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Toronto isn’t the best place to live right now. With the two centerpieces of this city’s culture currently undergoing renovations, and with the Power Plant gallery continuing to highlight just how irrelevant and uninteresting most contemporary art is, I find myself bored more often that I’d like to be. But the talk is of a cultural renaissance and the city is looking for some kind of vision for itself. One problem: this is the corporate centre of Canada, and corporations are lousy at vision. Look at advertising – it has become the dominant cultural and visual expression of our society. Pompeii was frozen in time and its frescoes were preserved. Such a disaster in Toronto would only preserve a galaxy of images of vacant expressions and languid poses.And the graffiti. God bless the graffiti. A recent book suggests the ancient cave painting of Europe had more in common to graffiti than they do to religious iconography, which personally makes sense. (However, since we fundamentally know nothing about the cave paintings, they will always be susceptible to fashionable interpretation: a century ago when religion was taken more seriously, they had religious meaning. Now that religion has faded in importance, they’re graffiti. A century from now, a new reading perhaps based on whatever reality is present at that time).

Christopher Hutsul, in today’s Toronto Star, interviewed some people about Toronto’s cultural vision. He spoke to Fiona Smyth, Matthew Teitelbaum (of the AGO) and Sarah Diamond (the new president of OCAD). Why Smyth was chosen to be the voice of Toronto’s artists, I don’t know. I guess he could have picked worse … there are plenty worse. Smyth hasn’t been relevant to the Toronto scene for a decade (at least that’s my understanding). When asked about her vision, Hutsul wrote:

“For painter Fiona Smyth, graffiti should be flat-out decriminalized. ‘Billboards are taking over,’ she says. ‘Every available space is being grabbed by corporations, and graffiti can be a counterpoint to that …. ‘ The art form could extend to our rooftops, which Smyth believes are an untapped resource for gallery space. She imagines a city where rooftops are connected by a network of catwalks and feature sculptures, art pieces and gardens.”

I have some idea of what she’s smoking, but I’d like to point out that artists really need to get off the anti-billboard bandwagon. Only because, we get it. Imagine you want to suggest a new strategy, argue a point, or hell, even get laid. There’s a progression that occurs in proposition, argument and in seduction. You do not belabor the first step. You move forward. Yes billboards suck. Next…..

There’s a self-consciousness at the moment in the Left of what has gone wrong … and this failure to evolve the message is surely one of the problems. Our city is over-corporatized, billboards are part of that, but graffiti is not an antidote to them. Graffiti can be as much of an eyesore … one person’s masterpiece is another’s whack job, and so we need to keep this in mind. I for one like how graffiti throws down some colour on the otherwise gray landscape, shows some imagination.

We shouldn’t even try to understand architects who think raw concrete is lovely, let’s not waste the energy. But let’s think of how there are paint factories in the world capable of producing enough paint to cover the CN Tower if we so chose.

The tower for one is nice enough as it is, but we’re also used to it that way. We are also used to thinking that ancient Greco-Roman architecture was purely white. But it wasn’t – the Greeks and Romans painted their buildings – they seemed to enjoy colour. They seemed to have suffered from the fear of empty spaces known as horror vacui. Yet, in our day and age, the pure white walled room is the temple of contemporary art and culture. The overall message is that colour is bad, somehow not pure, because of the puritan pollution of neo-classicism which still lingers in the mind of the cultural. Rooftops of gardens and sculptures is something they might have done 2000 years ago, but I don’t really think sculpture has much relevance and I further imagine the sculpture would be like the shit atop the poles on Spadina … pure eyesores.

Calling for catwalks and sculpture gardens is just asking for more space to put up advertising kiosks like Derek Sulivan did. Was his project a critique of capitalism, or the suggestion that billboards are ok, as long as they imitate what was done in Europe a century ago?

Teitelbaum suggests expanding the AGO’s exhibitions to outside the space … put stuff up at Union Stn and similar. I suppose he hasn’t walked through BCE place at any time in the past few years, or through that office building on Yonge that had a space Paul Petro used to run. The BCE exhibitions are usually interesting, but ignored by the business people going to and fro. Union Stn wouldn’t work either – the space is too shitty (the Go Train space that is) and that would be your primary audience. People arriving on VIA would be too distracted by their trip to check out art, and no one from downstairs waiting for a Go Train would go upstairs, probably because the show would have stupid hours or be otherwise inaccessible.

The waterfront idea has some merit, but they’d be encroaching on the Power Plant’s territory, and then there’d be a turf war. Power Plant people bitching about the AGO, I can see it now, and it depresses me. But let’s move on to Sarah Diamond, who, it appears, is full of the vigour of naivte. ‘Look at me, I’m the president of an art school! Let’s have a Happening’. Jesus H Christ.

Yes, to reinvigorate our city’s cultural life, let’s go back 40 years, to a time when Henry Moore fell in love with Toronto out of spite. Happenings with scientists. I imagine Power Point presentations on quantum mechanics and relativity theory and oooh, dark matter. A real happening now involves nudity, cocaine, endless kegs, and music that hurts your ears. That’s not something likely to be sanctioned by corporate Canada and its funders.

Diamond goes on to say that arts need to be at the centre and not at the periphery – but they are at the periphery just as much as plumbing is to many of us – because the arts have become a little industry. I mean, if I needed a plumber, I wouldn’t know where to start to find one. It’s hard enough trying to find somebody to fix your computer, let alone your pipes. The arts are the same way. I happen to know lots of artists because I am an artist as well, because that’s my scene. I don’t know any plumbers or computer fix-it people. For Diamond to suggest moving the arts to the centre is the same as the president of plumbing college saying people need to pay more attention to their pipes. Ain’t going to happen darling.

Nor should we have a crowd of artists at Pearson to welcome passengers. Lame lame lame …. I’m not that surprised she got hired on with these splendid ideas. OCAD doesn’t cease to underwelm me (although I was impressed they’d moved their library catalogue to a self-designed Linux system the last time I was there). Artists at Pearson would send a strangely parochial message, suggesting we’re so desperate for other people’s attention that we’re going to do a song and dance and paint them pretty pictures as soon as they get off the plane.

As opposed to a place like New York. You know what New York’s philosophy is don’t you? It’s Fuck You. That’s why people want to go there. Because their amazing, they know it, and because this gives them the self-confidence to be brash and rude and bold. So they can afford to say Fuck You. Toronto: please come see our hobbits on stage! Look at our shiny artists, aren’t we special? When Toronto has the balls to kiss off the rest of the world as we do the rest of Canada (not for nothing we’re so despised) then the world will take notice, find us interesting, and you won’t need artists at the airports. A healthy culture is not a self-conscious culture. Nor is a healthy culture one that looks to Yorkville celebrities as a source of identity, as happens every September.

The article ends with two poets. “Molly Peacock, poetry editor at the Literary Review of Canada, suggests we stamp poetry into every new sidewalk square. Peacock, who helped bring ‘Poetry in Motion’ to the New York transit system, says if this were to happen, we’d be ‘the most marvellously literary city in the world.'”

This would probably make me hate poetry. I like it on the subway, but on sidewalks like this I’d find it oppressive, overwhelming, and a gross validation of text over speech, which isn’t a balance we should be persuaded to topple. If we get all offended by the stupid adverts everywhere, wouldn’t text everywhere underfoot be a similar violation of public space?

The second poet highlights the idea that poets are useless twits who merely have a way with words. “Sonnet L’Abbé believes the key to a more artful city is for people to ‘ease up on the gas’ in the pursuit of economic prosperity and make a ‘personal commitment to loving art. And when I say loving, I mean paying attention to it, getting to know, not just throwing money at it. It’s like a person growing their own artistic flower … If you have enough flowers, then the whole city becomes a garden of people who love and consume and make art.'”

We shouldn’t be asking people who failed chemistry in highschool to suddenly become chemists. ‘Get to know chemistry …’ they’d say, ‘fall in love with the test tube’. Ridiculous. You can’t ask this of people.

But you can try to create an environment where culture is an ambient reality, so that whenever the interests is sparked, they’ll know how to follow it. Recently I’ve been reading the plays of Aristophanes. A couple of weeks ago, on my way to meet a friend and with time to spare, I dropped into the ROM to check out the Greek artifacts and to familiarize myself with the world of those stories. This is what living in the city means to me – the availability of material for the pursuit of my interests. Libraries, galleries, museums … these are there so that we can grow as individuals, so that we can learn something about the world and what it means to be human.

Gardens and sculptures are lame because they are window dressing, imitations of a style that meant something thousands of years ago, when the statues were of gods or heroes. Exhibitions in transit areas are stupid because those are spaces designed to be moved through… and artists at air ports are foolish because only cultures who are trying to impress the bigger more powerful ones are prone to do something like that.

Toronto is not New York because we don’t have the cultural wealth. Build up the wealth by supporting the artists who work here, and by collecting masterpieces from around the world (and not just from the Anglo-American Empire), and then the city could facilitate cultural individuals. As it is, the city’s best libraries are the university ones, which are limited to the public, and the institutions are more interested in their face lifts.

Canada is a great country and I’m of the opinion that a whole generation of artists and the like are currently working in the city, a generation that will be read about in tomorrow’s history books. Forget Andy Warhol, and Happenings, and all that shit New York did in the 1960s. Toronto’s 1960s moment is right now, and let’s pay attention to those artists if you want to feel like you’re living in a culturally vibrant, exciting, and relevant place.

My friend Izida and I were born 20 days apart on opposite sides of the world. She in Riga and I in Toronto. The circumstances of time have given her dual citizenship in three countries, one of which no longer exists. In January we’ll both be turning 30, and over the past month, as our friendship cemented itself outside of the vagueness of merely being acquainted, we’ve often described our ages to one another as being 30 although we are 29, and talked about what this means to us, how this chronological fact is modifying our perceptions of ourselves, how it is changing our lives.

We’ve been breathing air on our own for 29 years, but it is not entirely inaccurate to call ourselves 30 since three decades ago we were floating in our mother’s amniotic fluid, experiencing in an unconscious way this thing we later learned to call a body, or in Izida’s case, ??. Izida tells me she doesn’t remember Russia, from which she immigrated in 1980 at age 5. Her earliest recollections are of kindergarten in a synagogue basement in Winnipeg, sitting on the floor listening to people speak a language she didn’t understand and picking sparkles out of shag carpeting. These sparkles were her first Canadian treasures. She would bring them home, wet from the sweat in her hand, and hide them in her bedroom. My earliest memories go back to 1976, when my mother was pregnant for my sister. In 1981, I moved from Toronto’s west end borough Etobicoke to Clare, an area of Nova Scotia where my forefathers had lived since the late 18th Century.

A memory that works well means you begin to be dumbfounded one day, once those memories begin to pile up. Things that happened ten years ago can seem like something that happened last month. But this also confirms what adults tell you as you’re growing, that although their chronological age may be one thing, they feel like they’re another, an age quite young. My mother tells me she feels 19 although she is in fact 61. I escape this by being clever; I say that I’ve continued to grow and mature as I learn and experience new things, so I don’t feel like I did a year before and so on. But this is merely qualifying the fact that I recognize myself as an approximation of the person I was at 17, only with the issues that plagued me then resolved and new issues developing as I approach this 3rd decade.

It would be a fantasy if I tried to ignore the fact that I’ve grown up in a world enthralled by it’s extended nervous system, as McLuhan called our media technology. Approaching 30 means that I’ve become an adult without pretense toward being one, as one can be accused at 20. When I was growing up in the 1980s, there was a popular TV show called “Thirty-Something”. It was popular because it offered those boomers born in the 1950s a theatre by which they could explore the meanings and responsibilities of that age. They could articulate their anxieties and deal with their issues, issues of having survived the 1960s and 1970s, and the threat of the Cold War which caused them to question their future and perhaps encouraged their “live for today” irresponsibility and selfishness. Not that I ever watched it, after all, it was for ‘grown-ups’ and I was much more interested at that point in the new Star Trek show, but this is the understanding I bring to it today, being aware through osmosis of its popularity. I was perhaps a bit more aware of it than I would have been because it had more resonance on me, since one of the characters was played by an actor who shared my name, Timothy Busfield. Born in 1957 he is now approaching 50. (Some Google-fact checking reveals to me that this show ran from 1987-1991, although I would have guessed before that it had ran around 1983/84. While memory may contextualize one’s life, how often are those memories inaccurate?)

So what being 30 means to me is that I am now the subject of “grown-up” shows. And this is something which is a bit hard to accept about oneself in our culture as youth-obsessed as it is. It is so difficult to conceptualize that one feels the need to type out thoughts about it. What it means is that after spending three decades experiencing the world for the first time in a variety of ways, one has never been taken seriously by older folk. “Oh you’re just a kid” is heard over and over again. I am not expected to contribute anything significant – which is precisely why youthful stars and those called genius are considered so remarkable. I feel like many of my peers have never had the opportunity to experience themselves as anything other than someone youthful and not to be taken seriously and so they embrace that, feeling adulthood to be boring and limiting to their sense of fun, a sense which can make them as devilishly selfish as those boomers who have earned our loathing for leaving us a legacy of improvishment.

There is something else happening to us though, those of us 30-something both present and new. It is the fact that many of us feel that our age expectancy is not the official 70 something years, but having witnessed our grandparents live into their 80s and 90s, and those many that have lived past 100 have given us the idea that we too shall probably live at least as long. I myself think I’ll have an 80th birthday one day, and hope for the 100th as well. But perhaps we’re the first generation that will make living past 110 normal, in which case, being 30 means we are still as young and adolescent as many of us feel. An example I once came across illustrates this: if the age span was extended toward 250 years, meaning one at 247 was biologically equivalent to a contemporary 97 year old, then it would follow logically that for a given individual, puberty would only occur in their 30s. They wouldn’t reach their adult equivalent of our present 30 until their mid 70s. Over and over again in my journals, throughout my 20s, I’ve hoped that I’ll have a life span that makes my present concerns and problems as irrelevant to who I will be in old age as the misery of needing to have my diaper changed is to me now – a problem I’m sure I experienced but have no memory of and completely irrelevant to my problems today.

Turning 30 means that as an adult, I can no longer expect the sympathy bestowed on the naive. I am expected to be worldly and knowledgeable; to have confidence and not have to rely on others. The fact that my bank account is perpetually empty and I currently live on credit cards, dependent on my parents for meals and a roof, is not evidence of some youthful misadventure and indiscretion. It only reflects that I made a bad choice when figuring out a career – I decided to be an artist, a field which expects much without offering a guaranteed salary. I find myself in the ironic position of being extremely well educated and intelligent, believing that knowledge and powers of mind to be a form of wealth in which I am well stocked yet I have been unable to find a market of exchange where I can trade portions of this commodity for cash, to be able to become financially independent and secure. My issues today centre on trying to become concsious of whatever unconscious behavior I engage in which allows me to be free to read and work on my art projects while beating myself up for not having a regular 9-5 job which would provide for a healthy bank account and the sense of financial freedom while killing my soul by not allowing me to flower in the particular sunlight I need, that of learning and expression. My issues today centre on acquiring the independence expected of my age.

My peers, bruised by their experiences of family, do not understand how I can still live at home with my increasingly aging parents, nor can they understand why my sister would chose this as well. The sad truth is that so many of us, children of the 1970s, have found themselves in situations where it is difficult for them to get a foothold in the job-place and to be paid a salary sufficient for them to lead independent lives. This is true throughout the Western world. The issues that hovered over my psychology as a man in his early 20s have been replaced by “when can I move out? When can I get a full time job?” to say nothing of what I’m supposed to feel as a graduate of an art school: “when to I get that big solo show?” which I’ve come to see as not worth desiring anymore. Art has proven itself a mistress and now it’s time to find a wife.

One wants to contribute to society in a way that allows at least a salary, and at most, a contribution to the betterment of the planet. The world as it is in 2004, when I find myself less than 6 months from my 30th birthday, is so fucked up. However, that has been true for generations of 29 year olds. A Frenchmen born in 1759 would have written the same thing as someone from Massachusetts born in 1746, to say nothing of those who were born in 1910. The revolutions of history have given us a perpetual beta world in which change is commonplace and the displeased seek to rectify out of boredom and anger with their circumstance.

I for one am confident that the problems of the world today are constructed out of the idiocy of gray men with gray ideas. The War on Terror is as artificial as the War on Drugs and will not be won by a generation who’s mindset was formed during the Cold War; Israel and the conflicts of the Middle East will not be pacified by a government born in the 1920s, nor a generation who considers democracy optional. A generation which came of age at a time when the introduction of environmental legislation was considered controversial is not equipped to deal with the issues of global warming.

The habit of declaring “War” on our societal inconveniences and problems which have everything to do with a economic inequality and insufficient education will not solve these perpetuated problems which have nothing to do with simply being criminal behavior. A generation of men who have done a bad job of integrating women’s perspectives and who find glory in combative approaches are doomed to be the thought of as pathetic leaders for the rest of time, enshrined in the embarrassed conversations that will go like this: “How could they?” “I know I know…”. We are left waiting for them to remove themselves from the scene so that we can begin to clean up their mess.

Television and print news perpetuate certain world problems as being relevant, while doing a bad job of informing us on other more devastating conditions (such as the economic development of the Third World, or Africa’s devastating plague which represents an cruel economic inhumanity on the part of the west) means that yes, today’s “problems” are solvable because they are artificially important. The biggest problems, such as the economic inequalities which have led to the chaos of Africa and the Middle East, require new paradigms and perspectives that at this point can only be offered by the young. The future belongs to those of us for whom women in the workplace, environmental concern, and social critique are ambient and as such we have never known a world without them. Those of us who are presently 30 something, will be leaders and mentors to the true inheritors of the future, that mass of young people outnumbering 30 and 40 something Gen X and known as Generation Y, who I am told, are confident of their ability to change the world for the better.