paved :: marc weisblott

Summer must be in the air, because widespread coverage of the Lactation Station Breast Milk Bar hasn’t generated the sort of froth that such performance art traditionally depends on. A story on the CP wire explained how the pasteurized and culture tested by-product of six women would be available for tasting at the OCAD Professional Gallery on July 13 – while noting that bartender Jess Dobkin scored a $9,000 Canada Council grant for her efforts. But when Conservative MPs were grilled for comment, even Jason Kenney kept his foot away from his mouth: “Personally I think we should be funding cultural endeavours that actually draw an audience, that people are actually interested in.” The conclusion is that the era of outrage directed at federally funded projects like the dress made out of meat, the unwatchable porn parody flick Bubbles Galore and the masturbating Mexican may be over; indignation over community standards have been superseded by online access to every fetish, which means the the most offensive thing a performance artist can do is seem boring to their potential critics. While the taxpayer funding provides grist for grumpy commenters at Small Dead Animals and Free Republic, if a place called Lactation Station was selling pumps to nursing moms in Salt Lake City dating back to 1989, the provocation level for this stunt seems limited, even with the invitation for strangers to get a taste. Nonetheless, the attention has surpassed the effect of Dobkin’s previous projects, most of which concern perverted puppets, items being planted in assorted orifices and desperate yelps for attention – also, due to her preoccupation with getting hitched to fire hydrants, lamp posts and street signs, part of a commentary on same-sex marriage remaining unlawful in her previous home of New York City, it seems Dobkin had no choice but to approach her own motherhood as a solitary task. Lactation Station is just the opening salvo of Five Holes: Matters of Taste, an annual series that will also feature a woman having her body treated in a style meant to evoke the preparation of Kobe beef, apartment building models made from mouth freshening strips placed on the tongues of Regent Park residents, and a live remake of the movie Liquid Sky, set in late-’80s Toronto, a/k/a “a period of pacifying and distressing self-absorption”.

Given how reminiscences of Yonge and Dundas are the most intriguing element of The Humanitas Festival, the window between the end of an era and nostalgia for how it used to be has been narrowed to three-quarters of a decade – less time than its taken for the reinvention of the area to be complete. The ambient electronica heard on the new website for the Metropolis complex even boasts a late-’90s retro sound – as an NYC-based communications company is actively seeking advertisers for a plum spot on the exterior, whose gaudy rendering was the subject of a few days of online debate back in the dead of winter. Those brand logos will be mounted by next spring, at least six months before an AMC megaplex, Canadian Music Hall of Fame and Wolfgang Puck’s Café fill the space formerly occupied by a dismal flea market that deigned to call itself a shopping mall. But the ghosts of Dundas Square have provided the latest fixation for the [murmur] project, whose latest historical stories audible via cellphone will focus on a block curiously recalled more for selling jeans, books and burgers than records, hash pipes and pornography. This undertaking is part of The Networked City, a five-pronged outdoor art installation bridging the lower Yonge strip with the waterfront – other elements include the opportunity to transmit Morse code to the flashing beacon in the alcove at One King West, a recreation of the CNE’s lamented Bulova Tower capable of blowing bubbles, and a pigeon feeding sanctuary amidst the condo construction. Billed as “a month-long festival of what was, is and could be”, a whack of locally-minded events are grouped beneath the Humanitas banner, although a week-long forum series at the Cooler By the Lake Tent at the foot of Yonge acts as headquarters for the first week. There’s also an Airstream trailer set to crawl around the city, recording conversations about the experience of local neighbourhoods and landmarks. (Reserve a time and place here.) And the website MemoryArchive is concurrently collecting Toronto fodder. But the seediest era of Yonge St. is also being promoted as part of the festival, as OMNI 1 rebroadcasts their doc The Shoeshine Boy on June 3 (9 p.m.) and June 4 (8 p.m.), which dusts off 1977 footage related to the murder of 12-year-old Emanuel Jaques – providing a rare opportunity to see Yonge and Dundas in the initial throes of its late 20th century squalour. But that’s because nobody at Global has unearthed tapes of their nocturnal time-fillers, a test pattern alternative which consisted of a camera maneuvering through the streets to a sombre jazz soundtrack, a premise which wouldn’t be as soothing when confronted with billboards flashing neon at 4 a.m.

The Humanitas Festival [official website]

Compulsive viewing at Hot Docs has inspired a few bloggers to keep track of the flicks they’ve seen, providing some insights beyond the fact that Natalie Portman – along with co-star Dustin Hoffman and ex-boyfriend Gael Garcia Bernal – was in the audience at the Isabel Bader Theatre for the Canadian premiere of Wordplay. That chronicle of crossword puzzle geekery earned high praise amidst Wholesome Goodness blogger Sameer Vasta’s batch of reviews (”I am somewhat at a loss for words in describing the sheer amazingness of this movie.”). Consolation Champs blogger James McNally offers a comprehensive post on each doc he’s seen, ranked on a scale that seems to be limited to the numbers 8, 9 and 10. A Funkaoshi Production blogger Ramanan Sivaranjan has also typed screening notes that are mostly enthusiastic. Bombippy blogger Jay Kerr hasn’t been as consistently enthused by the festival, left unimpressed by the gushing of the programmers who act as emcee for each film (”What can you say when the director and the producer are standing beside you?”) and further annoyed by what appears to be some poorly calibrated HD projection, resulting in blurry film and ghosted titles. Dan Dickinson also kept score of screenings on his site, noting the advert for the Cadillac Escalade that precedes each festival flick was even screened before OilCrash, which is all about the coming petroleum apocalypse. What’s the Story? blogger Siobhan McLaughlin has been volunteering at Hot Docs, allowing her to catch three programs per day, and reports that a compulsive local film festival volunteer “Harvey” will find himself the subject of his own documentary, which starts shooting soon. Meanwhile, the festival offering that stirred up the most adverse advance reaction, American Fugitive: The Truth About Hassan, directed by the Governor-General’s husband Jean-Daniel Lafond, is subject to analysis by Tart Cider blogger Chris Selley, who concluded that it’s hardly the conspirazoid sympathy trip suggested by those who’d rather demolish Rideau Hall than listen to the theory that Ronald Reagan helped prolong the captivity of hostages in Iran until he moved into the White House: “It’s not Lafond’s fault if university students watch his film and conclude that the real villain is Bush despite him not having a damn thing to do with it,” writes Selley. “University students can come to that conclusion from staring long enough at a ham sandwich.”

[YOUR REVIEWS are welcome below along with any further links.]

While the 10th anniversary CONTACT Festival of photography boasts the slogan “Imaging A Global Culture”, complete with a guidebook in the form of a passport, the result of a few rolls of film taken on a far-flung excursion rarely compares to the achievement of providing a genuinely different perspective on familiar space. Consider an exhibit like Welcome Home, on display at The Social (1100 Queen St. W.) starting Wednesday (May 3), which salutes rental apartment buildings around the city blessed with often cryptic names geared to providing a subliminal sense of belonging, rather than the marketing tool associated with modern condos. A collective called Twin Lens Reflex have devoted the last couple years to exploring abandoned buildings and vacant lots around Toronto, shedding light on the bleaker side of public space and the residents of these glamour-defying neighbourhoods – images collected on the TLR weblog get matted at Supermarket (268 Augusta Ave.) through the month of May. John Oswald, the multi-disciplinary artist best known for his pop music Plunderphonics, straddles both the public installation and feature exhibition components of CONTACT: After Always Before, currently showing at the Edward Day Gallery (952 Queen St. W.), features “a genre of stills which are not quite still, and movies which never move”; and his treatment of the surrounding transit shelters with trompe l’oeil human imagery (pictured) appears destined to confuse streetcar drivers who won’t notice there’s a real person waiting at the stop. Meanwhile, neighbouring Financial District subway stations are hosting installations that offer nation-defying commentary: St. Andrew hosts Pedestrian by Stephen Waddell transplants people from the Berlin subway into the TTC, and Lost by Stephen Gill depicts people being bewildered by maps on the streets of London; the St. Patrick station will feature portraits of Chinese Canadians in Gu Xiong’s I Am Who I Am, along with Ding Danwen’s pics of high-tech trash recycled by the workers of China’s Guangdong province in Disconnexion. And while The Airport Series by Michael Awad offers site-specific comment on Pearson International, on display throught May, the windows of The Drake Hotel (1150 Queen St. W.) are being devoted to Olivo Barbieri’s arial shots of the fake architecture of Las Vegas – hey, if CBGB’s can make threats to relocate there, how long before West Queen West becomes the inspiration for a Vegas casino?

CONTACT Toronto Photography Festival [May 1-31, 2006]

The official program for the 19th annual Images Festival seems to be packed with details of the sort of affair that makes the city a stimulating place, alluding to lots of subversive layers of artistic inspiration dedicated to the elusive quest for some kind of comfort amid the hopeless state of humankind etc. etc. etc. Yet, beyond the introductory statements – from local, provincial and federal arts councils, the NFB, Telefilm Canada and a message from the mayor – it really does seem like the effort of an elitist cabal relishing the fact that there’s no clear indication to outsiders of what this 10-day gallery and screen festival is for. The lack of thematic focus was addressed by Peter Goddard in the Toronto Star, who took a stab at grouping together a few exhibits dealing with the topic of masculinity. Then again, a program of animated films Friday night (April 21) at the Workman Theatre (1001 Queen St. W.) dubbed Drawn Toward Danger are exclusively concerned with violence – from the 1918 production Sinking of the Lusitania and a 1939 MGM Christmas short “featuring adorable woodland creatures living in the fallen helmets of murdered soldiers in a post-apocalyptic landscape” called Peace on Earth, to shorts depicting children being held captive and/or killing themselves, to obligatory spoofs of the current White House mess. But beyond the assorted gallery installations, a few online works curated under the Images Festival banner offer some insight into web-based art trends: Utopia Suite is a five-year multi-platform project by local intermedia artist Clive Holden – plans include the development of a storytelling model using Google Earth’s satellite shots to illustrate personal memories from around the globe. That mapping trend is also covered by the online exhibition called Transposing Geographies, including recent efforts to illuminate looking at ruins in How I Love the Broken Things of Rome, and the search for immigrant-age serenity amidst the increasingly gentrified Lower East Side in Folk Songs For the Five Points. Which leaves one to wonder when Toronto will be ready to be subject of such elaborate forays into virtual tourism – or at least earn sufficient amounts of arts council funding evidently required for that to happen.

Images Festival [official site]

Hot Docs, slated for April 28 through May 7, features a program that manages to pack more curiosity into ten days than the average year year of multiplex fodder – not to mention satisfying those local nostalgic pangs for a broad-based cinematic assault uncorrupted by autograph hounds. The combination of increasingly cheap digital filmmaking tools, directors discovering wackjobs from around the globe via websites, and the increased commercial avenues for subtle observation have helped create a perfect storm of possibility. Not that the results don’t risk coming off as too self-indulgent; the shorter attention span bred by having quickie clips of everything online can lead one to wonder how many eccentric quests are really deserving of a 90 minute examination. The fest’s opening night flick, The Railroad All-Stars, deals with team of sex trade workers in Guatemala who take to the soccer field to gain the respect not afforded in their two-bucks-a-trick existence. More flamboyant obsessions are displayed in Mozartballs, directed by Larry Weinstein, which profiles a group of people obsessed with the composer on the occasion of his 250th birthday – and just in time for the 20th anniversary of “Rock Me Amadeus” hitting #1. Meanwhile, even though Atom Egoyan’s attempt to bring screening room pomposity to the Queen St. W. public via Camera Bar didn’t really succeed, a broader audience will get exposed to his traipsing around Lebanon, the birthplace of his movie star wife, in the camcorder diary Citadel. A few other meta elements of the Hot Docs programme include an onstage talk with Werner Herzog, a doc about CanCon filmmaker Allan King, and celebrity pest Nick Broomfield sniffing out neo-Nazi confrontations in South Africa. Bombay Calling is a homegrown candidate for mainstream success, given the topic of outsourced call centres. And for masochists, there is All Aboard! Rosie’s Family Cruise, which appears to confirm once and for all that a certain daytime talk show host didn’t really have romantic designs on a Scientologist movie star. (Brett Lamb, the festival art director, posted his pics from this year’s press conference, following up his own 2005 Hot Docs Blog.)

“In terms of demographics, this show is written and produced for Everyman,” argues Lord of the Rings producer Kevin Wallace, defending his debacle in a Saturday Star column by Martin Knelman which took bets on whether this behemoth can prove a critic-proof spectacle. The spin was in overdrive all weekend, following the rash of negative opening night appraisals throughout the international press. A reaction published in The Observer was titled Springtime for Tolkien and Mordor, evoking The Producers – another musical whose local staging failed to live up to advance enthusiasm. The review by Gaby Wood is favourable, but the changing is described as “reminiscent of an old British Airways ad”, while the duets “appear to have been inspired by a dream team of Michael Bolton and Enya”. The take in the L.A. Times by Charles McNulty threw in a comparison to Kevin Costner’s infamously overbudget Waterworld: “If the creators can get J.R.R. Tolkien’s mammoth epic down to 90 minutes from its current 3 1/2 hours, there’s even a chance it could one day reach Vegas.” But much as the opening of LOTR inspired puff pieces like the incredulous exhortation from The New York Times, headlined A Revitalized Toronto Pins its Hopes on the Hobbits, local stages with a budget of less than $25 million will gain some spillover coverage from the theatrical wags who’ve swung through town, like the Cleveland Plain Dealer recommending that a drama-enamoured tourist seek out anything but. Rachel Tolkien, the 35-year-old art gallery-owning granddaughter of J.R.R., had her endorsement of the play planted on the AP wire. While any fallout from the LOTR backlash apparently won’t be reflected in the box office until this fall – once all the advance ticket buyers and summer tourists take their turn suffering through 230 minutes of audience captivity at the Princess of Wales Theatre – what seems to be hinging most on the outcome isn’t the Toronto tourism industry, but J.R.R. sustaining a place on the Forbes list of top-earning dead celebrities.

Escape to Canada salutes the sociological temperament of the Paul Martin Decade – all 17 or 18 months of it – in a feature-length examination of how the confluence of legal same-sex marriage, sorta-legal pot smoking, and a trickle of young American war resisters sneaking north supplied this here land with a possibly fleeting sense of liberal frisson. So, it’s basically an 81-minute newsreel with fancier cinematography – something for the National Film Board to bank on behalf of a certain era, destined for viewing in social studies classes a decade or two from now alongside Flowers on a One-Way Street, or readily exploited by fire-and-brimstone broadcasters seeking evidence of the decline of western civilization. (The recent 60 Minutes profile of seed-seller Marc Emery, however, does a better job of probing his possible extradition to the U.S.) Despite the queer, stoned and insubordinate conduct on display, the movie itself plays it pretty straight, with filmmaker Albert Nerenberg not only staying behind the camera, he rarely employs the tactic of stringing up interview subjects with their own words. The results put cannabis cookie-baking nudist Watermelon (pictured) and gay marriage lawyer Martha McCarthy on a similar pedestal – which is fitting, given how much they look and talk alike. The soldiers who’ve bailed out of American military service are more compelling, if less articulate under their fraught circumstances, although they appear to be the most ecstatic bunch to ever roam around Bloor and Bathurst. And while Escape to Canada might as well be viewed on a laptop monitor, it’s been booked for a week of screenings at the Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor St. W.) starting Friday (March 10), allowing the residents of Deepest Annex to have their opinions reinforced with a bag of buttered popcorn. Hopefully the audience won’t get too carried away when guffawing at clips of a Parliament Hill rally in support of traditional marriage – last time The Bloor hosted a premiere like this, for The Corporation, chunks of the ceiling started hailing down.

Escape to Canada [official site]

Letters From Lehrer, the one-man show rooted in a temperamental correspondence with reclusive American political satirist Tom Lehrer between interpretations of his songs, is playing at CanStage (26 Berkeley St.) through February 25. But what seems like intriguing meta-theatre has garnered weak reviews from those turned off by Richard Greenblatt’s self-indulgence, as described by Silly Little Country blogger Alan Adamson, annoyed by the attempt to carve eternal left-wing grievances into Lehrer’s half-century-old song catalogue: “He appears to have failed to notice as well that the Soviet Union collapsed,” writes Adamson, “and that world poverty has been of late on a pretty good trend of reduction”. Maybe the federal election results here will end the default Torontonian perspective that the most sublime art form in America is anything hostile toward Republicans – at least one-man shows here are deserving of their own rulers to ridicule. Tom Lehrer’s decision to quit performing music in the mid-’60s, in favour of teaching mathematics at Harvard, makes for a decent fable – the American Dream was being obliterated by conflict, which drained his motivation to write whimsical songs about the periodic table, let alone Henry Kissinger. More realistically, Lehrer’s worldview was better served by grappling with the irrationality of numbers than struggling to crank out a few more yucks from behind the piano – he finished his statement before succumbing to self-parody. With his creative output suspended in time, the lousiest reaction Lehrer’s legacy will have ever received can be pegged on somebody else.

Celebrity semiotician Brian Joseph Davis, whose chapped book Portable Altamont offered philosophical odes to everyone from Don Knotts to Nicole Richie, offers an online gallery paying homage to 10 Banned Albums. The controversial vinyl records of yesteryear were burned by Davis, and then played, with the resulting audio available for download, or uneasy listening to accompany the original charred images. Those notorious sounds range from Stravinsky and Mahler, to "Louie, Louie" and "Me So Horny", plus mid-’80s political targets Prince and the Dead Kennedys, the thornier legacies of Muslim recluse Cat Stevens and JFK parodist recluse Vaughan Meader, and The Sex Pistols and The Beatles. Whether a Beatles LP that was only released in Canada actually made it to a Bible Belt bonfire in Longview, Texas is subject to discussion, but hopefully Davis’ sacrificial torching of an ancient Long Tall Sally album, among the nine others, won’t result in arrest by the copyright cops. 10 Banned Albums go on display starting Thursday (Jan. 12) for one month at the Diaz Contemporary (100 Niagara St.), part of the group show Untitled: Thoughts about sound, music, silence and confusion.

10 Banned Albums [Brian Joseph Davis]