by Dylan Passmore

Redefining Spaces: Three innovative methods of using public space

The role a city plays in the life of a citizen is a central one. A country can work to define the overarching politics of a person – can make them look at the world through a particular lens or contemplate their place in it. But a municipality makes the critical political decisions that touch your life in the most intimate way. In a real sense the city is the clothes that you wear, the water you drink, the food you eat; buildings and taxes, streetcars and school zones. That’s the attitude I had when I sat down in a drafty event room at the Harbourfront Center to hear Ed Keenan and Ivor Tossell host a panel called “Toronto Talks: The Future of our City”.

photo by Peter Morgan

The State and Impact of Canadian Arts and Culture Funding

The role Government plays in shaping the culture of a country is an uncertain one. On the one hand is the critical importance of forming a coherent fabric with which to build common values, and on the other is the danger that something critically important to the happiness and unity of a country is treated with a venal cynicism, as a political tool.

In every economic downturn the arts and culture sector is the first on the chopping block, and suffers a more severe proportional blow than any other. After all, even in surplus years it’s a favoured pastime in Canadian politicking for arts funding to be publicly denounced and the resulting projects ridiculed. But in this latest wave of austerity, the Harper Government showed a planned vision for the future of Canadian arts and culture – one that we as a society will hopefully learn to reject.

The 2012 Federal Budget shows a planned budgetary reduction of 191 million dollars between now and 2015. But it is the distribution of these reductions that are more telling than any amount of money.

"Abbaye de Marche" from the Ghent University Library

How Silence Works: Emailed Conversations With Four Trappist Monks

About two months ago I started reaching out by email to a group of people whose lives I wanted to know about and understand: The Trappist monks of Oka Abbey, in Quebec. Oka Abbey is the oldest Trappist monastery in North America. A century ago, it was a powerhouse; but in recent decades, the community had dwindled to a fraction of what it used to be. After leaving the Abbey to a heritage group, to be preserved as an historical site, the remaining monks relocated to a smaller retreat in the mountains north of Montreal.

Even if you’re not Catholic, you may have heard of the Trappists. They’re the monks that make those impeccably crafted beers. And the Trappist monks of Oka created a cheese worth drooling over that’s still widely sold today (though now it’s made by a Quebec dairy company). The Trappists are known for one other thing as well: they’re the only Western-based monastic order that still actively practices the “vow” of silence. (I put quotes there because neither the Rule of St. Benedict nor the practice of the Order actually contains a specific vow of silence. As I understand it, it’s an edict, a practice that’s a part of their lives that the monks happily follow.) It was this element of their lives, their dedication to the enshrinement of silence, that drew me to them. Not really knowing how one goes about approaching monks, I located list of monasteries in addition to the former Oka group and started emailing. It took a few weeks of very slow introductions to find the right people, but I ended up in conversation with four monks, two in America and two in Canada.

I was nervous; a lapsed Catholic who chased his ideals into a long education, I have a weakness to people who devote themselves more than I ever did to higher pursuits. But I found the group to be more than usually friendly, loathe to judge, voluble in writing and full of enthusiasm to correspond. They’d write me in the spare time they had between their daily work and daily prayer, most seeming pleased. Most asked that I respect their privacy, so their names have been removed here. This conversation was culled from four different interviews conducted using the same starting questions.

David French: Writing Home exhibition: The groundbreaker

David French is quite possibly the most important Canadian playwright you’ve never heard of. In the 60s a wave of writers started to push against the staid, classical nature of Canadian theatre. Their desire was for playwrights to write about Canadian lives for Canadian audiences, and the most successful of these was a young man from Toronto named David French.

Speed-the-Plow: A Hollywood story

David Mamet is unquestionably one of the heavy-hitters of contemporary theatre, and perhaps even contemporary literature as a whole. Over the past 30 years his name has become synonymous with a kind of stylized writing that is carefully, artfully structured in order to seem natural. If you find that characterization contradictory, imagine him as the verbal and aural equivalent of Impressionist painting. If a friend describes something as “like Mamet,” he means that the characters speak in short, powerful bursts, each overlapping and interrupting each other to create a sort of haze of words from which slips every now and then a slash of beauty.