the ALLDERBLOB

From the general hubbub at Toronto’s Music Hall last night, where the first round of “City Idol” was played out, one short speech resonated above all. Surprisingly, it did not come from the stage, where 82 would-be city councillors had displayed their wares for a precisely measured 60 seconds at a time, but from an audience member, near the event’s end.

“Dave Meslin for Mayor!”

Even Mez himself seemed momentarily taken aback. He had been about to explain the method of counting ballots. Instead, he gazed into the darkened crowd in front of him to the source of the call, and grinned for a moment. “That’s not on the table right now,” is what he finally said.

Right now. David Miller, take heed.

Dave Meslin is a guy we’ve known a long time: a planner and an organizer, a schemer and a strategist. We still remember his presence at an early “Dundas EAST” meeting, when we were first talking about what to do about the problem of speeding traffic on Dundas Street East in this end of Toronto. The main problem with the street was that while it had four lanes of traffic, only two were ever busy at a time, and even that for only about one hour a day. The other 23 hours Dundas was an empty speedway. People who were used to the status quo could all see the problem, but no one had any convincing solutions. About the most radical gesture that anyone came up with was to change the centre lane to a counter-flow with a red light to regulate which direction traffic could go in. Think Jarvis Street. Not very nice.

Mez was asleep for most of the meeting, a result of his stretching himself so thin in those days. We had in fact just rode over from an ARC meeting together. But he roused himself suddenly and threw out a suggestion:

“Ban all car traffic.”

What?

“Just ban all cars from Dundas. They only need it for an hour a day at best. Let them all go somewhere else.”

This was a great counterpoint to the Canadian Auto Association types who had been proposing all the houses bordering the road be torn out to make the roadbed wider. It had the result of moving us into a fruitful discussion where the elimination of two lanes of car traffic could be painted as a reasonable compromise.

Today Dundas East is a remarkable success story, where cyclists and motorists, residents and pedestrians, dog-walkers and school kids all seem to be getting along just fine.

Good ol’ Mez.

Mez eventually found a pressure point to which to apply his creative forces: the Toronto Public Space Committee, which he invented and inspired for several years. The TPSC’s main agenda is the elimination of the glut of corporate advertising that fills public spaces throughout the city. “David’s” TPSC has taken on “Goliath” in many contexts. They’ve even won some battles against city hall. The group puts out a great magazine, “Spacing,” and seems to be a magnet for creative and inspirational projects about city living. Several of the writers in the uTOpia book had TPSC affiliation.

We last talked to Mez about a year ago at the corner of Spadina and Adelaide, and he mentioned he was burning out on the TPSC and wanted to do something else. He had been working with Toronto city councillor Joe Mihevic (he drafted, as we understand it, Mihevic’s proposed resolution to require sideguards on trucks in Toronto–the bill passed, but sideguards are still wanting [apparently it’s not enough that cyclists’ lives would be saved; it’s going to take the crushing of a Smart car or an Austin Mini before the province acts on the city’s resolution –ed.]).

Shortly after that we heard about Mez quitting the TPSC and starting a new group, called “Who Runs This Town?”

From this emerged the City Idol proposal: to reinvigorate city politics with new enthusiasm (only 38% of those eligible voted in the last municipal election), a talent show modeled on the TV reality programs would be launched. But instead of searching out pretty faces or good lungs, the search would be for strong ideas and new energy. The plan, part one of which played out last night in the Music Hall, is to let folks vote for the strongest candidates in a series of preliminary heats, with the eventual four winners receiving support and strategic counsel from the City Idol “machine,” in an actual run for council seats in the four districts that make up Toronto City Council.

“Tell us more about the City Idol machine, grampa!”

Ah yes. You have your machine politics, and then you have your politics machine.

Mez, it would seem, is an inventor as well as a showman.

Up on the stage last night, he told us to stick around. The speeches were over: some of them remarkable for cleverness, for clarity, for sense of style, or for moxy. All of them short.

The voting was over. We had marked our ballots with the numbers of the five contestants we most liked (no easy feat) and passed them to ushers in the aisles with collection baskets.

The “contestants” were in the lobby out front, Mez told us. We could talk to them as we pleased while the ballots were counted. The process would take about an hour, he figured.

The hall was cold and most of us were ready to leave.

“I give you the counting machine!” Mez said, and gestured to the white curtain behind him. It jerked upwards.

On stage was a fantastic spectacle of some thirty or so people dressed like old-time bookies or accountants, complete with white smocks and green visors, bouncing to a staccato keyboard performance from Bob Wiseman (of Blue Rodeo fame). We watched them tearing the ballots into sections, dropping them into basins and transfering them into dishes and thence into bags, from large to small to smallest, the whole process a remarkable metaphor of a truly transparent democratic process.

The rhythm and melody was kind of mesmerizing. We forgot our fatigue and the chill in the air. We got up and congratulated a few people we knew who had made a bid for the “Idol” title. We had a two-dollar chocolate bar. We talked with friends in the hall. And occasionally we watched the machine, tearing passing, dropping, and processing. As it processed the ballots it folded up on itself from stage left to right, until only one last table stood there, Mez and a few others gathered around it.

The rest of the cogs of the machine linked arms and did a conga dance to the beat of the music.

And Mez announced the cut: half would move on to the next level, half were eliminated. He was nice enough about it. He encouraged everyone to stay in the real municipal race, in fact, for the fall elections.

Mez wasn’t among the contestants, not for “City Idol,” nor for councillor. Not for Mayor, either.

But he won’t be eliminated. We figure he’s got the stage as long as he wants it.

Friends: what is up with the giant genetically modified motor company, G.M? And what of its evil twin, Fourd [Hitler’s fave, you mean? –ed.]?

We refer to news reports:

According to the ALLDERBLOB, it was Ford that was to greatly increase ad spending, remember?

With oil prices “surging” to $75 per barrel [How’s this for “union labour:” it now costs you 1/3 of one cent for one “man-hour equivalent” of labour that oil provides–go here or here and do the math yourself–ed.], it’s no surprise that car companies are feeling the pinch.

But whereas GM responds by laying on the big bucks for advertising, Ford [or “Fourd”, as the Canadians spell it –ed.] has backed right off.

What’s wrong with you, Fourd? Cat gotcher tongue?

Why not turn to that splendid ad agency, the Campbell-Ewald boys, of Warren Michigan, who helped make such a mockery of GM with that recent “roll-yer-own” campaign that we wrote about here. A little research [the term is “googling” –ed.] turned up this gem about Campbell-Ewald: it turns out they were a prime recipient (to the tune of $154 million U.S.) in P.R. funds provided by the Bush administration to prop up its lackluster image following “Operation Iraqi Liberation” [in White House spokesman Ari Fleischer’s immortal words: it spells “OIL” to me –ed.].

They’ve made ads for G.M. since 1914, and it’s only now that the corporation’s star is fading. In contrast, it’s taken them just a couple years to put U.S. President Bush’s name on toilet paper the world over.

Well, Fourd, they might be looking for work [can you say: You’re Fired!? I knew you could–ed.].

“What is a man anyhow? what am I? what are you?”

Walt Whitman, “Song of myself”

It’s coming up on my 47th birthday and in honour of the occasion I’ve been looking into the diaries I used to keep [“my” birthday? “I”‘ve been looking? Did someone eat a poisonous mushroom? Seriously, what is up? –ed.].

It’s me here, Jacob Allderdice. I write this stuff. I write the ALLDERBLOB. I’ve come to refer to myself in the first-person-plural, as “we.” I started doing it one day, and I liked it. I’ll probably go back to it [Whew. Ain’t that a relief! –ed.].

Walt Whitman once wrote: “(I am large, I contain multitudes),” (parentheses and all). In the same poem he wrote:

I do not say these things for a dollar or to fill up the time while
I wait for a boat,
(It is you talking just as much as myself, I act as the tongue of you,
Tied in your mouth, in mine it begins to be loosen’d.)

I’m with Whitman. We do not say these things for a dollar.

But mostly it’s to disguise myself, here behind my wall. I’m sitting here hurling the flaming lobs, but it’s not just me, right? It’s me and all the people in my boat: the people who can imagine a world without cars, and can see how a moratorium on automobile advertising could be a step in that direction. Anyway, that’s what I tell myself: I am large. I am Blobby.

But I accused Jacob Richler [that daddy’s coattail-riding hack, you mean? –ed.] of something in a recent post, and it rang hollow even as I said it. I wrote

I say it rang “hollow,” not that it rang untrue. Because how often is we hide our loathing of something behind an attack on its apparent opposite? It’s classic behaviour, from homophobes who fear the feminine in themselves, to zenophobes who despise their own mixed backgrounds, to zealots and bigots of all stripes who wish to god someone would just kill them and put them out of their own misery.

Maybe there’s a little of that in me, with my lashing out at automobile advertising. When I jeer at advertisers for being “artists who have nothing to say,” aren’t I secretly patting myself on the back for finally, finally, having something to say myself?

Well, I am.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, see. And it’s a terrible cliche, but writers all live in mortal fear of the blank page. The cliche that comes back when we wail about having nothing to say is “Write what you know.” Then we all shit ourselves over the question of “what do I know that’s worth saying?”

“Know thyself,” Plato advised.

So writers keep diaries.

From the time I was 13 or so, from 1972 on, I used to write with some regularity in a diary–or “log,” as I called it (because “diaries are for girls”). I logged for about 20 years in a fairly consistent fashion. In 1992 I got married and it’s around then that I quit the habit. Not that I had no more secrets. Not that I had nothing more to complain about. Not that I didn’t still need the “help” keeping a log is said to provide. But writing a diary lost some of its zip, somehow, as I neared age 35.

There are lots of cliches about people who write diaries. One of them is from the Andy Capp comic strip: Mrs Capp remarks to a friend: “Anyone who has time to keep a diary can’t have time to do anything worth writing about.”

The fact is, the woman I was living with, who I subsequently married, had come across a diary I had been keeping, and read enough of it to develop serious doubts about my devotion to her.

Oh, I was devoted, I assured her. I said I’d prove it to her.

We got married. And some time later, after many many arguments, we got divorced.

It’s a bad move to read the diary of someone you think you know.

Take “Travels with Charley,” for example. In it John Steinbeck, the great American novelist, champion of the downtrodden, writes a first-person account of his friendship with a little poodle. Steinbeck reveals himself to be a mean-spirited, conceited, unpleasant little man. You come away wishing you could turn back the clock to your decision to pick up that book. Ugh.

My dad kept a diary in his youth, he told me. He grew up in Montana, on a homestead ranch. He worked as a cowboy on the giant McNamara ranch. He was in the U.S. army during the Korean war. He went to university on the G.I. bill, where he met my mother, who was from a Boston family of Unitarians, her dad a banker and investment counsellor.

It might have been interesting to read my dad’s diaries. Maybe embarrassing, but interesting.

But he threw them out.

Let’s say you’re getting married yourself. Would you throw out your diaries? Do they represent baggage from the past? Isn’t it smarter or safer to jettison them so your balloon will soar? If you believe the mantra of the de-clutterers, any book you haven’t read for two years is dreck. Get rid of it.

So you’re getting married. Your girlfriend is one of those de-clutterers. She’s kept a diary for years, and one day she looks at the stack of them and says, “I’m gonna throw these things out.”

But you’re the one who takes the recycling box to the curb. You see the diaries in the LCBO bag where she puts them. Jesus, you’re thinking, someone could find these. Someone could find them and read them, and someone’s secrets would be there for the world to know.

You’d pick them up, right? You’d be protecting yourself as much as your girlfriend. You’ve got a stake in those books–assuming she’s written about you occasionally during the past five or so years. I mean, you’ve been together all that time. She would have written about your first date, and how she knew from the minute she laid eyes on you, and all that. She’d have written about your fights, and your struggles, and your high points together… Right?

Better fish those books out of the trash.

But take my advice: don’t ever look at them. Never, never.

Today everyone and their cousin keeps a diary, or rather a “log.” It’s no secret that web-logs, or “blogs” as the cool kids call them, are hot. According to Technorati, a new blog is started every second these days. No one calls them “bdiaries,” but not, I don’t think, out of fear that someone will question their masculinity. Hardly anyone calls them a “blob.”

Okay. Okay. Okay.

BIG sigh.

“What’s eating you,” your editor asks [Oh, sorry, was that my cue? Actually, I was napping –ed.].

Like I said, it’s coming up on my birthday, and I’ve been delving into those diaries I used to keep. It’s a big stack. A book a year, at least. There’s what, 25 of them?

You think it’s bad reading someone else’s diaries? Read someone else’s diaries and you’re sure to say, “Ew, gross. Is that really who you are? And I thought I knew you.”

It’s worse when you read your own diaries.

With your own diaries, you have two storylines to follow. You read the junk you wrote about your life, and sometimes it’s interesting, or sad, or funny, or dull. But you have this other line that’s in your head, like an editor tapping his fingers and saying “What a bunch of crap” […um… –ed.]. This other line is the story that you didn’t write. It’s what really happened, that you ignored, or denied, or didn’t notice.

You read your own diaries and what stands out are the half-truths, the self-agrandizing statements, the lies you told yourself in order to get by back then.

And it leads you to wonder: what are the lies you’re telling yourself now? Because you know one thing to be true:

All life long, the same questions, the same answers.

Samuel Beckett