Description 61 - Nuit Blanche in the Crystal

For the third edition of the annual all-night art festival, I finally go into that iceberg that crashed into that nice old building to check out dozens of ID cards, British soldiers curling and people wildly applauding me in a stairwell.

Click here to subscribe
Click here to download directly (just seems simpler than having one of those embedded player thingies, right?)

Associated links
Nuit Blanche Toronto
Royal Ontario Museum
Sobeys!
Sobey Art Award

The Shortlist:
Raphaëlle de Groot (the masks)
Tim Lee via Lisson Gallery (the Goldberg Variations)
Terence Koh (the sphere)
Mario Doucette (the curling soldiers)
Daniel Barrow (the projections I read from)

Luba @myspace and the whole song
The Tap @myspace

And hey! Remember to help me celebrate my 10-year anniversary of my Canadian citizenship by calling the Description 62 comment line: 206-376-1528 Long-distance charges apply, and you have until Description 62 is posted in December.

Btw, as I write this, the Michael-Lee Chin Crystal at the ROM is no longer the new architectural bauble in town. All attention is now on the renovated Art Gallery of Ontario, redone by former homeboy Frank Gehry. After a week of press-exclusive ooo'ing and ahh'ing, it's now having a free grand opening weekend. As amazing as it looks, I'm going to avoid the rush and wait a little while - after all, buildings like this should be around forever, no? :-) When I do get down there, the iRiver will be coming along, of course.

I'll be honest - Nuit Blanche was kind of underwhelming for me this year. There were a couple really great things, including this stuff at the ROM, but otherwise, meh. It's very possible one problem (which other critics expressed) was that many exhibit sites were just too far apart. Whatever energy you were given at one site would be depleted by the time you got to something else. That could've just been in my zone (there are three) - one of these years, I really should get out of it and head down to West Queen West. Anyway, I still think it was worthwhile, and since the organizers tweak things each year, I suspect they'll tighten up the map for next time.

One project that made the distance problem bearable won the People's Choice Award for this year. The folks from Project Blinkenlights in Germany had an installation called "Stereocope," where they took over the lights of City Hall for an amazing lightshow that included everything from Pong to Rickrolling. But I didn't make it down there, so how do I know? I got to see a live simulation on an iPhone (Touch) app! Showing it off to Gilby at The Tap, he simply had to have it - so I told him to get it from the App Store on his iPhone, which he did, and after much gushing and playing, he showed me how to swoop around Nathan Philips Square with two fingers on the screen. w00t! Another thing that makes Project Blinkenlights so cool is the open source nature of the design and participation, so if you're geekier than me (and you are), go dig through their website and find what fun can be had.

Extra: Participate in Description 62!

A little announcement about the only kind of party I can afford, why I'm having it and how you can help with it by phoning Seattle. Btw, though I didn't mention it, you can get in on this even if you were born in Canada and have never left. Because I'm inclusive like that. :-)

Click here to download directly
...Okay, here's the subscription link too.

An Update on Description 60

Out of the two things I voted for in the second half of Description 60, one of them lost. That would be Bill O'Neill for Representative to Congress in the 14th district (Canadians: that's the equivalent of an MP). You might have heard the other office I voted for went the way I was hoping.

Pretty much everyone knows that overall, Obama won Ohio, since it was a "battleground state" and all (now get the hell outta there, foreign journalists!). In Ashtabula County, Barack Obama got 55.35% of the vote, while John McCain won 42.17%. Folks in my county had to vote for at least 23 different offices (11 were uncontested) and 5 state issues (5 and 6 got all the damn commercials); with 45 different levies/tax-raises and zoning things spread out for different districts and townships.

I spent election night at a little party at Kristin's place, where the landed immigrant from Michigan and I were watching CNN and Indecision '08 while answering questions from our Canadian friends (which no doubt hipsters in the packed Bloor Cinema were asking at their big party): yes, they vote for all that different stuff, so it takes time to count; no, usually they don't get a head start counting the early ballots; this is how one of those old machines works; most of us don't understand the electoral college much either; everything differs from state to state. With the chatting and the snacks and the switching back-and-forth with the hockey game, once the big news came down, it was for me a little hard to process. It barely started to sink in when McCain conceded (in a speech that presaged a return to McCain 2000, hopefully). And then of course came Obama's speech: it was another one of those great Obama speeches...but HE'D WON. We were all different levels of misty. But it just felt so wierd.

Of course, Obama is all anyone has been talking about ever since, how it is a new day in America, some Torontonians saying "welcome back America". Okay, fine - it is a historic thing in a couple big ways.

However...

In the baptist church basement (where I went to Brownie meetings) where my parents voted, 214 people voted for McCain and 208 voted for Obama (8 people voted for Nader - that guy's always gotta screw things up!). 46% of the whole country voted for McCain and Palin. In many states, a lot of dumb stuff won. But then, some smart stuff won as well. I suppose everyone feels that way, depending on what side they were on. The U.S. is as much of a crazy quilt of selfish and selfless, guarded and self-flagellating, sane and nuts and ethnocentric as it's ever been. It's not like the U.S. was a mess, went through a week-long extreme makeover and last night they moved that bus to reveal a shiny new hearts-and-flowers country with one big Great Room. It ain't gonna happen. There's a hell of a lot to be done, and it might not get done. Obama's going to run into that buzzsaw that everyone else with good intentions has run into in any government; people will fight, people will screw up, people will get lazy and greedy, merde will happen. People might even die.

However...

At Kristin's party, I checked my email on her laptop and found a note from my ex in San Diego. We've had plenty of conversations about voting, and he's explained how he used to be energetic politically when he was younger, but started getting beaten down by circumstance and the system and had concluded f-ck it, what's the point. But with this election, through the primaries and onward, he started getting lifted. He found himself battling his cynicism. Finally, last night, he emailed me when Obama took California big-time: "We did it!! It actually happened!! Holy crap...Voting today was the best feeling ever..." Again, he's not a flighty kinda guy - it takes a lot to bring him up like that.

I think there are millions of people like him with similar stories; people who've had the commercials and yelling and noise shoved down their throats and up their asses. I also think there are tens of thousands of them in Canada, who didn't bother voting last month because it wasn't enough to vote against something - they felt they had nothing to vote for. That's just the way Stephen Harper wanted it, which is why he's still Prime Minister. But in the U.S., there was something to vote for, and it was enough to get them to feel voting mattered, and in turn that they mattered. That is absolutely what made the difference, and if anything good gets done, that will be why.

What I take away from this experience is that although terrible things may happen, everything may fall apart, humanity's worse natures may win again, it is always possible to go from discouragement to hope to action - and there is ALWAYS something to vote for.

Bonne chance, Québec.

Description 60 - Vote Early, Vote Often

Two countries, two elections, two advance polls, two sets of dorky commercials and two chances for me to screw something up (which I do). Features music by Laura Barrett, golf pencils and defiant envelope-licking.

Click here to subscribe
Click here to download directly

Associated links
The previous election episodes: Description 11 and Description 26
Elections Canada
Conservative Party of Canada (boo!)
Liberal Party of Canada
New Democratic Party of Canada
Bloc Québécois
Green Party of Canada

Laura Barrett
"Deception Island Optimists Club" (mp3)
from "Earth Sciences"
(Paper Bag Records)

Buy at iTunes Music Store
Stream from Rhapsody
Buy at Amazon MP3
More On This Album

(that up there is the snazzy thing IODA has me do.)
Other Laura Barrett links: @myspace, @CBC Radio 3 and @Zunior
Federal Voting Assistance Program
The Democratic Party
Republican National Committee (boo!)
Ashtabula County Board of Elections
Presque Isle Downs

The Congressional candidate I voted for is named Bill O'Neill, not Dick O'Neill. Maybe I had too much dickishness on the brain after watching all this U.S. election stuff for a few days. >;-)

There was a lot of editing in both of those election scenes. Voting in Canada took about 15 minutes, while voting in the States took about a half hour. Listening back to the one in Jefferson, I think I sounded like a bit of a jerk, not just laying out my whole situation right off and later sticking in that thing about getting the wrong ballot in the mail previously. But then when I did get around to explaining, the woman at the counter was shaking her head through the whole thing. So I guess we both loosened up.

Now for crossing the border. Since I sold my car in the spring (more on that in another episode), and I'd be home longer than would be thrifty for a rental, I took the bus to Buffalo, then caught another one to Erie, where I'd be picked up. At the U.S. border at the Peace Bridge, the passengers get off the bus, go through the immigration part, then pick up any luggage they have and go through the customs part. Even getting to the point of getting off the bus took about an hour in line, which I later learned was a result of not only neglecting to bring in more staff for a long weekend (in Canada), but deciding it was a good time to bring on trainees.

Once I got to an immigration person, I gave her my one-way bus ticket (since Dad was having surgery, I wasn't sure when I'd be able to travel back up) and my Canadian passport which says I was born in Cleveland, U.S.A.

"Do you have an American passport?" she asked.

When I said no, she gave me one of those lectures-trying-not-to-sound-like-a-lecture saying that a Canadian passport listing my birthplace in the U.S. is not good enough proof of my U.S. citizenship, and that and a one-way bus ticket does not prove I have the means to go back to Canada. She was letting me off this time (you can feel a finger wagging, can't you?), but suggested next time I also bring my birth certificate, so I could have what she termed as "the best of both worlds" and be questioned as an American.

Thing is, a U.S. birth certificate doesn't prove my citizenship any more than the designation in my passport does - it only proves I was born there, not that I've retained my citizenship since then. Of course I didn't tell her that, or question whether she thought my Canadian passport could be bogus. I just smiled, nodded, thank-you'd and shuffled off to my suitcase, which went through customs very easily. This gave me the chance to sit in the bus for another hour as my multicultural brethren went through. The last of them was part of a small group of women (one of whom was in front of me in line) who were dual citizens like me...only they happened to be Canadian and Iranian, which meant they had to fill out a separate form. I guess it was some "Axis of Evil" form, which so far, we Canadians don't have to fill out yet.

And with that in mind, we Canadians humbly remind we Americans to please vote November 4th - or anytime before that...

Description 59 - Montréal Avant Podcamp

Before attending the first big social media "anti-conference" in Quebec, I buy fabulously unhealthy food, sit on a very high balcony and celebrate how Everyone In Montreal Is Cooler Than Me. Features music by David Usher and a last-second cameo by Julien Smith which emphasize this last point.

Click here to subscribe
Click here to download directly

Associated links
The other Montreal episodes: Description 28 and Description 29
Podcamp Montreal
Gare Centrale @Wikipedia
Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana
History and various versions of O Canada
Les Halles de la Gare
Première Moisson
A recipe for Feuilleté au jambon (but keep those mushrooms out!)
David Usher: official site, myspace, Maplemusic, CloudiD (his tech/social media blog) and the Podsafe Music Network
Six Pixels of Separation by Twist Image (Mitch Joel)
McGill Station and Place-des-Arts Station
Place des Arts
Le site officiel de Youppi! (I keep forgetting he's mascot for Les Canadiens now.)
Trylon Apartments
Provigo
Katherine Matthews and Rob Lee
A recipe for Tarte au Sucre
And where I ended up.

Those murals at Gare Centrale weren't even remotely trompe l’oeil, which I reminded myself later is an artistic technique of making two-dimensional things look like they're three-dimensional. I then wondered if I meant clin d'oeil, but that seems unlikely (though any Google research is overwhelmed by the fact Clin d'oeil is a huge women's magazine in Quebec). I was trying to come up with a style of French design typified by dark blue details against a stone/bone-coloured background - and even then the colours in the murals were reversed! Argh. Here's an example of those murals. I should've just said Art Deco and shut up until I had a chance to watch more HGTV.

I didn't go out and say that David Usher is a resident of Montreal, so I'll say it now. He's bounced around various places throughout his life, but had lived in Montreal a few years ago, and is now back - again, when he's not touring. More consistently from Montreal is Julien Smith, pretty much the first podcaster in Canada (Bob and AJ are the cause of me putting that "pretty much" in there) and not surprisingly one of the brilliant organizers of Podcamp Montreal. You can get an idea about this guy from watching his Podcamp presentation, which is still available (as of post-time) via the Ustream Podcamp Montreal channel. While you're there, check out the presentations I attended by fellow organizer Sylvain Grand’Maison and previously-mentioned "standard bearer" Scarborough Dude. They really aren't too inside-baseball, but just very engaging talks by very intelligent people.

And here's the view of Montreal from my 18th-floor balcony:

Again with the Nuit Blanche?

Yes, it's time (a little late) for the third edition of Nuit Blanche in Toronto, which was the subject of Description 25 and Description 45. It's an exception to my unofficial rule to not do shows about annual events every year, maybe because each year is different, and also because I've experienced it at different times in its 12-hourish overnight time span. Since I went through it early in the first year and late in the second year, this time (tomorrow) I'm trying to go for something in the middle. Of course, much of it depends on how well I do at staying awake. If a show comes out of it, it'll probably turn up some time next month (after at least one other episode).

Regardless of any of this, if you're in town, go yourself! It's fun - seriously! It's three zones of a bunch of pieces of contemporary art, presented in ways that are accessible to everyone (even, as Stephen Harper would say, "ordinary Canadians"), no matter what your feelings are about Contemporary Art. (I can vouch for that - I'm more of an Impressionist fan myself.) Check out those podcast episodes and see what you think. Then if you dig it, dive into a pile of guides for info: there's the official site, Torontoist's guide, NOW Magazine's guide, eye weekly's guide and a brilliant Google Map mashup from BlogTO. And if you see someone walking around pretending to talk on a cellphone and wearing a little white mic clipped to her purse strap, say hi.

Holy Phoque Indeed

(Props to Nathalie Petrowski's Cyberpresse column for the title.)

I don't usually find myself swept up in viral video fever, but this one is particularly Canadian and worthwhile.

While in Montreal this past weekend (more on that next episode), I was puttering around the hotel room with the Francophone breakfast show "Salut Bonjour" in the background, and noticed people talking about some film clip of a musician appearing before some sort of dismissive commission. Recognizing Stéphane Rousseau (from the film The Barbarian Invasions, but also a comedian and singer) as one of the inquisitors, I guessed it was a new feature film. Since my French sucks, that was as far as I could get.

Thanks to a link today on Twitter from Gilles Duceppe (or his people - he's leader of the Bloc Quebecois), I've found out the story, and it's pretty important for me to include here for a couple reasons.

First to go back for a second: last month, the Tory government decided to make a lot of cuts to some pretty helpful arts funding (Marc Weisblott did a fair job explaining some of this in the Scrolling Eye blog), which was preceded by a proposed bill which would effect funding for Canadian films with supposedly questionable morals (CBC has a good thumbnail here). Now we're in the middle of a federal election campaign (yes, us too), creative people who have to go through enough crap without all this are very concerned with what more could happen if the Tories win again. Many of them have organized into groups like the Department of Culture to educate and support each other and do some effective lobbying for once.

One group which is so far anonymous, but which seems to be without party affiliation and from Quebec, has made this three-minute film about the situation, "Culture en Péril (Culture in Danger)". The musician, Michel Rivard of a legendary band called Beau Dommage, appears before a government funding committee (including the fey fellow played by M. Rousseau) to propose a music festival to help promote Quebec music in France, and somehow hilarity ensues. No, it really does ensue, centred in part around the fact that the French word for "seal" (the swimming animal) is "phoque".

So here we have Quebeckers, who are way better at promoting their own stars and pop culture than in English Canada, bringing all their talents to bear to truly entertain and also illuminate some important issues - including issues important across the country regardless of language. And there are even English subtitles available (if you can't get them here, follow the YouTube link and follow the simple instructions to turn the captioning on).

I don't think it gets any more Canadian than this.

Description 58 - Queen Street West

It was the coolest place in (English) Canada, and then it wasn't. Three wise men walk me through it, with help from Bob Wiseman's music, some giant ants, some Trotskyites and a toaster oven.

Click here to subscribe
Click here to download directly

Associated links (deep breath...)
Last year's Jane's Walk episode
Queen Street West @Wikipedia
CondomShack (there'll be an episode about that someday)
Official description of this Jane's Walk
Duke's Cycle
Torontoist covers the Queen Street West Fire
Gary Duke's first visit of the fire site
The Big Bop
Bovine Sex Club and The Shanghai Cowgirl
Kickass Karaoke
Mercer Union (now on Bloor)
Art Metropole (now on King)
The Red Head Gallery (now on Richmond...sheesh...)
General Idea
Bob Wiseman: official, @MySpace and podsafe @publicbroadcasting.ca
Blue Rodeo
Parachute Club @The Canadian Pop Encyclopedia
CBC on the invention of Trivial Pursuit
Cameron House
Among its past denizens: Molly Johnson and Holly Cole
VideoCabaret's History of Small Villages
Horseshoe Tavern
Steve's Music Store
Mary Margaret O'Hara @Musician's Guide
Cowboy Junkies
Club Monaco
The Rivoli
A Tribute to Richard O'Brien
Original "I'm An Adult Now" video
Peter Pan Bistro
Silver Snail Comics
The CHUM-City Building @Wikipedia
Ontario College of Art and Design
NOW Magazine covers the Beverley Tavern closing
Video for Meryn Cadell's "The Sweater" (If you haven't heard this, please do that now. Definitely wear lip gloss.)
KITHfan.org (Kids In the Hall)
Queen Mother Cafe
The Nylons
The Rex Hotel Jazz and Blues Bar

What? I'm supposed to write more after all that? Don't you have enough to go through with all those links? I'm tired...

Okay, one more little thing: a door down from CondomShack is Kops Kollectibles, where I would often visit my friend Chris Edwards, who eventually moved upstairs to what became Vintage Sounds, a bastion of vinyl (albums, 45's, whatever) bought and sold and ordered. Unfortunately but maybe not surprisingly, their online presence is woefully minimal, but Fodor's has said some nice things about them and has contact information. If you're a High Fidelity-level music geek and can't bear the strip mall, start there and you may not go anywhere else on the street.

P.S. Kensington Video

I featured Kensington Market in Description 24, but frankly I was a bit slack about describing it, and the place is always worth revisiting. These days, I'm usually there about once a week to do some grocery shopping, and lately I've found myself there on a Pedestrian Sunday (aka P.S. Kensington).

The idea of P.S. Kensington is to show how much more human a neighbourhood becomes when cars are taken out of the equation - on Sundays from May to October, the main streets of the area are closed to car traffic. To be honest, I've found this a little redundant, since Kensington is already dominated by pedestrians and bicycles regularly taking up the little one-way lanes, very few people with cars and no time choose the place to hurriedly drive through, and everyone pretty much understands that. Shutting it down, then, doesn't seem to be a tremendous effort (unlike the Blackout Anniversary celebration that turned Bloor and Spadina into a piazza). Still, P.S. Kensington means more fun things than usual are made to happen in the streets, and it's a great attention-getter to bring people who aren't usually there to wander and visit the many wonderful independent vendors of the Market.

So here's some video I shot at P.S. Kensington a couple weeks ago while I was on my way to the store, and hopefully you'll get a better idea of the vibe of the place than I gave you a couple years ago. If nothing else, hey - tuba solo!

Description 57 - Flippin' to the 'A' Side

With the help of some slabs of vinyl I bought in St. Catharines in the mid-'80's, we travel back to a time Canadian pop music was trying to find itself - and so was I.

Click here to subscribe
Click here to download directly

(November 25 update below)

The Videos on YouTube
It Doesn't Really Matter by Platinum Blonde
Flippin' to the 'A' Side by Cats Can Fly
L'Affaire Dumoutier (Say to Me) by The Box
Terry David Mulligan on Good Rockin' Tonite
There Was a Time by One to One
Stay in the Light by Honeymoon Suite

View them all as a playlist!

Associated links
Platinum Blonde: official site, @iLike and @last.fm
Standing in the Dark: A Platinum Blonde Fansite
Cats Can Fly @Wikipedia
The Box: official site (Anglais ou Français) and @MySpace
The Box @ CafePress
Terry David Mulligan @CKUA, which has his radio show "Mulligan Stew"
One to One @The Canadian Pop Encyclopedia
Honeymoon Suite: official site, @MySpace and @iLike
Buy from Amazon.ca and from iTunes
St. Catharines Public Library
Fanshawe College (wow, fancy site!)

To you audiophiles...uh, you're here why? :-) Yes, these are over-20-year-old records played on a chintzy record player with a dubious line-in connection to the iRiver. It's still not too far off from how they sounded to me back in tha day. I'm hoping the audio quality, the Fair Use talk, the fabulous links to buy and my best of intentions will keep me from getting some very official-looking emails.

In my research, I found that Terry David Mulligan was one of the growing number of casualties of CTV/Globemedia taking over CHUM/CITY. After Good Rockin' Tonite, TDM moved to Muchmusic, and he was the CHUM/CITY voice of Western reason for a couple decades. But at the end of last year, still under contract, he got turfed just before his home province of B.C. eliminated 65 as the age of mandatory retirement (TDM turned 66 last June). This of course is a load of crap. This article from the Vancouver Sun talks about his wrongful dismissal case against them. Regardless, we have not heard the last of TDM. He has his CKUA thing and a great project about wines called The Tasting Room. Frankly, I think he'd be perfect for podcasting - we'll see what happens.

Okay, the Platinum Blonde stuff. Btw, the lead singer (and original bassist), Mark Holmes, is still a man-about-town around here. You wouldn't recognize him unless you kept in mind that he's sort of the local authority on British mod culture (he's from Manchester, yet another ex-pat). His DJ nights of mod/Britpop music with Bobbi Guy became so successful, they gave birth to The Mod Club, one of the major dance/concert venues in Toronto. He even finally did a solo record, which you can find on iTunes.

But back to tha day...

So here are these teen idol popstars, the most commercial band in Canada. Even Canadians could sell these guys.


CBS/Epic/whatever the hell became Sony in the States picks them up. And what's the first single/video for the USA? This:


WTF?

It was around this time, in May of 1986, I left study hall with Ron, Lori and Brandon, and we drove to Cleveland to meet Julie and others to see Platinum Blonde play a free show WMMS was putting on somewhere downtown. Here we are:


That's me with the flag, of course. After the show, we all meandered around and got each member of the band to sign my flag. We found them one by one hanging out in completely different places (I remember Mark singing the Man UFC fight song on the bus), both relieved to not be hounded by crowds and pleasantly surprised there were Americans who actually knew who they were.

This was a pretty good attitude to have - considering they were there as the opening band for Blue Öyster Cult.

That's right. This new wave/pop/rock band, the "Canadian Duran Duran", with the makeup and the hair and fancy suits, the most commercial girl-scream-inducing band in Canada, was opening for Blue Öyster Cult.

It was the kind of story I had only just begun to hear. We've come a...well...a moderate way.

(Update, Nov. 25, 2008)
One of the guys in the videos up there (with the long face), who I met that day in Cleveland, is Kenny MacLean. He was found dead yesterday.

While the cause of death is still undetermined, the Toronto Star has a very good article here, which includes comments from Mark Holmes and Chris Steffler.

Yet another person who came to Canada from elsewhere (Scotland), Kenny joined up after Standing in the Dark to play bass so Mark could be more lead-singery. So he was part of Alien Shores and everything that came after, which is a lot. In my work on the radio later, it was nice when I got to play stuff from his first solo album, which got a fair bit of airplay everywhere. In the years that followed, I'd see him around at the odd show, but of course wouldn't say hi. When I lived near Allan Gardens, I would often walk by a bar on Gerrard just off Yonge which would perpetually have his name on its marquee, because he had a regular gig there. I'd always see it and get his first solo single "Don't Look Back" in my head, where it is now.

While he was at the start of a lot of great things at the time of his death - another solo album, a venture mentoring aspiring musicians - it would seem he had a tremendous finale. The last time anyone saw him alive was at his CD release party Friday night at the Mod Club, which is impressive not just because that's such a big venue now, but because it's Mark's. They had their moments over the years, but performed together again that night as a part of what was considered a personally triumphant show. I think that's how a lot of musicians would like to go out.