Historicist: Life in Wartime
Elsewhere in the Ist-a-Verse
The Toronto Star's Holy Joe and the Principles rock out at Newzapalooza V on Friday night.
On the same night that their magazine counterparts were feeding on a chocolate fountain at the Carlu, the scrappy newspapermen and women of Toronto's major dailies were knocking back bottles of Molson and rocking out at the Opera House: Newzapalooza V, the city's fifth annual Battle of the Media Bands, went down last Friday, raising close to eight thousand dollars for the Children's Aid Foundation. And far from strumming as Rome burns, the event served—intentionally or not—as a defiant celebration of the romantically proletarian spirit that somehow still manages to underpin the culture of the broadsheets.
The Screaming Headlines, repping the Toronto Sun.
As far as we're concerned, though, the whole show was stolen by Holy Joe and the Principles, also from the Toronto Star, whose carefully honed groove/funk stylings were augmented by the presence of three impressively coordinated and choreographed backup dancers, led by figure-skating coach/homeowner/ace crime reporter Robyn Doolittle. Health writer Robert Cribb was responsible for vocals and, alternately, keyboards and sax, while City Hall scribe Donovan Vincent (pictured above) handled guitar duties.
Guests judges Farley Flex, Geri Hall, and Mark Breslin offered (non-)critiques of each act, and in the end narrowed down the seven bands in competition to three finalists: The Doubts, Holy Joe, and the Globe/CP badasses of Stimulus Package. Voting by applause crowned the lattermost the champions, the audience no doubt stuck with the Package's cover of "Monkey Wrench" in their heads.
If nothing else, Newzapalooza provided an opportunity for overworked journalists to indulge their rock star fantasies. "Isn't it a case of 'the grass is always greener'?" host Trevor Boris quipped. "Maybe Bono wishes he wrote for the Toronto Sun."
Photos by Jonathan Goldsbie/Torontoist.
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I had no idea this sort of thing existed. This is so awesome.
Also, in the first picture those extended arms look like longnecks from The Land Before Time.
Whoa there Goldsbie, your horses are getting out of hand:
The phrase "the romantically proletariat spirit that somehow still manages to underpin the culture of the broadsheets" is overwritten and cockeyed in multiple ways.
First off, you've got an adverb modifying a noun substituting for an adjective in "romantically proletariat," not to mention the bizarre personification in "manages to underpin," but more importantly, your thesis statement is just OFF.
The TABLOIDS, like the Sun (which you mention twice) are proletarian. The BROADSHEETS, particularly the Globe, tend to be more elite.
You can't use "broadsheets" to mean all newspapers. It's like using "blogs" to mean all websites or "diners" to mean all restaurants.
First, I acknowledge that I should have written "proletarian" instead of "proletariat." Neither myself nor the copy editors caught that. I'll correct it now.
Second, everyone knows that the Sun sees itself as proletarian (I would describe it more as populist, but whatever). But what struck me about this event is that, despite the undeniable elitism that exists in the upper ranks of the Star and Globe, a significant portion of the actual writers and (lower-level) editors at those papers would probably happily describe themselves as working class. I couldn't tell you to what degree that might actually be an accurate description, but that was certainly the impression I got.
I'd agree that journos probably tend to think of themselves as having the common touch, much more than say, TV personalities. The point was more to do with the use of the synecdoche, having a word that stands for one sort of newspaper refer to all of them.
Mea culpa though: my analogies were incomplete. "Blogs" and "diners" would be the equivalent of "tabloids" in the best sense.
What, no DiManno and the Death Fornicators?