Scotiabank hardly knows how to bank. It should come as no surprise that they can’t throw an artshow.
I tried to attend this year’s Nuit Blanche. I put on a black suit, towed along my infernal device and a couple of infernal friends, thinking that there might be something to do or, at least, something to take pics of and tweet about. Thus armed, I strolled about the town. Even with a map, I couldn’t find Nuit Blanche. All I saw was Queen Street looking like a bad memory of an all-ages, Much Music sponsored rave party.
True, there were more people than normal on Queen Street; each one of them looking for something that wasn’t there, creating something that, sadly, was, and I did see some videos of hockey fights with an awful jazz band at MOCA and some sort of giant litebright in the park, but that was all. That’s what the banks call art.
The rest of this celebrated night of art? Where the fuck was it?
Was it in the galleries? The same galleries that are open the other 364 days of the year. Perhaps it was in the shoe stores or the parties at the hair salons? Wherever it was, it was somewhere I was not. Next year, I plan on being at home playing video games. This so called festival is complete waste of time. I’d rather tickle my cat.
Nuit Blanche is nothing but a bunch of drunken window shopping. You can do that any night. You can do that without a government grant. This is just Toronto’s typical excuse for culture. Publicly funded corporate advertisements attended by howling mobs of morons. Everyone pretending that there’s something to do other than shop and something to talk about other than why our money is being spent on this bullshit.
Why are we paying to destroy any genuine culture and replace it with these monstrosities?
It’s just glittery bullshit. And this year it didn’t even glitter.
2 comments
the Chairman
October 7, 2009 at 12:32 pm (UTC -4) Link to this comment
I was waiting for it, so thank you.
Enthusiastic revues in the local papers left me feeling suspicious.
Is it really that special to be up and about at night?
I read about a million people participating. Who comes up with this shit?
How reliable is this number?
I guess it’s safe to say then, that the event has pumped additional 50 million dollars
to the local economy. Isn’t it what they always say?
Anytime somebody farts the cash registers are ringing.
I stayed home, and tickled my cat.
I guess I am a freedom hater.
Ryan Oakley
October 8, 2009 at 2:08 am (UTC -4) Link to this comment
You know, that’s what gets me about the whole thing. Not so much that it’s a huge piece of shit but that everyone in the media pretends it doesn’t stink. Meanwhile, every single person I talk to in person about it is “meh” at best. Usually worse.
One friend brought in some eager-beaver buddies from out of town and they were all so disappointed that they just gave up on the whole thing.
The media’s failure here and their parroting of manufactured numbers, their laziness and ill intent reminds me of something I saw on the way to the Bush protest. Some guy on the bus was getting interviewed by City TV. He mentioned having a Starbucks coffee to wake up and was told he couldn’t say that on the air because they were sponsored by, if I remember right, Maxwell House.
These media twits won’t even allow some yahoo to mention his preferred coffee brand. And these are the people that we get data from? Like Scotiabank doesn’t advertise on all of them? These are the people warning us that the internet is undermining journalism. Fuckin’ puh-lease. They can’t even call bullshit on Nuit Blanche. And it’s just sitting right there. Steaming!