I don't know who Tom Sandborn is but this is so nicely done.
Motivation for an opera, a play, an installation? Anyone?
Tom Sandborn
Vancouver Courier
Friday, July 25, 2008
I have a file in my computer called "No Future for Satire." It is dedicated to news items that support my favourite literary theory, the proposition that satire is dead as a form of fiction in the 21st century. The basic assumption here is that it is impossible to make up anything as grotesque as the six o'clock news.
A little-noticed decision by city council last September is now a standout piece of evidence in that file. The folks we elected to conduct city business decided, in their infinite wisdom, to spend $5 million from the $20 million Olympics Legacy Fund on turning two downtown parking lots into enormous outdoor venues. Those of us who can't afford the pricey tickets for Olympic events can gather there and watch them on huge TV screens and enjoy live entertainment. Talk about pay per view!
Motivation for an opera, a play, an installation? Anyone?
Tom Sandborn
Vancouver Courier
Friday, July 25, 2008
I have a file in my computer called "No Future for Satire." It is dedicated to news items that support my favourite literary theory, the proposition that satire is dead as a form of fiction in the 21st century. The basic assumption here is that it is impossible to make up anything as grotesque as the six o'clock news.
A little-noticed decision by city council last September is now a standout piece of evidence in that file. The folks we elected to conduct city business decided, in their infinite wisdom, to spend $5 million from the $20 million Olympics Legacy Fund on turning two downtown parking lots into enormous outdoor venues. Those of us who can't afford the pricey tickets for Olympic events can gather there and watch them on huge TV screens and enjoy live entertainment. Talk about pay per view!
The $5 million figure is only the city's share in this little bread and
circuses screening. The feds announced this April that they will put
another $10 million in taxpayer dollars into the funding for these
"Olympic Live Sites," and commercial sponsors will pony up the balance
of the estimated $23 million costs. The screens and stages will be
constructed at David Lam Park beside False Creek and at the old bus
depot site at Cambie and Georgia.
For this daunting amount of public/private investment, the city will get a few weeks of live stage and televised performance during the Games. Only the crankiest of civic critics (or perhaps a satirist who hasn't yet got the news that his craft is now out of date) would do the math and determine that this investment in Olympic entertainment ephemera could, if wasted on housing the homeless, create more than 100 fully paid units.
Far better, the people over at city hall have decided, to provide for a couple weeks of outdoor TV.
Besides, there is an opportunity here for the Olympics Legacy funding to actually create an ongoing and world class tribute to the things this city really values. As became clear this June when the city's highly paid Civil City Czar Geoff Plant took curious CEOs from such business heavyweights as Coast Capital Savings, KPMG and Telus on a tour of the Downtown Eastside's mean streets, the real future for that desolate section of Vancouver lies in poverty tourism.
We clearly lack the political will to end homelessness, so we might as well find a way to turn the urban poor and dying into a destination tourist attraction. Think Disneyland on the Harbour, or Poverty World.
But like Mr. Plant and his boardroom buddies on tour, most middle class tourists will not want to get too close to the smells and heartbreak on offer at Main and Hastings. Far better to be able to view the desperate and the dying through the antiseptic medium of TV. So let's not quibble about the costs of the Olympic Live Sites, or complain about the event's short lifespan and long debt line.
Let's turn the sites into ongoing Poverty Live Sites, with real time camera feed from key corners in the city's downtown killing fields.
They could become regular stops on city bus tours, and no doubt opportunities for a few more much needed Starbucks locations. Perhaps the publicly funded private police force the city has underwritten for the business community, the red-shirted Downtown Ambassadors, could be massed at the beginning of each shift for a bit of choral music to kick off the day's broadcasts before a day's work sweeping the poor away from business doorways and into camera range.
Let's give up any lingering illusion that the City of Vancouver is serious about waging war on poverty and get on with the much more lucrative and sustainable enterprise of making war on the poor and money off them.
Allen Garr is on vacation.
© Vancouver Courier 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
For this daunting amount of public/private investment, the city will get a few weeks of live stage and televised performance during the Games. Only the crankiest of civic critics (or perhaps a satirist who hasn't yet got the news that his craft is now out of date) would do the math and determine that this investment in Olympic entertainment ephemera could, if wasted on housing the homeless, create more than 100 fully paid units.
Far better, the people over at city hall have decided, to provide for a couple weeks of outdoor TV.
Besides, there is an opportunity here for the Olympics Legacy funding to actually create an ongoing and world class tribute to the things this city really values. As became clear this June when the city's highly paid Civil City Czar Geoff Plant took curious CEOs from such business heavyweights as Coast Capital Savings, KPMG and Telus on a tour of the Downtown Eastside's mean streets, the real future for that desolate section of Vancouver lies in poverty tourism.
We clearly lack the political will to end homelessness, so we might as well find a way to turn the urban poor and dying into a destination tourist attraction. Think Disneyland on the Harbour, or Poverty World.
But like Mr. Plant and his boardroom buddies on tour, most middle class tourists will not want to get too close to the smells and heartbreak on offer at Main and Hastings. Far better to be able to view the desperate and the dying through the antiseptic medium of TV. So let's not quibble about the costs of the Olympic Live Sites, or complain about the event's short lifespan and long debt line.
Let's turn the sites into ongoing Poverty Live Sites, with real time camera feed from key corners in the city's downtown killing fields.
They could become regular stops on city bus tours, and no doubt opportunities for a few more much needed Starbucks locations. Perhaps the publicly funded private police force the city has underwritten for the business community, the red-shirted Downtown Ambassadors, could be massed at the beginning of each shift for a bit of choral music to kick off the day's broadcasts before a day's work sweeping the poor away from business doorways and into camera range.
Let's give up any lingering illusion that the City of Vancouver is serious about waging war on poverty and get on with the much more lucrative and sustainable enterprise of making war on the poor and money off them.
Allen Garr is on vacation.
© Vancouver Courier 2008
Copyright © 2008 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc.. All rights reserved.
Leave a comment