3. Baseball Caps
By Timothy Comeau
I like b-ball caps cause they keep the sun out my eyes. That’s the biggest reason I wear them, since I don’t own a pair of sunglasses. I also wear baseball caps cause it’s a habit, a personal tradition. This developed in the early 90s. In my high school graduation group photo, I’m the only one wearing a hat (cause it was blue cordroy and it rocked -and it was sunny out that day). While reaching for a hat I’m often reminded of my days in university residence, when I was scolded by a patriarchal figure for going to class with bedhead. “At least put a hat on for god’s sakes!” he said. Because of the good times I had then, and the fact that we all wore baseball hats in residence, the tradition that began as a teenager was nurtured. I remember at the time being fond of the Tragically Hip song, “50 Mission Cap”, whose main lyric “I worked it in to look like that” seemed to exemplify the relationship one has with ones hat – as you work it in as it accompanies you through these experiences that live on in memory.
Sometimes I feel more comfortable with something on my head. I’ve worn other hat styles, but because of the ubiquity of baseball hats, wearing other styles usually draws for more attention than I’d like. You end up talking about the stupid hat you’re wearing. That quality of anonymous ubiquity I find appealing. You can do the whole “something on your head” thing without being too warm in a toque, keep the sun out of your eyes, and not draw undue attention to yourself.
I’m glad that there are no photographs of me from the 1980s wearing acid wash. As well, I managed to make it through the 90s without getting a tattoo. But the one area fashion area where I don’t mind following the crowd is to wear the baseball hat, since they are the contemporary tricorn. An example of this is how last summer during the previews for the new Star Trek show, they had scenes with the mid 22nd Century characters wearing baseball hats, which was meant to convey that they were more contemporary then the 23rd and 24th Century characters known from the previous series.
I’ve never been that much of a fashion conscious person, having known far more fashion victims than actual fashionable people, but I did become concerned a few years back that I wouldn’t date photographs correctly. It’s an interesting feature of fashion that one can date a photograph by what people are wearing; to within a decade when you’re dealing with obviously 20th Century photos. This is something I like about fashion in general, how it corresponds to that which we know by those two German words: the Kunstwollen and the Zeitgeist. It reveals something intrinsic about the human character’s need to belong to some group. As the anthropologists say, we are social animals and we wear clothes that reflect our tribal allegiances. Besides keeping the sun out of my eyes, and my hair in place, they help me date future photographs, and I can feel like I’m participating in a fashion sense particular to now.
1. Trudeau, CBC television, March 31-April 1 2002, 8-10pm
By Timothy Comeau
I didn’t like the look of the commercials I saw for this show, but I knew I would watch it regardless since Trudeau was such a mensch. He was a man who was so widely admired that his death was a national patriotic event for some, but was also so reviled by the western provinces and in Quebec that they’re reluctant to put him on the money just yet.
A. The Ubercanadian Colm Feore played Canada’s most famous international musician, Glenn Gould, and now he’s played Canada’s most famous politician, Mister Margaret. It made sense that he was cast as Trudeau, even though he looks nothing like him, a condition that almost seems expected after so many productions that strive to cast similar features. Because of these two roles, from such opposite ends of the white male canadian spectrum, I’ve now come to think of him as the ubercanadian, a role previously occupied by Trudeau himself as socialist-peacemaker-intellectual-world-traveler who loved Canada (and who Nixon hated!)
B. Halifax Having lived in Halifax, I was distracted in the first episode by recognizing so much scenery. I found the Beatlemania allusion filmed at the AGNS particularly laughable, because it’s the only time in my life that I’ll see that many people running out of the AGNS in joy. I wonder how John Greer feels about having his statue used as a prop during that somewhat awkward sequence (however, I thought was an interesting way to present Trudeaumania by referencing the way Beatlemanina was portrayed on film by the Beatles themselves). Couldn’t they have found another location that wasn’t so obvious, and one in which didn’t trivialize the location by assuming that “no one’s going to know where this is, so we’ll use this as an urban campaign headquarters”? For the most part they disguised Halifax well. I must say that I saw a clip of the program on the Mike Bullard show the week before, wherein the silent little girl give Trudeau a rose, while he overlooks the scenery from some balcony. seeing the clip I thought that scene had been filmed in Montreal – only while watching the show on Sunday night, with the Haligonian teleology in place, did I recognize the location as being the top of the Westin Nova Scotian or thereabouts.
C. Stylization Despite the fact that I’ve recently developed an allergy to stylization that exists only to prettify weak or boring ideas, I like the way it was used in Trudeau to enhance a weak budget and by-default nature of the casting. I thought this was a fair and legitimate use of stylization, which I’m defending agaisnt those who hated this obvious example of “cbc canadiana” – that usually wacky and poorly produced quality of broadcasts that makes CBC’s recent American marketing campaign futile. For example, my sister’s friend, who watched it with us, scoffed at when one of the dates fell from the top of the screen and then became unsynchronized. Such unexpected effects, in a biopic, was a surprise and kept my interest, whereas a slick and over-expensive American production would have bored me with it’s earnestness and had me channel surfing. Considering they wrote some of the script from cabinet minutes only realeased last year, the content was earnest enough without needing to be visually slick. Life in reality is not slick, and this after all, was a re-presentation of a reality.
D. The Best for Last I’ve long wished that a biopic would acknowledge the reality of the subject matter by using original footage here and there. My simple reason is so that I could be reminded of what the original looked like, or what the reality was like against the recreation. So, at the very end of the film, here was THE REAL Trudeau, who wasn’t as handsome as Colm Feore, nor as tall, delivering an early version of his “Just Society” speech at the 1968 Liberal Candidate Convention. As a whole, “Trudeau” was better served by using archival material, because I was reminded of the reality of this story, and got a feel for the marked difference between then and now.
E. Completely Gratuitous It was also nice to see Knowlton Nash again via the archival footage, since he was such a presence in my pre-cable childhood.
Related Links
http://cbc.ca/trudeau/
http://www.johngreer.ca/publicart/origins/originsFrameset.html
Rating: eight out of ten