't know what to do with their reaction.

If a reader appreciates, say, the writing but not the subject of a profile, if they savour the way the issues are explored, but not the conclusions offered by the writer, if they admire the subject but not the tone in which the subject was covered, will their Facebook friends understand the nuance? Probably not. So they don't Like. The story stands outside acceptable conversation circles.

Smart web publications know this. A great social media story has a single clear idea that generates a purely positive (or sometimes purely negative) reaction: Isn't this great! Or, with the addition of a comment, Isn't this awful? (You can Like the petition link.)

There are times when I think context (say, do nearby residents have problems with the otherwise admirable project? Will the prototype super-project ever be manufactured or be affordable?) is deliberately suppressed by some online publishers in order to fast-track the stories into celebratory social media. Ambivalence is the enemy.

That's how a story gets read nowadays--it get Liked.

But publish a cover featuring a handsome, "ordinary looking" young man who is an alleged bomber--a cover which doesn't use graphics or text to guide judgement--is to ask readers to react in a way that Facebook does not allow.... Isn't this great! No. Isn't this awful! .... Maybe?

To use a home improvement metaphor: The Dzokhar Tsarnaev cover story was a Philips screw, not a nail. But Facebook gives users only a hammer.

Of course, they get frustrated.

In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote about how technologies not only extend our capacity, they also amputate part of us. Automobiles allow us to travel long distances effortlessly, at a cost of restricting our bodily movements during the trip. Social media allows us to massively increase our ability to get a message out into the world, but it is amputating our range of possible emotional reactions.

Three unspeakable observations

I think Pope Francis, who seems genuinely humble, is doing an impressive job at reframing the image of the Roman Catholic church. 

I think the Harper government, specifically Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird, is doing a decent job on international human rights (let's go after Russia now, shall we? Perhaps Canada can host Pride House at the Sochi Olympics).

Closer to home, my garbage collection has been better (less mess on the street after pick up) since Rob Ford privatized it (I feel bad for the lost union jobs, but I'm speaking purely as a consumer).

Do these achievements affect my global view of these leaders? Not so much. Don't get me started on the Roman Catholic church's larger problems with sex, gender and social justice, the Harper government's job on international trade (or domestically--whoa!) or Rob Ford's vision, honesty, competence or mental health. But sometimes you have to give credit where credit is due, even if it doesn't change your vote.

When our shopping moves online, what takes the place of our favourite brick-and-mortar stores?

 Following on my griping about the Shoppersization of Canadian downtowns, this Economist article reminded me of the broader trends that have helped boost Shoppers’ ubiquity. We don’t really go downtown to buy things anymore.  

It’s not just that we’re buying more stuff online. It’s that many of those things that are best suited for online shopping—music, collectibles, books and periodicals—have also provided the best “third spaces” where enthusiasts can loiter and bump into other like-minded people—the reasons why people have loved shopping downtown. Bookstores, music stores, collectible boutiques and magazine stands are places where browsing without purpose can be a form of identity expression. Their disappearance (into the digital economy) is changing the character of our commercial streets, especially as more mission-driven shopping (hardware, household goods—stuff that can't be “dematerialized”) moves online and to big box outlets beyond our downtowns.

But wait—our downtown streets seem to be as lively as ever before. I think that’s because the rise of restaurant culture and burgeoning neighbourhood bar scenes have filled in the gap.

Storefronts where retailers used to sell "things" are now occupied by businesses offering experiences. The customers who produce “the scene” are as much the product as the food or beverages. Deprived of being able to loiter in the Heavy Metal section of a local music shop, we find a restaurant or bar that, through other means, puts us in close proximity with our demographic. We eat or drink together, rather than shop together.

Perhaps we’re looking at a world where there is little downtown retail other than convenience and food shopping. Thus the rise of Shoppers as a place to buy things you won’t travel any distance for (toilet paper, shampoo) or can’t wait to be delivered (drugs, a soft drink on a hot day).

What will keep our downtowns fun is discovering the next hot food trend, not hanging around in Sam the Record Man all day. It's a tastier pastime  but, compared to the browsing the CD bins, a pricier one.

Prefab leak

Exhibiting symptoms of Internet-distraction-itis, this week I went from watching the Stars video “Hold on When You Get Love and Let Go When You Give it” to co-lead singer Torquil Campbell’s voluminous Twitter feed. When I read Campbell's tweet, “All thats left online of the prefab album which recently surfaced and vanished. I've heard it though....,” I went on a frenzied mission to see if I could dig up the alleged album, employing nefarious means if I had to.

I found it. It’s been dubbed The Devil Came A-Callin’ which is also the name of one of the tracks. For Prefab Sprout fans, it’s manna from heaven. Devotees ascribe band leader Paddy McAloon with legendary song-writing powers, though his output has been minuscule since the early 1990s. So the fact that the leaked album is also very good—and very satisfying for fans—is enough to make me delirious.

It’s hard to tell when the 10 songs were written and recorded. The band's last release, Let’s Change the World with Music, came out in 2009 but was comprised of demos recorded in 1993. That album had a grand self-important sound that came across as bit stilted and surprisingly sentimental for a band that built its reputation on being anti-romantic (One of their best known songs, “Cars and Girls” from 1988, was an attack on Bruce Springsteen’s supposedly limited view of matters of the heart). It didn't have much humour.

This new mystery album channels the looser, raw quirkiness of the early albums, though the song craft is some of Paddy McAloon’s best. There are no breathy vocals from Wendy Smith, so we have to assume that the material is, at the very least, more recent than 2000, when Smith reportedly left the band.

Is it real? Of course it is. There’s the exuberant glee of “The Best Jewel Thief in the World,” the soulful “Mysterious” and the heartbreaking “Grief Built the Taj Mahal,” where McAloon chases Gershwin as doggedly as he ever has.

No word on if and when the album will be released—no word acknowledging the thing at all—but some of us will certainly will be raking the sky, “listening for smudged echoes of the moment of creation” until it appears.

Amazing Race Canada: Are we by nature hammier than Americans or do our TV shows just make us look that way?

You could complain that a trip across Canada is not even close to a trip around the world—no culture shock, no money-changing confusion, no unfamiliar signage and, for the most part, no language barriers (we'll see what happens if the race goes to rural Quebec). It should be easy sailing for the teams on Amazing Race Canada.

But what struck me most about the show’s debut was how the transition from US to Canada revealed the format’s cracks and crevices. And not just in the slightly less dynamic camera work and the slightly slower editing.

Firstly, there’s the over-the-top product placement. Air Canada, Interac and Chevrolet commercials interrupted scenes where Air Canada, Chevrolet and Interac were the main drivers of the action--we got a better look at their debit cards than the Blue Bear. Who says Canadians are more reluctant to sell their souls than our American neighbours?

Then then was the contestant selection: A Canadian Forces sniper who lost both his legs below the knee, a dad with Parkinson’s, twin sisters, gay cowboys, actress/model sisters, former PSA stars—each team seems to have been chosen for a larger-than-life signature attribute, a marker that sets them aside from an average Canadian, perhaps in the hopes of making the teams memorable in the muddle of bland niceness that was exhibited in the debut. CTV takes Amazing Race’s approach to diversity and turns it up to 11.

If the handy labels don’t work in differentiating the teams, then excessive coaching might. Many of the teams seem louder and cockier than I bet they are in real life. The one thing about the US Amazing Race is that the teams tend to be amazingly unguarded—they bicker and sabotage like no one is watching. Perhaps it’s the way contestants are selected, perhaps the exotic locations are suitable disorienting, perhaps it's pure American guilelessness. The way the American contestants talk seems exactly the way they might talk to their friends and co-workers.

The Canadians, by contrast, seemed almost theatrical. The expressions on their faces when they were being told about the prizes seem to have been drawn from some high school musical they once starred in. One gay cowboy clutched his pearls. The "dudes" high-fived in a staged manner. Many of the teams are behaving as if they’re doing impressions of reality show contestants, not participating in a reality show themselves. Oh, Canadian self-awareness. Our blessing and our curse.

Who will win?

Obviously the dating BC hippies. Not because of their paddling skills or eco-awareness. But rather: “We wear the same clothes all the time,” says hippie Darren.

The hippies seem more concerned about winning than making a good impression. How un-Canadian of them.

Why the Loblaw takeover of Shoppers won't make downtown life any better--and will probably make it duller

The hegemony of Shoppers Drug Mart in downtown life took a sharp left turn this week with the announcement that Loblaw intends to buy the pharmacy chain for $12.4 million. 

While optimists are hoping for savings though cost-cutting and perhaps loyalty reward synergies between the PC Plus and Optimum programs, the merger will likely speed up the Shoppersization of urban life—big generic chain stores gobbling up prime commercial space, squeezing out the variety and whimsy that makes city life great.

Throughout Toronto’s condo boom, it’s been clear that Shoppers Drug Mart is one of the top choices for anchor tenants in new buildings. (Winners or Marshalls might also do in a pinch.) Of course, why not? A pharmacy is a safer, quieter and less risky choice for storefront space than, say, a nightclub, independent café or niche boutique. But safe choices in retail tenants makes for bland and banal streetscapes. A 25-minute streetcar ride down Queen West from Roncesvalles to University—Canada’s most vibrant shopping street—showcases no fewer than four Shoppers Drug Marts.

Grocery stores aren’t particularly exciting either, but they’re usually in oddball parking-lotted places or, in the case of the two new flagship Loblaw—Maple Leaf Gardens and Queen West at Portland—imaginatively tucked away into larger developments. Target—again, not a retailer known for its beautiful properties but let’s do our best to muster some choices here—has so far only opened stores on the fringes of the city. The chain remains virtually invisible to downtowners. You can complain that Walmart hurts small independent shops, but you can’t complain the stores are eyesores. So far, the retail giant’s only central location is in a mall, though plans to open a new location near Kensington Market are enough to send a chill up the spine of any flaneur.

Shoppers Drug Marts are much more in your face. Small enough to eat up the best most high-traffic locations, big enough to squeeze out three or four small boutiques once they set their sights on a property. Shoppers drug Marts can make even the most unique neighbourhood feel like nowhere at all.

Surprisingly, Pharma Plus and Guardian drugs have done little to take advantage of all the new retail space that’s come available in central Toronto; the expansion of the Pharma Plus at Church and Wellesley seems almost uniquely futile. Which means that the city is not merely awash in new brightly lit pharmacies, but awash in a single pharmacy brand.

A Loblaw/Shoppers merger can only increase the homogenization of our urban landscape. Unless other major retail chains push into downtown—or unless landlords start making it easier for independent stores to get leases—our corridors will be awash in red and white façades, retail spaces that offer a little of everything except personality.