Film: The Queen of Versailles (Lauren Greenfield, USA, 2012)

This documentary was one of four films that I saw at the first ever Sundance London, which offered a column of 14 features (plus some shorts programs, panels and music) hand-selected from the American inceptive. Both documentaries were amazing (I also saw the insanely well-sourced and devastatingly expansive-in-scope The House I Live In) and both fiction films were kind of limp (For Ellen and Nobody Walks) and I am resisting the urge to declare that experience a cross-section of America's current indie exports. All I will say is is this: goddamn documentaries are getting good. And fiction is good too of course, but is it getting better?

Given the nature of the times, this could be the last great film to epitomize American consumption and excess. The film's becoming is amazing in itself, begun years ago as a portrait of the dynastic Segal family, who were then breaking ground on what would be the biggest house in the country. Then everything went tits up. The crash of 2008 hit and their timeshare empire, built mostly on leveraged finances, began to implode. One asset however, began paying off: the great documentarian gift of rapport. If Greenfield ever intended to capture their twisted value systems or morosely distasteful lifestyle choices, that slant never seemed to percolate. She filmed without judgement and they dug being able to make gregarious displays of wealth while simultaneously displaying their “human side.” And they became close. And as the family's lives began to erode, the show was allowed to go on, ending quite close to the date of its release.

If only all tycoons were such good sports. It helped that they might have thought we'd fancy them martyrs. Sometimes that may have been true, but in other cases one man's harrowing is another's morbidly hilarious. See: 1) Their attempts to fly commercial after losing their private jet. 2) Their attempts manage herds of exotic pets, defecating all over their increasingly filthy house – if not already too malnourished (or dead) to do so – and no domestic staff left to help them. The poignancy of all this, claims the filmmaker, is that this model of unsustainable living pertains to everyone in the first-world, just in varying levels of scale. No one, of course, would want to watch this happen to a middle class family. However, display a collapse narrative in truly operatic proportions, and it becomes compulsively watchable on many levels. And it's not just the thrill of seeing such superficial giants fall from the beanstalk.

There were probably endless opportunities to make the Segals look ridiculous and the family's deficit of self-consciousness would probably leave them oblivious to it all. Instead many choices were made that might evoke the family's softer side. Perhaps because they were too easy a target. Perhaps it was her documentarian duty to layer even grotesque displays of decadence with ambiguity. Cut to: INT. THE SEGAL'S GIGANTIC-FUCK-OFF TOWER IN DOWNTOWN VEGAS: The company's heir is galvanizing his sales team with all the fervor of a vacuum cleaner salesman: “We're saving lives here. The research is in, people who go on vacation live longer.” Is this the menacing plasticity of their industry? Or the stories they're telling themselves to morally justify their expansion? Cut to: the impressive and affordable digs that seem to blindside their very working class clients. Are they at least trying to be good? Cut to: David, the Segal patriarch and company's proprietor: “Yeah I guess I shouldn't have sold all our timeshares on a mortgage basis to any schmuck with bad credit because now I'm completely enslaved to the banks.” Are they victims too? Cut to: matriarch Jackie Segal selling off her extra things (well some of her very hefty amount extra things) for almost nothing in the husk of their disbanded department store. Is she really trying to cut material weight?

Regardless, I found myself cheering for them. We find Jackie revealing herself as, well, rather revealing. Her shamelessness, innocence and candidacy are almost disarming. She quickly becomes the anchor of the film, maintaining a certain consistency of temperament as our protagonist. Of course, it later becomes apparent that her charmed life may have deprived her of the emotional software to be anything but. On pace with our attachment to Jackie, is our detachment from David as he declines on every level, completely absorbed in salvaging his ruined fortress. The third act is a sad, but all-too-expected witness to Jackie's impotence in dealing with real-life family drama. David's familial drives wither and Jackie is utterly lost, not at all used to these brand new sewers of struggle and tension.

Ultimately, the characters are in themselves about as interesting as carbon, nitrogen and phosporous, but like all good educational shows on outer space, the way those ingredients behave during a supernova is riveting. The film captures such a cosmic weave of family, economics, and all the consumptive sludge you can pile on top of it with real energy and vibrancy. Its narrative pace would ensnare those on the strictest of Hollywood fiction diets. One casualty of this is occasionally feeling waylaid by segues into the real lives of the maids and surrounding people affected by the crisis. I felt guilty considering such elemental doc material like that a bit superfluous, but it's hard not to let your expectations get tainted by the fireworks show at center stage. You can't help yourself: it's a genre film with all the thrills of the“I-can't-believe-this-is-actually-happening” factor. This is an especially powerful combination to frame all the obscenities of lifestyle that the American one-percenters seem to so generously provide. And the ability of Greenfield to deliver this material with narrative precision impresses me in ways that fiction filmmaking hasn't seemed to lately. But it's the moments that you just can't find in fiction. Moments that could only burst out of such a fevered and thoroughly-filmed system of excess. (I dare Terry Gilliam to conceive of something more cartoonish than a Segal shopping spree...and this is after the crash).

Film: The Future (Miranda July, USA, 2011)

Apparently when you begin to think outwardly, your life is over. A couple decides to adopt a cat that only has 6 months to live. The comfort of this non-comittal arrangement is shattered when they find out that it might live for up to five years. The characters endeavour to start really plunging into the world (existentially, I guess? There's gotta be a better word for “being involved in meaningful shit”), because soon their obligations will narrow down to this not-so-insignificant adult responsibility. After the cat is gone, they'll potentially be 40+, and will have passed from the age-band that is privy to genuine experience.

It's a two-man show kind of set-up, where the characters are mostly isolated from the outside world and progressively augmenting their own perceptions and surrounding environment (although there isn't quite the horrific spiral into degeneration favoured by this narrative, i.e Deadringers). The characters in this form tend to render themselves human experiments, driven to the obligatory impulsive-life-change gestures to “see what happens”. They strip things down and open up to a new course, pulling themselves off the electrical grid, quitting their jobs and drawing new relationships from uncertain sources (i.e. randomly-acquired phone numbers). But a loss of momentum inevitably follows as their new occupations bob in the water and their new friends provide no shortage of tedium to swim through.

Seasoned with many comically awkward moments and whimsical, searching dialogue, this is the kind of film that makes a lot of reviewers use the word “generation”. It's interesting that the work of Miranda July, as elven as it might seem, has established her as some sort of arbiter of contemporary life. The Future's particular way of navigating our own misguided Peter Panism does emanate a “currentness,” as though speaking more directly to young(ish) thinking people than most. We, the over-exposed (sub)urban masses, braising in our own mythopoetic possibilities and constantly getting stung by the feeling of “oh shit, everything must happen now!” Drunk on romanticism, but emotionally-stunted. Charged by a sense of immediacy, but without a sense of direction.

Where is this all going? Life is just too aesthetically overwhelming to know how to act. If only we could stop time and take it all in (hint: you can, but as the film warns in its lyrical flight into the supernatural, don't use this power as a form of escape). Either way, Miranda July's vision of the sensory bouillabaisse of today's experience is so elegant and enigmatic, the word “postmodern” would just kill the mood. The wonderfully kaleidoscopic Me And You And Everyone We Know might have been more satisfying for me, but the intensified focus of The Future is a very prescient beam of a talented filmmaker's singular style. Did I mention it's narrated by a cat who seems grafted directly from a Don Delillo novel? Although I've never seen him use a non-human speaking part, I think this could be his inspiration to start.  

Film: The Raid: Redemption (Gareth Evans, Indonesia, 2012)

“I'm still thinking about The Raid,” said Gareth Evans (not the director, but a friend with exactly the same name), a week later. I realized then that the film remained with me as well, but I wasn't exactly thinking about it. Just as one doesn't really think about internal bleeding. I still felt The Raid. It resonated with the pitch of being beaten with several bags of cement.

Gareth saw the film again: “It's even better the second time because you go in knowing that there's no real storyline to worry about.” Sure there is, there's a crime boss, the hero's pregnant wife, the obligatory brother-mixed-up-with-the-wrong-crowd sub-plot, and, uh...

Okay so there's basically just those things. And yet the Curzon eagerly slapped it onto its film programme. In terms of meeting the criteria for entry into indie/art-house cinemas I guess it's grainy-looking and in another language, but that is the end of its rather thin artistic crust.  The rest is icing, a sugar rush for any 20-year-old male in search of the Valhalla of ass-kicking. It's a martial arts film that is mostly the martial part, all very purpose-driven and militaristic. There's no flouncy dancing around one another. We cut to the intimate parts. Horns lock quickly and bodies are broken vividly and thuggishly.

So credit where credit is due: this film has serious force. And in the last decade, martial arts movies had looked to be waning in popularity, consigned to flashy costume dramas, or overly polished gangster dramas with too many tacky suits and metal briefcases and members-only clubs with the name “Dragon” in the title. The Raid's answer to this: crime-lord sure, but no drugs, no money, and no pretty surroundings. The setting is almost macabre in its slumminess. It's a gritty, beastial, and claustrophobic survival show. You can feel the character's desperation, locked in with the savage bottom-rung of society and having to fight their way out of hell.

And we're in Indonesia. This is unknown territory, shimmering with ruthless uncertainty.  There are no movie stars and probably very little in the way of employee protection. Basically anyone can die at any minute and everyone is probably actually getting hit – if they want the job that is. (When the credits rolled I looked for multiple extras playing one part, imagining scenes with take after take where at one point the guy just didn't get up so they called in another unlucky soul to put his internal organs on the line for the most realistic-looking head-being-destroyed-from-smashing-scene possible).  

For such a seemingly lo-fi endeavour, The Raid no doubt beats to the rhythm of video game culture. The first act is all guns and explosives, used more generously than most war films. In some way this lends torque to its many melee scenes to follow, channelling those primal video game feelings of terror you get when your bullets run out.  

Tarantino will undoubtedly endorse the film as he does with all things that are so brutal they are silly and probably sidle over to its inevitable sequels, stamping it with a good ol' “Tarantino Presents” marquee. But this seems like something that will be crushed by whatever money and publicity lands on it. Although it will no doubt inspire martial arts films to come, it in itself might be a one-off.   Its thrills are organic.  Our sense of the film-maker's conceits are temporarily suspended.  But as with so many sequels, its duplication can give us diminishing returns, seeming transparent in attempting to continually pound us with The Raid Thing.  How much can you build on this? Grainier cinematography? More elaborate and glorious displays of pain?  Will we become numb, or, as with all good video games, is this viscerally pleasurable enough to have replay value? After all, those Youtube montages of people falling down never seem to get old.  

Film: Le Havre (Aki Kaurismaki, France, 2011)

This is a lovely little film, and I will get into that later, but I find this little bit interesting: 99% positive reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. 99%. There is currently a 97% approval rating for Casablanca*. What is the gravitational force around Le Havre that makes no one able to say anything bad about it? May I now speculate the unspeculable and predict the core feeling that we, the hardened, world-weary film audience left the theatre with: guilt. The guilt of 1) having your own tainted expectations of cinema revealed to you and 2) potentially being the kind of person that doesn't like this film (since they are probably also the kinds of people that hate puppies).

The set-up of Le Havre could not help but prepare us all for a tale of hard lessons: “How do I overcome a system that will do everything in its power to seize the illegal immigrant in my protection?” Shit's gonna get harrowing. And yet, this is how it goes down:

-Every character did the right thing without even questioning it.

-For every obstacle there was a fairly straightforward solution, and every character effortlessly summons the resources to transcend it.

-Everyone just keeps giving each other a break, without betraying even a twinge of self-interest...oh yeah, and everything works out in the end.

-People don't even die when they're supposed to. The final scene could not have been a better culmination of Kaurismaki's alternate universe.  A touching, but almost mocking inversion of our expectations.

Every corner of the film provoked expectations of darker tidings. And we felt a cynical bunch, sitting there blue in the balls for the pathos that never came. It all felt a little cheeky on the Finnish master's part, especially as a gesture to anyone familiar with his work. My memories of his films go as follows:

-Characters cannot seem to do the right thing ever.

-With every obstacle, characters get deeper into the shit and are not even given a chance to transcend the absolutely fungal hand they are dealt.

-Character's punishment continues beyond what is normally considered narratively just and you wonder when this ruthless bastard of an auteur is going to give them a break.

-People die when they don't even have to.

So you can imagine an audience just sitting there either bewildered or in waiting for the other shoe to drop and rain down some good old familiar tragedy and hardship onto this little fairy tale. After all, most films, not just ones from sun-deprived Finnish minds, involve some sort of struggle. Did he change medications? Is this a different angle on some kind of subversiveness? Or is Kaurimaki just reminding us of the simple pleasures of a film: “Things could work out like this, right? Wouldn't it be nice if they did?”

The passing of the film's events probably wouldn't seem so striking if it was an all-the-way comedy. Kaurismaki, after all, also trades in the “dark satire” markets of storytelling. Yet the film only attempts to be cutely humorous. And yet it's also not even that sentimental. Right off the tone is more mannered than that of say The Visitor's (which is my rushed example of the story's American equivalent; a wonderful film that couldn't help but end tragically).

There is stagedness to Le Havre, which lends itself to the fantastical nature of its story. Characters enter scenes purposefully, as though on cue. They speak in announcements, trying to reach the viewer at the back of the room even though they're mic'd and rendered polyphonic by any given venue's surround sound. The pace of the film is determined but even, maintaining the demeanour of someone taking a stroll, head up and still enjoying all the charms around them. A calm remains at its core, and its many lapses into silence provide some beautiful moments of breath and contemplation.

The whole thing smacks of the modern transcendentalists (i.e. Abbas Kiarostami, Hirokazu Koreeda, and apparently every director from Taiwan), more direct in approach, but not without an enigmatic sense of wonder. Best enjoyed on an overcast day. Bring a cup of tea and some good karma. (Puppy, optional).

*I have since learned that Rotten Tomatoes has been re-printing critiques from the time of a classic film's release. It's one “thumbs down” was from a 1942 Time Magazine article, made available in their online archive and thus thrusting it into “Tomatometer Scale” relevance. The film seems to be a pass with contemporary critics, thank god.   

Film: Carancho (Pablo Trapero, Argentina, 2010)

Everyone seems to be experiencing the same thing with Carancho: the suddenness of its acceleration. Not sudden in the sense of pulling the Hollywood-thriller plot-twist lever (not even just Hollywood...thrillers the world over) because we tend to feel the onset of all that about as subtly as acid reflux. The effect is very different here and it culminates in the third act when we are suddenly taken by a feeling of “holy shit, the stakes are really high, when did this even start happening?” There is almost no precedent for it, yet it feels completely earned and natural. This feeling of abruptness comes, ironically, from the film's initial reluctance to even narratively grip its audience. 


The film begins as an anti-thriller. As opposed to the genre's usual dependency on time to give all that titillating thrust and tension, Carancho's characters live in a world of timelessness. Night and day fold into each other. They sleep at night, they sleep during the day, she wakes up at work and sets out as the sun is setting, he makes her breakfast (after they attempt to make love but she falls asleep for 12 hours) but it's dark out. And there's very little appearance of technology – phones (not to mention call display, which feels almost omnipresent in plot-driven cinema these days), computers and even clocks apparently get confiscated at the front gate of modern day Buenos Aires (what year is it anyway?). There isn't even – to my memory anyway – any music, just a lot of tired people trying to deal with shit. The shit piles up, we cut away from the scene. New day, new shit. A doctor on shift work dealing with both a wild west health care system and soul-chaffing (sometimes explosive) patient situations. An ambulance chaser attempting to help people without making too many ethically-disastrous manoeuvres (while also constantly looking for a way out of the game).


 It all seems very fragmentary, almost documentarian, as we meander through neo-realistic shards of glass and metal for two acts, nipping at bleak little samples of the country's insanely corrupt accident compensation system. Then, in the third act, the film does something I've never seen done like this before: Contrary to most films that establish itself as a thriller from the very beginning, thus preparing you, baiting you, playing with you and finally paying off with some “Shocking! Unexpected!” thriller stuff, Carancho just sort of finds a thriller narrative without betraying its intention to do so. All of the dross just sort of languidly comes together to form a tremendously immediate feeling of being cornered and needing to thread a needle to get out. Things have seemed to close in and its now all Darwinian claustrophobia. As though the film became a thriller out of necessity rather than design, as all of the monkeys in the little cage were too close to each other for too long and had to start eating each other's heads. It maybe wasn't the most fun or satisfying system of delivery, but a very effecting way of saying “life is hard, wear a helmet.” I'd recommend seeing it, but I may have diminished your experience of it a little (I went into the film almost completely ignorant of what was in store). Or maybe not: watch closely and see if you can notice...when do you shift from detachment to dread?

Fermenting Masses

As a novice bartender, I was taught to sell the more expensive wines and spirits by telling their story, making them “taste better” by giving the customer a sense of grander appropriation. For example, “at dawn the vines are sung to by midgets; the grapes are not barbarically crushed, but verbally coaxed into liberating their juices; the juice is then not just fed with the gentility of gravity flow, but anyone that makes eye contact with it is fired.” I have been selling a number of Niagara's Organized Crime wines in my restaurant for some time now, so I asked myself, “what story should I be telling”?

Waiting in the 7am line on the bus platform, a young teen paced in front of me in broad orbit, a thin layer of skin over an ocean of indignation concerning whatever condemned him to this part of Ontario. Grimsby, one of the countless dust-mites on the back of the docile meadow-roaming beast that is Canada. The town is quaint in that polished way that is almost offensive. People say “hello” in department stores and they don’t even work there. Truckers driving down a main street suddenly snap and begin honking wildly to defibrillate the sleepy flanks of manicured Victorian homes and oubliettes of planned residential areas with winey names.¹ The huge spine of verdant rock looms over everyone like a dormant volcano, keeping the village humble, stationary, afraid to upset the giant.

If you continued tracing a circle from the 725km arc that is the Niagara Escarpment you can draw the perimeter of a giant dent in the earth that was a tropical sea about half a billion years ago. In the center bubbled the state of Michigan, pickling in saltwater for aeons. Today, the ridge is basically an artifact shoreline turned agricultural manna, an ever-giving waterslide of mineral-rich erosion into a bed of geologically-milled aquatic fossils. As I passed Hamilton, the shelf peered on in dismay at what looks like a graveyard of crashed starships in a tormented heap, casualties of some huge celestial battle. The only materials these industrial dragons seemed to produce were black piles of concentrated night terrors and smoke specially designed to remain permanently suspended in the air like middle fingers to the ecosphere.

Arriving in Grimbsy I took the much-needed 9km walk to the Beamsville Bench, where along the way I saw some of the most uncannily proud willow trees bursting like geyser popsicles from the buzzcut grounds of parks. They were like a sudden resurrection of the ancient sea through its crusty new cage. Of course, considering it would once again swallow the cities of Hamilton, Rochester, Detroit and other prodigal stains, the “sea” would probably become more of a viscous grey-brown swamp of industrial waste. There is one good reason in all of Southern Ontario that we are no longer submerged in oceanic brine and it revealed itself at the end of my walk where Niagara wine country began.

It’s hardly the serene experience one would expect. With “bangers” (basically blank artillery shells) detonating with regular frequency to scare away birds, it was as though a war for Ontario’s viticultural hold was going on just over the escarpment. I wondered if the sound distressed the fruit. Foolish yes, but it’s easy to consider winemaking a delicate process that cannot be messed with. The vineyards look like a horticultural old folks home. Corridors of boney old vines drag around their pendulous grape bunches like IV's, hunched onto their trellises, too spindly to stand on their own. The fruiting zones are covered in wire mesh to protect them from birds, primarily the ravenous starling, which eats multiples of its body weight daily. If they puncture just one grape, a cavity of rot spreads throughout the entire bunch. The freshly-emptied-dumpster tang of decomposition is constantly wafting up. Everything in the Niagara region says “be careful.” The wineries' operational buildings are planned-to-be-bland, demonstrating that same stucco-and-grey-brick frigidity of Grimsby's housing crops, just estate-sized.

One exception to this is the Organized Crime winery, which makes no attempt at polish. The first person I encountered their was Christina, the clerk at their tasting room/retail store, which was visually humble in a way that wasn’t even trying to be. Outside was a house-sized building held together with siding. Inside was basically my grandmother's living room. Christina spoke with that kind of aenemic honesty that could only be complimented by the lash of her Eastern European accent.

“Buy it now, or buy it on eBay in 6 months for twice as much.” And she would be right.

To involve me in the next harvest she had put me through to a pleasant, accommodating man who seemed happy to have me on board. Little did I know that this was Andre Lipinski, the winemaker himself, and probably the most prolific in the eastern lobe of the country. Spending his days driving between projects – also the winemaker for Foreign Affair, a consultant for a number of others², and a frequent aid in processing crops for wineries without the appropriate equipment³ – he has acquired the nickname “the travelling winemaker,” an oenological catalyst bouncing around the country. The awards he has won over the years, just in sheer quantity, are staggering and he hired me, an anonymous pair of hands, directly. Niagara viticulture is nothing if not accessible.

One look at a Niagara wine label and you can get a sense of that accessibility, a light-heartedness that betrays none of its cold caution. The labels like to mock the solemnity, exaltation and rigid production laws that have for centuries defined the Old World of winemaking. At first glance Lipinski’s wineries seem equally as playful and quirky, complete with the usual clever wordplay⁴. The story of Organized Crime is told on a sequence of panels, one per bottling: “Sometime in the early-to-mid 1900’s, there were two quarreling Mennonite congregations, who disagreed about the acquisition of a pipe organ, which led to one congregation breaking into the other church, stealing the organ and then tossing it down an embankment.” A silly little nugget of Niagara micro-history or a metaphor for the binds of traditional winemaking mores?

But the New World creates its own norms and restrictions too. Being defiantly fresh and fruity and cheerful is sometimes an inescapable confine of Niagara winemaking. So in 2003, Lipinski made a Riesling Reserve for Legends Estate Winery that tasted so Old World, so noxiously German and so impossibly beyond the Niagara extraction, it was as though someone temporarily grafted a slab of the Rheingau onto the escarpment. With the Foreign Affair Winery, he takes this new-to-old-and-consequently-back-to-new-again approach even further, forming a manifold of insubordination: The Appassimento method of drying the grapes out before fermentation, which tempers a wine with diabolical levels of concentration that has only ever – not “traditionally” or “generally,” literally ever – been executed with the most hallowed of Venetian reds. Lipinsky does it with 2 red and 3 different white (white!) varietals, inciting backlash and whispers of “now he’s just being different for the sake of it” from Niagara’s old guard.

Are they even that, though? Wise veterans or the small, cautious spirits of what’s really still a new guard with an adolescent inferiority complex? And why scoff at ambition in a country that is already on its way to making world class cool climate wine? Not only great whites, but fantastic Pinot Noirs and Cabernet Francs. Of course when one thinks of truly Stanley Kubrick levels of standalone Cabernet Franc, what might come to mind is the mighty Quintarelli Alzero, which was hitherto the only Appassimento-style red attempted besides Amarone. Lipinski, leaping the chasm, decided he could make one too. Commanding an unspeakable $110 for it, it has etched itself into multiple wine lists, including Canoe, the top-rated restaurant in Toronto. And his reputation continues to stab northerly. Lipinski’s portfolios are the talk of all those effortlessly cool post-Bistros of Toronto’s west end, along with many of the upper-brow fine-dineries that have finally conceded to recognize their own backyard on their wine list and figure they should at least make it count.

I wondered if it’s really true that labor-intensive things actually taste better. I wondered if I’d just be fooling myself like all the other sadistic gourmands out there if I actually let the wines make a believer out of me. As I swirled the glass of slave-driven juice I tried not to think of the grapes and their 100-day sentence in a wind dungeon, engines constantly blasting the moisture out of the air, starving them to raisins. They pray for mold to take them, but the conditions are too arrid for any trophic life. I try not to think of that agonizing couple drops of nectar squeezed from every humiliated bauble of fruit. But as the first honeyed currents of Foreign Affair’s Sauvignon Blanc, Riesling and Chardonnay rolled over my tongue, the flavors suspended me in such hanging contemplation that I wondered where a willow tree was when I needed one. Already hauntingly complex, they’ve hardly even aged yet. This is serious wine, a brutally delicious liquid Frankenstein. It becomes apparent that the caution of Niagara winemakers is that same species of fear that paralyzes the possibilities of brilliant audacity in every other field.

For Lipinsky, the labor, the process, is all in service of something bigger. That is the story of his wines: “you’re about to taste something that no one has attempted before.” Is it pretentious or exactly the opposite in a field where bold moves are just not worth the risk? As I think back to Organized Crime, I can’t help but see the threads of a modernist romanticism. It’s new world without the innocence, old world without the narrowness. A rebel that no one asked for, defying an oppressive force that everyone thinks is just a couple playground rules to ensure safety. ORGAN-ized Crime: making music when everyone was enjoying the quiet.

Footnotes:

1. The subdivision “Vineyard Valley” can be entered through the streets Cabernet Drive and Chardonnay Place.

2. Including Turkey Point, which pulls us 100km outside of wine-country-proper and into Ontario’s tobacco belt. where farmers are pulling their crops and replacing them with a more romantic vice.

3. Including wineries that haven’t even been constructed yet; they just have grapes and the skeleton of a building

4. See Daniel Lenko’s well-received release of Chardongay to raise money for AIDS as well as John Howard’s Megalomaniac line (SonOfABitch Pinot Noir, Narcissist [spelled backwards on the bottle] Riesling, MyWay Chardonnay, etc), a self-effacing jab at the archetype of egotistical wine virtuosos.

PILLOW FIGHT ENDS IN CHAOS! COUNTLESS DEAD AS BLOODSOAKED FEATHERS LINE THE PAVEMENT OF DUNDAS SQUARE!

Was anyone else hoping to read that in Sunday's headlines? There must be a certain neurochemical make-up of people that compulsively organize "events" regardless of their value - and a certain make-up of those that root for them to fail (i.e. me). Maybe I'm a Schadenfreude junkie or maybe Toronto's playdates bent on "urban bliss" are starting to siphon my own. Obviously my reticence to accept an expressly anti-cynicism movement spearheaded by two U of T students who really like the colour pink is going to seem a little, y'know, cynical. That's, uh, because I am. I mean c'mon, who wants to witness other people have fun for no good reason, except maybe those pseudo-spiritual happiness chasers the world over who continually champion these events. Well, mainly in the notoriously pop-psych- and community-health-drenched United States, the only country in the world that considers happiness something we'll one day be able to isolate, grow in a petri dish, and sell as an energy drink.

But the US still produces witty, satirical, perverse, and just generally confrontational urban playground happenings whereas Toronto's remain friendly, earnest and...well...cute. And ecstatic, with Newmindspace, the organizers of said pillow-fights-and-other-whimsy, splashing their website with photos of their events that look like a New Years celebration in the biblical heaven. This "fun!" and social aspect of such groups represents a new trend in mob activity that creates a stark contrast with historical "groups" like the Cacophany Society (still, after 23 years, active today) who were expressly anti-social, so much so that they eschewed the very notion of cohesion. Operating as individualistic coagulations of mischief, they sought not to enjoy their city, but to disrupt it and, potentially, dismantle the whole urban system. It seems, unfortunately, that after the presence these urban mischief (anti)-entities have established in North American cities (and popular culture in general e.g. Fight Club's Project Mayhem), there is an assumption that if any activity, regardless of its inanity, is done on a large scale, it's worthwhile, even epiphanical (quoting Jenny Holzer in Newmindspace's "documentary", which I will call a public service announcement: "the most profound things are inexpressible"). And one would think, given the freedom to develop ones own sense of play within the urban sphere, today's softer, cuddlier groups would at least go beyond scavenger hunts, capture the flag and other teacher-sanctioned frollicks of our youth. After all, this is fun you don't need an adult's permission for, as one of the many liberating aspects of urban play is the freedom from any need for licenses or other bureaucratic nods to execute something. So in kind with our generation's loss of a taste for revolution, today's demonstrations not only lack any spirit of progress, but have resolved to declare the opposite: a regress into childhood frivolity.

That's not to say there haven't been any attempts to mobilize an ideology. Kevin Bracken himself has stated that people's attraction to his Newmindspace activities are rooted in an "underlying frustration with consumer culture," articulating the impulses of these groups to enjoy themselves outside of what's being provided by the corporate octopi. However, he should be careful, since things like discourse can "[suck] all the fun right out of it." This coming from Brian Bernbaum of SFWeekly, who is not only a supporter of urban playground events, but a resident of San Francisco - the home of the Cacophany Society. San Francisco, a city with probably the most colourful legacy of provocative, ideologically-driven urban mischief events in recent history. Ranging from the incendiary to the whimsical, they're all tied to rhetoric on culture jamming, reclamations of public space, challenges to the deadening routines of urban life, etc. Something as simple as a large group publicly freezing in place (a very popular activity, executed all over the United States), can deftly contradict a city's obsession with motion.

Of course, it's easy to wax righteous any time something outrageous is going on. One blog calls the events a reclamation of the city from “the endless creep of advertising”. Okay, but what is the urban playground, but an internal fury of advertising. In fact, the vitally spontaneous nature of these events depends on the use of instantaneous communication (namely mobile internet and texting) to parse out the times and locations of events on the fly. Elaborate schemes (found particularly in an American brand of play centered around of messing with the public's heads) can be coordinated through the synchronization of phone clocks, coupled with the broadcast of silent commands, creating events that sometimes even comically challenge the technology itself (see: the Starbucks simultaneous cell phone conversation). Of course, continuing to entertain ideas of being involved in some sort of "reclamation" is incomplete and hypocritical. These groups are still not using their technological assets to their full revolutionary potential. In the Philippines, China and North Korea mobile communication is used to organize protests. Here, it's being used to not wear pants with a lot of people also not wearing pants. And as far as Toronto's "response to consumer culture" is concerned, it remains completely dependent on its psychological delivery system. After all, what else does most urban play appeal to than the basest of human desires? In doing nothing more than finding different mediums to aim at the early mongoloid parts of the brain, Newmindspace et al is otherwise indistinguishable from the advertising industry. They just don't want to make money...not yet.

Unlike our Asian counterparts, having a "reason" for these elaborate, perception-altering spectacles is too heavy. If Bracken wants to continue to appeal to today's delirious masses, he might want to stick to his other soundbyte: "Free fun in an age where entertainment costs you." And since most entertainment-driven mediums are designed for spectatorship purposes only (movies, sports, video games), the real pricetag is a spiritual one. It seems that the hunger to return to the idyllic days of childhood springs from a back-to-basics spirit of re-appropriating "fun" as something actually immersive, before we were swallowed by the static pleasures of the screen (if there was ever such a time for some of us). If only NMS commitment to this concept was steady. Contradictorily, their New York mass-bubble-blowing hosted a kitschy gameboy-themed after-party complete with a cover charge, suggesting not only that not even our city's cheerleaders of puritanical bliss can resist merchandising, but that their ideology has not been sanitized of media-zombie paraphernalia. And also, perhaps, that it's not about "purity" or "innocence," but youth itself, a fetish so pervasive, so easily tickled, that it guarantees NMS attendance in the 25-to-old range. And, just like moms shopping at the same stores as their daughters, this can be seen as yet another defensive reaction to the spreading generation gaps and telescopic pace of style culture. Each generation is having a harder and harder time understanding the previous one so why not close the gap by doing our youngest functioning children are doing (children are, after all, the most faithful to traditions).

The group's PSA kicks off with a quote from Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world." Kids...I thought you liked playing nice. You see, using the words of a great thinker who fueled the women's liberation movement and sexual revolution of the 1960's to inflate what is a veritable revolution of innocence is enough irony to sink an oceanliner. However, watching the rest of their video, I couldn't accuse them of not being clever. For example they used chalk, plaster of paris and tempera paint to cover queen street with hearts, which are impermanent enough to not be considered vandalism by the city's bylaws. Stamping love on an unwillingly moody environment and getting away with it: it's kind of funny, in a dialectical way. You can't help, but enjoy people's reactions: "I think Toronto's a better place because people are doing crazy, but really quite nice things." It's provocation without the slightest hint of malice. It's art that's pure of heart.

Perhaps too pure? The social politics of their events are a tough nut. They obviously preach inclusivity - come one, come all, engage in your...no, OUR city! - but since the people they attract, says Bracken are "like us", anyone not young, hip and fanciful might get their square asses stuck while spiralling down the urban playground's slides. Lori Kufner (the other half of NMS) concedes that people who use the city functionally (she calls them "business people"; I call them "most people") are more likely to hear about their events in the media or "from their kids." Really? Or how about as they push through the clots street nymphs as they lumber to adultland? People with driven, recession-fueled professional lives are inevitably going to be ostracized from people who have really nothing better to do in their city. To NMS's credit, the pillow fight seemed to expand their market to another type of bourgeoisie by reaching out to kids, which consequently drew a demographic of bored middle class families.

Further evolution of this movement is going to be rapid, care of, naturally, communication technology. The Urban Prankster Network is a veritable mischief laboratory; and they're already merchandising with a DVD and soon-to-be book available for purchase. People post their happenings, i.e. "No pants day, Sao Paolo, Brazil, be there!." Others float ideas, many of which don't get many takers (i.e. "outdoor library!...anyone?...anyone?...") People are already getting a taste for novelty and want to have their stamp on the next new idea. People are becoming very creatively-driven in a whole new medium of expression. And, fittingly, some cities are even making it all into a a game, a competition with marked progress of "our willingness to interact with the city". Although San Francisco just loves being the first, I wonder if the people at SFZero even thought to ask if the activities they award points to are even progressive.

We remain a country waiting for something meaningful to do. All these pillow fights and "complaints choirs" are just a harmless means of catharsis, practice for when it's time to actually make splash. Of course, when everyone finally gets the "storm parliament hill!" message they'll probably come dressed as Che Guevara armed with squirt guns thinking it's some kind of revolution-themed party. I couldn't imagine it any other way. We're a people that create memories for the sake of memories, forming mobs mainly intended to look exciting in pictures (every urban play network implores their members "take pictures!") - constituents of one big urban scrapbook. The question remains: do we really need an adversarial target for our public displays of affectation to count? Do these activities need a vision of a better world, or are they themselves that vision? Perhaps I'm over-analyzing things (wait... no, fuck that) and maybe it's just not so bad to have someone peel back the canopy of the urban jungle and let the sun shine in.