and...back at the Toronto desk

catching up...last night was the launch of Toronto's Neighbourhood Arts Network which (if you believe the bumph) will revolutionize arts education in this city.

can't knock their goals: administration & networking to make art classes and activities accessible to kids and older students across the GTA. fabulous, and crucial. but when i go to an arts event and listen to feel-good educational stories from administrators, i get bored. fast. i would rather hear from the kids involved--what did they actually create, and what do they think about these new art skills?

last night's celebratory launch seemed to treat education in art as a spiffy extra that we can throw into the pot only when we have surplus funding. shouldn't artistic play be an essential part of educating the next generation? and if so, why isn't it important for the education minister to show up?

instead, we had Ontario's new Minister of Tourism & Culture, Michael Chan, who didn't address such questions--mind you, no one really expected him to (he's only had this portfolio for 9 days, so he's still looking a little shell-shocked, discovering all the cute artsy songs he now has to listen to). his speech emphasized that the new network is predicated largely on encouraging business to invest in the neighbourhoods in question. hopefully the network is going to spend some time talking about what kind of business these neighbourhoods actually need...or want...and where art fits in all this.

the idea of culture & arts education as a stimulus to animate the urban environment isn't new; the idea of capitalizing on the arts to revitalize the city isn't new either. but so far, Toronto's new network just seems likely to emphasize the divide between the people who talk about making art and the people who actually make the stuff. because playing with the idea of creativity, with cute little ditties and matching aprons, is all very well. but art, if it's actually art and not therapeutic crafts, isn't only a marketing tool and shouldn't be treated as such.

yes, the people involved in this new project seem very enthusiastic, and i do wish them the best. but just the same, it was an evening of Toronto administrators talking about art...even free food can't make that interesting. i left the event a bit down-hearted.

and then, art saved me.

i walked down the glass corridor of Harbourfront and noticed the gallery space was still open, with no one there apart from the woman at the desk. the thread installation by Amanda McCavour is what drew me into the space--because i could glimpse the work as i walked away from the launch (my photo doesn't do it justice at all). inside the gallery, i discovered Shuyu Lu's equally fantastic embroidery of small meticulous scenes of Chinatown & Kensington Market...detailed, thoughtful, mysterious, a real conversation with the city and with the viewer.


the work was gorgeous. complicated. technically demanding. and committed to considering Toronto through art.

while i was there, none of the arts administrators stopped in as they left the party. which seemed a pity.

Small Press of Toronto Dec 12

my co-organizer Sang & i are madly finishing last minute details for the BOOK FAIR this Saturday at the fabulous Gladstone Hotel. over 60 presses with books, comics, graphic novels, zines, fantastic readers, workshops...come on down & check it out, for free!

rob mclennan's 12 or 20 questions

rob mclennan runs this excellent question series on his blog & i was so pleased to be invited. my favourite question was #5...

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Essential part of the process—you can immediately see what’s going over, what’s not. Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? Readings are wonderful—a way to connect to readers, to hear what they think, listen to other people’s stories. I love doing readings, even though they make me so nervous I can barely remember what I’ve said.

which reminds me...must decide what to read from RATS OF LAS VEGAS tomorrow night in Ottawa.

heading to Ottawa for the Small Press Fair

later this week, i'm off to the Ottawa Small Press Fair. i'll be reading at the pre-Fair soiree that's (to quote ze man himself) lovingly hosted by rob mclennan, with Michael Dennis, Spencer Gordon, Michelle Desbarats, and Garry Thomas Morse. looking forward to it!

Friday, November 27, 2009; doors 7pm, reading 7:30pm
at The Carleton Tavern (upstairs)
Armstrong at Parkdale, Ottawa

meanwhile, i've been watching rat videos, and i've finally decided that this particular rat is my favourite. it was thought to be extinct millions of years ago. you can practically hear this existentialist Laotian Rock Rat thinking to itself, "If i sit here perfectly still for long enough & pretend you don't exist, voila, you will no longer exist."

lovely first review for RATS

The Winnipeg Free Press says:

Toronto-based Lisa Pasold's debut novel is as enticing as the lit-up Las Vegas strip and as satisfying as a winning hand at poker.

for the rest of Kathryne Kouk's lovely review of RATS OF LAS VEGAS, visit the Free Press here.

Remembrance Day

Creative Places + Spaces: collaborate or die

BlogTO has my summary of the conference...i'm still thinking hard about some of what was discussed, and the artists involved...more soon!

Scribbling Creative Places + Spaces

this is the first time I’ve been involved in writing about an event that was being live-blogged & twittered via a Scribblelive screen. extremely interesting & distracting. reminds me of a study of GPS & its impact on our cognitive ability to navigate. we seem to be physically changing our brains with our new technologies; a study of London UK taxi drivers indicates that all the cognitive map-making necessary for cabbies actually alters their brains, making the back part of their hippocampus grow larger. and similarly, people who use GPS all the time are losing their map-making skills. (see further The Walrus, Nov/09).

surely we’re doing something similar with this constant hum of low-level multi-tasking—watching/listening to an event while making notes & comments about it. our media platforms that require us to look away at least occasionally from the person talking or performing. today, the huge projected scribble screens are distracting, like having a really chatty neighbour during an interesting speech. Sir Ken Robinson mentioned this today, “I sometimes wonder if tech doesn’t get in the way of the experience you’re trying to have at the time.” we all pondered this for a moment, then Sir Ken proposed: “Technology should be supplementing our lives not supplanting them.”

mind you, Sir Ken points out that technology, if it has always been there for you, no longer seems like technology. it’s just reality. (whereas I can actually remember a time before email, back in the dark ages when we were domesticating the tyrannosaurus rex, so the live-blogging definitely qualifies as technology for me!)

all this twitter-berry-ing is highly appropriate for the conference, because the ‘Creative Places + Spaces’ focus this year is collaboration.while Scribble produced a scattered dialogue today, all too often a 140-character series of micro-monologues, some of the Scribblelive board entries really did trigger further thoughts as the lectures went on. so conversation & collaboration can come out of the hubbub of twittering--something of a revelation to me. and most revealing, when the Scribble went dead for a brief period, i was disappointed, I felt I was missing something in the discussion & the conference.

the trick is getting tech such as Scribble to work with the cognitive diversity that today’s keynote speaker, Richard Florida, emphasized is crucial to creative discussion. “If you take people who are demographically diverse, you get cognitive diversity,“ he says, rather than taking a bunch of people who already think similarly—which just produces group thinking & isn’t getting us anywhere.

Florida’s talk was all about how complexity, creativity, and collaboration result in a resilient city. “At the very bottom of the struggle of our time is control,” says Florida. and he thinks Toronto is perfect to wage this struggle. “This is the great battle of our age, the battle between creativity and control... The world needs an example of a city that works. ...if we’re going to build creative places & spaces, we need to do it here [Toronto]. There are very few places on earth that can make this happen."

which brings me back to Sir Ken, talking this morning about our need to DISENTHRALL ourselves… if we're going to create a city that works...if we're going to even THINK about collaborating on a city that works...we need to think afresh. We need to disenthrall—it sounds like a new word, but in fact Abraham Lincoln used it. Sir Ken argues that we must disenthrall ourselves from what we take for granted. To innovate, to think creatively, we must shake off the bonds of common sense—disenthralling is crucial in this battle against control.

so can I disenthrall myself from technology while finding ways to use it? not sure. but I’m heading back to the conference tomorrow, to keep thinking about all this.

(images courtesy of Artscape's conference Flikr page, with the liveblog balcony today at the Carlu, and Richard Florida just before he hit the stage to praise Toronto & Mayor Miller)