paved :: marc weisblott

Corey Haim performed the most tragic disappearing act in the history of Toronto-bred celebrities by being in no condition to parade himself as a Hollywood casualty. A jaunty 2004 song called “Whatever Happened to Corey Haim?” by Irish band The Thrills earned him some ink after The Sun U.K. tabloid ventured to find an answer: “I’m clean, sober, humble and happy.” Yet, there wasn’t much hometown love after Haim did promotional rounds for a special edition DVD release of License to Drive. The widely-circulated CP24 story described him as “almost an unrecognizable shadow of his former self”, adding “he’s twice the size and twice the age” – a staggering expression of cruelty from the sycophantic local celebrity media. This lack of compassion for Haim dates back five years, when a True Hollywood Story episode showed the still-slackjawed teen heartthrob unintelligibly blathering about his first break as a child actor; following a drug-induced stroke, he was unsuccessful at auctioning off his extracted molar on eBay, although clumps of his hair remained readily available. Corey Feldman, who co-starred with Haim in seven increasingly obscure flicks, claimed in 2002 that the duo were all set to co-host a game show called Corey vs. Corey, until the Canadian half of the duo suffered his drug relapse. Now, a report in Variety floats The Coreys, “a hybrid improv comedy that would center on fictional versions of themselves” where 35-year-old Feldman’s comfortable suburban bliss with his 23-year-old wife – they were married by M.C. Hammer on an episode of The Surreal Life – is disrupted by a certain bloated couch-surfer who shares his first name, who is (a) dismayed that he can’t find a publisher for his tell-all book about a fling with Victoria Beckham (b) on the run from too many late fees at video stores around Yonge and Eglinton (c) killing time until his starring role in a Canadian movie about the rave scene can be delayed for long enough to pass for retro. Sadly, the Coreys are suffering from the delusion that they’re qualified to emulate Curb Your Enthusiasm instead of battling over who is most scarred from being financially exploited by their parents, finding out who would more money for selling bodily discharge at conventions, and determining who has transmitted the most infection to aspiring actresses – contests that would never be tried on Kenny vs. Spenny.

When the referrer logs start whirring with the name “Mary Jo Eustace”, it must mean her romantic rival Tori Spelling did something public with her new husband Dean McDermott – and, in this case, it was ensure the spurned ex-wife wasn’t allowed through the door of the MuchMusic Video Awards, an unlikely event for a woman on the far side of 40 to feel determined to crash. Just six-and-a-half months after Eustace’s future employer CTV breathlessly reported that Dean knocked up Tori, while both were still married to other people, the new Mrs. McDermott was flaunting a frock loose enough to accommodate the whole hockey team they aspire to breed: “When you have a young wife, they can actually have more children because they start younger”, Spelling said of her 33-year-old self, while ejected Mary Jo was forced to lurch off into the sunset, ending her three-week drought of media attention since moving back home. The annual MMVAs fulfilled the task of supplying the print media with a list of winners – rap ‘n’ roll videos produced during a year when broadcast television essentially ran its quarter-century course as a relevant platform for music clips – while supplying the celebrity press with the most heavily concentrated annual quota of Toronto-based glitz. And don’t forget the online snipers who find this spectacle offensive, because it seemed more moronic compared to when they were in the target audience, as if marketing schlock aimed squarely at pre-teens ever benefitted from accommodating the perspective of viewers old enough to copulate. Well, yesterday’s photocopied fanzine dedicated to Erica Ehm is today’s online petition to get Leah Miller off the air – yet the advent of a ringtone that adults can’t hear is emblematic of youth culture returning to its adolescent cocoon, instead of being dangled as a source of vigorous subversion worthy of adult attention, lest you end up accused of being as old as Mary Jo Eustace. The shambling MMVAs don’t lend themselves to liveblogging either, although retired pop critic Aaron Wherry kept a scorecard, blogger John Cairns sketched some impressions of the crowd, and self-flagellating freak show Mario “Perez Hilton” Lavandeira will presumably take great care to disclose the contents of his own $20,000 gift bag at airport customs.

Considering how this country can’t support a weekly publication focused on celebrity indiscretions for more than a few months, it’s time to start reclaiming our own exporters of notoriety who are up to the task – beginning with Sebastian Bach, who is currently providing tantrum relief on the VH1 show SuperGroup, in addition to swinging through Europe as the warm-up solo act for the reconstituted Guns N’ Roses, and his frequently recurring comic relief as the neighbourhood longhair on Gilmore Girls. Bach has been rehearsing for this media assault for 20 years, ever since his rapid ascent from teenage squealer at The Gasworks club to vocalist for New Jersey teen thrash band Skid Row was obsessively chronicled in the pages of M.E.A.T magazine, followed by the descent into obscurity that felled most late-’80s hairspray addicts – although when the second Skid Row disc was released 15 years ago this week, they were the first rock band to debut at #1 on Billboard, a last hurrah for their fleeting glory. A reality show where Bach acts as singer for a gang of underemployed stadium vets provides an opportunity to begin his revenge on the mass market: “The show celebrates and gently mocks a bygone era when rock stars were rock stars,” concluded Kelefa Sanneh’s review in The New York Times. “And the band members themselves seem surprisingly cheerful about the trade-off: they’ve traded a reverent radio audience for an irreverent television audience. Could be worse.” With episodes not scheduled for Canadian television, SuperGroup can be incrementally consumed online via the Windows-only Vspot broadband channel – or, more conveniently, via discussion threads from viewers who are debating whether Bach’s tantrums are simply being played for the cameras, or a manifestation of the real thing. Doc McGhee, manager of this prefab band of middle-aged rockers, who have taken the name Damnocracy, offered a psychological assessment: “Sebastian is low on IQ and high on RPMs.” His wife Maria, meanwhile, announced her porn starlet aspirations – much to the chagrin of Damnocracy’s geriatric guitar-slinging moral guardian, Ted Nugent. Bach is also being used as a security blanket for W. Axl Rose, warming up the crowd and joining GN’R onstage for the song “My Michelle”, as these doofuses measure whether North America is ready to accept them as cultural icons again. But any distinctions that remain unblurred between concert stage, reality television and scripted melodrama collapses in a heap at the mere sight of Sebastian Bach crooning “Hollaback Girl”.

Surveying the online chatter in the wake of the arrests of 17 fellas on terrorism charges, after buying three tonnes of what they presumed to be ammonium nitrate, provides a reminder of how the warblogging genre got credibility in the first place in the weeks following 9/11. Who’s going to disagree with even the most hysterical assertion that big city buildings shouldn’t be blown up by deranged teenagers? And those leaping to question the sanity of those bloviations can be refuted with link after link after link. But, as major news organizations end up publishing contradictory stories, while quoting one another in the effort to make police statements sound more scintillating, the line between fact and opinion blurs in lieu of actual information – except the people bashing away at their keyboards all weekend must have been able to generate some sort of collective truth, right? Well, in the case of right-wing amateur pundit network Pajamas Media, any partisan panic helps in the effort to convince marketers of luxury goods to steer ad dollars away from the New York Times. BuzzMachine blogger Jeff Jarvis was among those unimpressed by the NYT initially skirting detail of who the arrested actually were: “In the fifth paragraph, the suspects were merely ‘mainly of South Asian descent.’“, he observed. “India? Burma? Thailand? Indian? Southeast? Southwest? French-speaking terrorists from Vietnam coming to join their Quebecois confrères, perhaps? Who’s to know?” Subsequently, an NYT brief heaped praise upon the Toronto Star for breaking the story, while the national papers lost their grip due to their lack of Sunday editions, and the Sun was stuck with torquing seemingly clairvoyant tales of impending TTC terror. Meanwhile, the spotlighted comments from lefty readers at The Huffington Post acclaim Canada for being able to conduct raids without bugging all the citizens, and conclude Stephen Harper must be a swell guy because he wasn’t preoccupied with reading My Pet Goat. Well, at least the arrests and subsequent smashing of mosque windows creates a municipal election subplot more menacing than gun crime, as Angry in the Great White North blogger Steve Janke managed to get in the very first dig: “I wonder if Mayor David Miller will blame the lack of basketball courts and community centres to give potential terrorists a more constructive outlet for their energy.”

Mass culture died its first death in Toronto the first weekend of June 1986, when 1050 chum abruptly ended 29 years of a format based on a weekly pop chart, in favour of “Favourites of Yesterday and Today”. An aircheck of the transition, via Rock Radio Scrapbook, sheds light on the thinking: A spin of the worst song ever, Starship’s “We Built This City”, is followed by a montage of the biggest chum tunes of 1957 through 1985, a minute of wave noises, then a sermon from program director Terry Williams, sounding more social worker than disc jockey: “A few months ago, I asked you what exactly you wanted from this radio station. I told you then that what you said would matter very much. I’m here now to tell you how much. After all the calls were listened to, and all the letters were answered, and all the research was analyzed,” he explains, “we had no choice but to come to an undeniable conclusion”. The audience for AM radio music was aging, so the best they could do was satisfy “an unfulfilled demand” for sedate sounds of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s – after all, the rock ‘n’ roll youthquake moved to the FM dial, not to mention the impact of 1050’s corporate spin-off MuchMusic, while the more dynamic 680 CFTR had successfully siphoned off the remaining local interest in the hyperactive teenybopper Top 40 format. Plus, draconian CRTC policies ensured a ratings-deprived station like chum had nowhere to go but backward, as their internal energies shifted to synching CHUM-FM with the emerging yuppie zeitgeist instead. A few weeks later, the legendary CHUM sign outside 1331 Yonge St. was splayed across the road, coincidentally cut down by crafty vandals. The attempt to keep 1050 sounding quasi-contemporary hobbled along for a while, until the switch was flipped to nothing but oldies in 1989. Five years ago, when they tried to escape that trap as the flagship for a national sports radio network called The Team, it was an unmitigated disaster that resulted in a return to music 16 months later. Today, 1050 chum is a low-rated relic not without considerable charm, in spite of all the DJ patter outside of its morning show comprised of pre-recorded voicetracks. But while its definition of oldies radio has plunged deeper into the 1970s, the last several years of chum’s weekly hit list aren’t acknowledged. The final chum chart – published the day of the format change – is pretty drab, but the station fought to retain its cultural vitality until the battle turned into a losing one. While they’ve vowed to keep 1050 chum intact to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2007, the nostalgia is running on fumes now, especially in the era where an AM signal in Vancouver has surrendered drive time periods to nothing but the traffic reports.

The latest stunt from the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty (OCAP), who protested the opening night of the Stratford Festival might’ve “created quite a stir” in the Perth County media, but visiting city slickers weren’t buying. The Toronto Star dispatch from Richard Ouzounian mentioned the heavy police presence outside the production of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, “an exploration of what happens to a country when an impoverished mob sets out to overthrow the well-fed establishment” along with artistic director Richard Monette pointing out how this “annual playpen for the rich” was actually devised to keep local residents from going hungry. The threat of a 400-member mob – including a chartered bus from Toronto aspiring to throw tomatoes at The Who’s Who of the Rich and Vile – turned out to be more like 40, who found themselves being stared down by 200 officers on the other side of a security fence. The local Beacon Herald procured quotes from the rich and vile likes of Karen Kain, who explained how the average wage for a dancer is $17K per year, without benefits. A more sympathetic account of OCAP antics could be found last month in NOW, when activists did one of their romps through Rosedale: “If you’re rich, you got there by keeping all your money for yourself”, wrote Mike Smith. “But if you build your neighbourhood like a mid-millennial citadel, aren’t you kind of asking for a mob every now and then? It’s the genuine medieval experience. Residents should probably consider themselves lucky no one brought a battering ram.” Just like OCAP should consider themselves lucky to garner ink after their antics in October 2004, when they claimed to steal $3,500 in groceries from Loblaws in order to stage a gourmet picnic. But blaming the shortcomings of the welfare system on artists would’ve been a harder case to make in the GTA. No one seems to be getting rich from the deluge of springtime multimedia events in Toronto (CONTACT, Deep Wireless, digifest, Images, and this year’s awkward concoction, Humanitas). Yet, the participants might have a greater chance of being famous if those organizers did a better job of reaching out to a broader audience by building websites that detailed what was happening before, during and after each festival through words and visuals – instead of waiting around for a reporter to show up. Besides, if they work freelance, they’re likely feeling just as impoverished; the latest study from the Professional Writers Association of Canada has calculated that the net earnings for the typical Toronto-based hack haven’t budged in the past 30 years.

The popular topic of springtime 2006 patio debate in the GTA is Nelly Furtado’s song “Promiscuous” if a feature from The Times of London is to be believed. Their visiting pop reporter conveniently overheard three fashionistas upsetting their indie chick compadre with praise for a bossa nova songstress compensating for lacklustre sales with a dialogue-based ditty containing a chorus that’s perfect for a ringtone. First discovered at a Lee’s Palace talent showcase, after flocking here from Victoria, B.C., Furtado debuted with Woah Nelly!. Packaged as a complex counterpoint to pop starlets in skimpier outfits, she complained after FHM gave her a digitially-generated navel. The relative lack of enthusiasm for the ethnomusicological approach to the follow-up album Folklore jinxed any chance of her becoming the next Joni Mitchell, especially when Nelly had a daughter out of wedlock and didn’t put her up for adoption. Yet, those female troubadours of yesteryear didn’t have the option of trading in their image for hip-hop tracks about the craving to fornicate, nor the media platform to boast of taking lessons in “how to shake my booty properly”. Grilling her about this contrived attempt to fill the spotlight during Gwen Stefani’s maternity leave, Sunday Times scribe Dan Cairns tries getting Furtado off-message before it spreads: “Push her on this and she tries the la-di-dah rictus grinning, the it’s-a-breeze nonchalance about the star-making machinery,” he writes. “And she punctuates these inquiries with a curious staccato laugh that hasn’t even a semitone of humour in it; it sounds, instead, defensive and calculating.” Those insecurities must have been reflected in her Saturday Night Live performance, too: “She needs to get deloused if she’s got that many bugs in her hair,” offered a comment on Stereogum. Furtado’s mortage payments on that $4 million Forest Hill home aren’t entirely dependent on the hoochie posturing of “Promiscuous”, though – leading up to the June 20 release of Loose, European ears are being fed her single “Maneater”, which impersonates Sri Lankan rapping demagogue M.I.A. So, if her career proves to be a model of consistency in no other way, at least Nelly Furtado can boast of three different LP covers featuring her name spelled in the identical font.

Self-referential television shows aren’t anything new, but the announcement of two different NBC prime-time series depicting backstage action at two different programs that bear a conspicuous resemblance to Saturday Night Live reflects the scramble to retain viewers left wondering if they’ve gotten too smart for mass media – while allowing Lorne Michaels to retire with the confidence that audiences will have ceased to gather around the small screen at a specific late hour to glare at sketch comedy. 30 Rock is the SNL-sanctioned sitcom mirror on itself, whereas Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip will be the psychodramatic hour-long incarnation produced by Aaron Sorkin, and those beleaguered real-life network execs obviously anticipate the yin and yang will feed into the conversation about why fewer people are enthusiastic about the launch of a new fall lineup. See, when any idiot with a keyboard can leap into debates about the long-term prospects of the programming choices unveiled at the annual Upfront presentations, a scheme that can keep a few embers burning is a better strategy for a fourth-place broadcaster than just another batch of new shows that quickly fade into oblivion. Naturally, this SNL renaissance is credited to the mid-December enthusiasm for the “Lazy Sunday” viral rap video – but given how Canadian broadcasters have equal access to that virtual pipeline, any failure to develop the sensibilities required to feed it proves how little has changed in the 35 years since the CBC discouraged Mr. Michaels from developing SNL under their roof. With audiences continuing their online migration, a domestic business predicated on inserting commercials into imported shows may well be forced to favour two-minute productions over 22 minute ones – if only someone around here could imagine a launch pad along the lines of NBC’s plan for DotComedy, their new broadband channel that plans to repatriate the traffic flowing to places like YouTube. Without such developments, the only remaining television-related personalities in this town will be people who comment on television itself. The new CanWest Global concoction TVtropolis gets a head start, announcing a slate of CanCon that consists of nine original programs picking over the discarded detritus of the past, even though American cable has already run this type of cheap recycled retro into the ground. Just steer clear of the apartment building featured in the opening of SCTV – what sound does a plasma screen make when hitting the pavement, anyhow?

Dusting off an issue of Toronto Life from 15 years ago provides a reminder of just how dreary the future once felt in this town. Back when Baby Boomers were still a fair distance away from having disposable retirement income, the magazine paled in comparison to the alt-weeklies gaining mainstream traction, sorely lacked the stylish irreverence of Spy, and wouldn’t have tried to simulate the tawdry tattle-tales smeared inside Frank. Those elements were appropriated in time for the 2000s, though, when its aging readership became aligned with what luxury advertisers had to sell. Now, the threat surrounds the eventual extinction of the general interest monthly, especially when the experience of Toronto is taking on more diverse dimensions than ever. The reaction from Toronto Life consists of cover stories aimed at sixtysomethings curious about the enigmatic living, mating and earning conditions of their GenX offspring – with recent features on The Condo Generation, Single in the City, and now the return of the old standby Who Earns What. But the front page text is deliberately misleading – the words Million Dollar Baby, splashed across the smug image of Ben Mulroney, is accompanied by small print clarifying that he may only gross $400K a year. Also, the rundown of salaries previously laid out in small paragraphs – often accompanied by caustic confirmations or caveats – is reduced to a pedestrian four-page list, along with an introduction that explains how only three of the 400 people asked about their paycheque were willing to give fact-checkers something to work with. Yet, the results are still unsettlingly earnest. None of the salaries gleaned from public records or media reports come as a revelation, anyhow – although the guesstimates slapped on local yokels in the media and culture industries are a bit more intriguing: George Stroumboulopoulos is pegged at $150K, Steven J. “Ed the Sock” Kerzner gets listed at $120K, and a writer of three episodes of Degrassi: The Next Generation was compensated with $49K. On the wordsmith front, Ann-Marie MacDonald’s $310K is juxtaposed with Camilla Gibb’s $42K, compared to $16,322 for Darren O’Donnell. Musically speaking, Prince’s $56 million dwarfs Gord Downie’s $200K take, and $90K for Broken Social Scene pin-up Kevin Drew. But really, what the typical Toronto Life reader would hope their baby grows up to be is a CRTC-protected media mogul, what with Alliance Atlantis executive chairman Michael MacMillan earning $9,238,510, Corus Entertainment honcho John Cassaday scoring $4,292,514, and CHUM Ltd. boss Jay Switzer raking in $2,211,140. So, why is Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane coyly confessing that his $170K estimate wasn’t confirmed, when he gloated about transparency in the past? Maybe it’s a fear that a magazine that caters to a shrinking segment of the local marketplace will find its own fortunes following suit soon.

Give that woman who was dumped for Tori Spelling a star on Canada’s Walk of Fame already. After all, Mary Jo Eustace is currently doing everything possible to surpass celebrated record producer David Foster, who split with his wife while their stormy relationship was serving as prime time fodder on the hardly-watched Fox reality show, The Princes of Mailbu – where Foster’s hapless effort to teach his teenage stepsons how to act less bratty were doomed by the fact that their dad is Bruce Jenner. But rather than being confined to one time slot, Mary Jo’s week of overexposure has reaped the rewards of media convergence: An exclusive interview in The Globe and Mail coinciding with a multi-part exclusive interview on CTV’s eTalk, where her week of clench-jawed soft-focus confessions included the fact that she might’ve once given George Clooney head lice. Clooney’s make-up artist was determined to set the two of them up on a date, and after being introduced at a wrap party, a goodnight hug may or may not have resulted in the vermin being transferred from her scalp to his, no thanks to the infected spawn of that cheating cad Dean McDermott. Naturally, the jilted Mary Jo speaks of being “traumatized” at the grocery store at the prospect of seeing her ex-husband sucking face in Fiji with his new bride: “I have a great deal of empathy for Jennifer Aniston”, she says, even if calls to Ms. Aniston for comment wouldn’t possibly be returned. Getting cameras to chronicle a swishy decorator type determining which items from her Hollywood abode can be transported back to Toronto is an intriguing reversal of the Canadian show business dream, though – defeat by delusions of the big time must be reserved for women who’ve sacrificed their own cooking show sidekick career to support their husband’s desire to seek one-off guest roles in crime investigation dramas. Eustace figures she’s better off cashing in to provide a savings account for her kids, implying she doesn’t expect stepmother Spelling to stick around long enough to share her inheritance. Meanwhile, watching Mary Jo’s concurrent appearance on The Insider – the program hosted by rehabilitated pervert Pat O’Brien – is just another blurring of the line between celebrity interviewer and celebrity interviewee, and the fact that there’s more job security associated with being the one who asks invasive questions. When it’s revealed that Ben Mulroney is earning a half-million a year, while revealing as little detail as possible about himself, it’d seem that Mary Jo Eustace’s fulfillment will arrive when she gets her gig as the ringmaster for everybody else’s freak show.

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