The Amazing Kreskin, who brings his venerable act through the 905 this week, might’ve claimed the most accurate statistical prediction of the 2004 federal election results, even guessing the length of the minority Liberal parliament, but he’s been humbled into making a vaguer pronouncement for the next round: “The newly elected Harper and his Conservative Party now in office, will last, at least for two years.” The mentalist’s relationship to this country was forged through most of the 1970s, when The Amazing World of Kreskin was produced by CTV – it’s now due for a DVD box set, whose initial release will be packaged with a replica 1967 Milton Bradley board game. It’d appear George Kresge’s routine hasn’t changed much in 40 years, even if the internet has become a rival in any clairvoyant’s quest to establish long-term credibility; back in spring 2002, he was certain that the biggest UFO sighting of all-time was imminent. But this hasn’t discouraged him from publishing a whack of explicit expectations for 2006: Renewed enthusiasm for peanut butter, neckties and the legacy of Nipsey Russell; an uncovering of cruelty to animals in the Middle East, greater interest in forms of torture amongst kids and adult party revelers, and a fad involving shoeless and sockless feet; but also a backlash against voice mail, cellphones, loud music, bad manners, and every other societal trend your typical 71-year-old finds bothersome. Kreskin thinks more dentists will commit suicide, more psychatrists will go bonkers, and young people will be overcome by mass hysteria. Plus, he figures the poker industry will be exposed for corruption, while pendulums will be making a comeback. He also seems particularly fixated on the collapse of the media and entertainment industries, anticipating the point where movies become shorter, musicians are exposed for miming, and broadcast advertising is proven to be an ineffective sham. Maybe that explains why a plan to revive Kreskin’s television career, announced last summer, has failed to get off the ground. Kreskin will be going mental at the Oakville Centre for the Performing Arts on Thursday (March 2) and the Brampton Heritage Theatre on Friday (March 3).
Kreskin predicts you’ll read this story [Toronto Star]
Much ado about the anagram TTC subway map whipped together by “Robot Johnny” Martz, inspired by a similar treatment of the London tube highlighted on Boing Boing. While similar copycats keep sprouting elsewhere, those initial parodies were quashed by cease and desist orders, with the Toronto Transit Commission following their UK counterpart with a claim of intellectual property violation. TTC mouthpiece – and former CFNY newscaster – Danny Nicholson bluntly explained to the Star: “From our perspective, some of the content is offensive.” Would Martz’s original effort have remained online were it not for the Beavis and Butt-head-esque jumbles attached to certain station names? Not every stop could be an “Arborescent Grouch”, “Oboe Wind” or “‘Twas Sudden”, after all. While the anagram map was hastily recast with a generic layout, it provides yet another chance to portray the TTC as a bunch of bureaucratic killjoys who frown at any fondness expressed by artistically inclined riders, although it’s not too late to follow their NYC counterparts by holding a beauty pageant to find a spokesmodel. Robot Johnny’s brush with copyright law did give his efforts more weblog mileage than Leah McLaren’s confused Globe and Mail column, Logging out of the blogosphere, which appeared some 47 months after the first time this kind of shambling attempt to stir up gratuitous reaction was published by The Boston Globe: In the world of Web logs, talk is cheap, by Alex Beam, which managed to inject legitimacy into an emergent medium. Leah proclaiming that she’s jaded by political science sites, while feigning fascination at her writer pal David Eddie’s dedication to updating his site with personal ramblings once every three or four months, was really just a prelude to encouraging readers to investigate who might’ve been bashing her via the faulty Technorati search engine. The tactic seemed to work – “Leah McLaren” spent the weekend a notch behind fervent searches for a video starring a cheerleader from Singapore named “Tammy”.
Miss Toronto Tourism 2005 is due in court March 6 in connection with a masked purse grabbing spree, involving imitation firearms, at the Soft Hands Spa in Mississauga – in addition to being charged with planning a follow-up heist at Brampton’s Mystique Massage Parlour, along with four alleged accomplices, in October 2004. A report in the Star pointed out 20-year-old Zenovique Wilson earned her Miss Toronto crown in April 2005, while out on bail. Based on this forum posting, Wilson appeared as a SUNshine Girl a few weeks later, then she sported her sash at a Caribana-themed event at the Parkway Mall, although her blonder replacement was evidently given the honour of crashing Film Festival parties by the time September rolled around. Not unlike how Vanessa Williams was stripped of her title as Miss America 1984 after an erotic photo session turned up in Penthouse – only to become the most legitimately famous talent to score that honour – the Miss Toronto Tourism website now lists a runner-up as 2005’s titleholder. But perhaps in the effort to keep the tiara from being altogether tarnished, a Miss Toronto Tourism was already crowned for 2006, not that it’s easy to keep tabs on such details. The people behind the pageant, which launched in 1999, remain particularly elusive – the Toronto Board of Trade has been unsuccessful in ever trying to reach anyone in regard to the misleading “tourism” brand, reports The Mississauga News. While 1993’s second-place finisher in the Miss India Canada contest, Ruby Dhalla, is now into her second term as Brampton-Springdale MP, it’d seem a reigning ambassador of beauty needs to be accused of wrongdoing to get noticed in the GTA. Last summer, resident Miss Universe title holder Natalie Glebova was kept from acting in her official capacity at the Taste of Thailand Festival at Nathan Phillips Square when municipal policies insisted she could only be introduced as “an individual of note” – resulting in an apology from the mayor. The website for the beleaguered Miss Canada International contest, however, prominently features two titleholders who were dethroned over the past decade, perfectly appropriate considering the shady practices the event was accused of by former contestants. Hopefully, the self-proclaimed Miss Canadiana – the alter ego of artist Camille Turner – can continue in her quest to soak up the adulation that actual pageant winners are being denied.
Broken Social Scene, along with the community aesthetic surrounding the local rock ‘n’ roll collective, earn a 5,000-word treatment in The New York Times Magazine. The feature by Alissa Quart – the author of books on teenage marketing tactics and the dilemma of gifted children – leapt from mid-week subscriber e-mail delivery to the Stille Post message board, allowing the article to be heckled a few days before the Sunday brunch set flip past its pages. While it’s doubtful any NYT subscriptions were cancelled last October after critic Jon Pareles complained that Broken Social Scene, their self-titled record, “refuses to ride on Montreal’s momentum”, the attention merits comparison to Seattle circa November 1992, when a Sub Pop employee responded to a Times request for some indigenous hipster slang with their own contrived grunge glossary. And while this latest scenester overload was doubtlessly fact-checked to a fault, the hometown media pendulum has already swung back to dance clubs, due to the arrival of deported NYC nightlife kingpin Peter Gatien, even if accessing that martini-soaked society requires a disposable income, not to mention a wardrobe that wasn’t bought by the pound. Woven through the article are essential tips for any other town looking to cash in by projecting poverty: “He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie,” is how BSS celebrity Kevin Drew gets described, followed by an explanation of how, until recently, he lived “in a splendidly filthy room that he calls ‘a nest of destruction,’ where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong”. The resident chanteuse, Leslie Feist, is “eating fried fish cakes she’d purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation”. While no one dares admit to making money, Broken Social Scene gloat of rejecting ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard, but only because of their objection to the specific products being sold. “When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you,” explains Mr. Drew. “But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial.”
The morning after the latest decision favouring a streetcar right-of-way along St. Clair Ave. W., both sides of this NIMBY debate must agree that the system is the biggest enemy of all. A mid-October decision to halt the project was overturned by the Divisional Court of Ontario, concluding a four-month suspension of a four-month construction process that now faces a four-month period of negotiating with contractors while waiting for springtime. Plus, the $2.7-million in legal bills and inflationary costs is compounded by frustration caused by the tracks they started ripping apart between St. Clair’s two subway stations. This $65 million effort to reduce congestion, delays and danger along 6.7 overall kilometres is now seen as a done deal, even as Margaret Smith, whose group Save Our St. Clair has spent the past couple years rallying anti-ROW sentiment, insists “we are not convinced the fight is over”. What both sides in this debate had in common all along was the stance that St. Clair W. boasts some hidden potential that most GTA residents are oblivous to – Councillor Joe Mihevc speaks of a European-style renaissance prompted by a more assertive streetcar, although the S.O.S. argument remains that merchants will lose out when automobile access become altered. For the time being, all this publicity should inspire a few people to check out what all the commotion has been about. The website for Corso Italia makes a point of differentiating between the hostile social clubs of Little Italy on College St. (”coffee shops and billiard halls are filled with conversation, cigarette smoke, and lots of animated discussion about soccer – because their clientele is mostly older Italian men”) and St. Clair’s more hospitable domain of gelaterias and cappuccino houses (”exquisite, fashionable, with just enough attitude to be seductive”) – even though the area’s biggest claim to fame took place 23 1/2 years ago, when 200K people poured into the street after Italy won the World Cup. While the Salsa On St. Clair festival is slated for a mid-July weekend, plans are “up in the air” for a July 21 birthday bash for one former St. Clair resident, Ernest Hemingway.
The hoisting of the MTV logo on 888 Yonge St. finally supplies the Masonic Temple with some external identity – despite remaining a production outpost for CTV, the 1918 structure was going through another phase as a cryptic hunk of history across the road from Canadian Tire. Right before the designated building was snapped up the home for Mike Bullard’s exercise in late-night hara-kiri, its 30-year on-and-off heritage as a part-time concert hall – first dubbed The Rockpile in 1968 – an application to plunk 19 storeys worth of condo lofts on top was shouted down by the Toronto Historical Board. Now it’ll be pitched to teenyboppers as a midtown MTV, essentially replacing the lame duck discussion-based talktv cable station – which went into all-rerun mode in mid-2002, collecting $4 million per year in basic cable subscriber fees to facilitate classic episodes of Camilla Scott. CTV’s stringent license forbids this MTV from focusing on music content, something which the Chum Limited bean counters running MuchMusic are vowing to monitor with a vengeance. But who needs rap ‘n’ roll when you’ve got text messaging? “We’re creating Canada’s interactive social network for television,” promised programming boss Brad Schwartz amidst the sign mounting ceremony. “Viewers’ opinions count: it’s not our network, it’s theirs.” Sure, until they go online, at which point the MTV mothership intends to gouge out their eyeballs. This scheme ain’t a slam dunk, either. The cover of Business Week was asking Can MTV Stay Cool? for good reason – focusing on their loop of short attention span reality shows kept MTV from being a player online. Belated announcements of a “digital Marshall Plan” to remain relevant can be executed by buying a bunch of properties with Viacom money, but bafflegab about targeting teenyboppers through “highly-integrated ecosystems” seems almost apocalyptic. Their summer 2006 schedule is highlighted by a reality show, filmed inside an Indiana detention centre, called MTV Juvies.
Journal: Masonic Temple [infiltration.org]
What was dubbed the most boring feud ever – by a fellow fluff reporter if not both of the apathetic participants – the reaction to Ryan Bigge’s scalding review of Leah McLaren’s debut novel The Continuity Girl, which generated at least a dozen other blog posts that ended up contributing little to the discussion beyond links to other blog posts on the subject, culminated in a mea culpa from Toronto Star books editor Dan Smith: “What we didn’t tell readers last week, and we should have, is that Star reviewer Bigge had previously, in 2001, been on the receiving end of a decidedly nasty putdown of not just his own debut book, the semi-memoir A Very Lonely Planet, but also his person – at the hands of one Leah McLaren, in the Globe.” And nearly five years too late for McLaren to be joined in the best-seller list by Bigge’s self-help book for perpetually single guys, a premise that was slightly ahead of its time – or an idea that might’ve flown off the shelves more briskly had it been packaged as a field guide for females instead. Due to the fact that Bigge’s one book to date, published by the smallish Arsenal Pulp Press, dealt with his own quest for companionship, his newfound demi-celebrity finds him cast as the male version of whatever exactly Leah became famous enough to get a Harper Collins contract for. A glance at the Bigge World website verifies that Ryan cultivated this career in the field of zines and other independent media, in addition to many heartbreaking years in the brutal domain of mainstream freelancing. Leah McLaren? Not so much, given the frequently evoked web of connections that led to her securing regular pontification space in The Globe before age 25. But while antipathy toward Leah rivals water-cooler contempt otherwise reserved for tabloid celebrities, none of the journalism student types sniping about her have posed a challenge to the fearless wit that she’s credited with having. How can it be an issue of access when anyone can freely publish online, and seduce an unsuspecting world of readers? And if it’s not possible for anyone to secure and surpass Next Leah status on their own, how can anyone argue that she isn’t deserving of that $18.95 plus tax for each copy that’s sold of The Continuity Girl?
PREVIOUSLY: Local lurper lacerates Leah lexicon [*pic above by Bigge]
With no newsworthy accomplishments to dwell on, the weblog medium is taking a round of beatings this week – most extravagantly in the Financial Times Magazine, where the caustically titled feature, Time for the last post, is accompanied by a feedback blog all its own. Trevor Butterworth had little problem getting former editors of Gawker and Wonkette to unload about the relative futility of their intense link-seeking endeavors after serving time in those trenches. That feature contributed to a weekend-long pile-on that included a Slate financial story speculating on the Twilight of the Blogs as a prospectively lucrative endeavour, wacky neocon rag The Weekly Standard positing Web 2.0 Is Reminiscent of Marx (pictured), and The New York Times Magazine language columnist William Safire’s condescending salute to Blargon. It was exactly one year ago that blog triumphalism was operating at full steam, as the term “MSM” entered the parlance of the MSM, when amateur online apostles of both left and right American political rhetoric crowed about defrocking their respective threats against The Truth – the names of both Eason Jordan and Jeff Gannon are bound to appear in the blog edition of Trivial Pursuit. What’s gotten lost in the shuffle, unfortunately, is the hybrid of personal diary and sociocultural punditry that fueled much of the initial enthusiasm for the format. A piece in the Life section of the Saturday Star addressed The rarity of the black blogger, where Laina Dawes lamented the absence of those collective voices online in Canada – although any calculated attempt to change that dynamic usually undermines the creative potential of anyone who might be inspired to have their own unique experiences chronicled online in a generally scatterbrained fashion. Fortunately, Laina runs such a site herself, Writing is Fighting, a refreshing throwback to before blogs began the process of drowning in their own hype. (Warning: May contain a four-star review of the latest Judas Priest reunion album.)
Another round of nominations for the Juno Awards mean another round of opportunities to berate the recording academy for being out of step with reality. Such complaints are even more predictable than the CTV press release touting the eight nominations scored by Canadian Idol competitors, a skew owed to the number of units shipped to stores – not accounting for the number of Kalan Porter albums returned to the record company a few months later. Factory-sealed alternative rock was given a fair shot at hitting the Canadian big time a decade ago – back when a domestic major label record contract was still coveted by those who weren’t competing in an Idol contest – but that stuff generated little of the critical enthusiasm that was still regarded back then as a necessary part of seeding commercial success. Nowadays, of course, it’s entirely possible to consume vast amounts of new music without having the slightest notion of what’s topping the charts; it’s a testament to the talents of Nickelback that anyone would find it necessary to complain about them. What hasn’t been impossible to avoid is Montreal-based band The Arcade Fire having their name injected into every conversation regarding the politics of Canadian music, with the band’s border-crossing origins repeatedly evoked as evidence both for and against CanCon regulations. Those who’ve failed to be enraptured by The Arcade Fire’s determinedly unaccessible sound can’t be seen as anything but square, considering how they were put the cover of the Canadian edition of Time magazine – as if the Canadian edition of Time magazine has ever been noted for its relevance. Re-reading the painfully overwrought review of the album Funeral, whose publication on rock snob portal Pitchfork in September 2004 was credited for sparking its breakthrough, suggests The Arcade Fire are bound to collapse beneath the weight of their own pomposity. The biggest shortcoming of the Juno nominee list isn’t the absence of critically acclaimed names in major categories, it’s the inability of the awards show to depict mass appeal music as a concept worth abhorring anymore.
Frank Gehry came back to the town where he was born to tell us what we already know – Toronto missed its chance at architectural glory due to the fortress of condos on the waterfront. But at least his transformation of the Art Gallery of Ontario, to be completed in 2008, is sure to enhance a neighbourhood that never looked like it was given much thought ever since Gehry grew up there in the ’30s and ’40s, only to escape to California right after high school. The starchitect was widely quoted for his supportive words on Wayne Gretzky amidst gambling allegations, while sporting a Roots hockey bomber jacket, one day before No. 99’s new endorsement deal with the clothier was announced. Yet, the reason for this scrum was a three-month exhibit dedicated to Gehry’s greatest hits, to which the AGO lured local bloggers to post their own perspectives – arguably the first time such invitations were extended for a local media launch that had nothing to do with computers per se. The results are rounded up on the gallery’s own Art Matters site: Sam Javanrouh’s [daily dose of imagery] was among those pouring photos into the flickr pool. While the notes taken about the launch reflect a sedate affair, Spacing Wire’s Shawn Micallef was one of those who discovered, after roaming around the collection of working models, that grumpy anti-Gehry prejudices expressed by public space advocates may not be entirely fair. By contrast, 77-year-old Frank Gehry won’t likely have his curmudgeonly views about Toronto changed: “It doesn’t feel right, but I think I am just fuddy duddy because of my age.” Frank Gehry: Art + Architecture gets shown off at the AGO (317 Dundas St. W.) starting on Saturday (Feb. 18).
