My new Article is out on @theinterrobang I wrote about #torontopia created by @ryanlongcomedy The series has a interesting path of development a story not as simple as you would think. Sketch comedy is my favourite comedy. This series navigates satire and the gate keepers of culture in a way that feels fresh and familiar. I adore writing for the interrobang. I was so glad to put out an article about the next wave of Great Canadian Sketch. Link in bio. #torontopia #canadiansketch #comedynews #torontocomedy #comedytoronto #ryanlong #thehardtimes #canadiancomedy #sketchcomedy #sketchvideos #thecornerto #artsandculture #theinterrobang #comedyblogger #youngemodernlaughs (at Scarborough Bluffs) https://www.instagram.com/p/ByQStfOHoLf/?igshid=16byiqbmwzsri
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The first episode of the new season of #torontopia started streaming on @cbccomedy yesterday. Canada has always done for sketch comedy what Britain did for rock. Take it. Do it our own way. Then send it back out in the world to influence everyone . Sketch comedy never dies it only evolves and right now short content sketch is reinventing the path of development. As evidenced by Letter Kenny problems and The announcement that Toronto Sketch troupe Tall boyz II men landed a development deal with CBC after the success of their online content. There are so many things right about Torontopia. Although It has a core cast of wich it’s creator @ryanlongcomedy is central to. It did not evolve out of a sketch troupe so it avoids one of the major pit falls of sketch the same people playing the all the characters to various effect. Rather Torontopia casts stand up comics with strong characters comedy and shows their talent in new light. The show is familiar and fresh all the makings of a viral sensation. I have seen the whole new season. I have too much respect for the hard work of my peers to give spoilers. Especially @paulthompsoncomedy who’s undeniable interdisciplinary comedic talents found a home in Torontopia’s early videos a take deep root in the new season. Shout out to Rick Rowley @rickrowley3 debuting and Amish Patel @fadetobrown returning in roles perfectly cast. Toronto and it’s comics are far too often dressed up to make the comedy of people we are not. If drake’s music is a love letter to Toronto. Torontopia’s streamlined satire would be a indie rock anthem that came out of the mid 00’s era for wich it was named. ( look it up) The song would go “ This is Toronto we are laughing in the six I think you should visit Torontopia.” #youngemodernlaughs . . . . . #comedy #cbc #canadiancomedy #toronto #thesix #416 #carshow #funnyvideos #onestowatch #sketchcomedy #torontocomedy #disgustingmods #torontopia (at Durham, Ontario) https://www.instagram.com/p/Bxloel9nDRc/?igshid=1lohhcds5a4q
Celebrating Wavelength: las venus skyway playlist Pt. 1
15 years of Wavelength. That's quite a feat. Proud to say I've been around for all of them. Even prouder of the fact that this is my hometown's institution of higher (musical) learning. The stomping ground for the biggest and the brightest.
Many thanks to the entire wavelength team for including me in the proceedings and giving me the challenge of putting together this haphazard retrospective of music from the great city of Toronto.
Know these playlists don't even begin to scratch the surface. They're simply what I got around to as the night took hold. But hopefully I hit a few of the major stops along the way.
Gonna break up the list in to a few posts. Just easier to digest that way
The Barcelona Pavilion fight for your right to participate
Originally published in Eye Weekly.
And in this sense, the most intimidating thing you can say in the context of a pop song is not "fuck off" or even "fuck off and die," but rather these two simple words: "We want." They're two words that turn music into manifesto, two words that force listeners to get down with the cause -- or risk turning themselves into the unwitting victims of a gang swarm attack.
The most recent single by electro-pogo-a-go-go insurrectionists The Barcelona Pavilion opens with the words "We want." Actually, scratch that -- it really opens with the words "Rowsche... rumble," which they stole from The Fall song of the same name, but the brash sense of entitlement with which they nick that Mark E. Smith lyric simply reinforces the ensuing declaration of what they really want: "We want a new materiology!"
Even if you're not quite sure what the hell they're talking about -- a Google search for "materiology" will yield references to French philosopher Francois Dagognet, the Russian Academy of Natural Science and NASA -- the implication is clear enough: it's time to unlearn the rules you've been taught, to create new forms by abusing pre-existing pieces -- be they song lyrics or semiotics theories -- for your own devices.
"It's definitely motivated by an attempt at recontextualization," says laptop operator Ben Stimpson, who's been selected by Barcelona braintrust Steven Kado to serve as the band's media ambassador. (In the same deconstructionist spirit as the band's music, my interview with Stimpson fell victim to a deconstructing tape-recorder phone connector; he kindly reiterated the more salient points of the band's mission statement by email.)
"It's almost an attempt at hijacking context," he says. "Using quotes or samples as framing devices is one way to face the anxiety of influence head-on. Quotes are documents as well as reference points and by incorporating them, we avoid a denial of history but we also foist new context and significance upon their content."
As can be gleaned from Stimpson's choice of words, The Barcelona Pavilion are as much a theoretical as musical construct, initially born out of Kado and fellow mouthpiece Maggie MacDonald taking the crowd-participation exercises they instigated as members of The Hidden Cameras to more polemical extremes.
Since debuting at a house party in December, 2001, The Barcelona Pavilion (which also includes bassist Kat) have been challenging the idea of what a band can get away with onstage while promoting the celebratory communalism that results when you pack sweaty bodies together in tight spaces.
They are a dance band without a drummer. Kado and MacDonald's between-song exhortations to the audience -- best summed up by their single "How Are You People Going to Have Fun If None of You People Ever Participate?" -- often last longer than their actual songs. Stimpson's onstage role amounts to triggering the beats on his laptop; for all we know, he could very well be spending the remainder of the set playing solitaire.
"When we first started The Barcelona Pavilion we were more concerned with conceptual and aesthetic principles rather than the logistics of putting out records and playing traditional shows," Stimpson says. "We were shamelessly academic in our approach to things. We were interested in occupying more of an intellectual function that was deliberately attempting to subvert precedent performance and musical structures. We recognized a tyranny of humourlessness that presided over a lot of bands and audiences. It felt as though Toronto was living up to its reputation for being strangled by Protestant moralism."
But even in the supposedly more open-minded environs of the underground, The Barcelona Pavilion have seen their invitations to dance met with blank stares, if not outright hostility; earlier this year, MacDonald was the subject of a particularly vicious screed posted on indie-scene hub, www.secretarcade.com, which sparked an intense debate over the band's authenticity.
"We were surprised at how hysterical and zealous certain people were," Stimpson says. "When we first started playing shows outside of living rooms we were met with a lot of passive hostility as well as a lot of frothy-mouthed accusations -- mostly to do with Steve and Maggie's tendency to address audiences directly but also having to do with our being contrived.
"We felt that there was nothing wrong with being contrived as long as it was in good faith and that all our sloganeering, uniforms and mission statements had less to do with pretentiousness and more to do with being well organized. Arguably, proclaiming your music as 'sincere' or 'authentic' is an equally contrived strategy as shouting at people to get involved."
Ultimately, The Barcelona Pavilion see dancing as simply the first step to a greater social good, and now that the band have begun to successfully loosen Toronto's collective cross-armed pose -- "there seems to be a new sensibility of open-mindedness in Toronto that makes our work comfortable," Stimpson says -- their ideals have likewise become more ambitious. Kado has formed the Blocks Recording Club (blocksblocksblocks.com) to facilitate homemade recordings among local indie artists (including Kado's outrageous cover of OutKast's "Hey Ya!," released under his Blankett alias), while the group continues to evolve from basement art project to a semi-professional band that puts out records and tours internationally and does all that other stuff normal bands do.
This past summer, the "New Materiology" single could be seen in the front-window display of London's venerable Rough Trade Records shop; eminently influential BBC DJ John Peel has become a relentlessly vocal supporter; and the band played to enthusiastic packed houses in the UK opening for The Gossip. But even as The Barcelona Pavilion creeps into the heretofore uncharted arena of public acceptance, fashion spreads in The Face still seem a ways off.
"We played The Barfly in London, which is like an industry showcase bar," Stimpson says. "It was weird, there were these celebrities there to see the band that was on before us, like Ian Brown. We went on and pretty much cleared the room."
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When I was attending public school in exurban Ontario, every grade eight class had to take a day-long field trip to Toronto to see and do "Toronto things," like seeing the GAP store in the P.A.T.H subterranean shopping mall, riding on the TTC and visiting the Toronto Stock Exchange back when there was an actual trading floor. The motivation behind this trips was to expose country bumpkins to life in the big smoke, as a matter of culturing us and making us face the fear that all of us supposedly had of the Big City.
I took a pass on this trip, because I found it demeaning and because school trips to Toronto always ended up with my parents forgetting to pick me up from school and me sobbing uncontrollably, cold and alone, in the parking lot until it got dark and they realized that I was missing. Other students were really excited for it, thinking that a day trip to Toronto would be a transformative experience, akin to returning their spirit to its home. The one goth kid came to school the day of the trip with her look turned to eleven, as far as small town goth fashion was concerned (a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt, black skirt, fishnet stockings and black nail polish), perhaps imagining that she'd encounter a fellow goth on the street and that they'd become fast friends. Similarly, the group of boys who had just discovered hip hop were jazzed by the prospect of encountering actual urban black men, like the ones from Naughty by Nature videos. While they boarded the bus, I went to spend the day doing mindless busy work in a classroom with students in another homeroom who had gone on the trip the day before. I got to listen to their classroom discussions about how "unique", "interesting" and "different" Toronto was, and how some couldn't wait to grow up and move there. I tried not to laugh while I struggled with math problems.
In high school, I was hanging out with the faux-burn-outs (read, white kids who smoke a little pot and came from good upper-middle-class homes and would ultimately do well in life), playing guitar in the smoking area, while they discussed their plans to move to Toronto after graduation. "I have to move there. I'm drawn there," the girl with maybe fifteen facial piercings said in an impassioned tone. "That's where my people are." That's when the significance of Toronto finally hit me.
Toronto -- where small town weirdos go to meet and fawn over the uniqueness of other small town weirdos. Such is the consequence of being a city with a high concentration of colleges and universities and being the long-time hub of a national economy that turns on economic migration. This is why anyone who refers to themselves as a "life-long Torontonian", or something to take affect, actually grew up in Eastern Mississauga. Actual Torontonians, transplants or not, self-identify by their respective neighbourhoods, perhaps because they want to disassociate themselves from
Having gained this knowledge too early in life really messed me up, because it kept me from envisioning my soul being received in Toronto. I've never had that rank Canadian drive to risk it all and relocate to Toronto or, even Vancouver for that matter. It might be symptomatic of my dislike of everything Tim Horton's.
When I was a teenager, Toronto represented Saturday day trips to "the Big HMV", Tower Records and Sam the Record Man to buy seven-inches and back catalogue CDs that you couldn't find in the suburbs and beyond, capped off by Extra Value meals at the Eaton's Centre McDonald's and being picked up by a friend's mom at the Yorkdale TTC station. There isn't any magic, just shame and regret, in shopping trips.
As an adult, Toronto is an overpriced, boring and unconvincingly pretentious city. It's meeting liberal phonies at the Centre for Social Innovation for demeaning "job" interviews -- meaning internships disguised as paid work -- with their media and tech start-ups. It's having to pick coins, sticky from stall beer, off of slippery bar tops because bartenders aren't courteous enough to drop your change into your hand, citing illogical health concerns (you're already handling dirty money, literally, how does dropping it in my hand constitute poor hygiene?) but really it's because they expect you to leave it there as a tip. It's paying $1500 a month to live in a shoebox in Regent Park, where you still have to take a bus to find fresh produce beyond what one might put into an iceberg lettuce and orange dressing salad. Save for gawking at and announcing the make and model of the luxury cars that pass through Yorkville on an early summer Friday night, everything else is totally inaccessible to a person of limited means and zero prospects, such as myself.
Recently a friend, who gently insists that I move out of my parents basement and get on with my shitty life, told me that she could land us a one bedroom, with bunk beds mind you (which only adds to the awesomeness of heterosocial cohabitation), for $1200 in the city's "Junction" neighbourhood. That's where people my age who've actually made something of themselves and even deliberately created new lives go to sustain, with the benefit of status and wealth afforded them by "Creative" labour, the otherwise encumbering and embarrassing kidult lifestyle for a few more years before moving to the suburbs. The presence of this class has steadily revived this quaint little enclave that used to shutdown at 6pm into something novel. In other words, it's what those who dreamed about Toronto created when they stopped dreaming and actually started living it. Something like the suburbs, but unlike the suburbs.
In a hilarious video that’s gone viral since its release Friday, a man dressed in a full Batman costume is seen around the city – on the subway, outside City Hall, in a Starbucks — asking (rather, screaming) at passersby : “WHERE ARE THEY?!”
Presumably “they” being the bad guys.
At the climax of the video, Batman gets a beef jerky stick (“original, not spicy”) and screams about his parents being dead while two excited girls hug him outside the Eaton Centre.
The man behind the mask is Toronto resident and stand-up comedian Alex Brovedani, who can switch between his normal voice and Batman’s deep, throaty growl at a moment’s notice.
I went to college with Alex and I take full responsibility for putting his life on the ruinous path that follows broadcasting school. He was a nice kid studying to be C++ programmer when I stopped him in the student lounge to interview him, in character as an Australian kangaroo boxing commentator, and put the idea of transferring into the broadcasting program into his head. If I could take back time...
