Kids are learning Socialism instead of Math! Or, why do so many adults hate the fact that we no longer beat children in schools anymore?

I knew I shouldn't have clicked on this Margaret Wente article, about how "the system" is failing Canadian kids at math.

But I did, in part beacuse a) my son has started school again, and b) he seems to have a hell of a lot of math classes! In fact, math seems to squeeze everything else out of his education this year. The fact that Wente claims that math is all but invisible in her column set off my BS-detector because it's the exact opposite of what an actual child in the Canadian school system is actually experiencing.

Maybe it's a trick by the teacher to teach them about the wonders of Stalin and the glories of East Berlin before the fall of the Wall, but I'm going to hedge my bets and say that the schedule is accurate, and that he's spending more time doing math than any other subject, by a considerable margin.

It is true, however, that last year's math test scores in Ontario are a bit lower in Grade 3 and 6 than they have been in the past 5 years. And it's true that there might be a trend there. But the pedagogical "issues" Margaret Wente is describing have been around since I was in school in the very late 1970's.

As always, I both encourage you and discourage you from reading the comments. They are the usual miasma of incohate rage and conjecture about how no longer forcing children to memorize times tables and teaching them creative ways to problem solve is Socialist Liberal Communists ruining our society and "failing our children". Except that it's not true.

I mean, I don't want to say that Margaret Wente is full of shit here, but my own anecdotal evidence is as follows: last year my son learned multiplication tables, as in, he had to memorize them, along with a weekly spelling test where he uh, had to memorize how to spell words correctly. Other kids, not just my son, were also subjected to this kind of rote learning.

He also learned about division and multiplication, and he also learned to add large numbers by stacking them on top of each other. So he, and everyone in his class, learned algoritms and memorized facts at school. Here in Ontario. Last year.

In fact, in what I'm sure would come as a shocking development to Margaret Wente, he was asked to review his multiplication tables over this weekend!

Oddly enough, this is not only how I learned to do math, it's also how my parents learned to do math!

Just a few years ago, I would help my step-daughter with her high school math, and it was all quadratic equations and trigonometry. It was never "Hey, see if you can figure out a cool way to calculate the acceleration of a Care Bear in her Care Car on the way to visit her friend Dora the Explorer in Cuddle Land, if Dora is 3.4 cuddle units from Careland and it takes her 12 love time units to get there? Please tweet your most creative attempt and then like it on Facebook".

So are these people telling us that kids aren't learning to do division or multiplication the old-fashioned way? Yes. Are they completely full of shit for reasons that I do not at all understand? Also yes.

Is the problem here that school is, at least to adults, more enjoyable now? It's as though all these grown ups recall school as being this soul-crushing experience of constantly having to memorize facts and figures, and in true modern Canadian fashion, instead of thinking that there might be a better way, instead believe that this young generation should be subjected to the same things that turned Margaret Wente into Margaret Wente?

Then there's this. Most adults I know are terrible at math, even those who were taught in the good old days back before "student-centred learning" became all the rage. How many of these self-righteous turds could help their children with math past Grade 6?

Perhaps the Ontario government should start measuring that, because I bet the results would shock the same mean-spirited jerks tut-tutting the current state of Canadian education. You who were products of that old system, many of you also suck at math.

By the way, the old system sounds pretty crappy. My parents grew up in the good old days of learning, and do you know what I took away from it listening to their stories as a kid? That most teachers in the old days were masochistic assholes who liked nothing more than to hit kids with straps and to treat kids they didn't really like with utter contempt or disdain.

Do you know what the approach was back in the day if you were bad at math or anything? It was to write you off! "Hey kid, there's always bricklaying or the steno pool! HA HA!"

Margaret Wente pines for the days when the switch was plentiful, and rote memorization was everywhere. This says a lot more about Margaret Wente than it does about what kids are actually taught in Ontario, which, if my son is anyone to go by, is basically the exact same stuff I did, except with more empathy.

If empathy is that bothers you about schools today, then maybe you're the problem.

A Sad Thought

For a few years now, I have been making the rather pessimistic prediction to friends and family that in 10 years, Canada will, in most respects, be to the right politically of the United States. My contention was that it would happen almost happen without a word, and Canadians would only realise it when it was far too late.

Does Anyone Remember John Weinzweig?

Canadian composer John Weinzeig would have turned 100 this year.  The Toronto Star had a nice overview of what's going on in celebration of his life. But before I get back to him I have to ask: Do you remember that whole thing about needing a new Hockey Night in Canada theme song?

What do you say about the winner? I say it's really, really kitschy.

Firstly, Bagpipes? And isn't this really just another David Foster Olympic tune, except without the edge? Or are the bagpipes the edge?

The new hockey song isn't bad. It's just kitschy. Which I suppose means really bad, but it doesn't sound really bad, so does that make it a work of genius?

Perhaps I've been reading too much Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste, a book I picked up at my favourite bookstore.

It's a depressing read. If you take the book's arguments seriously, basically everything around us is kitsch. As some of the Amazon reviews contend, this could be a "hoplessly outdated" high/low view of art, and I suspect most people who read this book will balk at the possibility that there's this much bad taste out there.
Worse, it was written in the 70's, and as far as I can tell, things have gotten much much worse on the kitch front. At least people way back then came by it honestly! (That's a not very obvious joke right there)
I even found myself looking at the book going "Really? That's kitsch too? Crap! I like that"...he has a special dislike for superheroes - one of the captions for some Batman bedroom wallpaper reads: "The idiotic figures of Batman and Robin raised to the level of unsophisticated decorative fetishes." That, my friends, is contempt! but then again, when you think that superheroes are our biggest, fattest Hollywood spectacles, which people watch while eating an artisinal hamburger with artisinal relish and artisinal kraft dinner made by artisinal artisans from the land of Artisinalia...

Also, my son has a pair of Batman pajamas. He hates them. Now I realise why - my son has an innate hatred of kitsch. God bless that little boy!

I digress...by the end of this exhausting book, I began to dismiss old Professor Dorfles essays as the sad musings of a modern curmudgeon, musings that sound, ahem, a lot like this blog...but just as you get to the end, he makes a case for Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein as decidedly unkitschy artists. Why? Because they use kitschy elements...the miasma of kitsch is unstoppable.

My theory as to why kitsch is everywhere? Kitsch is the aesthetic form of late, late, late capitalism. I mean, once you've exhausted handbags and diamond encrusted watches as luxury goods, where else is there to go but down? Rich people want to eat terrible food too, but they don't want to pay terrible food prices! and if you think I'm kidding, the latest issue ot Toronto Life has an article on fancy tater tots! you cannot make this stuff up folks!

But what about that hockey song? I listen again to the not-so-new Canada hockey song, and I recall how excited people in Canada get when Tim Horton's offers to slop chili into a bowl made of bread, and it seems that Professor Dorfles worst fears have been realised as Canadian society. We are so deep in kitsch that we know nearly nothing else. This is where Stephen Harper was deeply wrong about ordinary Canadians not caring about the arts - when it comes to kitsch, it seems both Canadian artists and ordinary people can't get enough of it. I should know, I live near Dundas and Ossington, perhaps the epicentre of artsy kitsch.

So what's all this crap about kitsch got to do with the hockey anthem, or the title of my post?

My suggestion for the hockey anthem - John Weinzweig's Hockey Night in Canada. It's resolutely unkitschy, for the same reasons Warhol and Lichtenstein are. You can listen to it here. Stick - Check- Bodycheck. He takes the kitsch and he stabs it to death right in front of you. And as a choral piece, it reminds us that our experience of hockey on television is very much through the colour commentary. The other theme songs are just there to tell you to sit down on the sofa, Weinzweig reminds you that you're there to be part of a sacred ritual in Canadian society - watching grown men skate around on ice and shoot a vulcanized rubber disk at each other in the hopes of hitting it into a net.

I would gladly watch the first four minutes of Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday to hear it. But then I would probably turn it off.

In other news

Today is the 200th birthday of the Richard Wagner. 

I wish I had something bloggy to say about him, you know, cheeky and showing off how smart and above it all I am, but all I can say is that his operas are some of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced.

As someone also doing a PhD in German, I should especially say something about his impact on German history, but all I can say is that his operas are some of the most beautiful things I've ever experienced.

The Difference between Right and Left

If David Miller, the former mayor of Toronto (and purported socialist) had been caught on tape smoking crack and spewing racial epithets, and Gawker were fundraising $200,000 to get a copy of the tape, they would have raised the money in a single day and we would all be watching it on the Internet, alongside the video of David Miller's resignation.

Funnily enough, I was walking through the Junction a few weeks ago, and David Miller walked past me.  He smiled, and I wished I had said, "we miss you!".  Miller was far from perfect, but he never made Toronto the laughing stock of the world.  Oh but he also raised taxes so he's the devil.

I really do wonder, what would it take for "Ford Nation" to lose faith in this clown?  Given that he's really a cipher for alienated rage, I suppose the answer is nothing, but you are welcome to venture forth in the comments!

But back to my original point.  The reason there is a Ford Nation is because a lot of people here, in fact, about a third of Torontonians, are always out for blood, and they are nearly all completely on the right side of the political equation.  I often try to ask myself, why are these people so angry, but in that anger comes an incredible amount of reality-bending motivation.

How many people on the left could you imagine seeing a video like that of David Miller and then trying to argue it was doctored?  And yet this is the standard line, as though these drug dealers sat some guy in front of  a green screen and then CGI'd Rob Ford into the video!!  Can you imagine how insane that sounds?  It would be cheaper to just outspend him in the next civic election!

No the "left's" actual tactic was to try to have him legally removed from office, which failed.  If the video is real, Rob Ford did this to himself, and not the staff at ILM, who created it while on a break from the latest Star Wars film.

Ugh

Today's been a pretty crazy day here in Toronto.  We had an earthquake this morning, and then the Toronto Star broke a story about a video supposedly showing Rob Ford smoking crack and making racial slurs.

Except the Star didn't break the story.  I happened to be on Gawker last night when they put up the whole thing, read it, (you should too, it's kind of amazing) and then went to the Star to see their reaction.

Except there was nothing there.

Come today, it turns out the Star has been sitting on the story and the released it, and pretended as though it was theirs all along. As a result, there's some pretty funny (and nasty) stuff going on between the Star and Gawker on twitter, which is actually kind of sad, because although Gawker is completely right that the Star is being stupid in claiming this is their story, Gawker doesn't seem to know that the Star, as far as Canadian papers go, is maybe the last bastion of relatively decent journalism in the country and not a front for business interests like the Globe and Mail and National Post.  Instead they're playing the whole "Canadians are dumb boring people who don't really know much about things", except for the fact that they get all the same media as we Americans and watch it obsessively..."


That being said, it's comically cheeky of the Star to call their slightly differing account of the tape an "exclusive", and I can see why people at Gawker, like Tom Scocca, are so angry about it, or at least appear to be really angry about it on twitter.  And it's also annoying for the Star to get all self-righteous about Gawker getting pissed off, given how much of the paper lauds its own muckraking when no one else is doing it.

I'm actually really glad Gawker broke it, in part because Canadians usually only take something seriously when Americans are involved, and it also makes it a lot harder for the usual Ford crowd to merely blame the Star for this.

I guess I'm talking about this and not about the actual video in part because these are the only people to have seen it, and so this is actually the story right now, in which two rare outfits where decent journalism is still practiced are totally crapping over each other. 

That's actually the saddest part because Rob Ford has been a lost cause for so long now that's it's not actually even worth talking about him.

A Tale of Two Columnists

There are two columns worth reading in the Toronto Star today.  Royson James, who I don't always agree with, in part because he constantly plays devil's advocate, has a really nice piece on the issue of the Scarborough subway.  I can't help but wonder if the decision today by Toronto City Council to discuss transit taxes was fuelled in part by James' cogent analysis of the rank hypocrisy that surrounds the debate over whether or not Scarborough should get a subway extension or an LRT.

Although I live in downtown Toronto, and I guess I'm supposed to be at war with people in Scarborough and Etobicoke, my deeply held socialist beliefs force me to believe that if we taxed the hell out of everyone, we could have subways running down every major street in the entire city, whether we needed them or not.  That even includes people who live in Scarborough or Etobicoke or all those something-York areas north of Bloor and West or East of the downtown core are called..

Seriously though, James makes a good point about the actual politics going on, and how the absence of a Scarborough subway isn't necessarily just because we downtowners don't think they deserve one, but that their own representatives on Council are part of the problem.

***

Which brings me to the other column, by Martin Regg Cohn, which concerns the recent Ontario provincial budget.  Unlike James column, Cohn tells us all about the various statistics that show us we're in a slump, and accuses the current Finance minister, Charles Sousa, of ignoring the plight of the Ontario economy. 

The problem with this piece is that Cohn himself admits, at the very end, that there's very little Ontario can do to actually change its position in a national economy run by a federal government more concerned about extracting the remains of long-dead dinosaurs in Alberta than pretty much anything else. 

Instead, he trots out the usual centrist Canadian columnists' bromide about the Ontario government needing to instill "an entrepreneurial spirit in Ontario’s commercial classes" in order to "kick-start" Ontario's economy.  Maybe people aren't feeling so entrepreneurial because that magical market put Ontario into this predicament in the first place.  Does anyone remember the economic meltdown of 2008?  Rescuing the auto industry and such? No?

Perhaps Cohn was trying to be balanced after writing a number of pieces that were more supportive of the Liberals?  And his editor told him he needed some balance?  Maybe I'm just tired of hearing how Ontario's economic problems boil down to some regulatory fiddling and letting "the market" step in and magically figure everything out, and how pointless his column seems, except to allow the trolls who populate the Star website to talk about how if only government got out of the way (because it's always somehow in the way, I guess, building roads, cleaning water and taking away our garbage). 

That's not actually how markets work, ever, and generally, it's when we let the markets do their thing that all hell breaks loose.


 

Salome at the COC

So we went to see the Canadian Opera Company's revival of Salome Wednesday night.

It was awful. 

A long-standing tradition of mine, when I know I'm going to see an opera, is to avoid the reviews, in part because I don't really want to know what I'm seeing until I'm seeing it.  However, what both of them convey quite nicely is the insipidness of our critical culture here in Canada.


To be fair actually, the Toronto Star review, by John Terauds is OK.  I think he's trying to be diplomatic, but he is not nearly as hard on the staging as he should be.  And I think he, like many Canadian classical critics, is much more polite about the quality of the singing (and the musical direction) than he needs to be.

The Globe and Mail review, however, reads like copy from a Canadian Opera Company press release.  Who is J.D. Considine?  It turns out he's a rock critic, who also now does jazz reviews for the Globe and Mail, which makes him a perfect candidate to review an opera!

Am I being snotty here?  You bet!  It would be like asking me to review a rock concert!  Has he ever reviewed an opera before?  A quick Google search indicates that he reviewed Tannhäuser at some time, but that's it.

I don't really read the Globe and Mail anymore, in part because the quality of the writing and reportage has steadily declined over the years, but his review is more of a joke than Atom Egoyan's "controversial" staging of Salome.

Mr. Considine completely swallows Egoyan's premise, which is that somehow, Salome needs some kind of updating so that people would understand it better.  What's worse is that nearly every review of the opera online essentially concedes this premise.  You know, that opera is old, and difficult to understand, and so we need to have it explained to us by the director, who occupies the role of a benevolent storyteller father, like Stalin.

Except it doesn't.  Especially not this one.

Nearly everyone talks about how Egoyan successfully conveys "psychological depth" and "family issues" in this production.  However, my sense is that he did this mainly through his program notes, which everyone dutifully read and accepted as Egoyan somehow shining a light on an aspect of the opera that had, until now, been neglected.  In essence, he argues that his production seeks to move away from thinking of Salome as a femme fatale, and more as a product of her environment, that perhaps she has been sexually abused, and in the midst of damaged and violent environment, herself becomes an expression of this violence.

Except that the first lines that Salome sings in the entire opera are the following:

Ich will nicht bleiben.  Ich kann nicht bleiben.  Warum sieht mich der Tetrarch fortwährend so an, mit seinen Maulwurfsaugen unter den zuckenden Lidern?  Es ist seltsam, dass der Mann meiner Mutter mich so ansieht.

Translation:

I will not stay. I cannot stay. Why does the Tetrarch look at me all the while with his mole's eyes under his shaking eyelids ? It is strange that the husband of my mother looks at me like that.

So Egoyan's entire justification for his staging, the premise that he proceeds to beat you over the head with by deploying cliche after cliche, is something which Wilde and Strauss manage to convey in about a minute of music and dialogue.  We know that she is disturbed and bothered by Herod's sexual advances.  Showing us a girl on a swing, and then Salome getting (symbolically now, in a positive contrast to the 1997 production) gang-raped by the Jews(!) during the dance of the seven veils doesn't really do anything but serve to show that Egoyan is good at manipulating the bored narcissists who I suppose he (and many others), believe make up a good chunk of modern opera audiences.


Why do I seem really pissed off about this? In part, I actually spent a month in Vancouver back in the 90's watching this opera (this very Egoyan production in fact) get put together.  There were things that bothered me about the production, but I was never able to really express them, maybe because I was so much younger, and I, like most of the people reviewing this opera now, naively believed that there was some kind of productive relationship between "edgy" and "arty".

Now I'm a bit older, and a bit wiser, and I can't help but see just how terrible the whole thing is now.  I mean, Herod in this production is meant to be a drug lord or something (at least he was in 1997).  So why the hell does he have John the Baptist in his basement?  Was he some unlucky Jehovah's Witness, whose monthly door-knocking excursion went horribly, horribly wrong?

And I know that this is when well-intentioned people will step in and say, "No, no Andrew, it's art, and Egoyan is trying to convey the allegorical aspect of Salome here."  But what's the allegory in a drug dealer having a religious fanatic in his basement?  The entire crux of the story is that Jochanaan is a kind of political prisoner, held there but not to be killed.  His death has tremendous implications, but the way Egoyan stages it deprives the entire story of this tension.  Herod is just a pervert, and John the Baptist a disheveled nut.

I suppose this is what enrages me (yes I know, 1st world problems, blah, blah blah, don't care about art or the human condition when there are more important things to be worried about) is how so much of this is framed as "controversy".

It's the ultimate arts marketing dodge  - stage a bad production, but throw in a blowjob (no really, there's one in this staging!), some nudity and also a sense that Salome is really just an damaged child by showing us a film of it, and it comes out the other side as "controversial".

I think what it's really called is bullshit.

I've seen some really interesting modern stagings.  They don't always work, but they are often pretty good.  This wasn't.  This staging of Salome seems to rely on the viewer to trust Atom Egoyan to have some insight into the opera simply because he's Atom Egoyan, and in the auteur-starved country of Canada, I suppose that's enough.  And I say this having really enjoyed Egoyan's production of Wagner's Die Walküre a number of years ago at the COC, so I'm not saying he's incapable of it either.

Suffice to say that Egoyan performs a very nice bit of sleight of hand - he and the COC marketing department manage to fool most people into thinking that what is completely obvious in the libretto and music of the opera in fact emerges only thanks to his ingenious direction!

I could go on for a looooong time about the problems in this production, but I would actually also like to talk a little about the music, which was almost equally disappointing.

The production was, overall, not terribly well sung.  I mean, there were no stand out bad singers, and to be fair to Egoyan, I think he gets one character right (Herodias), who also happened to be the strongest and most compelling actor and singer in last night's performance.

The Salome was excellent, although she, like many of the singers, struggled to be heard over the orchestra, to the extent that the fault must lie with the conductor, either in his casting of the roles, or of his handling of the orchestra.

I have yet to be really amazed by our new music director's handling either the music, the singers or the orchestra, and I genuinely wonder why some of the singers were cast in this production when they fairly clearly were not entirely well suited to the roles. I mean, it's never bad, but I certainly don't understand why the COC orchestra is always singled out for praise, except that they are often the best part of a mediocre performance.

If you were planning on going, don't, unless you are OK with spending money to listen to the last 10 minutes of the opera, which not even this staging could ruin.  I don't want to say that it's worth it just for the end, but the opera succeeds despite what's gone on before, because not even Atom Egoyan could get in the way of Strauss' sublime music and sense of drama.  He tried, but at the end, Strauss managed to triumph over the intellectual and emotional desolation of this production.

***
Anyway, some of you might wonder why I never posted anything on the recent production of Tristan at the COC.  I saw it, but unfortunately I injured myself on the way to the opera, and didn't really feel like writing much up at the time, and now it seems a very long time ago!

That being said, I also saw Opera Atelier's recent production of Mozart's The Magic Flute with my son and girlfriend.  Unlike Salome, this production was straightforward and simple (read traditional), and yet incredibly engaging.  Opera Atelier advertised it as a great "first" opera for kids, and it was true.  But what made it great fun was that the production let the opera speak for itself, in all its sublime strangeness

I've said this before, but I am really tired of the idea that every opera going experience has to be sold as providing some added pseudo-pedagogical value.  First of all, most modern productions don't actually do this (see above) and secondly, I think it's time we stop insisting on the idea that classical music is somehow good for us as a way of justifying its existence in light of its high costs.


But I need to think about this more before I actually attempt to explain myself!  Some other time, then.

Some thoughts on why people are not enamoured of unions right now

Reading today that the recently privatized garbage collectors here in Toronto voted to reject unionization does not come as a surprise, but it is a pretty depressing result nevertheless.

As I have written before, I feel as though the way in which Torontonians think about our garbage collectors is a very clear example of the general state of incoherent mean-spiritedness in the city when it comes to the public sector.

This isn't terribly surprising, given that there has been a fairly long-term (and highly successful) assault on the idea of the public sector being anything more than a bunch of lazy unionized assholes who are literally stealing money from the honest taxpayer.  As a former civil servant, and now part of the broader public sector, I still get into arguments with people who. on the basis of having had to wait for an hour to get their driver's license renewed, conclude that the government "can't do anything right".

Beyond the fact that this is a no-win argument (if the renewal office was staffed to the gills, wouldn't that be more wasteful? or maybe it's 20 years of attrition to pay for those tax cuts that had some effect?), it points to a much plainer fact - nearly no one in Canada ever has to deal with any level of government.  This is why most people go to city hall to get their passport, or e-mail the province to ask about their local property taxes.

The reality is that most Canadians don't have a clue as to how their governments work.  And what's funny about this is that they don't really have to, because we live in a society where our governments, even if I really don't like them, still manage to make the quality of life here in Canada pretty good.  But the quality of our public service has now come back to bite the public sector in the ass, because it's actually done a pretty good job of uh, doing a good job.

Anyway, I say all this in part because when the garbage strikes happened here in Toronto, it shocked people into remembering that there was this whole public sector, and it did all kinds of stuff for them, like picked up their garbage, looked after their children, or provided cheap recreation for them. 

However, in a spirit remarkably consistent with the laughter and derision towards protestors during the G20, rather than thinking that outside workers might have as much dignity as say, someone who works at a bank, we as a city, very loudly and clearly, told them to shut up and get back to doing our dirty work, and how dare they think that they deserved what they negotiated over the years, like all those previous agreements that no one noticed, and where all these "benefits" accrued. 

"I mean what", the civic body thought to itself, "do the outside workers think union negotiations are some kind of good faith contract between two parties?"

So it does not surprise me that the workers at GFL did not unionize.  I don't think it helped the union's cause when their initial strategy was to argue that GFL would do a bad job, going so far as to set up a hotline for people to call to complain.  Not a great idea, given that the GFL garbage collectors might actually think the union is accusing them of doing a bad job (which is kind of was...).

But when you think about it, I suspect most of those who work for GFL were here for the last strike, and that the last thing they wanted to do was to rock the boat right now.  I doubt that GFL even really had to press them that hard - it was ordinary Joe Toronto who scared them into rejecting the union.  I mean, right now they are the worse-off heroes of the city!   Way to take one for the team, ladies and gentlemen of GFL!

That being said, I'm sure things are probably pretty good for them right now - as is common with capitalism, there is always the opening gambit, when the company is flush with cash and able to show its workers that they can offer similar benefits without union protection  (Remember the early days of the National Post?).  But it will get worse, and GFL will ask (and likely receive) more money from the uh, taxpayer, to increase its profits while keeping wages "competitive" and costs low.

This is the perversity of our civic culture right now, and I can't help but be reminded of Michel Foucault's preface to Anti-Oedipus, when he reminds us of "the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us." (And no, I'm not saying GFL or the workers are fascists like Hitler of Mussolini!!!!!  His comment is about why we enjoy hurting ourselves to assume a particular kind of power)

I am certain, as we all are, that the garbage collectors who voted again unionization all sincerely believe that they will be better off, in the long run, without collective bargaining, because right now, they all probably feel as though they have the power, the power to be on the city's good side, and that the union would take away that power. 

However, just as one of my tyrannical former bosses believed that governments could do away with unions because "they weren't relevant anymore", by simply saying what he said, he unwittingly demonstrated their necessity.

Better luck next time, CUPE 416!

La Clemenza di Tito

I was the Canadian Opera Company's production of Mozart's last opera last night.  I don't actually have much more to say about it than the Toronto Star or the Globe and Mail.  I completely agree with this reviewer that it was really well sung, maybe the best sung Mozart opera I've seen at the COC, and that the substitute for Michael Schade, Owen McCausland, really shone in the title role (especially in the 2nd part).  However, it was marred by one of the most incoherent productions the COC has ever staged. 

Now I have complained about COC strangeness before, like when they tried to set Beethoven's Fidelio in a Kafkaesque (HA!) bureaucracy, or completely ruined the ending of Don Giovanni (for laughs?), but the problem with this one went deeper, in part because the notes the director, Christopher Alden, wrote for the playbill were quite intriguing.  He argues that Titus, who is characterized by his clemency (hence the title!), actually tyrannizes his populace with kindness. 

I have to admit, this sounded like a really interesting take, and I looked forward to seeing that.  Unfortunately, what happened on stage failed to resemble even the director's argument for the production!  Instead, it came off as farce, which, in light of the libretto and Mozart's music, simply made no sense.  It resulted in people laughing at points of high seriousness, and reducing certain characters, like Annio and Vitellia, to wildly inappropriate caricatures. Basically all the humour that was set up in the first part led to the audience seeing certain characters as funny, and so when they got serious, like when Vitellia completely changes her position on Tito, it comes off as though she's not serious, or perhaps insane. 

It was the same with the setting - I enjoyed the idea of a kind of late-late Modernist building, and the fact that it looked like every 1960's arts centre lobby in Canada, from Vancouver's Queen Elizabeth Theatre to the Confederation Centre in PEI.  But again, there was no payoff.

So unlike some of the previous productions I've seen, which were obviously thought through, but the concept itself was poorly conceived, this one struck me as intriguingly conceived, but terribly articulated in its execution. 

Nevertheless, I would highly recommend seeing it for the singing, and it's a shame that the house was the emptiest I've seen it in a long while last night given the quality of the musical performances. 

Just try not to think too much about what's going on on stage.