No More Jeopardy on CBC?!

I’ll take “Bullshit Moves in the Name of National Culture” for 1000 please.

According to this article in this morning’s Globe and Mail, new CBC English-language services head Kirstine Stewart is looking to axe Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune from the line-up and replace them with home-grown content.  Stewart believes that the rationale for keeping the popular American game shows on the air is invalid “now that… we can make shows like Dragons' Den or Battle of the Blades that are consistently making big numbers.”

I’m not even going to get into the fact that Alex Trebek is, um, Canadian, or the fact that somehow Coronation Street makes the cut.  Stewart claims that since CBC has become a better competitor with private networks in the past few years, it should no longer need to carry American content to attract viewers.  I’m all about Canadian content, but there are questions of feasibility too – the record-breaking programming over the past few years (Little Mosque, Being Erica, Battle of the Blades, Dragons’ Den, etc.) has aired later at night, in the 8 or 9 p.m. timeslot.  Call me cynical, but I think CBC is unlikely to produce a hit that can compete with the long-established Jeopardy! in the awkward 7:30 p.m. timeslot.

And if CBC is suddenly so willing to put principles before ratings, why is Don Cherry still on the air?

Image courtesy of Jeopardy!

Baby, It's Cold Outside...

Here in Toronto, the forecast calls for a windchill of -10 and 5 centimetres of snow tomorrow.  Fortunately, culture is an all-season sport!  Stop by the library, video store, and your favourite vendor of snacks this afternoon, so you can spend the weekend holed up in your cozy home.

READ: Books about pop culture can be thinly veiled publicity stunts, or they can be smart exercises in cultural studies.  Stick with the latter.  I just finished Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. by Sam Wasson.  You get to indulge your appetite for Audrey Hepburn, Edith Head and Givenchy, but still feel smart while you brush up on Truman Capote, the sexual revolution, and the history of film production.  It's the thinking woman's chick lit.  As for me, I'll be reading the Jay-Z memoir Decoded.

WATCH: Here's hoping I'm not the only person left who still rents DVDs.  The Social Network is out this week, so if you missed it in theatres, now's your chance to weigh in on the Oscar hype and watch Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake play complete assholes.  If you caught it the first time around, check out Mao's Last Dancer, "the other ballet movie of 2010."  Realistically, I'll probably be watching Black Swan for the third time - my coworker picked up a bootleg copy for me.

LISTEN: Cold weather calls for something mellow, introspective, and hey, why not Canadian?  Check out Freedom or Death here.  I'm planning to catch up on radio shows I missed during the week due to my radio-unfriendly workplace.  Paul Giametti was on Q on Monday to gab about Barney's Version - you can listen in here (January 10).  And if you take my advice to read Decoded this weekend, obviously you will need to listen to the Black Album on repeat.

Stay warm!

Art and Law: The Bronson Controversy

This story has been in the news for about a month now, but took a legal twist this week – Canadian artist AA Bronson has retained counsel to pressure the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery to return his portrait Felix to the National Gallery of Canada, in response to the NPG’s significant alteration of another artist’s video installation on “moral” grounds.  You can brush up on the details of the controversy in Toronto Life and the Globe and Mail.  In the meantime, it raises an interesting question – how much control can Canadian visual artists exert over their works through the law?

Answer: not much.  Visual artists in Canada have legal counsel at their disposal through the non-profit organization CARFAC (Canadian Artists’ Representation/Le Front des artistes canadiens).  CARFAC’s mandate is to “defend artists’ economic and legal rights and educate the public on fair dealing with artists.”  CARFAC’s history has been one of protecting copyright and ensuring fair payment for living artists, but it has not historically been a strong advocate for artists’ ability to have their works displayed in context.  No wonder – there is little provision under Canadian law for this, and artists take a risk when selling their works that they won’t be used as intended.

What’s the solution?  It’s difficult to see how any legal provision could be taken to uphold contextual rights in visual art that wouldn’t seriously infringe on an exhibitor’s freedom of expression.  My armchair musing?  Artists need to negotiate control over the display of their works at the time of purchase, and they can only do this if they are in a sufficiently strong economic position.  Control will always come at a price, but hopefully, continued advocacy for fair payment should make the cost of control less prohibitive for artists.

I unequivocally agree that Bronson’s portrait of his partner’s corpse, shortly after his death from AIDS, is compromised by being displayed with a video installation that has been heavily edited to remove allusions to HIV/AIDS that are deemed “un-Christian.”  I think it is reprehensible that the NPG is motivated more by the religious right than by artists’ intent.  With no evidence of a purchase agreement friendly to Bronson’s wishes, though, I think he and his legal team are unlikely to be successful. 

Canadians in the (Arts and Lit) News

It’s a good week for Canadian artists across the board!  Let’s see which Canucks are getting press south of the border.

 Toxic Event, Chemical Cloud Screenprint by Seripop

Who: Montreal design duo Seripop (Yannick Desranleau and Chloe Lum)

What: Experimental visual art, specializing in screen-prints

Where: New York – heavy art bimonthly Print’s February Issue

Check it out here.

Who: Toronto Public Library’s Human Library project

What: Pilot program involving “checking out” a volunteer with an interesting life for a chat

Where: The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog

Learn more here. 

Who: Alice Munro

What: Duh

Where: Huffington Post’s list of “Most Important Contemporary Fiction Writers” – chosen by two of the thirteen authors interviewed, and the only writer to be chosen twice

See the whole list here.

Image courtesy of Seripop.

Downtown Cop Turned Street Art Activist? Interesting...

This profile of Toronto policeman Scott Mills is a couple of days old, but it’s a cool read.  Mills partners with businesses to provide legal space for graffiti artists in back alleys.   Check out the space in Broadcast Lane, which Mills helped to set up, and a neighbour’s reaction:

The article praises Mills’ efforts to help street artists channel their work legally, but despite Mills' popularity, criticism abounds, too.  Opposition to commissioned graffiti generally takes two forms – those who think it has no inherent value and validates illegal tagging, and those who see it as selling out.  Reading about Mills, who seems genuinely passionate about the artists he works with, it’s hard to object to his work, and looking at the photos, I can’t help but feel envious – I’d be happy to volunteer my back alley uptown, though I suspect my neighbours and landlord (slash mother) might feel differently.  Then again, the mystery and secrecy imparted by illegal graffiti is a huge part of its charm – how exciting was it to wake up on May 10 this year to proof that Banksy had graced Toronto’s streets?  So is Mills a champion for alternative art, or a patronizing cop who doesn’t really get it?

I haven’t decided, but in the meantime, I’m busy browsing Toronto street art in Torontoist’s Vandalist column – more recommended reading/viewing.

Video by LegalGraffitiArt.

The Warrior Emperor and China’s Terracotta Army

Well I’m on vacation now, which means it’s time to catch up on Toronto attractions that I would never be brave enough to face on a weekend.  Case in point: this ROM exhibit, documenting the political growth of the Qin dynasty in China, culminating in the enormous tomb complex built for emperor Ying Zheng circa 210 BCE.

The exhibit provides a solid historical grounding for the tomb, covering 500 years of dynastic change and conflict in China, but of course the real reason we’re all there is to see the terracotta warriors!  Photos of the excavation site in Shaanxi province are haunting, showing endless rows of stone figures, surprisingly lifelike, to the point where at first glance, the missing heads seem deliberate.

The ROM exhibit includes ten of the life-size figures, in a variety of roles (military, civic, etc.).  The stone sentinels are set in a gallery with little else in the way of historical description or related artifacts, allowing them, rightly, to take centre-stage.  I must say that the dungeon-like Garfield Weston Exhibition Space is put to excellent use here – with walls painted dark brown, lots of angular corners, and statues lit eerily from below, it is easy to imagine that this is, in fact, a tomb.

Very spooky!

Unfortunately, I am immature, and the horses strongly 

reminded me of Gumby's horse, Pokey.

After the terracotta army, the remaining smaller artifacts, housed by sunny yellow walls, seem uninteresting and anti-climatic.  I think the exhibition would have done better to end with its strongest pieces.

Side notes on the ROM – it was sunny in Toronto today, making the dinosaurs a particular treat, but I am sorry to say that the batcave is not what it once was.  Eschewing the strobe-light heavy finale in favour of a hokey narrator was a mistake.

Photos from the Wikimedia commons and courtesy of www.rom.on.ca

Social Fiction

I first read about this phenomenon in this article in the New York Times this summer, and I’ve been fascinated by the concept ever since.  Can you tell a story through social media, by manipulating the interactions between various users?  And more importantly, will anybody read it?

The novel referenced in the Times article, My Darklyng, is clearly meant for the teen girl set, and I figured I would be doing the concept a disservice to base my opinion on something I’d be unlikely to enjoy in hardcover anyway.  Instead, I tried 2009’s November in Manchester.  In this self-proclaimed "social media love story," a cast of eight characters blog and tweet about their lives over the course of a month, and the story emerges in the interplay between them.

My conclusion is that its definitely possible to tell a story in this way, but that it requires far more blunt language, in order to establish context, than the average social media user actually displays to the world.  In November in Manchester, James tweets “Persephone not answering my calls.  Will see if I can catch her at work.”  What kind of pathetic, sad-sack person admits to someone not calling them back to all of their friends and followers?  I’m not buying it.  In real life social media (oxymoron?) you don’t share “Time to say goodbye to the second woman in my life” after a break-up, you either post cheesy song lyrics or photos of yourself with someone attractive draped over you.  The characters in November in Manchester just lay it all out there, with none of the nuance and subtlety that people use when crafting their online personas.

I think the social media novel is an interesting experiment, but without the benefit of narrative and description afforded by a print novel, it relies too heavily on dialogue, forcing its characters into unrealistic exchanges in order to advance the plot.  I much prefer the device when it’s used irreverently – fake Twitter accounts are less ambitious in scope, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, and can still effectively tell a story – i.e. Toronto’s own RebelMayor (the only funny part of the 2010 mayoral election).  This is not unlike early film – the attempts at drama come across as contrived and overwrought, but comedy translates well in almost any medium.  Maybe social fiction just needs to come of age.