Gavin Thomson
U1 Philosophy

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The aim of Philopolis is twofold, explained Susan-Judith Hoffmann, a professor of philosophy at McGill who gave a presentation entitled “The Philosophy of the Natural Sciences.” First, it aims to “make philosophy part of a larger academic conversation, and to demonstrate that philosophy is an important voice in its own right.” Secondly, organizers set out “to make philosophy accessible to the general public and to give it a role in shaping public life.”

The jargon typical of average lectures was avoided by gearing the presentations toward inexperienced but interested listeners. The 100 speakers, giving 80 presentations, did not oversimplify, though. Professors and students alike offered their input on topics as diverse as “The emotional education of reality TV,” “The paradox of free will,” and “Turning the wheel of Dharma: a really short introduction to Buddhism.”

“For philosophers,” said the president of the Philosophy Students Association, David Brooke Struck, “Philopolis presents a great opportunity to see how much our discipline has in common and to share with others, and how beneficial this can be to philosophical development. For non-philosophers, it presents an opportunity to step back from the book or the microscope and recognize the application of one’s interests to a broader intellectual landscape.”

The importance of stepping back was Philopolis’s underlying theme. Focussing too specifically on issues such as the mind/body gap risks ignoring crucial fragments of debate, and stepping back to find coherence in the whole helps recover them. Philosophy is commonly misunderstood as being an isolated and irrelevant subject, lagging behind science and far too broad to solve anything. Philopolis demonstrated that high-calibre philosophy can successfully be presented to the public as relevant and practical, and furthermore, in step with science. “Philosophy attempts to express and understand not only what it means to be human, but also what it means to do the things humans do,” said U1 student Emma Ryman, who gave a presentation on “Plato’s Underworld.” “For any human activity, there is a philosophy behind it,” she explained.

Many of the presentations included art, music, film, or computers. “Lecture and Demo: Chaotic Music and Fractal Art: A Glimpse into the Neurophysicality of Aesthetics,” for example, featured all of the above. There were also live demonstrations. “The Improvisation of Philosophy” included an improvised performance, and McGill’s TNC Theatre presented absurdist philosophy through a production of The Bald Soprano.

While this was only Philopolis’s second year, the quality of its organization was on par with longer-running series at McGill. On a practical level, Struck evidently did a superb job of arranging the event; so did the numerous volunteers, mostly McGill students. The schedule was easy to follow and the presentations were punctual. There was even free fruit. Naturally, though, there is room for improvement – attendance was limited, and mostly comprised of philosophy students. Next year, Philopolis will hopefully receive more presentations by non-philosophers, and a less homogenous audience. Judging by its success this year, this is bound to happen.

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This professor was particularly fond of making jokes about George W. Bush. In a first-year lecture filled with impressionable young students, a joke is the perfect way to enhance biases. “George W. Bush is an idiot,” says the professor. “I knew it!” say a number of U0 students. “I was right all along!” Starting thus, it’s hard to do the very thing that is essential to learning: learning the other side of things.

What? Lighten up! Humour enlivens, challenges, gives energy to otherwise boring material.

Yes, it does. But a funny professor is not always better than a boring one. It depends on the context. In the political science class the professor’s humour was dismissive. Saying “George W. Bush is an idiot” does not explain his actions or even provide a broad overview of them; it dismisses them under the label of “stupidity” and moves on.

There is a Peanuts comic in which Lucy and Charlie are sitting on a couch. “I have three new philosophies,” Lucy says. “What difference does it make? Who cares? Life goes on,” she continues, smiling. “Profound, huh?” “Maybe a little too profound,” Charlie says. “What difference does it make?” Lucy says in response. “Who cares? Life goes on.”

Dismissing something and moving on is antithetical to pedagogy. All the best teachers I’ve had promoted understanding all sides of an issue. But when a professor ignores this by glossing over an issue with a laugh, it’s often overlooked.

The case is worse when the joke is meant to be ironic. That is, when the joke says one thing, but implies the opposite. When a professor says “Every great thinker has been a man” as a joke, the humour arises in the incongruity between what the joke says and what is actually the case. The joke has the potential to be funny, so long as the people laughing do so because they recognize the incongruity between the joke and the truth.

Clearly, however, these kind of statements can be detrimental to learning if the students don’t catch the irony. They can cause the person laughing to dismiss the significance of the claim or agree with it. It is not merely a shame that jokes can do this; in different pedagogical contexts which deal with more serious issues, this kind of humour is dangerous.

I recently attended a voluntary lecture on feminism where the four professors made jokes about issues of sexuality. The jokes were made ironically and most of the audience caught on. But some did not. One presenter said that the distinction between how women and men are generally perceived is that the former are “something to fuck.” Everyone laughed, but not for the same reason. An ironic laugh sounds different from an un-ironic laugh, and I heard blurts of the latter. Perhaps someone who laughed without irony went home and repeated what the professor said to their friends. Maybe they had a good chuckle. How funny that is! Women are something to fuck! And a feminist professor actually said that? Really? That’s hilarious!
“In me it is made very plain / That parables are told in vain / To those who have but little brain,” said an unknown 18th-century didactic poet. There is a certain kind of elitism involved in pedagogical humour. “Women are something to fuck” would have been an okay joke to make so long as everyone understood the speaker didn’t believe it. But some people didn’t. They laughed for a different reason, namely, because they agreed. Racist jokes are racist to a racist. Those that did not perceive the gap between that the joke and the truth – that is to say, those that did not understand the joke was intended to be satirical – laughed because they thought women are actually “something to fuck.” They went to a lecture on feminism only to have their misogynistic views reenforced, just as many U0 students attended a lecture on politics just to have their old biases reenforced. Consequently, the same beneficial effect that humour can have on learning strengthened their misogynistic views; that joke gave energy to the view that “women are something to fuck.” Laughing gave it life.

The word “elite” has connotations of exclusivity. But, to be sure, seeing satire as satire requires some degree of social awareness. Some regard South Park as making fun of, well, everything, and some take its irreverance literally. “Cartman is racist and homophobic and anti-Semitic,” people in the latter category say, “so it’s okay for me to be like that too!”

I am not arguing for elitist classrooms; I am arguing that professors should be aware that not everyone sees irony as such, so if a satirical joke has the potential to warp a major issue, it probably will. Of course this issue cannot be dichotomized so starkly, but that just emphasizes the degree to which humour is ambiguous in pedagogical contexts.

The professor said “Women are something to fuck” in hope of satirizing a misogynistic view of women. But the sad truth is that it perpetuated the one-sided view of many audience members, who didn’t catch the satire.

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The word “comic” is associated with humour and childhood, and perhaps this is why comics have remained, to some extent, a thing of the past. But they are not just that. gangLion comics – a self-publishing Canadian zine that just released its fourth issue – shows what contemporary comic art at its best can do.

Based in Toronto, gangLion gives new comic artists a chance to publish their work. They offer manageable deadlines and encourage new comic artists to meet and share ideas. “Our knowledge of how comics are created is continuously hindered by the secrecy and solitary nature that most comic artists seem to thrive in,” said Georgia Webber, the zine’s publisher, organizer, and designer. “What we also don’t see are all the people who…decide to give it a try, and find that it’s too intense or that there’s too much pressure and seclusion. We aim to give those people a chance before they give up on themselves, and to open up the creation process of the more independent creators to help them develop their skills.”

gangLion’s fourth issue contains eight comics by seven artists. It offers a range of styles and skill levels, from those who have evident expertise to those who are obviously in the process of developing it.

The opening comic, by Daniel Ra, is a simple one-page animation of the the circle of life. It depicts a man’s day from morning to night through a series of banal images, readable from left to right or right to left, showing both the circle of day-to-day routine and the circle of time. The simplicity of its funny-yet-depressing theme is perfectly harmonious with its brevity, making it more of a punch in the face than something to ponder.

The second comic, though, is tedious and predictable. “Two Years Left,” by Jason Bradshaw, uses four pages to tell the story of a prisoner with high hopes for freedom, who is killed on the day of his release by a falling brick in a construction site. The suspense the comic builds implies the conclusion early on. It is dry and unfunny to read.

The highlight of gangLion’s fourth issue is “the day the internet exploded,” by Nick Semko. Semko uses an animation style reminiscent of DC Comics – replete with black and eerie green – to render a hilarious modern apocalypse. Much like Dr. Strangelove, “the day the internet exploded” combines witty and unpredictable dialogue with the threat of an apocalypse. But instead of nuclear attack or an environmental zeitgeist, the threat is that the Internet – contained within a giant container “bursting at the seams” – will explode. The Internet’s last moment consists of a high school student’s Tweet and a teenage boy uploading a shirtless picture of himself onto Facebook. Then Star Wars kid escapes to embark upon a killing spree with his light sabre, the puke combined from everyone who’s ever watched “Two Girls One Cup” floods the streets, and all the cats, “no longer forced to endure the humiliation of playing at a keyboard being dressed in absurd outfits…turned on their tormentors…[and] devoured everything in their wake.” The conclusion is equally hilarious. Semko uses humour to thrust a very contemporary fear onto the reader in much the same way a cat owner hides medicine in its food. The first response is laughter and the second is anxiety.

The best comics in gangLion are those that are economical with image and language, like the “Circle of Life” and “the day the internet exploded.” They use a naïve medium to express sophisticated ideas. And in this way they are an intimate kind of art. Gabrielle Charron-Merritt, author of gangLion’s “An Unripe Peach,” a facile story about the pleasure of simple secrets and imagined revenge, writes, “If people enjoy [my comic], they’ll take me seriously with a hug rather than a handshake.”

The release party for the fourth issue, was held at Divan Orange on March 2. It hosted four music acts that were similarly informal and quasi-innocent. Charron-Merrit – also a musician – played a solo acoustic show, followed by Ghost Trees, Elgin-Skye, and Emperor Bulash. Charron-Merrit’s sound was discordant and jarring, at times bursting into moments of sweetness; Ghost Trees was ghostly and warm; Elgin-Skye was un-naïvely bubbly, like a coy person’s most poignant diary entries; and Emperor Bulash, the only full band, put on the best performance of the night with multi-vocal folk rock that was youthful, clever, and honest. If Emperor Bulash were a teenage boy, they’d be the kind you’d want to take home to your parents, then take on an all-out binge drinking road trip across America, dining-and-dashing along the way.

gangLion’s fourth issue will be available at Drawn and Quarterly within the next month. For more information, visit ganglioncomics.blogspot.com.

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It’s not strange, then, that Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist “anti-play” The Bald Soprano is alienating, but it is strange that it’s hilarious. After its first showing in 1950 the audience either laughed or left miserable. McGill Tuesday Night Theatre’s first performance of the play had similar results, though the perpetual laughter made it difficult to measure the amount of sadness.

“Such kakas such kakas such kakas such kakas such kakas such kakas such kakas. I could never have imagined that my dream of one day flying a cacao tree while playing the Crhihuahua would one day come true in the suburbs of London,” said McGill’s director Julien Naggar in the director’s note. “There is logic to that statement in the same way that there’s a logic to everything that is said in this ‘anti-play.’” Despite being utterly ridiculous, unpredictable, fragmented, and irreverent (or perhaps because of this), McGill’s The Bald Soprano is deeply challenging and affective. Ionesco thought misery was constant, and this “anti-play” goes beyond just presenting the misery of the absurd by putting it right there in front of us, where we feel a part of it.

In the first scene, Mr. and Mrs. Smith sit in their “English middle-class interior.” Mrs. Smith, who is played by a man (James Thorton), darns socks and rambles about dinner, grocers, and eating well. Mr. Smith (Michael Ruderman) sits across from his wife and responds with a slight click of his tongue. He finally speaks to argue about a doctor. Then follows a contradictory conversation about a large family, every one of whom is named “Bobby Watson.” The characters are immediately obscure and nonsensical but oddly human. The audience can’t help but ask if Mrs. Smith is a woman or a gay man. And what the hell are they talking about? As the maid (Lara Oundjian) tells the audience later, we are supposed to make sense of the nonsense. Gender and sex, among the many concepts the play challenges, appear eerily illogical. The most basic things – the phrases in small talk and the everyday motions of walking to the door and sitting on chairs – appear completely absurd.

Much could be said about the play’s complexity and affective power. What separates The Bald Soprano from other artworks dealing with similar issues is that it forces them upon us. Presenting the things that are assumed to be logical and obvious in an illogical way shows how illogical and unobvious they are.

The performance itself deserves as much praise as it received laughter. Naggar chose a superb cast and crew and provided them the freedom to show it. The minimalistic stage design is clever and off-putting, as is the music. The actors’ talent for dialogue is only outshined by their masterful and eccentric physicality.

Thorton does not even have to move for his body language to raise questions. He sits like a ’50s woman, and right away it’s unsettling – not because he doesn’t get it right, but because he gets it so right it confuses what “right” means anymore. His back looks frail and his knees shiver. Like the whole play, he embodies a precarious cusp: at any moment things might fall into madness.

His/her/their husband, Mr. Smith, does the same in the opposite way (embrace the logic of contradictions!). Ruderman, like any perfectly normal ’50s British man, conducts himself with a masculine tenseness that is so stiff it’s breakable. When his wife talks to him he tenses his jaw and narrows his brow, and when he finally bursts into an intense moment of anger nothing about him changes. His temper is there the whole time, even in the way he crosses his legs while he reads the paper.

Danji Buck-Moore, who plays Firechief-Benjamin Harwick III, both a fire chief and a door, moves with a hilarious and endearing childlike charisma. He maintains a balance between energetic ambition and sensitivity, both sexual and intellectual. His stories about animals and family trees make no sense at all and carry on without any intelligible train of thought, yet it is obvious that in his mind they are intelligible, and he is desperate to tell them.

His lover, the maid, played by Oundjian, is fiery and haunting. Like all the actors, she plays her role as a stereotype, but is at the same time base and individual. Her subconscious sexuality manifests itself without any need for restraint. Her smile, perhaps the highlight of her character, is mad. More than any other character she revels in this insanity. Perhaps this is why she appears so natural in such an entirely unnatural setting.

Mr. and Mrs. Martin (who are really imposters of Mr. and Mrs. Martin) played by Spencer Thompson and Phae Novak respectively, parallel Mr. and Mrs. Smith in many ways. They conduct themselves in the same typical manner. They keep their backs straight and refrain from any gesture that suggests honesty – a model of perfect small talk decorum. But there is something gentle behind Thompson and something innocent behind Novak. Thompson lives the absurd like a boy. He’s amused by it. The Bald Soprano captures the subjectivity of emotion and time (at one point there is an extremely long and hilarious awkward silence), which Thompson adopts into his physicality. Novak’s eyes widen as the play goes on. That, and her raspy, playful voice-delivery, would be endearing in any normal setting, but in the play she is the most alienated. The more innocently she looks at things, the more detached she is from the way the things actually are. And the way things actually are is what The Bald Soprano destroys with such perfect imperfection.

That is the absurd, and McGill’s interpretation of it is both visceral and gut-wrenching; it will either wrench your gut with laughter or misery.

The Bald Soprano is playing in Morrice Hall, 3485 McTavish, from  
March 10-13, and March 17-20, at 8 p.m.  

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Meno has, of course, been studied extensively. But rather than offering a new interpretation of the dialogue, Jan Zwicky, in her recent book, Plato as Artist, offers a new approach. She treats Meno not as a piece of pure philosophy, but as a piece of philosophy and art.

Plato as Artist’s main goal is to “enliven” Meno, which, Zwicky writes, is a “philosophical jewel” with “a kind of geometrical perfection.” She aims to regard Meno’s “every detail as worthy of our concentrated philosophical attention,” so that its meaning “springs to life.”

To do this, she synoptically treats the dialogue as a plot, in which the characters feel and respond and act as beings who are more than mere pawns expressing philosophical ideas. Meno, Meno’s slave, Socrates – all are depicted with psychological realism: why does Meno turn his head? Here, the way Socrates touches Meno’s shoulder is ironic – he’s implicitly mocking Meno’s vanity. Here, Meno is lying – look at the way he scratches his elbow. Meno says that, but really he means this – the details are in his posture. Artist treats the characters intimately; they become more like us.

Plato as Artist’s approach is refreshing. Delving into the nuances of Socrates’s dialogue, illuminating Meno’s implied thoughts, and treating the characters’ gestures as another form of language sheds, in Platonic fashion, new light on an old work. Artist deals with the implicit language of Meno more than it does the explicit, and the former comes to have a meaning of its own which, in turn, contextualizes the latter. Through this approach, Meno’s hidden strengths are highlighted; apparent quirks and contradictions begin to make sense. And it becomes clear that Meno’s theatrics are worthy of such attention.

Unfortunately, Zwicky’s prose style is unsuited for Artist’s subject. She often favours rhythm over content, cleverness over truth. The book mingles high formality with slang, falls into long-winded digressions and, at its worst, ignores the economization of expression and clutters what should be clear. Discussing Meno’s passivity in responding to Socrates, Zwicky writes, “Meno’s failure to engage, his apparent insouciance thrown lightly over the abyss of his inattention, is breathtaking.” More breathtaking is this sentence’s lack of clarity.

Considered in pieces, the style is often bright and animated. But collectively, it weighs Plato as Artist down. For an essay which deals with philosophical issues that are famously complex, the style is distracting.

Artist’s best moments are when the clarity of its expression equals the originality of its approach. In a passage early in the book, for example, Zwicky masterfully combines Socrates’s behaviour regarding moral beauty with her extensive knowledge of Plato’s other works to strengthen the connection between Plato’s account of the relationship between moral and mathematical beauty. Later, she compares Meno’s naïve idea of virtue with a “field of naturalists” who “leap to reflection on the genus of some plant, without looking carefully at its special characteristics.”

In moments like these, Artist is an energetic and informative commentary on Meno. To a new reader, it offers a more human approach to a text that, considered in the traditional scholarly way, is daunting and obscure (who really acts or speaks like Socrates?). And to an experienced reader, it offers new views and moments of realization – I never thought of it like that before!
As a work that changes the way Meno is often discussed, Artist succeeds. It applies sympathy’s power over understanding to a text that is often viewed unsympathetically. Ultimately, though, Artist falls short of the potential its best moments hint at, as its tendency toward convoluted and inaccessible language defeats the originality of its project.

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Stanton’s exhibition, on display at Corrid’Art de Compagnie, is part of a larger body of her work responding to public space in Montreal. Stanton aims at “highlighting the mundane…turning what we take for granted into something artful and meaningful…to find (or uncover) the ‘performative’ in the everyday.” And, with very few photos, she does just that.

(Being) One Thing at a Time proposes to “open up a dialogue between the body and the space it traverses,” and it is Stanton’s attention to this dialogue that turns average people in average places into expressions of visual language – a language that alters drastically depending on place and space.

In one photo, a group of eight people (including Stanton) feed each other soup across the table in a restaurant. In their subtle, relatively impolite way, they alter their relationship with the environment with this simple action. “When we feed each other, as adults…not for one bite but for an entire meal, we are creating another dynamic and visual language that seeps into the environment around us,” Stanton said. What stands out is not the gesture, but the gesture in relation to its surrounding space. In a public place, this simple and infantile action appears transgressive and slightly unethical. It’s hard to pinpoint just what about this is incongruous – the place, for passive-aggressively imposing such tacit rules, or the people, for so passive-aggressively violating them.

Similarly, another piece shows groups of couples kissing on a sidewalk, a street corner, and what could be a café. The background is indistinct and ordinary. But the couple’s collective gesture, though simple, looks discordant against it. Removed from its typical context, kissing appears ludicrous.

In a third photo, 11 colourfully dressed people are shown in a grassy park, lying awkwardly on bicycles as if they had all fallen off and promptly gone to sleep. A line of text beneath it reads, “We make a small blanket of our bicycles and bodies, warming our skins and the side of the mountain. Does the grass feel us? Does the sky notice?” Not necessarily; but certainly the people do.

Stanton’s art emphasizes precisely that point – that to us, no space is neutral. Spaces and places exists to us as sense data and, later, memory. Like people, they hold memories and emotions. And in the same way that we influence people, we influence public space.

In another photo, for example, four people hold doormats saying “Welcome” on a sidewalk in front of a carpet store. A mundane place becomes cordial through a simple human action. This is the highlight of Stanton’s art: more than anything, the photos emphasize human freedom in space and place. And they did it in such a simple and subtle way that they emphasized the degree to which this freedom is easy. Hold up signs by a carpet store and it becomes a place for gathering, kiss on a sidewalk and it becomes a place for romance, fall onto the grass and it becomes sensual and curious. Subjectivity manipulates objectivity.

Stanton’s art captures human possibility – taking the given, inert world, and making it better, more humane. It depicts with witty simplicity the degree to which each act is public and powerful, and the degree to which even the most banal places and spaces are responsive and instrumental. Places are malleable, Stanton tells her viewers. We have creative power over them.

(Being) One Thing at a Time is on display at Corrid’Art de Compagnie (6323 St. Hubert). For more information visit bankofvictoria.com.

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The Room is an anomaly. It does not fit into any genre. The strange figure behind the movie is Tommy Wiseau. Along with other mysteries surrounding his biography, Wiseau claims to have grown up in New Orleans, even though he speaks with a vaguely Eastern European accent. The only explanation behind how he managed to individually raise six million dollars in order to direct, produce, and star in The Room, after he had already written the script for it, is that he imported leather jackets from Korea. Originally, Wiseau intended to make the movie a drama, and it was advertised as such. But once it became clear that it made people laugh, it was renamed a “Quirky new black comedy…with the passion of Tennessee Williams.”

But this description also fails. There is no way to sum up The Room. It simply does not make sense.

It is not that the acting is horrendous (Wiseau and company perform like Subway’s Jared Fogle in a game of charades), or that the plot is worse; no, there is something inscrutably pathetic about it. In one scene, for example, Lisa asks Johnny if he was promoted at work. Johnny says, “Nah.” Lisa, always quick with a response, says, “You didn’t get it, did you?” She is not being sarcastic.

And this is the way the movie moves forward: half-logically, half-hysterically, droning along tediously forward like an absent-minded doodle across a blank white page. The entire film is based on one love triangle, one problem, and one collective relationship. As soon as it builds a tiny bit of tension, it repeats, and the tension dissolves silently in the repetition. If a hint of the outside world seeps through, it turns out to be a time-filler, and is never brought up again. If a character says something remotely interesting, the response is monosyllabic. Sometimes it’s just a laugh. Mark: “I used to know a girl, she had a dozen guys. One of them found out about it…beat her up so bad she ended up at a hospital on Guerrero Street.” Johnny: “Ha ha ha. What a story, Mark.”

Yet the film is remarkably engrossing. Watching it, I had the feeling that something great was taking place. Partly, I think, because the film is utterly original. No one else could ever create a movie this bad and this hilarious. There is a conspiracy theory surrounding The Room, that the film is an elaborate joke staged by some prominent Hollywood director. Watching the movie, though, there’s an earnestness to it that negates this possibility – not in the way some American Idol hopefuls appear to actually think they are good singers, but in a way all by itself. The movie is so pitifully sincere it seems like the product of an ethereal spirit or an unknowable alien. The plot was so basic, the dialogue so bad, that it was not basic at all: it was a-basic. What makes this bad movie so good? How can bad be good? Why was watching The Room the best movie experience I’ve ever had?
For one, I’ve never been to a movie that people were so enthralled to see. The Room played in a small room at 5080-A St. Ambroise, and it was just as much a party as it was a screening. Organizers Dan Ahmad and Denise L’Hirondelle did an excellent job of raising spirit and telling newcomers what to do. Whenever there were spoons in the movie, which was quite often (Johnny’s house is decorated with paintings of them) everyone yelled “spoon” and hurled plastic ones at the screen – about 12,000 in total, according to St-Ambroise’s Facebook group. About half the audience had memorized a significant portion of the dialogue, and knew what to say or when to scream on cue. When the camera panned the Golden Gate Bridge, as it frequently did, there was a chant of “Go! Go! Go!” Whenever there was a sex scene, the chant was: “Unfocus! Unfocus!” (Tommy Wiseau naked is indistinguishable from a dehydrated, beached whale). There was never a silent, spoon-free moment.

The Room has recently become an Internet phenomenon, attracting fans around the world. Yet screenings are rare – most take place in Los Angeles and, oddly, Montreal. At the screening there was a sense of camaraderie between the cult followers, as there is at Rocky Horror Picture Show productions and Star Wars conventions. Like other cult classics, The Room attracts a group of young, dedicated fans who form a kind of subculture. What most separates them from other cult groups is their deep enjoyment for ironic entertainment and sarcastic humour.

To appreciate a movie such as The Room is to appreciate those things that movies should never be. The Room is the anti-movie. As Warhol changed art by discarding its most tacit rules, while maintaining the surface appearance that he hadn’t really done anything new at all, The Room discards all movie standards and conventions, by doing everything all generic movies have done before, and does them much, much better. The movie is not just a poor copy of an old film; it copies such films’ failures and carefully avoids falling into their strengths.

Thus The Room begins with no bases, continues without substance, repeats with nowhere to go, and ends with, well, the best movie experience I’ve ever had. I will never call it art. Tommy Wiseau is an unintelligent man-child with an incomprehensible need to see himself naked and hurt. Yet, what he has given to this world is something very, very special.

The Room is playing again on February 27th at the Centre St. Ambroise (5080-A St. Ambroise). It’s beyond my recommendation.

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The Room is the product of a multi-threat who ended in multi-debt: Tommy Wiseau, a Hollywood nobody who individually raised six million dollars in order to make the film himself – since no one else wanted to. Wiseau wrote, directed, produced, executively produced, and starred in the movie, which he based on a play he created as well.

In short, the film exists only to showcase Wiseau’s glaring limitations as a director, writer, and performer. The Room stars amateur actors, whose voices are sometimes out of synch. They spend most of their time in a living room and on a rooftop, around which the digitally composed San Francisco landscape changes its relative location. There are four prolonged sex scenes, three of which are shot in the same bedroom, all of which are accompanied by R&B slow jams. The plot, I have heard, is also bad.

The film has become an Internet phenomenon and a cult classic. But getting your hands on it is tough. It plays at midnight screenings in L.A. and, oddly, Montreal. It is tradition that you BYOPS (bring your own plastic spoons [to throw]).

Bad movies are fun. But more than that, they offer a chance to explore the aesthetic of bad, the act of movie watching, and the nature of entertainment in general. I’m sure you share in my excitement.

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Outside, the street is dimly lit and narrowed by high snow banks. Though there are very few restaurants in the area, Pho Tay Ho is still hard to spot. There is a low awning above its door lit by white Christmas lights, and a wide window through which its tables and television can be seen.

I went to Pho Tay Ho with three friends in search of a meal I could eat for under $10, hoping that I would enjoy it too. Even though the menu was written in three languages, Vietnamese, French, and English, it was simple to choose from. The problem was that I had never eaten pho (pronounced “fuh”) before, and did not know what and how to order. Fortunately, one of my friends is a dedicated pho eater. He even has a term for that sensation you get when you eat too much too fast, and your ears burn and it’s hard to breathe or see, and all of a sudden most things seem funny – “pho freeze.”

He helped me order Bua Ba Xao Xa ($8). But it was too tasty to eat fast: beef broth and rice-noodles, flavoured with crumbly peanut sauce and vermicelli, topped with basil, mint, and coriander.

Traditionally, pho is a beef-broth soup served with rice noodles, bean sprouts, basil, and lime. The broth is made by simmering beef with cloves, ginger, and cinnamon for several hours; and adding spices until it develops a texture richer and spicier than typical Western broths. It is served with a variety of meats: beef flank, beef tendon, beef tripe, and so on. Chicken broth and meat is less popular but still common.

In fact, my other friend ate Pho Go, Long Ga, Tai ($8.50) – a pho with the heart and liver of a chicken. After dubiously stirring his chopsticks through the meaty pieces, he ended up enjoying it so much he promised to eat it again the next time we go.

And there will be a next time. Not only is Pho Tay Ho’s food impressive, its service and setting is too.

The restaurant is small – there are only eight tables – but it manages to appear spacious. The ceiling is high and the walls off-white, with bouquets of white flowers and scenic paintings of Vietnam hanging on the walls. It reminds me of a small house where all the furniture is in the right place.

Our waiter was genuinely kind and patient. He checked to see if we needed any help ordering without being invasive; when he caught us having a hot-pepper eating contest he laughed and offered more tea.

Pho Tay Ho is generally a friendly place. Sometimes, our waiter would make conversation with guests at other tables, while cooks would come out of the kitchen to have beer and chat. Another waiter actually sat down with a table of guests over a meal, and watched the boxing match on the television. But this is not to imply the service was slow; our food came within 10 minutes of ordering, and the exact moment we ran out of tea the cashier filled it back up again.

Being a perfect place for a casual date, dinner with friends, or enjoying a meal alone, Pho Tay Ho is surprisingly inexpensive. Combined, all four of our meals cost under $40, including tip. If you’re willing to travel the distance, I strongly recommend it.

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The poetry reading at Green Room on November 12 attested to this sentiment. Canadian poets Erin Mouré, Stephen Collis, and Norma Cole each presented some of their material to a warm and utterly attentive crowd. Green Room offered a snug and relaxed setting; its smallness fit the crowd, who sat mostly on the purple velvet couches along the exposed brick walls, on which a selection of oil-based paintings was on display. The bar, across from the couches, sold mainly beer. And near the back, faint Christmas lights hanging from an air vent somehow added a quaint appeal.

Cole, born in Toronto and now teaching at the University of San Francisco, was introduced as “a poet who enters the body of expectation.” Indeed, her poetry offered the sense of being led somewhere. According to Mouré, Cole’s poetry “keeps us awake, as insomnia does – by repetitions and jags of perspective, shifts. It lights gardens.” Cole seemed to playfully yoke startling and fragmented images together into a sinuous whole, all the while evoking a sense of sprightliness through her terse, nuanced language. A reading from “Natural Light” exemplified this: “music was/ playing, heavy/ breathing said/ hello, concrete/ proof, treeless/ space, nothing/ but sand.”

Collis’s poetry, on the other hand, was replete with Anglo-Saxon rhythms and tough, pounding sounds. At times echoing the style of “sprung rhythm,” invented by Gerard Manley Hopkins, his poetry affected a sense of uplifting, of tugging onward as if moving one’s feet with one’s hands. His latest book, The Commons, depicts contrasting tensions and freedoms in urban landscapes through the eyes of the “mad-peasant poet,” John Clare. We are lead on a search for commonalities between people and places in the privatized terrain of capitalist society, particularly in Vancouver where “colonialism is still rawly present.” “Blackberries,” one of Collis’s longer poems, follows Clare as he partakes in the urban berry-picking tradition in Vancouver, where – using whatever they can – locals collect berries as if picking apples in the countryside. Often droll and witty, Collis’s poetry was at once critical and sensitive: “Commodity, filling itself up/ just able to mute ‘oil can, oil can’/ through tin lips.” Mouré discussed body, mind, sex, poetry, and censorship by reading excerpts from a collection of her essays. Borrowing terms from Spinoza, she rendered the body as something made of “velocities and relationalities,” and discussed porn – “an expression of sex” – in relation with this image. But, she conceded, how much does the censorship of poetry in Canada even matter, if poetry is so unattended to? As Mouré said, “How far a fall is it, from the sidewalk to the gutter?” Overall, though, her stance on poetry was critical, funny, and inquisitive.

What we are pointing to in Canadian poetry at the moment, then, is a diversity of voices, not linked by any particular means of poetic expression, but by a general freedom – which, of course, is difficult to define. And the poetry readings at the Green Room offered direct access to a few poets who epitomized this diversity, each writing in their own particularly captivating voices.

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Nouveau Système lies on Notre-Dame Ouest, in an area that reminded me of Steel City, where at any given moment you might spot a Sylvester Stallone-type figure drifting right on by the diners, gas stations, and florists – possibly on his way to meeting other Sylvester Stallone-type figures for drinks and fisticuffs.

A greasy diner just like every other greasy diner, Nouveau Système’s counters boast scattered Pepsi cans and pizza boxes stacked high. Behind them, a few chefs mumble jokes as they fry everything imaginable. A selection of cheese and carrot cakes sits below a flat screen TV, while decade-old pictures of meals line the back wall. Completing the look were its tables and tiled floors – coloured in a forlorn and unclean teal – its tarnished pink booths, and its oddly abundant mirrors, seemingly placed to allow you to watch yourself eat.

In short, it looks like the Seinfeld diner, populated by King of the Hill’s cast, spending their mealtimes watching hockey, making desultory remarks, and growing bald.

My friends and I sat down in one of the pink booths, with the intention of eating a full meal for under $10. Having leafed through the menus, we all realized it would be impossible to spend any more. Système’s selections consisted of fries, gravy, chicken, steak, pizza, and spaghetti. Everything else was a combination of such staples.

The most instantly appealing option was “Pizzaghetti” – a pizza cut into the shape of Pacman, with spaghetti crammed inside its cheesy triangular mouth. Second to that was the “Michigan avec frites,” a large hotdog oozing with grease and covered by an onerous meat sauce, which settled elegantly over the plate.

Feeling somewhat risk-averse, I avoided such extravagant dishes, ordering the simple “Spaghetti and Chicken” dish. It was awful. The tomato-based meat sauce was straight-from-the-can; overwhelmingly salty, it enveloped my pallet with a certain je ne sais quoi aftertaste.

Meanwhile, my Chicagoan friend, Clay – who was in Canada for the first time – thought it appropriate to have a go at the poutine. It was so large it had to be shared. A friend reported that there was a hint of cinnamon beneath the mass amounts of gravy and salt. I couldn’t pick it out, but I trust it was there.

But don’t get the wrong impression. When you eat cheap, you get the sense you deserve food like this: there should be gratuitously large amounts of calories; there should be substantial health risks. “It’s the best kind of bad,” Emma said prophetically.

When we had finished eating, we collectively felt full, fat, and greasy. So, in a vain attempt to burn calories, we decided to examine the paintings on the wall.

The one with the most effective power depicted a blonde woman in a garden, looking like she either belonged in a cult or the fifties, thrusting a fencing sword into a small mirror – which was on fire. We concluded that she was piercing the fiery frame of eternity and Hell. “Avant-larde,” Clay said.

Next to her was a painting of an Olympian man dressed entirely in white, thrusting his fencing sword triumphantly into a heavenly sky, from which rays of sunlight enveloped him in an angelic spotlight. Presumably he had run a race – a race with a sword – because an applauding crowd had gathered behind him at the finish line. They too were dressed in white.

I couldn’t find a reason for the cultish motifs of light and fencing, but they certainly gave Nouveau Système a distinct charm. We had a very pleasant time eating, discussing the artwork, and digesting our food amidst the clamour of spitting grease and smoker’s cough.

Nouveau Système isn’t worth going to if you aren’t in the area. But if you ever wake up there, finding yourself next to Sylvester Stallone in one of its onerous pink booths, you might as well – you know – take a look at the paintings.

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It was my first time at La Société des arts technologiques. After first getting the sense that it looked like the type of bar Christian Troy from Nip/Tuck would visit on one of his womanizing sex-endeavours, I was impressed not only by its unpretentious layout, but also by the visual atmosphere: walls and curtains were lit by erotic shades of white and red, and between presentations projector sheets were adorned with moving images of digital art, pop art, and photography. The DJ played a collection of minimalist electronic tracks, loud enough to tap a foot or shake a hip to – and for conversational incompetence not to get too awkward. Together the layout and music operated congruously, contributing to a stimulating atmosphere replete with creativity and optimism.

After a large crowd had filled the venue, speaker Jason Prince opened the night with a succinct and occasionally theatrical lecture on the Turcot Interchange and its alarming environmental effects. Seven minutes later, activist Pascale Barret underpinned her argument against animal cruelty in the art world with disturbing images of starving and beaten dogs across the wide projection screen behind her. Then Paula Meijerink, an assistant professor of landscaping at Harvard, argued for the multifunctional usages of asphalt in the developing and redeveloping of urban areas.

Such was the diversity the lectures provided. The rapid exchange of ideas covered topics ranging from cookbooks and food to the pleasure and playfulness of the creative process, and from the relationship between cars, philosophy, and people to designing your own games on an iPod Touch.

What united the speakers was a sense of optimism about and a devotion to creativity. Whether the means of expression being discussed was photography, architecture, game-design, or journalism, each speaker promoted the importance of imagination and the value of ideas.

However, the diversity of speakers revealed that the brief nature of the Pecha Kucha talks means that it’s not always an effective medium. Some speakers rushed through their lectures, skipping slides and providing overly summarized accounts of their already brief presentations, while others seemed to lose track of time. Overall, however, the effect was that of a coherent synopsis: speakers made their key points and left the minor details out.

Aleece Germano, after giving an effective slide-show presentation on the Swap Team – what she hopes will be “North America’s biggest clothing swap organization,” – confessed that “it’s really hard to say everything you want to say in 20 seconds…. If you cough you’re finished!”

The audience seemed to appreciate the format. Avoiding exhaustive ramblings and trivial digressions is not usually a bad thing. “It managed people’s attention span well,” said Erin Taylor, a McGill student.

It’s no surprise that, since Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham of Tokyo’s Klein-Dytham Architecture formed Pecha Kucha in 2003, it has visited 237 cities worldwide. Its populatrity speaks to the capacity that the Pecha Kucha medium has for encouraging accessible discourse in today’s Twitter-obsessed society.

Pecha Kucha should be back in Montreal in two months or so. For more information, visit pecha-kucha.org.

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