One Last Night with Mata Hari

(Here are my Director's notes from the world premiere production of One Last Night with Mata Hari, which just finished its run at the Isabel Bader Centre for the Performing Arts in Kingston, ON.)

A century after her execution by firing squad in 1917, Mata Hari remains a household name. Search for her on Google and you will generate more than 40 million hits. Much of what you will find mixes fiction and fact, with the emphasis on the former. Mata Hari has become a mythological figure for the modern age: an exotic, treacherous femme fatale who seduces men, drains them of information, then ruthlessly betrays and discards them. As enchanting as she is dangerous, that version of Mata Hari has been embodied on film by some of cinema’s most glamourous stars, including Greta Garbo, Jeanne Moreau, and Sylvia Kristel. The real woman is barely visible beneath all the layers of fabrication. But now that the records of her secret trial are available, we have a better chance of recovering the truth.

To be sure, Mata Hari herself contributed much to her own myth. Before she was ever accused of being a double agent, she was already trafficking in a form of deception. Her stage persona was a deliberate invention in a mode we now would call “cultural appropriation.” To be blunt, she might as well have been using Edward Said’s Orientalism as a handbook. Mata Hari presented herself as half-Asian, but she was all Dutch, born Margaretha Zelle (she preferred the French version of her name, Marguerite). In that respect, one can compare Marguerite’s creation of Mata Hari, a putatively half-Asian performer, to Archibald Belaney’s creation of his fraudulent First Nations persona, Grey Owl. Of course, both were exposed as imposters. But it is worthwhile looking beyond that “aha!” moment to consider why Europe was at first so eager to embrace Mata Hari as a performer and so ready later to believe she was a traitor.

One way of grasping the point quickly is to compare Mata Hari to another semi-mythological figure from the Great War, the legendary Canadian flying ace, Billy Bishop. John Burge and I are both admirers of the elegant simplicity of the musical Billy Bishop Goes to War, and in some ways what we’ve created is deliberately the flip side of that show. Whereas its tunes were often inspired by the patriotic music hall, ours draw more on the sardonic cabaret and art song. As a mythical persona, Billy Bishop represents the culmination of the vast patriarchal and nationalistic drive toward war, a nearly gleeful bloodlust (“we’re going to fight the Hun!”). Western Civilization was plainly in the grip of a neurotic obsession with violence as an agent for change. But there were other means of expressing that same desire, as Modris Eksteins taught us in Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of Modernism; in the shadow of war, art was making its own sort of revolution. Mata Hari’s performance might have served as a sort of dream in which the East represented freedom from repression: an erotic, feminized revolution.

What of Mata Hari’s career as a spy? [Spoiler alert!] “Career” already overstates the matter. She did indeed provide the allies with some information, although her job was not made easy. Was she a double agent? Well, as we show, the conviction was based on scant evidence.

The authorities were eager to preserve Bishop’s life because he was “good for morale” (meaning good for preserving the enthusiasm for killing or being killed). If Mata Hari represented a tug in the opposite direction---away from Thanatos, the death instinct, and towards Eros and life---it is easy to imagine why it would be in certain interests to portray her as an enemy of the people. Now, that is an argument about preferences in propaganda; to move from there to the idea that there was a vast conspiracy to execute Mata Hari would be to indulge in paranoia. However, to suspect a smaller conspiracy is not at all unreasonable. After the war, Mata Hari’s nemesis, Georges Ladoux, stood trial for treason---twice. In the end he was acquitted, but enough evidence had been mustered against him to end his career.

2015 Convocation Address

This speech was actually delivered when I was guest speaker at the Spring Convocation, not at the more recent convocation a couple of weeks back, but I had totally forgotten about the speech until I was reminded today. Here goes.

Convocation 2015

Principal, Chancellor, Rector, Colleagues, Family and Graduands:

Certain Indian yoga masters say that, whenever a novice sits down to meditate, there is a risk of all the demons floating around nearby rushing in and creating a distraction. Apparently, concentrated intelligence is a threat to these demons. They want to keep the mind of the novice away from the spiritual and return it to trivial earthly matters. The demons want the novice to stop striving for something higher and to instead rest content with the default world.

Sound familiar? Sure, the demons you know probably take a different form. They look more like, oh, that Netflix series you were bingeing on, or Facebook, or…uh…Tetris? In other words, one’s own demons are never terrifying monsters. They’re comfortable and familiar. But they are the adversaries of our more precious purposes.

Still, whatever your particular demons might have been, here you are, so you must have been at least moderately successful at wrestling with them and concentrating on your studies. Congratulations.

But what happens now? Does getting this rolled up piece of paper mean an end to the struggle? I hope not. The whole point of your degree is to effect some permanent change in your thinking.

But what change? Well, it’s become a cliché in convocation addresses to say that the purpose of a liberal arts education---with varying emphasis on the arts---is not to supply knowledge, but to teach you how to think. It’s a cliché, but as with many clichés, there is some truth to it.

Let me back up a bit.

We get the term liberal education from the Romans. What they meant is the education that would help a free person take an active part in civic life. At its core this is about conceiving improvements for society and interrogating the ideas that are handed to you. It’s about cultivating a critical attitude towards what have become social norms.

Now the reason that the arts are crucial to this enterprise has to do with the insights of extraordinary individual minds. Such a mind, notwithstanding that it may belong to an eccentric social outlier, occasionally affords us a vision that is more compelling and far-seeing than what the world is otherwise willing to reveal. And regardless of whether that vision is in the form of a concerto or a play or a painting or an essay or whatever, it establishes its own authority by compelling our imaginations, in effect freeing us from the tyranny of our preconceptions about how the world works.

A great work of art confronts you with something for which you were not quite prepared. It takes what you thought of as fixed reality and causes that to slide into contingency and illusion. By studying these works, by embodying them within ourselves, we are pursuing a kind of mental discipline: a form of discipline that, paradoxically, leads to intellectual freedom. We all understand we are not free to play the bassoon until we have studied and practiced the bassoon. In a similar way, freedom of thought depends upon study and practice. And the discipline of thinking critically about and through art, the activity of a liberal arts education, leads to a free imagination.

The idea is well understood within the university; outside there are other opinions. Not long ago, I saw a videoclip in which the tv personality Kevin O’Leary was talking about education. First he declared: “money is the only thing that matters,” and then he said that, consequently, a “liberal arts degree…is useless” (BNN Video, G&M, 6 Feb 2015).

Now I hope that none of Kevin O’Leary’s loved ones are here in the audience, because O’Leary will be playing the role of demon in the rest of what I have to say.

We know that what O’Leary says represents a very commonplace a point of view. But is he right? Is money the only thing that matters? Let’s agree that money is important, never more so than if you don’t have enough. But you can only eat, dress and sleep so well. Once you have enough of it to make your life comfortable, pursuing money for its own sake, or for power, is a kind of neurosis. Those who worship money or power can never have enough of either. As some very rich people like Warren Buffett or Bill Gates will attest, having made yourself comfortable, the only real worth you will find in money or power lies in how you use it to improve the world.

But even were we to accept the premise that money is all-important, O’Leary is just factually wrong in suggesting that those with liberal arts degrees don't make money. On the contrary, the evidence shows that those with liberal arts degrees tend to do perfectly well financially. Why? Well, because you are imaginative, resourceful, articulate and insightful: all crucial qualities contributing to prosperity in any field.

Why would O’ Leary dismiss that? Well, let’s look at the other part of what he’s implying. For those who believe that money is the only thing that matters, what does a useful education look like? The preference would be for you to smoothly join the economic machine, become a docile worker causing minimal disruption to the flow of wealth up the pyramid. A useful education would make the student a morally obtuse, quiescent commodity.

By contrast, a student with a liberal education is a critical and carping individual with “ideas” about how the world could be “improved.” In the it’s-all-about-money world, such people are not merely useless, but inconvenient, even threatening. They become threatening the moment they decide they’d prefer to make a better society instead of apathetically or cynically resting content with default assumptions about the world.

This brings us back to those demons who, because they were threatened by concentrated thought, tried to distract the yoga novice. Naturally, I am not suggesting that Kevin O’Leary is an actual demon---though, neither can I rule it out---but his suggestion that money is all that matters does represent the sort of values produced by a refusal to think. In short, he is demonic insofar as he is a self-elected representative of the kind of self-absorbed, unexamined, lazy prejudices that much of your education has given you practice in recognizing and resisting. …And which I hope you’ll go on resisting.

Here’s where the idea [alluded to by Principal Woolf] comes in that, after you leave Queen’s, the university goes wherever you are: because, you’ll discover that resisting the demons of lazy prejudices often requires a disciplined mindfulness that has been fortified by your education. And you’ll find, too, that your robustly educated imagination is an enormous help in doing many of the things necessary to live a full and happy life. I’m speaking of things such as:

Discovering what you really need as opposed to accepting what others want you to want;

Learning how to express yourself so you always say exactly what you mean and so your own feelings and ideas never seem confusing and alien to you;

Understanding other human beings well enough that you do not automatically attribute to maliciousness what might be as easily attributed to incompetence or desperation;

Now these ideas are focused on the individual mind rather than society at large. But, as Mahatma Ghandi taught, any greater social struggle is first of all fought within the self. You have outgrown the simplistic world of melodrama, where evil is always external. You know that the demons of greed and narcissism, apathy and ignorance, fear and suspicion are not really floating in the air around us, or even on our tv screens. They are within us. Having the strength of imagination to see this and resist is where the struggle to make a better world begins.

Thank you.

Ten Years When the Winner of the Genie Award for Best Picture Was Better than the Winner of the Oscar for Best Picture

No Canadian film has ever won the Oscar for Best Picture, although seven Canadian films have been in the running for best Foreign Language film, with one actually winning (as I mention below). Does this mean that Canadian films are just not in the same league in terms of quality? Not so fast. I offer here a list of ten occasions when an award-winning Canadian film has been, in my opinion superior to the film selected by the Academy for Best Picture. I should say that I do believe there are lots and lots of great films that have won the Best Picture award; it’s just that, in these ten cases, I think that there were better films, which the American Academy ignored and the Canadian Academy didn’t.

1. 1987

Best Picture Oscar: The Last Emperor
The Last Emperor is pretty to look at, and it focuses on a fascinating episode in history, and it is very, very long, which possibly adds to its impression of grandeur. But the sweep it made of the Oscars that year did a lot of damage to the credibility of the Academy. Vincent Canby hit the nail on the head when he compared it to “an elegant travel brochure” in the New York Times. As lushly attractive as the film is, it is thin on real content. The script (which also won an Oscar) is dull and vapid, rarely rising above the level of a soap opera.

Best Picture Genie: Le Déclin de l'empire américain

Let’s admit that The Barbarian Invasions (2004), the sequel to The Decline of the American Empire, is probably the better movie (indeed, it won the best Foreign Language Film Oscar that year, so I haven’t put it on the list for that reason; and also because I am not sure I would want to argue that it is a better film than the 2004 Best Picture Oscar winner, Million Dollar Baby). But there can be little question that Decline is better than Last Emperor. Where the Oscar winner is a solemn historical pageant that quickly becomes turgid and never really engages any important ideas, the Genie winner is a lively character-driven drama in the spirit of Chekhov. Because it was a movie that belonged so clearly to its time, it has dated a little, but in 1987 it was surprising and unconventional and it is still full of ideas.

2. 1989

Best Picture Oscar: Driving Miss Daisy
Yes, Driving Miss Daisy is a sweet and likeable movie, and I wouldn’t want to encourage anyone to dislike it. The question I want to raise has to do with the artistic achievement it represents. The movie sticks fairly close to the play by Alfred Uhry, a sentimental favourite of theatre audiences. But, as charming as the play is, and as winning as the performances of the main actors are, judged as a piece of filmmaking, the movie seems no more than…fine, blandly competent. (This film also raises the question of what the Academy is actually judging when they award Best Adapted Screenplay: the specific work of adaptation or the overall accomplishment regardless of how much adaptation there was? Either way, I await a rational justification for why the award went to the barely adapted screenplay for Driving Miss Daisy over Branagh’s somewhat bolder screenplay for one of Shakespeare’s classic dramas, Henry V.)

Best Picture Genie: Dead Ringers

Dead Ringers is as disturbing as Driving Miss Daisy is charming. David Cronenberg has created a film that is haunting because scene after scene it manages at the same time to be both repellently horrific and absorbingly beautiful. It is an astonishing and wholly original work. Many people hate the movie for what it does to them emotionally, but the strength of that response speaks in favour of Cronenberg’s artistic achievement, not against it. Dead Ringers is like a nightmare shared by the whole modern world: all our obsessions with eroticism and violence and with the mechanical scrutiny of human beings flow together into this movie. It is a brilliant work of art and a shattering experience for the viewer.

3. 1990

Best Picture Oscar: Dances With Wolves
I used to have the idea that Dances With Wolves had won the Oscar in the same year that Black Robe had won the Genie, but this is not so.

(Black Robe is indeed a great Canadian movie, but it won in the following year, 1991, when Silence of the Lambs won the Oscar, and I’m not convinced there is an obvious enough difference in quality to make a point about that.) The reason I wanted to put them into the same year, I think, was because of all the ridiculous things Dances With Wolves did in telling a story that is similar to Black Robe’s, about European contact with First Nations people. Again, Dances With Wolves is often very beautiful, but it is a silly film that uses sentimental melodrama and well-worn clichés to appeal to our emotions and avoid any intellectual scrutiny. It is, in short, rather adolescent in its sensibility. It may be enjoyable at that level, but it is hardly great art.

Best Picture Genie: Jésus de Montréal

Jésus de Montréal is an allegory that alludes continuously to the life of Jesus of Nazareth, but the main emotional and intellectual thrust of the film has to do with the idea that any genuine spiritual awakening will pose an intolerable threat to the establishment. A feeling of euphoria emerges at first, only to be replaced by dread and sorrow and finally acceptance as the film continues. For the viewer, it creates something very close to a religious experience, albeit one that is really entirely heterodox. It is dangerous and thrilling and profound.

4. 1994

Best Picture Oscar: Forrest Gump
The faults of the movie Forrest Gump may be summed up in the way that the catch-line of the movie was altered from what it had been in the novel. Where, in the novel, the lesson Forrest learned from his mother was that “bein’ a idiot is no box of chocolates,” in the movie, this famously became “life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you’re gonna get.” A grim and pessimistic truth has been replaced by a rather saccharine and sanctimonious piece of optimism. But it is worse than that. The real damage is that the story of Forrest Gump stands as an allegory of the experience of the United States of America over those decades. An indictment of a nation that has been slow to learn and has suffered for that lack has been turned into a feel-good, can-do story. The very notion that an opportunity for self-scrutiny should be seized upon and profited from has been discarded in favour of a cheerleading session. In short, the movie valourizes stupidity.

Best Picture Genie: Exotica

Atom Egoyan’s Exotica is another one of those strange, quasi-hallucinatory Canadian movies that deliberately challenge the mainstream ordering of values and experiences. At first, the scenes and characters in Exotica seem to have no coherent relation to one another. Indeed, the story is not even organized chronologically. The main sense of order lies in the film’s consistent offering of images of obsession, of boundaries crossed and of taboos violated. The effect for the viewer is a queasy sense of being complicit in something that is bound to bring an enormous flood of remorse. When the heart of the mystery linking all these characters is revealed, it arrives with awful clarity and the realization that what lies at the core of many experiences is unresolvable tragedy. Exotica is a sternly demanding, but emotionally exhilarating work of art. (It is worth noting, too, that one of the short-listed nominees for the Genie that year was Whale Music, which, in a way is a kind of critical commentary on what the film Forrest Gump embraces: the deliberate choice of mindlessness as a way of avoiding painful experience.)

5. 1997

Best Picture Oscar: Titanic
Lest anyone should believe that this whole exercise is motivated and informed solely by nationalist prejudice, let me note that James Cameron, the writer-director of this, my least favourite movie on the list, is Canadian. So be it. I hasten to admit that the last twenty-five minutes of Titanic (with the exception of a few moments of mawkishness) are brilliant filmmaking. The sinking of the ship is an extraordinary spectacle marrying a huge array of different talents and disciplines. The film up until that point, however, is a different story. The script is shallower than a comic book. Stilted dialogue, preposterous plotting, clichéd characters are all packed into the stalest sort of melodramatic story imaginable. Titanic contains so many groan and wince inducing scenes and lines of dialogue that one hardly knows which to single out for special derision. And let’s not even talk about that dreadful, cloying theme song from Celine Dion. No, watch it for the shipwreck and do your best to forget the rest.

Best Picture Genie: The Sweet Hereafter

Here we have Egoyan again, with a very different sort of disaster movie. This disaster doesn’t involve thousands of passengers aboard the largest ship ever made; it is just a couple of dozen school children on an ordinary school bus, although they nonetheless drown in icy water. The actual crash is almost eerily unremarkable in the film. Rather, the focus is on the aftermath, the complicated interplay of relationships. Love, betrayal, loyalty, exploitation, grief, honesty and deception all come to the surface after the accident. And I would argue that the cast is one of the best ensembles every captured on film.

6. 2002

Best Picture Oscar: Chicago
I don’t have anything against Rob Marshall’s Chicago. I actually think it’s a fun, invigorating film and that its music is much better than many musicals. It’s well cast, and the choreography, cinematography and direction are all impressive. If pressed for criticisms, I would have to admit to finding the story a little thin and not especially significant. But I would by no means want to suggest that this was a bad movie. No, the real problem for Chicago in this context is that...

Best Picture Genie: Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner

...Atanarjuat is a genuine masterpiece. It is based on an old Inuit legend about a man’s attempt to escape a group of killers, a story that continues to resonate profoundly as figurative rendering of the daily struggle of life in the Arctic. The story of Atanarjuat is, essentially, one of the central myths of the Inuit, and every aspect of the film works to ensure that the story lands with an uncanny persuasiveness in the viewer’s imaginations. This may be the most startling and original film ever made in Canada. In fact, when I am made Emperor of the country, I will decree that Atanarjuat is required viewing for anyone wishing to retain their citizenship. That’s all.

7. 2005

Best Picture Oscar: Crash
I actually think that Crash is a pretty good film, and again, I should note that the writer-director, Paul Haggis, is Canadian. (Which really ought to have made him hesitate more before he went ahead and used the same title as David Cronenberg’s 1996 movie…but, whatever.) However, there are a few things that keep Haggis's Crash from greatness in my opinion. First of all, the set up of the racial collision feels a little schematic and somewhat predictable, and, at moments, even a bit clichéd, so that there is sometimes a feeling of safeness and familiarity about the movie that is probably not what was intended. Second, I find that too often it strains credulity with the various coincidences and the outrageously bad behavior of the characters. Still, these are somewhat minor quibbles with a movie that, in the midst of so much mindless dreck, is mercifully about something important, and it does have a strong impact on the viewer. Indeed, it would not have made it on to my list except for what won at the Genies that year.

Best Picture Genie: The Triplets of Belleville

The relentless ingeniousness of this animated feature is breathtaking. It reminded me of the effect of those early Disney movies ⎯ Dumbo and Snow White ⎯ before that studio settled into the narrow formulaic approach they mostly take today. But, of course, the work of the animators in Triplets of Belleville is in a new age, and it amazes with its vivid effectiveness in frame after frame. This is a story in which love and goodness prevails, but the story is so weird, so extravagant, that it never settles into cliché or feels overly familiar. I’ll admit that I can’t possibly justify preferring this movie to Crash on intellectual grounds; but the delight it brings is just overwhelming enough that my preference is undeniable.

8. 2008

Best Picture Oscar: Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire is another visually arresting movie, and the fast pace of the editing adds to the visual excitement. But I think that the degree to which this film fails to rise above the level of eye-candy is probably its greatest fault. I don’t want to damn it for its gross implausibility, of which we could equally accuse Charles Dickens, one of the screenplay’s clear influences. The setting in an Indian slum is unusual for a mainstream movie, but apart from that, it is quite formulaic and the dialogue is too often trite: “Come away with me.” “And live on what?” “Love.” Moreover, for this viewer, the inescapable constant awareness of how the manipulation of emotion is occurring scene after scene, tends to take away from its feel good ambitions. It just feels too much like a well-oiled clockwork emotion machine.

Best Picture Genie: Away From Her

In contrast, Sarah Polley’s Away From Her, which is based on an Alice Munro story, “The Bear Went Over the Mountain,” feels anything but familiar. That’s one of the themes of the movie: the idea that the movement of a loved spouse into the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease entails finding oneself in an unknown land, in which neither one’s spouse, nor one’s love nor one’s self seem familiar any longer. This is a good-looking, well-edited film, but the most compelling aspect of the movie is probably the rich, detailed performances that Polley drew from her terrific cast. It is undoubtedly somewhat depressing to watch, but by compensation, it is always a bit invigorating to witness the triumph of great art being made from terrible experiences.

9. 2011

Best Picture Oscar: The Artist
The Artist is another charming film, but it would seem that the chief reason for the enthusiasm that it generated, was surprise at the way it proved that the old conventions of silent films ⎯ not merely the lack of sound, but the dialogue cards, the performances conveyed through pantomime, and the stark reduction of the complexity of real life to a clear, melodramatic plot ⎯ are still quite effective. What had seemed merely a gimmick at first acquaintance actually created something quite fulfilling for the viewer. And it was that amazement that prompted people to say of what was, finally, merely a good film, that it was great. I think that, viewed in a few years time, when the novelty of The Artist no longer startles (not, of course, because other silent films will be made, but merely because one knows already that it was done and it worked), it will seem what it is: solid entertainment, but no more than that.

Best Picture Genie: Incendies

Incendies is often uncomfortable to watch because of its content and some of its settings, but it is always enthralling. The performances are terrific, and the scenes all seem absolutely fresh to the screen. There is a highly crafted plot that is driving the story, a sort of thriller, but it has to be said that it is unconventional enough that it is difficult to believe that anybody could predict exactly where it was going without having read the play by Wadji Mouawad first. That is another thing that is remarkable about Incendies: it would be almost impossible to guess that this screenplay had started life off as a play, so naturally cinematic seems the story.

10. 2012

Best Picture Oscar: Argo
Argo is good fun, but although it is about a very serious subject, it is certainly not a movie to be taken seriously, simply because it plays so fast and loose with the facts. The real story, if you want to read it, is laid out in Robert Wright’s very exciting and very readable Our Man in Tehran. Naturally, one expects Hollywood to make stories conform to Hollywood conventions, so there are no surprises in that. But it is difficult to achieve greatness by playing wholly within such limited popular conventions, and Argo doesn’t surprise there either.

Best Picture Genie: Monsieur Lazhar

In contrast to Argo, Monsieur Lazhar is a film that seems innocent of convention or calculated effect. It contains perhaps the most extraordinary ensemble of child actors that I have ever seen. They are never less than convincing, and the depiction of the social workings of the classroom is compelling and truthful. Moreover, the story, though quite simply told and containing little action, manages to be utterly wrenching. This is terrific, under-stated filmmaking.

Polychromic Plumes: The Peacock's Song

About twelve years ago, I wrote the book, lyrics and music for Chantecler, a musical that was based loosely on the 1910 play by Edmond Rostand. The story is set in and around a barnyard, and the cast consists entirely of animals. Rostand's verse play is a tragicomedy that champions romanticism and traditional French nationalism in opposition to modernity. But in my musical version, the story basically becomes a satirical comedy about what happens to values when they are caught between, on the one hand, deluded traditionalism, and, on the other, cynicism and pretentiousness masquerading as sophistication. How does one find one's way through to something authentic? It seems to me that it is worth producing again, and on a larger scale than I did back in 2002. So O've been revisiting it recently, revising the text, and reworking and rewriting some of the music, and one of the pieces I enjoyed revisiting most was this one, a patter song. It struck me that it works fairly well independently from the rest of the musical, so I thought I would post it here. The Peacock is a sort of celebrated critic in the barnyard, whose opinion is increasingly sought on all aesthetic matters.

CROWD: Hail...to....the Ma-as-ster!
Master Peacock bless us here!
With your insightful eyes and never failing ear!
Tell us all your tail does see!
Reveal your critical dexterity!

PEACOCK: My friends you’ve been so gracious
To suggest I’m perspicacious
And I can’t call your assessment
Disproportionately grand.
I deplore the great disparity,
But multi-ocularity
Bestows a rare sagacity
Beyond other birds’ command!
And if I may be provocative,
A wiser, more evocative
Derrida or Foucault
In my dazzling derrière looms:
Neo-Nietzsch-e-an proponents,
Exegetical exponents—
Yes I’m poli-perspectival
In my polychromic plumes!

CROWD: He’s poli-perspectival
In his polychromic plumes!

PEACOCK: It’s true that my proclivity
Is interdiscursivity;
Toujour the polysemious
The linear jamais.
Yes, all matters hermeneutical
Are to me pharmaceutical;
The thrill of Deconstruction’s
What I privilege today.
Sure, of all the dazzling fashions
That could e’er excite your passions,
This doyen of the haute couture
Will make the others pale!
Taj Mahal’s a paltry palace
And Aurora Borealis
Makes a petty, pallid show
Next to my iridescent tail!

CROWD: The Northern Light’s a sorry sight
Next to his shiny sparkly tail!

Master Peacock, won’t you, please,
Tell us everything that your tail sees!
Master Peacock won’t you say:
Are we in the style of today!

PLUMP HEN: Does my dress reveal my figure?

PEACOCK: Why, I’d call it “lard-o-scribular!”

DUCK: My quack?

PEACOCK: It goes...?

DUCK: Just “quack.”

PEACOCK: “Aphoristical,” I’d say.

OTHER HENS: And our clucking?

PEACOCK: “Ornithological”

GUINEA HEN: He speaks so—

PEACOCK: “Heteroglossical.”

TURKEY: And, Master, do please tell us
If our farm is a-okay!

PEACOCK: Well, the sunflowers are van Gogh-esque;
And quite Edgar Allen Poe-esque
Are the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells
I hear ringing in my ears!
The garden smells too peat-ish
But the apples are Magritte-ish
Your allusions are both rural
And post-modernist, my dears!

CROWD: Our allusions are both rural
And post-modernist, my dears...!

Then the song shifts, as a parade of grotesque show roosters arrives to be assessed by the Peacock.

The Politics of Downtown vs Suburbia

I've now seen a few articles centred around the Toronto electoral map for the 2010 election. I post the map below, not to be inflammatory, but to offer a historical context to consider the problematic nature of the Right-wing "populism" in the outlying regions vs Left-wing "elitism" in the city centres.

This is map of the German elections of 1933, in which the Nazis won a majority. Dark brown represents the districts that they won outright; pale beige represents where they lost. Look at Berlin (#2 on the map) vs the surrounding regions. Without wanting to suggest that the actual politics are equivalent (they are decidedly not), I do want to suggest that there is a case to be made that the styles of political discourse seen in that 1933 German election (a decline into grievance- and fear-mongering, name-calling and contempt for reasoning) were comparable to those that have led to the similar looking maps of Suburban Ford Nation vs Downtown Smitherman supporters, or, in many Canadian cities, Downtown Liberals/NDP vs Suburban Conservatives. My point, really, is that an extremely divided electorate is, in aggregate, a stupid and even dangerous electorate. I hate the idea that we must fatalistically accept this situation. I believe that the major political imperative all of us face is to wrest the discourse away from sensationalist and ruthless demagogues, to find a way of acknowledging, articulating and addressing the feelings of grievance that drive many into the hands of those who are being elected on slogans rather than because of soundly-reasoned platforms. It may be infuriating that people vote that way, but they do. Mockery, however well-deserved, will not do the trick of reforming them; nor, evidently, will appeals to pure logic. Patiently reaffirming common interests in order to pull people back into some shared centre may be the best we can do.

Grotowski's lab

A friend of mine recently drew my attention to this clip from a film made in the early seventies about Jerzy Grotowski's theatre lab. Now, I realize that many, if not most people in the world, would dismiss what they see as flaky, but we who come from a theatre background are supposed to be more open-minded than that. And I've tried to be, so watch it with as much of an open mind as you can muster, and then I'll say what I think.



Okay, so here's what I think: First of all, I recognize the value to a performer of feeling expressive vitality throughout the body, but this strikes me---as a lot of Grotowski's stuff always did---as pretentious and obscurantist. "If this precision is absent, then the result is useless..." says the narrator near the end. And yet, it's not clear to me what the intended theatrical "use" of this sort of thing ever was. You could defend it by analogy with theoretical physics, I suppose, but the body is not abstract, so that argument would be straining for validity. Relevance seems a fair issue to ask about. Those hand movements resemble something encountered in Kathakali training; but absent the tradition, what would be the point of such specificity of gesture? Are we really to accept on faith that it is all preparation to convey some aracane code, "signaling through the flames" (Artaud) about some inner truth? The meaning is somehow thrown back on some vague organic feeling of rightness for the performer, but what could it communicate to the greater world? We know (v. the film "My Dinner With Andre," where Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory discuss this at length) that Grotowski ended up turning his back on theatre and channeling his energies into a sort of quasi-religious isolated community---a cult.

Now, there have been plenty of people who have embraced cults, and who have found therein for themselves a tremendous existential sense of purposefulness. But my beef with cults is the same as my beef with any ideology: part of our life is---must be---irrational, but as soon as you exclude rational argument, doubt, and evidence from any project altogether, it becomes a vehicle for our broken, limited selves, and refuses to engage with what we might be.

Moving one's hand into a difficult and painful position can undoubtedly strengthen the hand and even the self; but I feel such acting exercises should never entirely lose communication with rationality. And when I look at this clip, I see Grotowski's lab well on its way down such a path.

Noël Coward’s Private Lives

These are the programme notes for my production of Private Lives, for Plosive Productions at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa, play September-October 2013.

David Whiteley and Alix Sideris in a publicity shot for Private Lives. Photo by Andrew Alexander.


“I think that very few people are completely normal really, deep down in their private lives.”

The critic John Lahr once declared Noël Coward’s Private Lives to be the “high-water mark” of “comedies of bad manners.” If we remove the qualification “bad” from Lahr’s memorable description, we will find that Coward’s play is joined by a couple of others, most notably Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest. Should that observation encourage us to look for a sensibility shared by two writers who created widely celebrated, socially astute personas within a society that rejected their sexuality, we may certainly find evidence of it in the plays. It is undoubtedly true that any society that criminalizes homosexuality must inevitably turn every gay person into a performer of some sort; a select few will become consummate performers whose personas define the style of their eras.

Rather than resting with that one insight, however, we do well to consider some of the other sources of the disengagement Coward felt ⎯ and in turn bestowed upon his characters. As suave as he seemed as a public person, Coward had known humiliating poverty before he finally knew great wealth, and this, along with his status as a “bohemian” artist and agnostic, made him highly conscious of his lack of ease amongst complacent materialist philistines and prudish Pharisees. Many if not most of his comedies are founded on such a conflict: “artistic” types discovering that they are not merely incompatible with, but weirdly incomprehensible to those who complacently identify with social conventionality.

At its darkest, Coward’s indictment of such complacency was expressed in Post Mortem, the work that is chronologically closest to Private Lives and which shows the ghost of a man killed during the Great War returning to find that in the 1930s, people apparently have learned nothing whatever from that debacle: complacency remains the greatest threat to vitality and humanity. At its lightest, of course, we have Private Lives itself, in which glib, impatient irony is the method of deflecting an awareness that might otherwise lead to bleak nihilism. Amanda and Elyot are very witty; but implicitly, “being in on” the joke means one also has to “be in on” something of the raging discontent that seethes beneath the surface of this bad-mannered comedy.

In some respects, it seems impossible to set Private Lives at any time but when Coward conceived it: between the two World Wars. And yet there is very little in the play that obstinately refers to a specific time and place. Amanda’s Paris apartment is, in some ways, out of time: a forest of Arden, an Illyria, an Athenian forest, in which nature and enchantment reveal true selves in suspended time until the clock moves on and the public world must be confronted again. And it is with that in mind that I have taken a few liberties concerning the dates of some songs I have used. It is, from that outlook, simply a dull error of chronology that Rodgers and Hart did not write Elyot and Amanda’s “theme song” ---"Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," from Pal Joey (1940)--- in time for the first production of Noël Coward’s play.

Raging discontent haunts idyllic Paris. Photo by Craig Walker.

The Great Gatsby

It's been years since I've read The Great Gatsby but it made such a strong impression on me at the time that it continues to haunt me in some ways. With a new feature film based on the novel about to open, there has been a renewed discussion of the book. And, inevitably, in any such discussion of a widely acknowledged classic, there will be some who claim to have discovered that the emperor has no clothes. In The Globe and Mail, books editor Jared Bland posted this article:

Why F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby is anything but great

I wrote the following in response, but since I don't anticipate that the Globe and Mail will publish this in the Letters to the Editor section, I decided to post it here as well:

Jared Bland’s claim that the “emptiness” in the style of The Great Gatsby makes it a bad book is exactly wrong. The passage that he chooses to illustrate his argument is, in fact, a perfect example of how Fitzgerald captures the maddeningly elusive texture of a life that has been founded on delusion and falsehood. Practically every image defeats the reader’s normal expectation of establishing a concrete picture of the world being described, giving us the vertiginous sensation of directly experiencing Gatsby’s existential nullity. I am reminded of those who have criticized the film Citizen Kane, claiming to have discovered something “hollow at its core.” What is hollow at the core of that film is Kane himself; what is hollow at the core of Fitzgerald’s novel is Gatsby, and both have become classics because they so perfectly capture what is hollow at the core of the American Dream.

Death and the Maiden

These are the programme notes I wrote for the production of Ariel Dorfman's Death and the Maiden that I directed for Plosive Productions at the Gladstone Theatre in Ottawa. It plays until May 19th.

Genevieve Sirois and Paul Rainville in Death and the Maiden. Photo by David Whiteley.

In a sense, Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden marks a return to the enduring theme of one of the oldest masterpieces of drama ⎯ the work that, arguably, defined for two millennia what theatre could do better than any other form of art ⎯ The Oresteia of Aeschylus. Both the very old trilogy and the much newer play treat the difficult question of vengeance and its relation to justice. But whereas Aeschylus places the question of retributive justice in a complex context of multiple and conflicting moral and religious imperatives, Dorfman has pared that question down to its starkest dimensions: the establishment of guilt and the question of what to do about the guilty.

Still, lurking behind these questions in Dorfman’s play lies another, one that is perhaps still more disturbing: the question of who we are as human beings, once the constraints of law enforcement and practical responsibility for the consequences of our acts are removed. Given absolute power over the life of another person, what would we do with that power? Such circumstances present the ultimate existential laboratory: with unlimited power to define ourselves, the mask of civility dropped, we might be revealed as monsters, as angels, or as anything in between. The question strikes to the very heart of who we are, who we want to be, and the sort of world in which we want to live.

In Canada, we may feel ourselves to be comfortably removed from any urgent necessity to personally address such questions. And yet we have a government that, on our behalf, has expressed its intentions of imprisoning more of our population for longer periods of time, and its willingness to accept information extracted from prisoners under torture. What is done, then, will be done for us, and is therefore our moral responsibility, and it is only by a willful self-deception that we can pretend to shrug such matters off.

Meanwhile, there is the unpleasant but unavoidable fact that each of us lives under a natural sentence of death anyway. So, while the consolations of any sense of justice that does not include revenge are, perhaps meagre, so are the consolations of justice that DOES include revenge. Our past suffering cannot be obliterated by the fresh suffering of another, and there is no escape from death for either the victim or the oppressor.

This is a play about someone who has been forced to become prematurely intimate with death at the hands of another, and about the question of what to do about that encounter. Intimacy of that sort cannot ever be erased entirely, so to look here for magical versions of justice that vanquish death would be naïve. But it is perhaps possible that, by fully addressing some of the questions this play raises, we can learn something about how to live.

Who Killed the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre Company?

(with apologies to Bob Dylan and Cock Robin)

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said City Hall, they depended on us,
And we gave them free rent, in that you can trust.
Although we clawed back surcharges galore,
Still, it’s just that the theatre should have made more.
Forty-eight years of no grants, whereas others got lots?
Yes, but why didn’t the company make pots and pots?
Sure we took tens of thousands from them each year
Did we think it would break them? Well, we don’t have a seer!
Look, last year they were desperate, we tossed them a bone,
But they failed just the same. Maybe accident prone?

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the Olympics, from their vast bed of cash
If they say so, it’s envy! Their teeth they can gnash!
We kept them out of First Avenue? Yes, that is true.
But constructional dust would’ve made athletes blue.
So we forced them to wait, but your blame we defy;
It’s not all our fault downtown rents are so high.
Too bad they were cash-broke once we had done.
But we did pretty performances; weren’t they good fun?

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the Feds, when they looked up at last
And anyway theatre belongs in the past.
It’s prisons and jets where our money must go;
And corporations need more, as you surely must know.
Maybe THEY could’ve helped Playhouse out of this jam
The ordinary folk, we know, don’t give a damn.

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said big business, why look at us?
They should make their own money and not moan and cuss.
We’ll sponsor a show where our profit seems sure
And we’ll place a few ads in a glossy brochure.
But the kickback we get from the Feds is our own
And you know that you’ll never get blood from a stone.
The community’s health, hey that’s not our affair,
And the media says profits trickle down there.

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the media, indignant and hurt
You can’t expect US to wear a hair shirt.
We’ve cut back on arts coverage, this much is true
But celebrity gossip is more fun to view.
As for moral duty, it’s weighed in the scales
And we struggle ourselves now to keep up our sales.
Intelligent critique is boring old hat
The public is fickle, but certain of that.

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

Not us, said the public, shocked and aghast,
We’re beyond all reproach, we should never be asked!
If our taste has been coarsened, that is our right,
An evening of theatre? A dead boring night!
Sure, once in a while, some of us go,
But then only if it is “something we know.”
Reality t.v. is what really shines,
‘Cause we’re down to earth. (What’s “philistines?”)

Who went and killed the Vancouver Playhouse?
Who ruined the company? Who was the louse?

It was I, said Max Reimer, I did the deed.
I killed it when all it could do was just bleed.
My artists and I did our best to persist,
But the time finally came to no longer resist.
Yes, art and finance is a balancing act;
One wants both acclaim and the theatres packed.
But with hits of both kinds, we’d begged for support,
‘Til at last we just had to give over the fort.
Exhausted and heart-broken: that is my cost.
I wonder if others even know what they’ve lost?

Not Anonymous

The Chandos portrait of Shakespeare

The movie Anonymous, which opened in Canada last week, is only the latest ⎯ although perhaps the loudest ⎯ in a series of attempts to discredit William Shakespeare that reach back to the nineteenth century. Anonymous depicts Shakespeare as a fraud, a middling actor who merely served as the beard, or front man, for Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, whom the movie portrays as the real author of the plays. The film is directed by Roland Emmerich, who is best known for the disaster movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, and for 10,000 BC, a film that gives an idea of the kind of distaste Emmerich has for historical accuracy.

And, indeed, Anonymous doesn’t disappoint in that regard. Emmerich shows us the playwright Christopher Marlowe alive and well on the day the Earl of Essex leaves for Ireland in 1599, when Marlowe had already been dead six years; he has a character say that Marlowe died when his throat was cut, whereas famously Marlowe was stabbed through the skull, just above the eye; he has audiences marvelling that Romeo and Juliet is written in blank verse, when blank verse had been the medium for drama for at least thirty years already, since Norton and Sackville’s Gorboduc in 1561; and most baffling of all, he offers no explanation as to how the Earl of Oxford, who died in 1604, went on to write a series of Shakespearean plays that continued to emerge at the rate of one or two a year for the next nine years, including some, such as Macbeth and The Tempest, that allude to specific historical events that occurred after Oxford’s death.

In short, Anonymous is a dishonest work. If it exposes anyone as a fraud, it is Roland Emmerich, not Shakespeare.

However, while he bears ultimate responsibility for the movie, some readers will rightly object that Emmerich himself is not responsible for the theory that the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s works. True: that responsibility belongs to a man who rejoiced in the name J. Thomas Looney. Looney first proposed that Oxford was the real playwright in a book called Shakespeare Identified (1920). However, Looney was himself responding to earlier questions raised about Shakespeare’s authorship that had begun in the 1840s, and in particular those that had been advanced by Delia Bacon, who (surely not motivated by regard for her surname) had argued that a group of writers led by Sir Francis Bacon had written the plays. And those are just the two most familiar of many astonishing theories. Other candidates who have been proposed include Christopher Marlowe (who, in this theory, faked his own death), William Stanley, 6th Earl of Derby, and, most recently, Sir Henry Neville. What all of these candidates have in common is that they were graduates of either Cambridge or Oxford University, which William Shakespeare was decidedly not. Moreover, all of them, with the exception of Marlowe, were also nobles.

Those facts point us to what ultimately seems to motivate all theories that call into doubt Shakespeare’s authorship. They are all based in snobbery. They are founded in indignant incredulity at the very possibility that the son of a small-town merchant could become the greatest writer of all time. The theorists try to couch their objections in supposedly irrefutable facts: they say the plays must be the work of someone who was well-educated in literature and law, someone who understood court manners, and someone who was well-travelled. But each of these points is easily answered.

The evidence of education that the plays show is hardly anything that would be particular to the university, where little literature, let alone dramatic literature, was studied. Universities then concentrated on subjects such as philosophy, theology, logic and natural science. Rather, the plays show evidence of some education in rhetoric and Latin, both of which were taught in ordinary Grammar schools. One of these was located in Stratford-upon-Avon, less than a kilometre from Shakespeare’s home, and he would have been eligible to attend it free, because his father was the town’s High Bailiff (an office equivalent to Mayor). And if Shakespeare had no formal education after he left that school, he would be in good company, for any list of candidates for second best playwright in English would have to include the great polymath, Bernard Shaw, who dropped out of school at age fifteen, and the intellectually brilliant Tom Stoppard, who ended his formal education at seventeen.

There is, however, evidence of fairly wide reading. But, demand the conspiracy theorists, where would someone of modest income find these books in the absence of a public library? Well, many of the books upon which Shakespeare’s plays depend (including some of the most important, such as an English translation of Plutarch’s Lives, a Latin edition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and a few others, possibly including Holinshed’s Chronicles, the source for the history plays), were published by Richard Field. Field was a prominent London publisher and book-seller, who was about two-and-a-half years older than Shakespeare and had grown up about a block away from him in Stratford-upon-Avon. It was Field who published all three of Shakespeare’s long poems.

It is true that the plays show some sense of how the law worked (although there is little about actual law cases); but then the Elizabethan middle class was breathtakingly litigious, and we have plenty of evidence that William Shakespeare was frequently in court.

As for the insistence that the author of the plays would have to be a noble to be as familiar with royalty as the plays suggest, there are several quick answers: court intrigues and manners were all but universally imitated in the literature of the time; and anyway, Shakespeare was often at court as an invited performer. Furthermore, it would have been much easier for a middle-class writer to learn of courtly manners and speech than for a noble to imitate the language of commoners, which the plays also contain, and which is represented more convincingly than was managed by other playwrights of the time.

The most laughable objection is that plays that are set in Bohemia, Italy and Greece show that the author must have been well-travelled, whereas Shakespeare had never been outside of England. Well-travelled? The plays speak of the seacoast of land-locked Bohemia, and likewise suggest that there is a sea-port in the inland city of Milan; they put a thick, dark forest on the outskirts of Athens, where for centuries there had been no more than olive groves; and they seem innocent of the knowledge that there are canals in Venice. I could go on, but the point is that these are the works of someone with a vivid imagination much more than they are eyewitness accounts compiled by a world-traveller. (By contrast it has to be said that the plays accurately depict the geography of England.)

Other complaints concern the alleged lack of evidence that the actor Shakespeare was an author. For example, it is sometimes declared that we have no letters written by Shakespeare. Not true. We have a few, all prefacing his poetry and typical of the grovelling that writers of a lower class were forced to assume toward noble patrons. We also have first-hand testimonials as to his authorship from those who knew William Shakespeare, such as fellow actors and company share-holders John Heminges and Henry Condell, and from his friend and greatest rival as a playwright, Ben Jonson (for whom Shakespeare had acted). Those who believe these statements are evidence that a vast conspiracy was maintained amongst all those who worked with Shakespeare have obviously never worked in the notoriously gossipy theatre profession, let alone encountered the level of indiscretion that can be expected from a bitter rejected actor. And on that point, we can say that there are also statements from enemies, such as those who objected to the success enjoyed by a playwright of modest class and education, which likewise explicitly identify William Shakespeare as the author of the plays, the author with the actor, and the actor with the man who was born in Stratford-upon-Avon.

The bald fact is that no doubt whatever was raised from any quarter about whether Shakespeare had written the plays attributed to him until the 1840s, about 230 years after his death.

Why was such a doubt raised then? Well, we know that the nineteenth century saw an enormous growth in the status-obsessed middle class, and the identification of fine sentiment with aristocratic nobility. But a further reason must be that the authors of that age showed remarkably little feeling for theatrical language. Although theatre was popular, there was little new real literature to be heard on the stage; and the attempts to write new poetic dramas in the vein of Shakespeare’s resulted in many flat, turgid “closet dramas” that no one thought of staging then, let alone today. Accordingly, they overlooked the one point that stands most conclusively in favour of the actor William Shakespeare being the author of the plays attributed to him: his plays are better than the others produced during his lifetime because they were and are more theatrical. And why? Well, here is the crucial fact: of all his contemporaries, Shakespeare was one of the very few playwrights who actually lived every day in the theatre, where he learned how actors thought and worked and how audiences watched and listened. Shakespeare clearly loved the theatre, and understood better than any of his contemporaries its enormous potential to reach the secret recesses of the human heart. That he and his fellow company members realized that potential over and over again is not an achievement of which he should be robbed simply because some people cannot imagine how he did it.

The true Shakespeare is not anonymous.

Twelfth Night; or, What You Will

These are the programme notes I wrote for the production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night I directed for the 2011 St Lawrence Shakespeare Festival.

The term “Twelfth Night” refers to January 6th, which is the day that commemorates the coming of the Magi, the first revelation of Christ to the Gentiles. So, in one aspect it represents salvation for those who previously lacked understanding. But there’s another aspect. For the Elizabethans, this day would have marked the end of the festival season, and so this accounts for both the mood of celebration that hangs over the play as well as the sense of melancholy that arises as the holidays come to a close. It might have felt to them a little like our New Year’s Day often does to us: the last chance to celebrate, which, because of the celebrations that have preceded, is a little more muted, as the “appetite is sickened by excess” ⎯ to paraphrase Orsino’s first lines. So, there are two ideas here: the melancholy close of celebrating a season of miracles, but also a sort of hopeful last chance for joyful miracles to arise.

It is that latter idea which is promised by the alternative title, “What You Will.” And this is one of the main businesses of Comedy: to help characters sort out what they think they would like to happen from what they really would like. It is, as Viola puts it, a hard knot to untie; however, only when it is untied can vitality and love emerge triumphant. The other main business of Comedy is a related one: to depict the development of self knowledge in some characters and to ridicule the lack of it in others. In this respect, Twelfth Night is an acknowledged masterpiece of the genre. It shows us excess in both the poles of dignity and festivity, and it encourages us to find a golden mean.

The country in which the story takes place is “Illyria,” which, if we are to be literal, is located in the former Yugoslavia. What is more important than geography, however, is that “Illyria” be depicted as a place caught between melancholy and joy, a place that is deeply devoted to music, and a place in which foreigners arrive to find that miracles are still possible. So, for this production, we are asking the audience to inform their idea of what “Illyria” might be like with a vague idea of post-1798 Rebellion, pre-Home Rule Ireland. This idea is meant to be less a representation of any real Ireland than an evocation of the “Ireland” of our literary imaginations: a place where festivity, melancholy, enchantment and the age-old anxiety about enforced servitude to false masters all combine to create what Yeats would call a “terrible beauty.”

Steve the P(i)M(p)

You have a fiancé named Steve. Well, he SAYS he’s your fiancé, but some people call him your pimp. (And, if you are a straight male or a lesbian reading this, so much the better, because that will help you experience the feeling of a deeply ill-advised connection.) Steve was a little brutal and callous in his younger days, but you hope that he has calmed down a little since then. Certainly he seems strong and decisive, but there are moments in which you worry that he may be a little too controlling for your comfort. There were, for example, those kids that he and his friends beat up last summer, when they were making some noise out in the street. But you’ve decided for the moment to wait and see how things work out, because Steve clearly wants to move on to the next level of a more serious connection.

You are out in the car which was purchased with your money. In fact, everything is done with your money, and while you don't exactly begrudge spending it, there are times when you wish Steve would appreciate a little more the fact that it IS your money. Steve is driving, as he always does, and for the time being you are content to let him do so (although you are a little bothered by the presumption with which he has personalized the licence plates to read “HRPRS RIDE”). There are plans to run several errands, some of which are important. But he is often also stopping to give money ⎯ your money ⎯ to his sleazy friends, and you really aren’t sure why. And in one case, he stops at a gun store and brings out some enormous and expensive-looking weapons which he has purchased on your credit card. “Wow,” you say, “how much did THAT cost?” “Look, shut-up,” he tells you, “we can afford it, okay?” Similar things happen at several other stops and suddenly the prospect of all this money going out makes you begin to feel ill and to want to go home immediately. You tell him just that, saying “Steve, please, let’s not make any more stops or spend any more money, okay?” Without looking at you, he mutters “Uh-huh.” You press him for a more explicit answer, and he says “Yes, yes, alright! No more today.” But just a little bit later, he is pulling into the driveway of yet another friend’s house and you see him at the door writing a cheque on your account. When he gets back into the car, you say “Steve, I thought you told me that there would be no more?” And he turns to you with his cold grey eyes, a trace of a smirk on his lips and he says: “Well, it’s no more than I PLANNED.”

So, the question is: do you marry the guy?


That scenario came to me during the federal leaders debate, when Stephen Harper (or Steve, as he was back in his Reform Party days) said flatly that there were no more corporate tax cuts in his budget. And yet, as many sources will confirm, the Conservative plan has the corporate tax cut going from 18 per cent last year to 16.5 per cent this year to 15 per cent the year after. So what he meant was that there would be no more than he had already PLANNED. This kind of casual deceit, showing so much contempt for citizens, is absolutely typical of Harper. It is exactly what brought him into the situation in which his became the only government---not only in the history of Canada, but in the history of the entire commonwealth---to be found guilty of contempt of Parliament. Harper would have you believe that it was a “partisan” parliamentary manouevre, but the fact is that it depended on the decision of the very non-partisan Speaker of the House that the Government had indeed been guilty of Contempt of Parliament. And in case you believe that the Conservatives wouldn’t agree that Milliken was a non-partisan judge in this case, here is House Leader, John Baird (known to some as “Harper’s pit-bull”) on Milliken at his retirement: “Speakers from all around the Commonwealth look to you as their leader and their inspiration as someone who has conducted himself very professionally.” That doesn’t sound like the description of a man who has used his office for dishonourable partisan ends, does it?

Okay, so let’s suppose for the sake of argument that we all agree that Harper has shown arrogance toward clearly answering the people of Canada through their elected Parliament (keeping in mind that a clear majority of Canadians did, after all, vote for a party other than his). That’s a fault, certainly; but if he is really working for the good of Canada, we could consider it a “benevolent dictatorship,” couldn’t we?

However, the effects of this dictatorship are NOT benevolent, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the mismanagement of the economy, which is going to reap serious consequences as we are forced to spend a greater and greater portion of the federal budget on the servicing of the debt. This is no small deal: the debt now stands at over half a trillion dollars ($519 billion) and given Conservative policies is projected, by the Parliamentary Budget Office, to increase to $652 billion by 2015-16.

How did we rack up so much debt? Well, of course, by running deficits.

By now, every Canadian knows, or ought to know, so frequently has it been mentioned in the media, that after several years of running surpluses and reducing our overall debt under the governance of the Chretien-Martin Liberals, the Government of Canada is currently running a $56 billion deficit. However, there is a widespread view, one maintained even amongst some of Stephen Harper’s most ardent detractors, that the deficit that the Conservatives have racked up during their five years in office is due entirely to the global economic crisis that took hold in October 2008, and that no government could have avoided it, so that Harper and his finance minister, Jim Flaherty, are not to be blamed for mismanagement. While there is no doubt that the crisis would have caused some trouble, it is edifying to go back to the report of Kevin Page, head of the Parliamentary Budget Office to see what he had to say in November 2008 of the deficit the government was already running:

“The weak fiscal performance to date is largely attributable to previous policy decisions as opposed to weakened economic conditions, since nominal GDP is higher than expected in Budget 2008. Tax revenues are down $353 million year to date compared to a year earlier, due in large part to recent policy measures, such as the second one-percentage point reduction in the Goods and Services Tax and reductions in corporate income taxes.” Library of Parliament: Parliamentary Budget Office, "Economic and Fiscal Assessment" – November 2008 page 16 http://www2.parl.gc.ca/sites/pbo-dpb/Economy.aspx

In February 2011, in his Opening Statement to the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance, Kevin Page basically reiterated this analysis, saying that when, as expected, the economy reaches its full potential by the end of 2016, there will still be a deficit of $10 billion because of policy decisions. In other words, the federal deficit is not temporary and circumstantial, but structural, because Conservative policy has the government spending more money than it can possibly take in even under ideal circumstances. (February 15, 2011, page 2, available on same webpage)

So, the point is that, in an effort to win voter support, Harper reduced the Goods and Services Tax by two points, which, while a somewhat popular gesture, is almost meaningless to the vast majority of Canadians. (Honestly, can you say that a 2 per cent sale would ever induce you to buy an item that you would otherwise consider too expensive?) But while meaningless to individual Canadians, that gesture deprived the Federal Government of billions of dollars of revenue. And the corporate tax cuts, while they ensure the continued financial support of the Conservative Party from those who run the corporations, likewise have generated no discernible benefit to the Canadian economy, as I will allow this economist to explain. (You might want to click through on the title to watch it on YouTube, because otherwise the framing of the video may be off.)



(Of course, it's true that economists can have differing views, and that Harper cites U of Calgary economist Jack Mintz as saying that corporate taxes would reduce jobs. But it's worth remembering that this is the same Jack Mintz that Harper attacked as incompetent when he supported a carbon tax in the Financial Post in 2008, so apparently Mintz is brilliant when he agrees with Harper and a dolt when he doesn't. Which is typical of Harper's attitude.)

Meanwhile, as the debt increases, we are becoming ever more vulnerable to the international economic troubles that have created havoc in one country after another.

So, my point is, if we are expected to be content being treated by our Prime Minister as a nasty pimp treats his hookers, shouldn’t we expect some actual protection in return?

In Memory of Suze Rotolo

The cover of the 1963 album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" shows Dylan moving through the snowy streets of Greenwich Village with a young woman at his side. It is she, rather than Bob who looks straight into the camera, and therefore straight at the viewer, and therefore, straight at the teenager I was at the time I bought the record (about 15 years after its release). To my mind at the time, she seemed to affirm our mutual enthusiasm for Dylan (albeit perhaps for different reasons), and this made me feel a sort of distant connection with her. The young woman is Suze (pronounced "Suzy") Rotolo, 19 years old and Dylan's girlfriend at the time. Rotolo died last month at age 67, not long after publishing "A Freewheelin' Time," her memoir of the years so iconically captured by that photograph. She certainly deserved to be on the cover of Dylan's albums. It had been Rotolo who had introduced Dylan to the poet Rimbaud and to the songs of Brecht and Weill, both of which Dylan considered important influences. However, having a relationship with a man like Dylan couldn't have been easy at the best of times; to try to ride the out-of-control bronco that was Dylan's rocketing career at the time must have seemed impossible.

Indeed, it wasn't long after "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" was released that Dylan and Rotolo broke up. In a way, the writing had already been scrawled on the wall before the cover photo was even taken. In the previous year, 1962, Rotolo had gone with her mother to Italy. It was clear that her family wanted her to put some space between Dylan and herself, and the tactic seemed to work when Suze decided to stay on, turning the scheduled short vacation into a six-month stay. Dylan felt the relationship was over, and he wrote one of his most moving songs, "Boots of Spanish Leather" (Spain standing in for Italy) to capture the sense of desolation he felt. As it happened, Rotolo did eventually come back; she and Dylan were re-united; according to her memoirs, Rotolo became pregnant but then had an abortion; then she and Dylan broke up permanently. At this point Dylan became quite deeply bitter and in that frame of mind, he wrote the scathing song "Ballad in Plain D" describing in the most thinly veiled terms how, in his view, Rotolo's family had poisoned their relationship. Dylan later regretted having written and recorded that song, and he never performs it anymore. However, the song "Boots of Spanish Leather" he does perform, and it remains an honest and thoughtful rendering of the growing sense of hopelessness that attends the apparent end of a relationship. Interestingly, Dylan never allowed any other private relationship to be photographed as frequently as he had permitted himself to be shot with Rotolo, and that fact helps to create an extra aura of precious innocence around this youthful relationship. For after this time, Dylan guarded his private life much more jealously, and so in most of his off-stage photographs, we see him alone, isolated, free from attachments: an existentially absolutely self-determined figure.

Here's a short film I put together using a 1999 bootleg recording of Dylan performing "Boots of Spanish Leather."

Toronto Subway 1949-54

"The Toronto Subway Song" was a 78 record released by Ozzie Williams and his band in 1950. Here's a link about the record. (This is NOT the same Ozzie Williams who currently leads the Marion Street Band and who is Taj Mahal's son.) I happened to stumble across a recording of the song recently, just after I had been looking at the photos in the City of Toronto archives, and they seemed to cry out to be put together.

Lest anyone should look for a political message in this video, I probably should state explicitly that my enthusiasm for the Toronto subway as it is should in no way be taken as an endorsement of the current Toronto Mayor Rob Ford's absurd idea of extending it. Building subways in the mid-20th century still made a lot of sense, but the cost has since sky-rocketed, and sadly, no city anywhere in the world is starting a new subway now. Ford's notion (one hesitates to call it a "plan," because there is so little serious thought behind it) is a multi-billion-dollar pure fantasy that would cost three times as much and serve far fewer people than the light rail plans that he wants to scuttle. Ford's attempt to lead people to believe that he could back out of the light rail plans and destroy the city's streetcar system and build new subways instead was disingenuous at best. There is no evidence that he ever would be able to proceed past the first part of the plan: tearing up streetcar tracks and light rail systems.

A Fantasy of Clemency: Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband

This is the program essay that I wrote for the 2009 Shaw Festival production of An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde. The run of the show is over now, so there seems no reason not to publish it here.


LADY STUTFIELD. Do tell me your conception of the Ideal Husband. I think it would be so very, very helpful.
MRS. ALLONBY. The Ideal Husband? There couldn’t be such a thing. The institution is wrong.
LADY STUTFIELD. The Ideal Man, then, in his relations to us.
LADY CAROLINE. He would probably be extremely realistic.
--- Oscar Wilde, A Woman of No Importance (1893), Act II


On an evening in early May, 1864, the newly knighted Sir William Wilde, father to then nine-year-old Oscar and the most renowned eye-and-ear surgeon in Ireland, was giving a public lecture at the Metropolitan Hall in Dublin. As his audience arrived, they encountered a young woman named Mary Travers, who was distributing a pamphlet she had written under the name “Speranza,” in which she intimated that she had been raped under chloroform two years earlier by a Dr. Quilty and the incident connived at by Mrs. Quilty. Naturally, this caused a buzz: the Quiltys were barely disguised portraits of Sir William and his wife, Lady Jane Wilde, and “Speranza” was the pen-name under which Jane Wilde had become a celebrated writer.

It was apparently the stolen pen-name rather more than the suggestion of her husband’s outrageous misbehaviour that goaded Lady Wilde into action. Months earlier, she had disdainfully returned a letter in which Travers claimed to have been compromised by Sir William. “I really took no interest in the matter,” Lady Wilde later explained. “I looked upon the whole thing as a fabrication.” In fact, she knew all too well of her husband’s proclivities; Sir William already acknowledged three illegitimate children. As for Mary Travers, she had been long familiar to the Wildes as a patient of Sir William’s and a frequent guest in their home since 1854, when she was eighteen.

In that patriarchal day, Lady Wilde clearly saw what her course of action must be: she wrote to Mary’s father, informing him of “the disreputable conduct of your daughter at Bray where she consorts with all the low newspaper boys in the place, employing them to disseminate offensive placards in which my name is given, and also tracts in which she makes it appear that she has had an intrigue with Sir William Wilde.” She added that Mary’s “object in insulting me is in the hope of extorting money.” This was a mistake. Mary Travers found the letter and decided to sue Lady Wilde for libel.

The trial was a great sensation, covering dozens of full pages in The Nation, the major Irish newspaper of the day. Under cross-questioning, Mary Travers’s suggestion of being chloroformed evaporated, and when she admitted that her return visits to the office had included further sexual episodes, it appeared that the allegations of the doctor’s criminality were settling into something more like sustained impropriety. There was much anticipation that the disgraced man might take the stand to complete this defense, such as it was. But, because it was not he, but his wife, who was on trial, he never did.

That decision proved disastrous for Sir William, whose silence was taken as a tacit admission of guilt. Whereas the jury fined Lady Wilde a mere farthing in damages, Sir William’s reputation was ruined. Rapist he might not be, but the doctor was clearly a scoundrel and a target for derision. He removed himself first from public life and then from Dublin altogether, retreating to County Mayo, where he became an unwashed, ill-tempered, shrunken old man.

At the time of his mother’s libel trial, Oscar Wilde was ten years old, and although he had been sent off to school before the trial began, he could not have remained untouched by the scandal that was consuming his family name. One imagines at least that the affair must have helped to shape Oscar Wilde’s response to his own similar scandal and trials thirty years later. In that time, Wilde had come to know other public men whose careers were ruined by scandals. In 1885, a friend of Wilde’s, Sir Charles Dilke, one-time under-secretary for foreign affairs, found his career abruptly ended when he was named co-respondent in a divorce case. Then, in 1889, Wilde was given a more disastrous example: Charles Parnell, the great Irish statesman, a symbol for many of the hope for Irish unity, was discovered to have had an affair with a married woman, Kitty O’Shea. Parnell married O’Shea once she was divorced, but his career was shattered by the incident, and with it, some said, Ireland’s future.

When An Ideal Husband opened in 1895, it was by no means unique in its story of a public figure who is threatened with ruin by the exposure of a scandalous misdeed. Indeed, there was a vogue for such plays. However, Wilde’s play was original in two respects. Most noted was the startling wit upon which the play vaulted to popular success. The other point of originality was perhaps less obvious: that the disclosure of Sir Robert Chiltern’s past indiscretion, in contrast to other plays of this kind, does not automatically result in the end of his public life. Rather, Wilde revolts against the requirement of perfection in public men, and he has the character clearly based upon himself, Lord Goring, attempt to persuade Chiltern’s wife, Gertrude, to reach a merciful moral verdict about her less than ideal husband. Thus, forgiveness from a paragon of feminine moral purity is sought for a political and legal offence ⎯ selling insider information ⎯ as if it were a moral failing of mainly personal relevance.

So, was Wilde attempting in some sense to secure belated exoneration for Parnell, for Dilke and his father? Perhaps. But it is equally likely that he was already considering his own possible fate in the light of his father’s. That is to say, Wilde, now a famous man, dreaded the exposure of his own secret life, and hoped that his wife, Constance, and by extension, society, would prove forgiving should it come to that. Wilde had married Constance in 1884; by 1886, she had given birth to two sons. However, in 1886 Wilde also met Robbie Ross, the Canadian journalist who was to become Wilde’s first male lover and his closest friend. Wilde recognized his true sexuality, and his life changed utterly. With the end of repression began the most productive and brilliant period of his career. But he assumed the burden of a sexuality that was literally criminal according to the laws of the time, a dark secret that was at last dragged out into the light when the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, left a card for Wilde at his club on which he had written: “For Oscar Wilde, posing somdomite” [sic]. Despite his family’s dismal experience, Wilde sued the Marquess for libel, starting off the chain of events that would lead to Wilde’s two years of hard labour for “gross indecency.”

The phrase “hard labour” hardly begins to convey the mercilessly harsh and humiliating conditions of the sentence: two years of solitary confinement, feeding on gruel, sleeping on a plank bed, being flogged for the most trivial infractions, all to punish the “crime” of having sex with men rather than women. “The system,” Wilde confessed, “seems almost to have for its aim the wrecking and destruction of the mental faculties. The production of insanity is, if not its object, certainly its result.” His few loyal friends feared, rightly, that the experience would break him. Bernard Shaw wrote a petition pleading for Wilde’s early release, planning to have it signed by people of high social standing. Not a single willing signatory could be found. Eventually, Shaw gave it up, explaining mournfully to Wilde’s brother that, given his own reputation as a degenerate crank, his solitary signature “would reduce the petition to absurdity and do Oscar more harm than good.” It seemed that the prevailing attitude at this point was best represented by the man who, as Wilde stood shackled in his convict uniform at Clapham Junction, waiting for transfer to Reading Gaol, declared “By God, that's Oscar Wilde,” and then spat in his face.

So yes, Wilde probably felt that clemency should be extended to public figures who had committed indiscretions, and perhaps An Ideal Husband should be seen as a fantasy along those lines. The reality, leading to his exile in France and his miserable decline and death at age 46, is so much more sordid.

Today, in the Cimetière du Père-Lachaise in Paris, the most visited site is surely the grave of Oscar Wilde. Molière, Sarah Bernhardt, Balzac and Jim Morrison all have their admirers, but hardly a moment in any season passes between opening and closing that there is not a clutch of visitors at Wilde’s grave. And while the grey stone of the art deco sphinx that serves as Wilde’s tombstone has been heavily defaced, it is not with any scrawling of taunts, but rather with lipstick kisses. It seems that Wilde has found his clemency after all.