Somewhere in the Sahara desert there is a sheik with a troupe of camels looking for me, and when he realizes he's in the wrong time zone, on the wrong continent -- probably in the wrong hemisphere, but I'm too lazy to check a world map right now and years of school have dulled my recall -- he will be upset. He'll have to get a boat and sail over to the west coast -- and I'm not there either. Those camels are going to have frostbitten toes by the time they get here.
The next step is for the sheik to have contracted pneumonia as he slowly made his way across the country, and to expire slowly and messily in my arms. Preferably with a little phlegm dribbling out the corner of his mouth. That would be a typical Canadian romance. Not for us the muscular blond angels on horseback or the mysterious noblewomen fleeing murderous agents of evil. Canada seeks perfection of the parlour romance -- cracked linoleum and all.
I may well be the last real romantic left in this country. I don't mean in the sense of "I like to walk on the beach and listen to Bartok in a candle-lit bath with a couple of bottles of cold rosé" -- although that is certainly true -- but in the sense of belief, passion, anger, horror and love. I hate how Margaret Atwood draws me in with her word-mastery and repels me with her superficial characters. I hate the weary grimness of Anne of Green Gables. I hate the bad lighting in Canadian teevee.
I love Bertram Brooker's "Alleluia" in the National Gallery of Ottawa and I could stare at it all day. I love how unabashedly Leonard Cohen uses drum machines and Robert Palmer girls. Toronto's "The Look People" did a cover of Bohemian Rhapsody with their drummer clad only in underwear with a huge black wig stuffed down the front, and I love that. I love "Arcadian Adventures with the Idle Rich" more than I love "Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town". I love how stupid "Strange Brew" is.
"Voice of Fire" is emphatic, and I love that. People who had never seen it in its 60 foot or 90 foot or whatever glory complained about how much it cost and how simple it was, and I hate that. Any Canadian artist who takes a real stand is to be commended. Subtlety is not a virtue when you only have one message, and I hate how pervasive needless subtlety is in Canadian art.
I lay myself on the line for beauty, for justice, and for fun, and I hate how tired much Canadian art is. I hate how conservative it often is and I hate how purposefully obscure it often is. We hate it when our politicians doubletalk us. Why should our artists be any more favoured?
It could be that, since we import most of our pop culture from the United States, Canadian artists feel they'll never be mainstream enough to matter, so they might as well be cliquey and self-indulgent. It could be that a socialist economy inhibits ambition enough to keep us from having many vibrant artists. Or it could just be that Canada has winter for at least a third to half the year and everybody's too damn tired to get excited about anything.
Whatever the reason, too many Canadian artists have succumbed to the belief that they're journalists, not creators. The job of the journalist is to show what has been. The job of the artist is to feed the future. Not with interminable tales loaded with beautiful writing and no soul; not with symbols you need to be indoctrinated to understand; envoys of entropy and lords of mud... sellers of paper-wrapped dreams and dispensers of forgotten blood... ministers of... the spirit of William S. Burroughs? Oy, we become what we mock.
© Gabrielle Taylor 1997-2001. All rights reserved. Contact: gtaylor@hypercube.org