When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Photo by {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/ltam/2480103142/”}Louis Tam{/a}, from the {a href=”http://www.flickr.com/groups/torontoist/pool/”}Torontoist Flickr Pool{/a}.

As instances of plagiarism continue to pile up at former TDSB director Chris Spence’s door, many of those who trusted him to be a strong leader are angry and disappointed at the depths of his poor conduct.

Some are also arguing that Spence should be especially ashamed of himself for disappointing black people who viewed him as a role model.

In an op-ed published last week, former CTV and Toronto Star reporter Desmond Brown all but suggested that Spence’s plagiarism would make civil rights heroes who fought for racial equality roll over in their graves. I understand Brown’s disappointment with Spence, but I don’t understand or accept his outlandish conclusion, on behalf of black people, that beyond Spence’s actual commission of plagiarism, his “real crime was to ignore our history.” This is a shocking and dangerous overreaction—a reinforcement of a racist worldview that holds black people chiefly responsible for society’s ingrained anti-black stereotypes and prejudices.

“Here’s a guy who defied the stereotype that blacks aren’t fit to hold positions of power,” Brown lamented in his piece, titled “TDSB’s Chris Spence: The role model who failed.” He is clearly distraught at the loss of “someone I could have looked up to when I was a student, possibly averting me from an early career as a cab driver.”

But the responsibility of ensuring that black kids grow up with a sense of belonging and self-confidence falls on society as a whole, not simply on presumed black heroes like Spence.

We must therefore reject Brown’s conclusion that “Spence’s actions are an affront to everyone who fought for and demanded equality.” Injustice, plain and simple, is the affront—and to every person, living or dead, who has longed for equality. To err is human, even when you are black. If we construe one black person’s failings as a betrayal of all who share their complexion and ancestry, we are simply reinforcing the notion that some people can and should be judged differently because of the colour of their skin.

Given how thoughtfully many black social justice crusaders have explored the complex nature of identity, Brown’s reduction of this case to simple shame over black failure is particularly unhelpful. Consider W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued in his ever-relevant The Souls of Black Folk that “[i]t is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”

Brown’s most revealing admission is that, upon initially hearing of the allegations against Spence, “[a]s a black, my first inclination was to defend him.” Many black Canadians have had a similar experience watching the beginning of a news report about a terrible crime, and hoping the accused is not black. That unfair burden is too great for racialized people to bear together, never mind any one person individually. It is also a double-standard our white peers are not expected to follow.

Brown argues that, in addition to apologizing to all students for his conduct, “Spence should have also added an apology to the black community which he has let down and embarrassed.” Would Brown similarly argue that Margaret Wente, who recently feigned an apology for what she described as “journalistic lapses,” (i.e. plagiarism) should issue a separate apology to white people for embarrassing them? Would he say that Lance Armstrong let down the white community by using banned substances during his cycling career?

No, Wente and Armstrong are rightly judged for their actions as individuals—no one presumes to evaluate all whites through their respective conduct. It is our collective shame that we cannot say the same for black people in our society.

We have to be honest about the finite impact black role modelling can have in a society so skewed against black people. This is why Brown’s comments are so troubling: they place an inordinate amount of blame on Spence for ruining a promise he could never hope to deliver on his own.

People like Chris Spence can absolutely serve as role models, but theirs is a supporting role in a feature film starring systemic racism, that veritable evil which informs people of African heritage we are born with something to prove. A collective cultural blind-spot pushes us to endow the black TDSB director with racial responsibility we would deem preposterous for someone belonging to the (functionally invisible) white race.

As a candidate for Toronto City Council in 2006, I participated in a debate on equity issues. Candidates had to submit our responses to debate questions in writing before the actual event. The debate organizer, who was critical of my written responses, accidentally copied my campaign on an e-mail to her assistant. “His answers are just as poor as the rest,” the organizer said of my submission, “which is a shame because he is black and should know better.”

There is a line, at once real and imaginary, that divides the struggles of black people from our non-black brothers and sisters. Whiteness remains the unidentified backdrop for blacks like Brown and myself to discuss unfulfilled black potential, as our white-dominated society looks on. We would all be better served by broadening the conversation beyond the presumed “black community,” to include every person who cares—or ought to care—about smashing the racial barriers that needlessly continue to divide us.

The largest and most obvious change in Much’s proposed new licence? The videos. Specifically, Much wants to drop their minimum airing time of music videos from 50% of airtime to 25%. They also want to count “music video programs” for that 25% requirement, which would presumably include shows like Video On Trial, which have music videos in them but are not really a vehicle for airing the videos per se. Given that Much currently airs Video on Trial in between three and six hours almost every day of the week, this is a big deal for them.
Much’s argument for changing the licence in this regard is twofold: first, that people can watch music videos through other sources (i.e., Youtube), and second, that there just aren’t as many music videos as there used to be. We’re going to come back to that second point a bit later on, but let’s focus on the first for now.

One of the reasons people generally watch music videos on YouTube? Here’s a thought: maybe it’s because the vast majority of programming MuchMusic uses to fulfill its music video requirements happens overnight. All of the famous MuchMusic “specialty shows”—shows like The Wedge, RapCity, Loud, and MuchVibe—now air at 3 a.m. on weekday nights, which is of course the perfect time for a discerning young music fan to learn about new bands in their favorite genre. The generic MuchMegaHits now airs at 2 and 7 a.m. daily. UR11, the internet-themed vote-for-your-fave-videos show complete with lolspeak title and lack of respect for the younger generation’s intellect, airs at a comparatively accessible 11 p.m.
What’s on Much during the daytime? Well, today, you can watch My Date With… (it’s Fall Out Boy!), Love Court, Video on Trial, Punk’d, Pimp My Ride, My Own Show, Styl’d, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, When I Was 17, The Vampire Diaries, an airing of the movie Centre Stage, and then The Vampire Diaries again. The only show with actual, uninterrupted videos in it is MuchOnDemand. That’s one hour of videos, between 1 p.m. through to midnight.
Apparently, MuchMusic thinks this minuscule level of prime-time video airplay is too difficult to maintain. What do they want to replace it with? That’s in the licence amendment proposal as well: they want to increase the amount of time they can spend airing dramatic series and cartoons (from 15% up to 20%) and the amount of time they can spend airing movies (from six hours a week up to 10% of airtime, which is a little more than sixteen hours a week).
Oh, but it gets better than that! MuchMusic, a channel that was once defined by its Canadian content, a channel which sold its Canadian content in numerous foreign television markets successfully, now thinks that Canadian content is too hard to produce at current levels! Hence, they request a 5% drop in the amount of Canadian content airtime (from 60% down to 55%), and to entirely abolish the requirement that half of their programs from 6 p.m. through midnight be Canadian. On the bright side, this might mean a lot less Video on Trial in prime time (but then again that’s about the last entertaining show MuchMusic still bothers to make).

Oh, and MuchMusic also wants to remove the requirement that they air French-language music videos. (They currently “fulfill” this requirement by airing French Kiss. Remember French Kiss? Well, you can watch it even today! If you get up at 6:30 a.m., the only time it ever airs.) Their argument here is that other music channels like MusiquePlus and MusiMax serve that need, which is of course bullshit: the point of the French-language video requirement was never to serve French-language audiences, because MusiquePlus showed up less than two years after MuchMusic did; the point of the French-language video requirement was to offer English-speaking audiences the chance to see French-language videos. It was meant to be educational, to promote Francophone music culture. (If nothing else, it informed English Canada about Mitsou.)
But so long as we’re discussing the stimulation of culture, let’s talk about MuchMusic’s other stated reason for pursuing this licence amendment: the argument that there aren’t enough music videos for them to easily fulfill their airing requirements. You know what’s interesting? In addition to wanting to cut half of of their video airing requirement, they also want to cut half of the money they’re required to contribute to MuchFACT, the fund that assists emerging Canadian talent to produce music videos. Much is quite upfront about their reasoning: since they won’t have to air so many videos, they shouldn’t have to spend so much money.
If there’s any element of the proposed licence change that’s more odious than this, we’re hardpressed to name it. MuchFACT and VideoFACT before it are responsible for the growth and nurturing of so many major Canadian music acts that it’s ridiculous: k.d. lang, Sarah McLachlan, Blue Rodeo, Sloan, The Pursuit of Happiness, Nelly Furtado, Bran Van 3000, K-os, and Metric, and those are just the beginning of a very, very long list. (The videos in this post are just a few of the products of MuchFACT and VideoFACT.) So many bands that otherwise wouldn’t have gotten off the ground have fans to this very day because of VideoFACT, from the Skydiggers to Sandbox. (Okay, so maybe nobody remembers Sandbox, but their guitarist went on to become Bubbles in the Trailer Park Boys.)
But none of that matters, because MuchMusic, and more specifically CTV, don’t want to spend that money. And that’s what this licence amendment proposal boils down to, of course: money. CTV bought MuchMusic and ran it right into the ground, and instead of actually trying to make a channel people want to watch, their plan is to do everything cheaper: fewer Canadian shows, less of those oh-so-rare videos, less money promoting Canadian culture. Of course, the irony is that MuchMusic used to be one of the cheapest networks to operate ever, before CTV came along, and it produced tons of Canadian culture and made money doing it; in fact, it was Canadian content regulations of the sort CTV is now trying to evade that made MuchMusic so successful in the first place. And that tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it?

And who could blame him? In the courtyard of Hart House, clusters of disarrayed cool kids stood not too close to guys who looked like suits, even in ripped-on-purpose jeans. Servers, careful not to trip over piles of empty Red Bull cans, passed trays of tuna tartare and other tiny yummy things. Photographers looked for Polaroid moments and reassured pretty girls they wouldn’t end up “don’ts.”
Because, after all, it was a Vice Magazine party. But the Vice you know and love, hate, or love to hate? Not exactly. Last year’s Festival Ball was the hottest mess of a party we’ve ever stumbled out of, starring Karen O, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and everyone you’ve ever recognized from Facebook. This year, the party was bigger, quieter, almost clean, and very obviously sponsored by CKOne. It smelled more like Hollister than alcohol.
It was left to headliners Crystal Castles to keep teen spirit alive, and no surprise, it took all of five bleeping minutes for those video-gaming, head-banging electro-punk-ass scene stars to make the crowd forget their differences and their dry cups of booze and dance. Then, speaking of Crimewaves, it’s CK One-too-many as rowdier guests set alight their unwanted bottles of sponsor scent in the parking lot—a veritable bonfire of vanities. Who said Vice was dead?
And as for the real frosh party, it turned out to be the ETalk kickoff: the new kid on what was once the CHUM block (now CTV) opened TIFF’s red carpet festivities with a P. Diddy-hosted, Sam Ronson-spun fete on Friday night. Apparently it was televised live, but who was at home to watch? Three unfinished floors of the recently reno’d labyrinth were crammed with industry types and celebrity stalkers alike, standing elbow to implant.
Of course, the only place to breathe was the smoking patio. We joined a gaggle of girls stealing cigarettes from slender, mustached man in a brown three-piece-suit. The gentleman, so obviously not from here, turned out to be a Parisian by way of Montreal. Did you know Montreal has the oldest film festival in Canada? Yeah, well, we have Lindsay Lohan. Looking over the smoking crowd to the third floor window, we spied her unmistakable mane, catching flashes of light as she smoked (yes, indoors—eat your heart out, Sean Penn!) and texted away. Suddenly, everyone around us (and, okay, us too) started doing the same. And when DJ Sam leaned over and left one on LiLo’s lips? It was like an episode of Gossip Girl, but without the good clothes.
Those, thankfully, were to be found in the basement of Holt Renfrew. The luxury bastion’s annual soiree was in honour of John Varvatos for Converse, but we doubt you could have snuck in wearing Chucks; even the defiantly un-fancy Miss Thunderheist (playing sidekick to k-Os) put on stilettos with her Cheap Mondays and American Apparel tank. Sophia Bush—an actress so un-actressy that she had to introduce herself in full before we blurted, “oh, you’re kind of famous!”—shimmered in lilac Leger; the mop-headed MGMT boys carried around plush dogs as accessories (don’t give Paris any ideas, please); and Jeremy Piven was… short.
Late, late, later Friday night, at the Drake, Holts holdouts (a few fashion folk, assorted industry types and their hangers-on, and a painfully eccentric theatre director wearing bunny ears, “the better to hear you with,” he deadpanned) lounged to beats by DJ-slash-Crystal-Castles-manager Mikey Apples. At ten minutes to four a.m. last call, he put on “Crimewave,” and tired stilettos found their groove again.
Saturday night, and the air reheated at CTV headquarters, home to the post-screening party for Blindness. It was chaos, we hear, and we can hear because we weren’t there: apparently, the third-floor soiree was so loud, attendees joked the film could be renamed Deafness.
By Sunday, partygoers were so tired that at W Studio’s afterparty for Zach and Miri Make a Porno (Kevin Smith’s new, likely literal, suckfest), studio giant Harvey Weinstein strayed from the VIP fishbowl and walked among them practically unnoticed. Other big-name attendees included Elizabeth Banks, Edward Norton, a perpetually pissed-off Adrian Brody, and that Adam guy from the Beastie Boys, wearing a backpack and skate shoes (yes, we get it, you don’t care; maybe we don’t either). Still, as far as we’re concerned, the hottest action on the red carpet was when a bag of coke was dropped on it by an unidentified guest.
As W wound down, cabs headed to (of all places!) Easy and the Fifth for a party in honour of partying. Shinan Govani was poking around the VIP section, but the only boldface names we saw were Moet and Chandon. As a dapper young photographer said, halfway through scrolling through shots of Valentino for Vanity Fair, “when champagne is free, anything is good.” The unofficial motto of TIFF? For better or for worse, we think so.

Switch Up The Partnering

The original has increased the styles of dancing over the years, but the partnering has remained the same: boy meets girl. Male-female pairs are common in Latin dances, but styles like hip-hop, Bollywood, and contemporary become richer when the pairings aren’t restricted to mixed pairings. Having two males or two females dancing together would allow for new moves and the visual diversity would make the Canadian Dance more interesting than the original.

Mix Up The Numbers

A highlight of the Dance seasons is the group routine, in part because it breaks the monotony of watching just male-female duos. Why not bring more of a group element to the show? Dancers could compete in small groups of three, four, or five for some of the weeks to bring some variety. Imagine watching more contemporary routines with three male dancers like the one performed by members of the Alvin Ailey troupe or a cheeky Bollywood routine with two couples. With instant replay and sharp critique by the judges, the viewer would still be involved, able to see and understand the performance by each dancer, and vote accordingly.

Kill the Anti-Gay Vibe

On the American Dance, judge and exec producer Nigel Lythgoe has made increasingly queasy jabs at male dancers (he says there’s no room for effeminate male dancers) and spewed crap, like saying a dancer looked as if “someone’s taken a broomstick and shoved it up where the sun don’t shine.” Not surprisingly, Lythgoe was also a former producer of American Idol where host Ryan Seacrest and judge Simon Cowell use schoolyard-level insults of you’re gayer. (On either show, you’ll rarely hear a peep or whisper about any contestant being out.) Hopefully, if we can infer from how inclusive Canadian Idol is and the presence at Pride, there shouldn’t be any doubt that, on this point, the Canadian Dance will make us proud.