Tax dollars from the very governments he’s convicted of plotting to blow up are helping ensure the curtain goes up next week on a “sympathetic portrayal” of one of the members of the so-called Toronto 18 terror plotters.
Shareef Abdelhaleem was found guilty earlier this year of two terrorism-related charges in connection with the Toronto 18 plot to bomb downtown Toronto.
Following his conviction, Abdelhaleem told court if he ever learned of another terrorist plot, he would sit back and let it happen.
Now he is the leading character portrayed in Homegrown, one of the plays in this year’s lineup of Summerworks, a Toronto festival that has received almost $90,000 from all three levels of government within the last year including a $30,000 operating grant from the city-funded Toronto Arts Council, $24,500 in operating funding from the provincially funded Ontario Arts Council and $35,000 from federally funded Heritage Canada.
One play. From a theatre festival featuring several plays. That's received $90,000.00 in total from the City of Toronto, the Province of Ontario, and the Government of Canada.
"Security" for the G-20 = 1,200,000,000.00
Theatre festival in story=0,000,090,000.00
Oh my fucking god.
So, what about this hideous play? Peat actually lets the playwright talk about her project honestly, but by this point, with the shit-head Sun cover and the Shit-head intro to the story, the damage is done:
Homegrown’s playwright Catherine Frid says the play is a “sympathetic portrayal” of Abdelhaleem, not of a terrorist.
“He wasn’t planning to blow up Bay and Front Street with a truck bomb,” Frid said. “People don’t know the whole story behind Shareef’s conviction, I’m not speaking for all the Toronto 18, I’m just focusing on the one person I met and whose case I followed and I’m telling that story.”
Frid said she’s not condoning violence or advocating terrorism and she’s not anti-Canadian.
“I’ve never even joined a political party but this is something, because I have a background in law, that just really stuck in my craw,” she said. “If you care about Canada, and we all do and you know what we’re all proud as hell of our country ... but you have to look a little bit beyond the headline and it is so easy to portray these guys as, you know, the big scary threat.”
As I said though, by that point in the story the damage has been done. The Sun has got its stupid cover, it's whipped its shit-head readership into a pants-pissing "shred our civil rights please!" frenzy, and it's given them yet another opportunity to shriek that the arts in Canada should be left to the vagaries of the strip-mall capitalists.
If this is Kory's handiwork, then he's indeed a revolting blight on our political culture.
6 comments:
The narrative pushed by the Stun is so predictable that hewing to it doesn't even need to involved the higher brain functions. Eventually critical thought will be rendered impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.
Yeah, they can write that bullshit in their sleep by this point. And their shit-head readers simply breath it in. They don't have to do more but skim the headlines and all the cliches fall into place.
Ignore the butt-ugly mullet-headed moron everybody.
Carping about $90,000 for a theater festival when compared to (insert budget $ figure here)(insert name of CDN government program you hate here) is always ridiculous, but when you think about it, art funding invariably is a lousy return on investment for a couple of reasons:
1) First and foremost, it's always going to be seen as a "toy" for the rich and middle/upper middle class, and when it is political in nature the works in question invariably preach to the converted.
and
2)If the work is controversial, it pulls the focus away from the message a group is putting out and puts it squarely on the issue of arts funding every time.
Apart from "big ticket" items like the symphony or ballet, most artistic endeavors are either low overhead (writing a novel while waiting on tables) or becoming low overhead (digital cameras and laptops have lowered the capital necessary for film-making) or could be low overhead (church groups, community centers and schools helping support theater/live music). Take it out of the public sphere, and while you might not be able to defuse all of the outrage, you will be able to keep the focus on the issue itself, and not how it gets paid for.
And finally, I'd also argue that it paradoxically encourages a perverse kind of conservatism amongst art museum directors. I'll see endless canvasses full of splatters and rectangles, and performance artists doing god only knows what, but I'll doubt I'll ever live to see a retrospective of John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage's work in a gallery, because if it's one thing fundamentalists and progressives can agree on, it's that female nudity is wrong, wrong, wrong, which is a shame, because at the moment, their work is a lot more cutting edge than whatever recycled abstract expressionism is currently being exhibited in the National Gallery.
Mark,
I'm going to have to disagree on that one. Not from any in-depth knowledge of the subject but the sense i have from friends and acquaintances in the arts community that the miserly public assistance to the arts creates a bare-bones infrastructure that sustains a permanent means of some sort of life for local arts communities.
As well, the theatre festival being trashed by the Sun propagandist is evidence of challenging works being given a chance to find an audience.
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