GUELPH POLITICAST #93 - Scott Thomson, Guelph Jazz Festival Artistic Director

September is coming, and everything will get back to normal. Then again September starts with one of the biggest cultural events of the year: the Guelph Jazz Festival. Now in its 23rd year, the Jazz Fest is getting ready again to fill the downtown core with the finest improvised and creative music from across Canada and around the globe, but this year, things might sound a little bit different.

GUELPH POLITICAST #80 - Danna Evans, General Manager of Culture, Tourism & Community Investment

Is Guelph a tourism destination? That's debatable. Certainly many Guelphites would argue that there are reasons that people who don't live in Guelph should visit Guelph. Great festivals, a cool downtown, a big church you can see from everywhere... the Royal City is where it's at, and this week, I talk to the person in charge of making sure you know all about it.

A Brief History of Hillside (With a Chance of Doom)

The year was 1984. A generation of young people were given the eternal answer to "Who you gonna call?", Cirque du Soleil redefined just how far you can make certain body parts bend, and John Turner began an epic three-month ride as Prime Minister of Canada. Meanwhile, here in Guelph, a small community music festival was launched that more than three decades later endures as a summer destination that's synonymous with the Royal City.

GUELPH POLITICAST #42 - Jay Reid and Hayley Kellett of the Making-Box

Comedy is big business in Guelph. Who woulda thunk it? Guelph has been long known as a destination for artistic works, unique music festivals, and accomplishments in filmmaking and media art, and now the Royal City is staking a claim to comedy. If there is a comedy revolution in Guelph, then the Making-Box is ground zero, and this week, the Guelph Politicast goes inside with the two people behind the wave.

The Politico Calendar for April 2016

It's April already, and in that first full month of spring there is a whole new sense of promise and opportunity. In the next couple of weeks there will be all sorts of festivals and special events, along with the usual meetings and information nights. Many of them are here connected in this month's Politico calendar.

GUELPH POLITICAST #24 - Scott McGovern, Ed Video Media Arts Centre

Scott McGovern (R) with former Politicast guest David Knight

As you may or may not be aware, in my other life I'm involved with Ed Video Media Arts Centre and sit on the board of directors. Why should you care? Well, that's a disclaimer for this week's Guelph Politicast, in which I sit down with Scott McGovern, Programming Director of Ed Video, to talk about arts and culture in Canada, why the the topic doesn't get much discussion in an election campaign, and how the life and work of artists living in Canada is often misunderstood.

Press Release - City Hands out Grant Money

Obviously, this is one of those stories. I know there are people out there who think their taxes are too high (and at least some of them may be right), and that our local government should focus exclusively on keeping the roads open, the park grass cut, and the snow ploughed.

On the other hand though is the responsibility to create a higher standard of life beyond the bare essentials, and that includes the offering of a financial helping hand to those in need, and the accommodation of the city's various arts, culture, sports and recreation organizations. Numerous community groups are recipients of this funding, and the year 2013 will be no exception.

Esoteric Nazi Labelism

The anonymous nature of the internet has long been a source of irk for people that like open and honest debate. It's too easy for people to duck behind a handle and lob hate-filled tirades at such diverse targets as Barack Obama, the Cincinnati Reds and filmmaker Ridley Scott. Now I believe in Freedom of Speech as a foundation for our whole, you know, society, but part-in-parcel with that freedom is responsibility. 

So when someone who goes by the moniker "Serious Cynic" compares our local government to Nazi Germany, it means it's time to reach back and remember some words written here and here.

PR Friday #2 - Members of Cultural Committee Named

Along similar lines to that first release, the City of Guelph announced today the make up of its new Cultural Advisory Committee. The press release came out earlier today naming nine people who will advise the city and council on matters concerning the arts, culture and all the cross tracks with heritage and business interests in Guelph. Read on to learn more: 

GUELPH, ON, October 17, 2011 – The City of Guelph is pleased to announce the community members named to its newly created 2011 Cultural Advisory Committee.

“Council has appointed a talented and dedicated group of citizens who will provide invaluable advice to staff and Council as we work together to foster a vibrant Guelph filled with arts, culture, heritage and creativity-driven businesses,” said Mayor Farbridge.

Committee members were selected through the City’s Citizen Appointment process and are named to one-year terms. The selected community members include:

• Greg Pinks (Chair)
• Nancy Sullivan (Vice-Chair)
• Catherine Alexander
• Lynn Broughton
• Ronald East
• Reinhard Kypke
• Anuradha Saxena
• Elsa Stolfi
• Sally Wismer

Representative of the business, arts and social sectors, the members bring a well balanced range of skills and experience to the committee.

“I am very excited to work with this strong and diverse group,” said Greg Pinks, Cultural Advisory Committee Chair. “This is a great opportunity for community members to help develop, nurture, and promote arts and culture in Guelph.”

About the Cultural Advisory Committee

The Cultural Advisory Committee will support the work of the City’s new Arts, Culture and Entertainment department and will act as a bridge between the local cultural sector, the community at large, and City Council. Over the next twelve months, the Committee will play a key role in the development of a Public Art program and a comprehensive inventory of Guelph’s cultural resources. As community champions, committee members will work to increase awareness and appreciation of the local cultural sector. The Cultural Advisory Committee will meet will meet at least quarterly, and will establish subcommittees to work on various projects as they arise.

PR Friday #1: MacKay Resigns from Arts Council

So the press releases have been kind of rolling in like waves this Friday - and indeed all week - so I'm going to start moving them out by having a "Press Release (PR) Friday."  First there's this kind of surprising news that Anne MacKay is stepping down as executive director of the Guelph Arts Council after one year on the job. It's been a pretty important year for arts in the city with the promotion of Fab 5, and a seeming resurgence in the perception of Guelph as a music scene. Check out the press release below:

Guelph, ON (October 21, 2011) – Guelph Arts Council (GAC) announces that Anne MacKay will be stepping down as Executive Director.

Mary Calarco, Board President, says “Anne made many positive contributions to both the organization and the community. Her enthusiasm for the arts and unwavering optimism will truly be missed. ”

Over the last year, the Board of Directors worked with MacKay as they expanded GAC's focus on creative collaborations, community outreach and local partnerships. GAC is committed to maintaining this positive momentum as the organization looks forward. MacKay departs on October 28, 2011.

“It has been an amazing year” says MacKay “full of valued opportunities to see deeper into this community’s truly dazzling breadth of arts and culture activities”. MacKay plans to return to her private consulting practice, working with groups in the charitable sector. “As I shared with the Board, I came to GAC as a fan and I certainly leave as one. And I know that the long-time and new volunteers will continue to bring their new perspectives, knowledge and excitement together to beautifully serve the arts and culture life of this community.”

Guelph Arts Council Board of Directors will begin their search for a new Executive Director next week, and a hiring committee will be established to ensure a suitable candidate is hired to fill the position.

About Guelph Arts Council

Established in 1975, Guelph Arts Council (GAC) is a coordinating/resource organization dedicated to encouraging the development of the visual, literary, performing and heritage arts. GAC strives to enrich the cultural life of the community and to encourage widespread involvement in the arts.

Summer Editorial Series: The Conclusion – Has Guelph Changed?

Sometimes wading into the online debate and trying to make common sense of the issues is like yelling at chestnuts for being lazy. If you’re interested in sampling some of the Whitmanesque wit that makes up the Guelph political discourse, one needn’t look any further than the comment section on the latest blog post at 59 Carden St.

The topic du jour was last week’s unveiling of a new logo for Guelph Transit, a mitigating nugget of public relations to help cover for the fact that we won’t actually get our new routes and schedule till the late fall, and won’t step foot in the inter-module transit hub till next spring. Many of the comments were about the wasteful cost of an obviously aesthetic manoeuvre, but never underestimate the anonymity of the internet to allow for the most puerile and base comments to be made in the name of “debate.”

Let’s scroll down, as it were, to a couple of comments in particular. “Waiting for a slow, roundabout ride that almost gets you there, accompanied by the smelly freak show, is for people who can't afford better,” said a regular poster named Grumpy Old Corporal. Adds Doug, of no fixed last name, “If you think that a new logo and slogan will get me out of my car, so I can ride with drooling, mumbling staggering, rude, loud, profane, sloppy and the freak show of Guelph. You're crazy!”

First of all, you know your day’s gone topsy turvy when Grumpy Old Corporal is the voice of reason, and regulars on 59 Carden Street know what I’m talking about. Second of all, would these guys say any of this aloud if not for the anonymity of the internet? I’d bet my bus fare that if Doug or Grumpy ever come into direct contact with the Hills Have Eyes mob from central casting that is apparently the transit using population of Guelph, they’d be too busy trying to not lose control of their bowels.

But this isn’t about the not-so-startling lack of civility on the internet. This piece is about a tonal shift I’ve been sensing in Guelph for some time now. (Hence the above name of the piece.) Now granted, the internet is a terrible place to gauge the temperament of people on average since it typically attracts extremists from both ends, but I’m thinking of something more basic. A gut feeling. This isn’t the city that fought Wal-mart tooth and nail for 10 years. This isn’t the town that revels in, as my friend Oliver from CFRU observes, being the Berkley of Canada. Heck, this isn’t even the place they took Mondex for test drive in back in the 90s.

Remember Mondex? It was to the debit card what HD-DVD was to Blu-Ray. Never mind.

I guess what I’m trying to say, simplistically, is Guelph used to be cooler. Don’t get me wrong, Guelph can still be cool, and is infinitely more cooler than, say, Burlington, but I do feel, what I will call a “Stepford Effect,” creeping into the works. The Stepford Effect, of course referring to Bryan Forbes’ subversive cult classic, where in people start imposing a set of characteristics on a city for what it should be, not what it can be or what it is. A city should have low taxes, lots of shopping, malleable borders, a quiet downtown, and no roustabouts with a cause ready to disrupt.

The assumption now is that Guelph, as it was, is wrong. Being known as the place that held out for so long against Wal-Mart is bad for business. Being known as a place where conscientious objectors occupied green space to try and stymie urban sprawl is bad for business. Despite the fact that our downtown is a centre of arts of culture, you better not put up posters to promote and celebrate that culture because the city will slam you with fees. Then, when its time for a budget crunch, we’ll always make sure to cut transit first, because no one worthy of being pandered to takes public transit. Oh, and by the way, in the one area of the city where we know the highest concentration of low-income people live, we’ll support the closing of the area’s only discount store and replace it with a mid-priced furniture outlet, because there’s one thing our city’s poor needs it’s not paying a cent on a new living room set till 2013.

As with any editorial piece, I don’t mean to say that my way is the right way, but the intent, like with all my editorials this summer, is to try and get people to think and promote dialogue. This is the complete opposite of the intent of the above comments discussed, but it seems like this the only kind of conversation that counts anymore. As we head into a new election cycle, let’s try and reverse that trend together.

And now, on with the news…

Post No Bills Here (A Wack Attack)

It heartens me greatly to read the responses from the various mayoral and city council candidates, and hear their tremendous outpouring of support for the arts in the City of Guelph. The problem though is that this support is sometimes hard to see and feel in the day to day matters of an artist going about their business in the Royal City.

Is Guelph arts friendly? I would say yes. Or, at least, it’s certainly friendlier to the arts than where I am from, down the road in Georgetown, where the word “culture” is non-existent and outsourced to Brampton and the rest of the GTA. The arts are fundamental. They give a community ownership and identity, which is why many of the “bedroom communities” of the Greater Toronto Area are so indistinguishably bland from one to the other.

If, by now, you’re nodding your head – be careful: Guelph is halfway there. Drive down Gordon and once you pass the University of Guelph, there’s not a single cultural establishment. unless you count Borealis Bar and Grill and Manhattans. You may point out that Borealis Bar and Grill has live music, but there’s nothing distinctly Guelph about Borealis because its part of a chain. But Manhattan’s Bistro caught fire last month, which meant that a very popular music and art venue was taken out of commission for an indeterminate amount of time.

For now, it seems that with the exception of the Guelph Little Theatre and Galaxy Cinemas, anything arts related is happening downtown. Here’s the “but”… But I’m not sure that some people at City Hall really want it to be. Or, at least they don’t want the art being done to be of the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) variety.

I’ve written here, and in my Echo column, recently about the disturbingly heavy-handed by-law smackdown on postering downtown. Ed Video Media Arts Centre, the board of which I currently serve on as Co-Chair, has been taken to court twice this year for postering fines. Each trip has resulted in a couple hundred bucks going from the near empty pockets of an already struggling arts centre – which also has the virtue of being Guelph’s only artist run centre – into the seemingly greedy maw of the City’s coffers. And we were not alone.

The Bookshelf, The Palace, and the triumvirate of Van Gogh’s, Vinyl and Jimmy Jazz were all taken to court for postering fines, with the owner of the three Macdonell Street night clubs getting hit the hardest of all. On one day back in June, the city took Ed Video, The Palace and The Bookshelf to court, and got from them the grand total of $500 in fines. The owners and administrators of these businesses all sat in court for a full day, losing a day’s work each in the process, all so that the city could collect 500 bucks? From a cost management perspective, this is wack.

The cynical among us may now be saying that’s what you get. But these businesses offer nothing but venues, it is up to the people running the event to promote and if your event is on a (no) budget, then that quarter page ad in the Mercury, or 20 second spot on Magic FM, or banner on the railroad bridge over Norfolk is that much more unobtainable. The cheap promo solution: posters. And lots of them.

The effectiveness of a poster campaign, in terms of delivering actual bodies to your event, can be debated until you’re blue in the face, and probably will be again. But the fact of the matter is that there are numerous bands, small theatre groups and filmmakers that have made their mark at performances people were attracted to seeing by a poster pinned up on some street corner. To use a Guelph example, the Constantines didn’t play their first few shows at the River Run, they played them in people’s basements. Facebook is nice, Twitter is cool, but the old school approaches of posters, word of mouth and mention in “traditional” media (newspapers, TV and radio) still get you more attention than having your tweets out.

But of those three, the latter is the most expensive, and since you can’t be everywhere at once, to talk to everyone there all the time, word of mouth only gets you so far too. Now here, you may say that there’s already plenty of space for postering downtown. Many businesses offer their window or a bulletin board inside their store for posters. Further, the City of Guelph gives you three – count ‘em: THREE – whole public spots downtown for your posters.

First, let’s give thanks to those businesses that do offer those spaces for event posters. It’s a wonderful service, and whenever I’ve been doing posters, I’ve always appreciated the space. But does it strike anyone that in a culturally vibrant city, like the one Guelph always says is wants to be/is already, then why make people compete for the same limited space? And does it further strike anyone that seeking a seal of approval from the City before putting up a poster kind of defeats rebellious/eclectic/guerrilla nature of an indie arts event? Isn’t this also a form of censorship since getting a stamp of approval for your poster is a tacit admission that the City of Guelph approves or disapproves of the quality of your event?

While you chew on that, consider this. It’s a photo essay by Dylan Reid about postering in Toronto. He makes some fairly astute points about how posters add to the culture and aesthetic appearance of a city, and how corporations have come to co-opt the idea of postering as way of proving street cred and appeal to those that are down with the new and the hip. Kind of like how artists move in to a neglected area of a city and make it flourish with new ideas and new hot spots only to get priced out when the gentrifying begins.

The short version of this long story is that we have a mindset at City Hall that’s punishing young artists for not having enough money to promote their event in the “proper” way. That punishment is not monetary since the venues are the ones being punished in cash. So what happens when venue owners decide the money made from an event is not worth the cost and headache of court dates? Well put simply, those wishing peace and quiet downtown in the evening will get their wish.

We don’t need a poster free-for-all downtown, but we do need due consideration. I was with the crew from Synn Studios when we were shooting along the river behind the River Run Centre this past July, and I don’t know what dog owners are doing with their pets when they take them down there, but they’re certainly not stooping and scooping. You literally had to watch every step while walking on the grass to ensure you weren’t going to scraping something nasty off your shoe later. Now what’s the greater harm: a poster advertising Band X and Band Y, or the fact that the area under the bridge over the Speed River is basically a litter box?

And perhaps we can take a moment to consider all the pet lovers of the world that adore and take care of their furry friend only to lose them somewhere along the way. If the City continues on their present course, I look forward to the day that 11-year-olds are hauled before a judge for asking people to keep an eye out for their lost kitty. Too bad Missy, you could have used that 100 bucks to get a new kitty, but instead you’ll have to pay the City that C-note, because while love may conquer all, it doesn’t cover the cost of putting a poster up on the wrong pole.