Let’s Play “Spot the Canadian”
Editor’s Note
Ashtray. Jackass. Palm tree. Sorry. About. House. What do these words have in common and—aside from looking like an experimental poem—why do they belong in This Magazine’s annual culture issue? The first three are the words on which my American accent comes out (on the “A”s); the latter three words on which my Canadian one does (on the “O”s).
Growing up on the Canadian–American border, and later hopping between the two countries, as so many Canadians do, I never bothered separating my CanCon from my AmCon. Throughout my youth, my mom kept a picture of Pierre Trudeau Scotch-taped to the fridge. My grandparents kept one of Ronald Reagan. There was the American Sesame Street or there was the Canadian Friendly Giant, but I wasn’t all torn up about my choices. On Sesame Street, they taught Spanish, and that upset my world slightly but then I grew accustomed to it. I thought: Bonus, another cool language for me to learn random words in. House. Casa. Maison. Later, there was Martika or there was Candy, Boz Scaggs or Roch Voisine, Square Pegs or Degrassi Junior High. There was The Old Man and the Sea or Two Solitudes. There was…no American equivalent to Nobody Waved Goodbye—and that’s probably a good thing. High school attempted to sort all this out for me, as did university with its clearly divided courses: Contemporary CanLit or AmLit Between the Wars, Gwendolyn MacEwen or Willa Cather.
When I moved briefly to the southern US, my Canadianisms registered. My friend Kristin told me that the word “sorry” was supposed to be a homonym of “sari.” I took my friend Greg to an art house to watch Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet Hereafter. He fell asleep, admitting, “I don’t know about your Canadian filmmakers. What’re y’all about up there?” No one had heard of Windsor, Ontario, so I told them I was from Toronto. When they didn’t know Toronto, I told them I was from Detroit.
When I did move to Toronto, I learned that I had never really been Canadian enough. I began studying publishers’ book catalogues and following the media more closely. I realized that Canadians care about Canadians—while simultaneously being the largest foreign market of US culture.
My own audio-visual consumption recently: the White Stripes, the National, Neko Case, Last Days, The Aristocrats, The 40-Year-Old Virgin. On my shelf: Jonathan Lethem, David Sedaris, Jonathan Safran Foer. American culture goes in and out like water. Even in its ebb and flow, it’s constant: product begets media, followed again by product. Cuff the Duke, the Organ, Chad VanGalen, Lie With Me, Where the Truth Lies, Water, Derek McCormack, Tamara Faith Berger, Michael Turner: these, on the other hand, are just as refreshing but there are fewer ads telling me so.
Maybe my cultural conundrum comes down to my own Canadian insecurity, a matter of feeling or perception. For instance, Jason Anderson seems to have no problem at all with his identity. In his feature this issue, “Text, Lies and Celluloid,” American and Canadian authors and directors have many of the same things to say about the process of adapting work from page to screen—a process Anderson deems nearly as old as cinema itself. With comments from Canadians Clement Virgo, Tamara Faith Berger, Guy Maddin and Atom Egoyan; and Americans Liev Schreiber and John Boorman—the point here is not Canadian, American, or any other nationality, but culture itself. Culture, character, art and, surprisingly, fidelity. A fidelity to ideas.
Richard Poplak looks at another kind of fidelity in his feature, “Two Cultures: One Cheque.” Poplak explores the fidelity of regionalism and language as it pertains to film—and film funding. Going by Poplak’s theory that Quebec is—in the case of its winning film market—not the “distinct” part of the Canadian equation, but the established business model, confidence is everything.
Looking at a recent book by Los Angeles artist Jolene Siana, Brian Joseph Davis examines a Canadian band’s cultural place during Reagan’s ’80s. “To Ogre, with Love” is a 12-hole Doc Martens-view of how culture moves between borders. With the same notion of borderlessness, Katrina Cizek’s “The Real Deal,” stands witness to how we, as truth junkies, project our versions of reality all over the world, not only with our films but our photographs and our tendency to blog under duress.
Canada may be short on “bums in seats,” but we’ve no shortage of cultural producers. This Magazine invites you to enjoy them shamelessly—from our filmmakers to the new authors featured this issue courtesy of our Great Canadian Literary Hunt. As Marshall McLuhan said, “All words, in every language, are metaphors”—even, I’d venture, “ashtray, jackass, palm tree.”
Emily Schultz editor@thismagazine.ca
