Culture in Danger
Many thanks to Good friend Shane for sending me along this link. I laughed my tooshie off, and then realized that there’s more truth to this video than parody. It fits well with our focus on how arts and culture augments both our quality of life, as well as our standard of life.
Thanks again, Shane. You made my morning!
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I watched it twice, too funny.
ROTFLMYAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
this vid made me spill my beer, lol awesome.
How ‘ordinary working people’ are central to our art
Stephen Harper was wrong to suggest that artistic creations and working life are two divergent realms (an so was Councilor Joanne Gignac, who actually spoke for the mayor and the majority of city council, my comment!)
NOAH RICHLER
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
When Stephen Harper made his unfortunate remarks about the arts, in Saskatoon, what really grated was just how patronizing they were to Saskatchewan and the “working people” whose vote he was soliciting. They inferred that “working” Canadians have unsophisticated tastes and showed a stunning disregard for the cultural contribution of a province that has provided Canada with the singer Joni Mitchell, the sculptor Joe Fafard, the famous artists’ colony at Emma Lake, and a panoply of authors including W.O. Mitchell, Sinclair Ross, Fred Wah, Sharon Butala, Guy Vanderhaeghe – and, one could easily argue, the great American author and environmentalist Wallace Stegner.
..Canadian writers tell the story of Canada’s “ordinary working people” because through work we have discovered ourselves. And so this strain of storytelling is robust from one end of the country to the other – in the novels of writers such Michael Crummey and Donna Morrissey of Newfoundland, just as it is in the more contemporary work of Vancouver’s Michael Turner, Douglas Coupland (Silicon Valley geeks are tomorrow’s “ordinary working people”) and the inventive Lee Henderson.
“Ordinary” Canadians – working ones, reading ones, and the vast number Harper does not realize actually do both – should reflect on the Saskatoon novelist Guy Vanderhaeghe’s dedication, in The Last Crossing (a CBC “Canada Reads” pick in 2004) to “all those local historians who keep the particulars of our past alive.” When it comes to telling the story of this great country, it is the historians who have certainly done most of what we’ve come to call “the heavy lifting,” and then novelists run with it.
It is wrong to disparage this bunch, for one day you, an “ordinary working” Canadian, possibly, may find yourself wondering where your life went. And as you watch American television saying nothing about how you came to be where you are (work usually explains it), perhaps you will be fortunate enough to have had a wife or a relative who might actually have written something of your life down. Maybe you will even have done so yourself.
But if not, it will be a novelist or an artist who does that job, and you will be grateful for it. You will be thankful for Sharon Butala, whose great short story “Gabriel” follows a farmer who has abandoned his homestead for a job in the city (but who can never forget the farm he left), or someone who has subsequently followed in her fine footsteps. Or, if you are from Newfoundland, you will thank the stars for Lisa Moore who, in her forthcoming novel, is busy remembering the workers and the families affected by the loss of the Ocean Ranger – who else is remembering them?
…And, if you are from Toronto, of West Indian descent or not, you will be unforgettably moved by how Austin Clarke has chronicled the lives of Toronto’s hard-working (or not-working) Caribbean immigrants of the 1960s in his Toronto Trilogy of novels.
You will be unforgettably moved because governments, promising so many things, will have done none of this work. And if the company that you work for, or your government, screws you over, you will see that it is the novelist, not the politician, who remembers you. It will be someone like Leo McKay Jr., a teacher from Stellarton, N.S., who ensured, in his novel Twenty-Six, that the “ordinary people” of the same number who died in the Westray mining disaster of 1991 were not forgotten even as a company shunning questions strove to obliterate the memory of these fallen men.
And finally ….”Ordinary working people,” ones now doing shifts out of a bunkhouse in Athabasca or Yellowknife, roaming the country in the hunt for work as so many previous generations of Canadians have done, take account: when the inflation of the coming years arrives, and the value of your home is reduced to half of what it is now; when the payments on your wide-screen HD television are becoming impossible to meet; when, God forbid, you lose your home because 80 per cent of Canada’s exports travel to the United States but, unlike the wooden arrow manufacturer whose representative in Congress has managed to attach a pork-barreling loan onto the tail of the $700-billion bailout he subsequently approved, we here in Canada have no American vote–then you will see that the oil executives and their government toadies, not artists, will be the ones swilling champagne because theirs is the stock that won’t drop. And you will find that they’ll not give a toss about “ordinary working Canadian,” beyond what can be squeezed out of you at the pumps.
http://www.thestar.com/FederalElection/article/515830
My Comment (based on fifty years experience with artists and arts groups in this city) Who will write the stories of Windsor’s history and the present, who are they that will paint pictures of the moment of lives destroyed, assembly lines empty, store fronts vacant, homes emptied and abandon …no one! The free ride is over ..but there was never a free ride in this city for our artists, just a big calorie laden free meal for city council.
Our artists, writers, photographers, poets, sculptors, printmakers, our crafts people and yes our film makers, will go quietly about their passion, regardless of the miserable attitude of this city and tell and record our story, in its beauty, its angst, its ugliness, of lives created and lives destroyed, all without ever sitting at the big table in chambers.
Harper and Gignac et al have it so very wrong. And a work of fiction, either historical or hysterical will be written without ever a mention of them. Painting and photographs will be painted of barren carcasses of assembly lines hanging like bones of the dinosaur in a museum, the poet will write of the angst of a family loosing their home through eviction or foreclosure, exiles will right of the uprootedness and loneliness of distant places and at the same time the hope that comes from a new frontier.
To say that the arts don’t matter to “Ordinary Canadians,” is to strip us like the Tar Sands of our humanity.
Classic! Someone should let that guy know not to come to Windsor. Don’t forget the “free ride is over!”