This month I turn 77. Like other old people, I have begun to labour under the delusion that younger people might give a hoot about what I have to say about being old. So I’ll tell you. Also, like other old people, I ramble sometimes, so I’ll put these random observations in separate chapters.
Now that an election is approaching, we may be due for a revival of one of Pierre Poilievre’s favourite accusations against the current Prime Minister: the suggestion that Trudeau is somehow unqualified to be the nation’s leader on the grounds that he used to be – and this is, apparently, hilarious – a high-school drama teacher.
Selma Lazarus: Montreal Winter Scene, oil on panel, some time in the 1970s. I’ve long held that the creative process is essentially the same, no matter what art form you’re working in. I think I learned this from my mother. Mom was an artist – a painter, printmaker, and quilter – and, without knowing it at the time, I learned a lot about my own favourite art form, playwriting, by watching her paint. Mom enjoyed modest but reasonable success. She studied with Group of Seven painter Arthur Lismer, and she exhibited her work every year in the Montreal Museum of Art Spring Show. One year she had a one-woman exhibition in L.A. On another occasion the Montreal Star ran an article about her, and my teacher, Mrs. Levitsky, put the clipping up on the blackboard, making Mom, briefly, a celebrity among my classmates. Her painting studio was in the basement of our house. She would work from found photographs or still lifes, or she’d photograph landscapes, take the photos home and create paintings based on them. I sometimes hung out in the basement while she worked, and she’d explain to me what she was doing. She never talked about
In honour of the start of the new theatre season, let’s engage in a thought experiment. Let’s pretend you’re an intelligent, friendly extraterrestrial, visiting Earth from another planet, in order to study humans. We, your human hosts, are proud to introduce you to various human activities and accomplishments. You’ve found our math, sciences and engineering interesting and respectable, but it hasn’t knocked your 17 alien socks off: after all, you’ve already got to our planet while we’re still taking shots at our moon. You’re more curious about those human activities that are known as, well, the humanities: philosophy, psychology, anthropology, politics, law, history – and especially those peculiar pursuits called “art” and “culture.” You’ve sampled music, painting and sculpture; and now, we’re taking you to a building called a “theatre” to witness a human activity called a “play.” This will be your first introduction to human fiction. Wait, what? Why not start with written stories, novels, comics, movies, TV, streamed video? Because we want to hit you with the full magical weirdness of the most direct kind of fiction we have, unmediated by distracting technology. Just as this was the first form that fiction ever took among humans, let it
Every year at this season I honour the birthday, on August 4, 1901, of a personal hero of mine. His origins were unpromising. He was born Black in a racist society, in an urban neighbourhood justifiably called the Battlefield, to a 16-year-old sex-trade worker and washerwoman, and a father who abandoned them after impregnating her with a second child. He left school in Grade Six, and at 11 was arrested for firing a gun with blanks on New Year’s Eve, and sentenced to the New Orleans Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys, where he served two years. From these humble beginnings rose a man whom the music critic Gary Giddens has seriously compared to Dante, Shakespeare and Bach; whom the great jazz and classical trumpet player Wynton Marsalis calls, uncategorically, “the greatest musician in the world”; and of whom the singer Tony Bennett said, “You judge a country by what it gives to the world. And what America gave to the world was Louis Armstrong.” Armstrong revolutionized trumpet playing and jazz singing. He played so loud and high that other musicians would examine his trumpet for technological gimmicks. (There weren’t any. It was him.) The jazz solo, with each musician taking
In the June 8 Globe and Mail, there appeared an excellent wakeup call of an article by culture reporter Josh O’Kane, called “Squeezed Out: The State of the Canadian Arts.” The sub-heading read, “Costs are rising, audiences are hesitant and funding is shaky […] It’s a make-or-break year for the country’s cultural sector.” Sad but true – and the result of a perfect storm of causes, including the continuing psychological impact of the pandemic; competing technology that keeps people at home; and rising costs for everything, including evenings out. Live theatre is taking an especially big hit. O’Kane writes, “This past March, [the Professional Association of Canadian Theatres] published a startling number […] Theatre attendance was down 46 per cent from 2019 across the country.” Well, take heart, because I am now going to solve this. I’ve been compiling a list of the things wrong with theatre today, and how to fix them. Admittedly, these are small factors, but they may have some sort of cumulative effect. Let’s begin where the theatregoer often begins: at the websites. It’s astonishing how uninformative and un-navigable are many theatre websites, and not just because I’m old. Staffers construct them from inside the company,
(This is Part Two of my story of moving to Vancouver, from Kingston, for at least the next few months. For Part One, read previous blog.) I’d foreseen having an emotional letdown on arrival, but not how devastating or long-lasting it would be. For the first couple of weeks I remained more or less depressed. A few days after my arrival, I performed a symbolic ritual that I’d looked forward to: I walked around Stanley Park, smoking a little cannabis, like in the old days. But I kept thinking, “Yeah, so this is the famous park, this is the famous weed, so what?” Back in Kingston, whenever I’d seen Vancouver on TV, I’d sighed a little. But now the actual Vancouver scenery looked like a TV screen in Kingston. On previous visits to Vancouver, I’d reminded myself that I was just as much here as I would be if I were living here. Now that I was living here, I felt just as much not here as if I were visiting. In Kingston I’d been in exile from Vancouver; suddenly I felt homesick for Kingston. I began wondering what’s wrong with me. Could I never be happy? At least visiting
In March, after a dull day in Kingston, Lin said, “If PAL Vancouver calls tomorrow, tell them we’ll take it.” I laughed. We’d been on their waiting list for 14 years, and had never heard from them. The next day, PAL called: an apartment was available. PAL is a Performing Arts Lodge: an apartment building with subsidized rents, mostly for older folks who’d wasted their lives in the arts and never made much money. Because we’d wasted half our lives in the arts and spent half making modest amounts as a publicist (Lin) and teacher (me), we qualified for a less subsidized but manageable rent – and in the most beautiful real estate in the world: at the entrance to Stanley Park. But when PAL did call, the first thing we said was, “We’re not doing this, are we?” “Nope.” It was too much work, exchanging our big, four-bedroom Kingston house, crammed with decades’ worth of stuff, for a one-bedroom flat without enough space for the two of us. But then we talked all afternoon about it. Were we being lazy? Cowardly? We’d both complained that our lives in retirement weren’t interesting enough. We’d contemplated different scenarios, including other PALs
“We all know what goes on in those college classrooms,” said Ontario Premier Doug Ford once, on the basis of having attended college for two months. He was referring to the popular stereotype that our colleges are hotbeds of leftist professors surreptitiously indoctrinating innocent students with our ideology. Okay, look. I was a leftist college professor for 31 years. Here’s how this works. First of all, it’s the world’s greatest job, and I’m not complaining, but nobody ever said it was not difficult and time-consuming. I earned my salary, spending thousands of hours on the job, inside and outside the classroom, teaching playwriting and related theatre topics. I can’t imagine taking on that whole other, unpaid job of brainwashing them with my leftist politics, on top of all the official, paid-for stuff. It would be a massive task to perform on a volunteer basis. And the main reason it would be a massive task is because I have no idea how one might go about doing it. My students were not children. They were savvy, curious, skeptical young adults, with efficient built-in ideology detectors, which it was our job to help them refine further. I cannot fathom how I could
On my retirement from teaching at Queen’s, I decided to learn to draw. I had tried fitfully, a few times over the years, to master this craft, but had repeatedly given up. This time I decided to stick with it until I either became satisfied with my drawing, quit because it would never be any good, or died: whichever came first. I worked from two excellent, very different books – Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards and Making Comics by Lynda Barry – and from classes with some fine teachers at the Kingston Seniors’ Centre. And it all made me miserable. In the long term, I had no style, context, or ideas about what to do with my drawings once I learned how to draw them. And in the short term, proportion and perspective in particular defeated me. My childishly distorted limbs and skewed horizons filled me with shame and anger. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t do it right – or why it mattered so much. This began to take the shape of an existential crisis, exacerbated by the irony that I had just spent 31 years teaching playwriting students how to overcome exactly