Toronto City council on verge of austerity measures: how will this impact the strength of Arts and Culture in our city?

The arts and culture sectors are critically distinctive assests to Toronto and its economy, expressed in the world renowned events such as the Toronto International Film Festival, the Toronto Fringe Festival and Luminato Festival, for example. We must not ignore the impact that this sector has on enhancing our competitive advantage on the world stage. The arts and culture sectors are one of the most significant economic catalysts for any city. We as citizens who wish to live in a vibrant and dynamic city must push the various levels of government and leadership to prioritize it for the benefit of all our communities in Toronto.

There is an opportunity now to hold this new municipal Ford-administration to account for any erosion to funding support for cultural institutions, councils, and other stakeholders. The city and it's leadership need to recognize the cost that the city will suffer if they compromise this imperative. For instance, having the city at the table as funding partners for cultural projects is critical for attracting private enterprise to contribute crucial complimentary sponsorship dollars, scenarios testifiers spoke to at the Core Service Review that occurred at the end of July.

The organizing committee of Friends of the Arts, a collective of art advocates in Toronto, has initiated an online petition for those who would like their voice to be heard in regards to arts funding in our city, there are opportunities to do so. Find out more around the risks facing arts in Toronto and how you can take action. Visit www.ipetitions.com/petition/friendsofthearts today and add your name.

Election 2011, the shady aftermath: This is the culmination of one many discussions I've had in the last 24hrs ...

This Harper regime has till this point, through their two minority terms governed for five years. When they complete their majority term, it will take them to being nine years in government. At the end of those nine-years it will be a struggle to dial-back and return to a semblance of a 2006 era-society, in other words before the Conservatives got into government.

Now standing on the other side of the 41st Canadian General Election, this Harper Majority government has just been rewarded for corruption, for misspending, for lying, for scandal upon scandal. What that means is that this is just the tip of the iceberg ... they tried in 2008 to axe funding to opposition parties (catalyzing the 2008 30 min-coalition), now they have the Majority and will succeed in doing that and all the others things they could not do as a Minority. And the implications the nature of this style of governing have fundamental consequences to erode democratic parliamentary access & equability (such as it is).

What depresses me today, what am I afraid of is the script, the wish-list hiding in the jacket-pocket of Harper (keeping it warm, and close to where his heart should be) ... contents of which we have not anticipated, notions and initiatives so subtle in nature, we will over look them but exist their as old CPC ambitions to consolidate government power and satisfy their base. Nevertheless a list that is ready to be deployed by the CPC in this climate of a majority rule in a parliament disarmed to its own defense (cf. skirting ... contempt of Parliament, taking their Senators and running them in parliamentary elections etc etc) For the next four years, we undeniably need to brace ourselves for this new Canada on the horizon.

Back in the day around when Stephen Harper was the strategist for Preston Manning and the Reform party, he made a comment, which always stuck with me: "When I am done remaking Canada, you will not recognize it."

And here we stand watching him and his government - his regime with unfettered restraints ....

The King's Speech - a commentary via Twitter.

IndiraBalki 

"The clouds methought wld open & show riches / Ready 2 drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried 2 dream again." - quot'd in King's Speech.

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Brideshead Revisited Anthony Andrews cameo in King's Speech as PM (Nevil Chamerlain?)

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Edward's abdication speech he relinquishes his title of King and Emperor. "Emperor?" Ah yes, Emperor of India.

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki

I never seen the mircophone framed and regarded by it's characters such a menacing object d'art #horrorshow#Kings_Speech

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Bertie and the Doctor have a throwdown in Westminster. Cut-it off fellas. Put Edward back on that thron!

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 
Anthony Andrews was not Chamberlain, he was PM Ball (?)#kings_speech

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

The war-speech delivered to Bertie and he is wearing his miliatary ribbons on his jacket. #really?really? #kings_speech

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

All the commoners spaces .... I LOVE the beautiful wall-paper #whenNoticingMiseEnScene,mghtbeBored #kings_speech

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

#kings_speech deserves the Academy Awards for proper-good cussing per second/frame. #bugger #shit #fart

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

More meancing lights, mircophones ... Poor Emperors#kings_speech

3 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Bertie should make Geoffry Rush the Vicroy of Austrailia!#kings_speech

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki

#kings_speech soundtrack Britney Spears' Me against the Music

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Jamaica just got a visual shout-out! Brrrrrap! Brrap! #kings_speech

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Edward and Wallace look so prettay! #kings_speech

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

We need a new module Speak.Speak.Speak #kings_speech

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Lot of Beethovan to fill it out to the end #kings_speech

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

People were snoring through this screening #kings_speech#justsayin'

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki

No corgis were harmed too much in the making of this film.#kings_speech

2 hours ago 

IndiraBalki 

Commented to me: 3 6 mafia wuld say #kings_speech song should be "it's hard out here being a King"

2 hours ago 

When I Have Fears by John Keats

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean'd my teeming brain,
Before high piled books, in charact'ry,
Hold like rich garners the full-ripen'd grain;
When I behold, upon the night's starr'd face,
Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance,
And think that I may never live to trace
Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance;
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour!
That I shall never look upon thee more,
Never have relish in the faery power
Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think,
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

A virtual movie of John Keats reading this poem from poetryanimations 

“One Star Fell and Another” by Conrad Aiken

One star fell and another as we walked.
Lifting his hand towards the west, he said–
–How prodigal that sky is of its stars!
They fall and fall, and still the sky is sky.
Two more have gone, but heaven is heaven still.

Then let us not be precious of our thought,
Nor of our words, nor hoard them up as though
We thought our minds a heaven which might change
And lose its virtue, when the word had fallen.
Let us be prodigal, as heaven is:
Lose what we lose, and give what we may give,–
Ourselves are still the same. Lost you a planet–?
Is Saturn gone? Then let him take his rings
Into the Limbo of forgotten things.

O little foplings of the pride of mind,
Who wrap the phrase in lavender, and keep it
In order to display it: and you, who save our loves
As if we had not worlds of love enough–!

Let us be reckless of our words and worlds,
And spend them freely as the tree his leaves;
And give them where the giving is most blest.
What should we save them for,–a night of frost? . . .
All lost for nothing, and ourselves a ghost.

TIFF notes from the field: Poetry by Lee Chang-Dong, pt1

September 10, 2010 (the 35th year of the Toronto International Film Festival) I began my 16th year attending my home-city's film festival by seeing the North American premier of a Master from Korean cinema, Lee Chang-Dong's film Poetry. This film comes already heralded by many critics as a masterpiece and most recently a winner, awarded Best Screenplay at this year's Cannes film festival. Consequentially it found its way into TIFF's programming schedule, of course, I wanted to see what all this was for myself. I picked it in my advance ticket selections (which doesn't always guarantee you will get the ticket) and maybe by luck or inspiration ... it became my first film for this festival season.

The film opens with a beautiful sequence, shot with real sound. In other words, stripped of all music or film scoring. Only naturalistic sounds of the character's environment appear in the film's soundscape. In this opening, the screen lays out before us a wide vista of a ripping babbling river, hugged by green hills and banks speckled in the distance with small houses, roads, and shore trees. The camera's movement is motivated by children's voices and moves to search out their sound perspective at a distance, pans to the right to rest its gaze on them briefly before cutting in closer on them. The powerful effect of having no intervening music made me think instantly about sound design conventions that have developed over the course of film history, which has come informed the sound design and logic of this seemingly simple opening in these most elemental way. As well what I noticed is by not having music or intervening dialogue, for what seems to be a beat or two longer than what is conventionally allowed for in establishing shots has the immediate power of placing me within this place beyond the lens ... inviting me as a viewer into this verisimilitude, into this Korean country landscape so seemingly non-dynamically, but upon closer examination, extremely dynamic in its restraint.

In the wider shot, the sound of the river is more prominent because the camera's originating point of view situates it within the rippling water. When the camera cuts in on the children on the bank of the shore, the camera's point-of-view now (POV) is planted on solid land - the sound's POV logic has adjusted as well: the children's dialogue and play are clearly discerned and heard. The glory and pleasure of the cinema customarily defaults towards valorizing its visuals, which the cinematic experience can so specially construct for its viewers. But the unheralded humble champion that brings story to life and recreates a sense of place in that other special way cinema can occurs on the level of sound and its design. (See essay for a discussion that explores how important sound functions in filling out narrative logic in a analysis the aesthetics of a gladiatorial contest in Ridley Scott's Gladiator (2000), 'Narrative and Spectacle in Gladiator,' Richard Rushton, pg 34 - 43 CineAction Issue #56 - September 2001 ) It is through this under appreciated but holy marriage of cinematography and its images as animated through sound, which is presented to us to experience in this opening sequence in all its qualitative purity. Here Lee Chang-Dong establishes and gives us the parameters of style that this movie's narrative will enfold. A deft hand arranging elements with precision and restraint, this opening sequence - apart from putting forth its story's expository seed (the children discovering the dead body washing up off the river) - establishes the film's stylistic foundation from which a beautifully constructed film will be built.


In Poetry, Chang-Dong develops arcing themes of personal expression, individual agency, beauty, and moral-decision. All these are located and proceed through the main protagonist Mija (a beautiful performance given by the legendary South Korean actress Yun Junghee, who was without experience with simultaneous recording, revealed by the director in the Q&A after the screening). A grandmother who struggles to write one poem, while navigating the calamitous circumstances her grandson places her in the middle of while she raises him alone. We first come to meet Mija at the beginning of the film experiencing the awkwardness of early-onset Alzheimer's. 

Here in the opening of Poetry, all the salient stylistic features of the film are set out for us. The narrative will be told and anchored to what I would like to call a "naturalism". This naturalism will give room to the viewers to observe and aggregate meaning themselves (or equally, gives us freedom not to). The director takes great pains to set the narrative one-step away from fully accessing Mija's subjectivity, so as the climax of the story's action descends we are not privy to the motivations and psychology of this grandmother. We are left to interpret these causes and consequences ourselves. Ambiguity is favoured instead of direct and clean closures. However, there is enough implicit cues for each viewer to develop their own theories of what this exquisite character has either come to achieve herself by her own choices and agency. Or, perhaps, the director leaves room to suggest where the story ends is simply a matter of timing, circumstance and fate for all the characters involved.

In a future post, I would like to spend some time discussing other features of the film. Explore the features that hold the emotional core, and true beauty within this film. The function of language or exploration of the creative process through poetry, and perhaps soon we can also delved into the feature of the screenplay, it was awarded best screenplay at Cannes.

And “...So it begins.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

I have always had an on again and off again 'something'-affair with writing. As Montréal writer Saleema Nawaz tweeted the other day:

Something about writing -- the assertion things are this way rather than that -- makes me uncomfortable. But assert we must. Why else write?

This points to a conflicted space of what is really authoritative in the greater scheme of things. You know? Don't get me wrong, expression has always been important to me - the more intense, original and memorable something is I have always had a natural curiosity to seek it out whether it be found in film, theatre, conversation, ritual, dreaming, or sitting by the water contemplating ... But writing and building something around the  complete endeavour of self expression, which is on some level is a mixture of selectively cultivating, and (if you are honest) wholly and entirely laying out one's unconscious vulnerabilities, I have just never really embraced as a consistent practice. 

So now, all of this is calling to me and won't let me go. So writing it will be outside of the 9-5 and away from the miscellaneous and copious amounts of note taking and note-losing ... it's time to form it and place it on the virtual page. Stick with me, and let's see what takes shape.