Just now, thinking of how rotten that movie was last night, how entirely forgettable despite being charming and entertaining and at times funny [The Ladykillers]- makes me aware of living in 2004 – the same sick ennui of a decade still figuring itself out, as in 1994, when Forrest Gump came out, and that stupid movie Speed which inspired men’s haircuts. (And the real influence on hair styles for the past ten years, Friends began). It is an utterly miserable time to be alive and intelligent, just as it was then. Only now I am 29 and not 19.
The sickest TV show was on tonight – The Swan – where they give some plain person plastic surgery and a new wardrobe and then humiliate them by keeping their new attractive appearance from them until the dramatic unveiling of the mirror. It’s a nightmare of exploited self-loathing and the propaganda of physical beauty over intellectual development (which almost always leads one to an attractive appearance in spite of physique) … and what I just wrote there can be critiqued by saying that nowadays, one decides to look good not only through grooming and fashion – available to all since time began – but is now accessible through the reshaping available through the surgeon’s knife. So be it … I don’t really have that much of a problem with plastic surgery – but I do have a problem with indulging in people’s self-loathing in order to sell cars and whatever other shit was on between the dramatic scenes.
Glimpsing the end of that show was like seeing the disturbing parodies of television shows that one used to see in dystopian movies set in the 21st Century. This is what we’ve come too … it’s not enough that the graduates of art schools – supposed artists every one – have traded in their talent and vision for useless products and bags of cocaine.
Journal Entry, 28 April 2002[…] Watched the animé film
Metropolis last night. The scene in the snow which romanticizes winter. I’m beyond that. I’m going to wake up and it’s going to be May 2004. The war in Afghanistan is over. Saddam Husein has been overthrown by an American assault. The first anniversary of the Sept 11th disaster has been celebrated and memorialized. People no longer refer to it as 9/11 nor to they constantly talk of a “before September 11th…” nor “after September 11th…”. Winter came twice. And now, in the spring of 04, the sun shines, the leaves blossom, and the primaries are under way to get rid of the bonehead president. […]
May 2004. These dark years of being lied to and being told over and over what to think and feel are over. People are too busy watching the latest DVD’s now, or playing with the latest PDA. Is this a return to the carefree days of 2000, when the world’s conscience consisted of fucking organic hippies protesting in the streets? They’ve gone back to being irrelevant, since as Buddhism ten years before, the organic thing is hip with the middle class.
1. Trampoline Hall, Monday 26 April 2004, at Rockit, 120 Church Street Toronto
by Timothy Comeau
I might as well be up front and saw Trampoline Hall (to be written TH in what follows) gets 10 stars, for what are obviously a variety of reasons, but for the purpose of this review I’ll try to cover the basics, or why I at least enjoyed it. As I type this, I’m remembering checking out some of the press they’d archived on their website and I think, ‘they don’t need another glowing review; there’s no need to add to that list with things said or thought before’. But then again, the articles featured therein don’t really review the shows. It’s more about what you missed.
The reviewer tries to turn their experience into a story, and provide photographs for the How-the- People-of-the-Future-Will-Think-We-Looked collection. So this can’t be that type of review…no photos for one, and for another, no point in rubbing your noses is what you missed. You’ve missed many conversations between millions of people, and that never seems to matter, but if you need to know something from such a talk, you get a synopsis, or a accurate retelling, or an expanded book. You missed the conversations Benjamin had with Adorno but you’ve probably got the ultimate result of that sitting unread on a shelf somewhere.
I go on like this since TH had the aspect of a really good conversation. One of the first reviews I ever wrote for the Saturday Edition was about a really awful roundtable talk I saw at Harbourfront Centre featuring uninspired and washed up has-beens. It didn’t make it to screen, which is probably a good thing. Now, the worst part about that talk, which I use as a measure of awfulness in spite of the fact that I’ve since seen worse, is the way the audience is locked out of the ideas being presented, and we get rambling speculation, as opposed to consideration. Really, TV, for all it’s evils, is better than this because at least there’s a script in there somewhere, some evidence of thought however puerile. In such a scenario, one can’t help but feel that the audience is actually more intelligent than the panelists, who are only on stage because of past accomplishments which are now obscure. In the case of Trampoline Hall, there was no sense of that. Perhaps because we were all approximately the same age, one really had the feeling that intellectually it was a level playing field, and our accomplishments so far in life mean that there was no need to look up or down at anyone, beyond the physical aspect of the speakers being on a stage. So let me polish that metaphor a bit more to say, the distance one looked up at them, (or down, if one was in the balconies) was not great and was inconsequential.
I liked the location, the upstairs of the Rockit bar, with its balconies (which lived up to hosts Misha Glouberman’s envisioning of the proper TH venue), beer, plastic cups, chairs, tables and cigarettes. I’m not going to use the word community beyond this sentence, a word being both tired and uninspired, to talk about how nice it is to hang out with strangers for a show in a smoky cub to listen to three people’s ideas on things you would not think to talk about otherwise. I’ve come to think that the point of all education and performing in the world, the art shows, the paychecks, the trips to the library and the bathroom, the links to good reads and torture photos on the net, is all so that we can have mutually interesting conversations over bummed cigarettes and a pint. Following the natural process, food for thought becomes shooting the shit. We get to affirm our mutual interest in each other through a common language.
And TH is all about sharing an interesting conversation in such a context with an audience. Instead of listening to some Guinness philosopher’s pet theories at the bar, we instead put them on a stage , and offer them the time to present this idea. And for me this is ultimately what made Trampoline Hall an enjoyable night: that respect was shown to both the audience and the presenters, by giving each time. No interruptions, a question period, and a bathroom break. No squirming and bored panelists there because it’ll look good on the CV. The speakers seem generally invested in presenting their thoughts, and by virtue of being there, the audience is willing to listen.
Oh, and this is what you missed: Tyler Clark Burke, spoke about her grandfather who was a New York supreme court justice; the next speaker was Julian Holland, who spoke of slanted suicide statistics and the capitalistic inhumanity present in their bias, and the last speaker consisted of Lee Henderson, who spoke of freeloading: how to do it and what to avoid. This last talk inspired the most laughter.
Related Links: http://www.trampolinehall.net
Rating: ten out of ten