When A Film Lab Cancels an AI Show, Who Gets to Define a Cultural Commons?

Works by the artist Rick Valicenti from the exhibit Playbot Companions.

We are pleased to welcome a new critic, Jason Wang, to Critics at Large.

In the first week of October, Toronto hosted a small but telling cultural collision. On Oct. 1, artist and designer Rick Valicenti opened Playbot Companions at 99 Frames Parliament Street: a two-week presentation of framed, AI-generated hairstyles linked by QR code to tiny “playbot” faces and backstories. The conceit is simple and unnerving — show the hair, hide the face, and force the viewer to complete the “playbot” as a person. But the sharper question is: what happens when intimacy becomes a design choice and companionship a consumable commodity?

Wild at Heart: Surviving Pynchon and Bolaño

(Bloomsbury.)

“We know that hyperbole is first of all a rhetorical figure of exaggeration but it is more fundamentally a moment of hubris. Hyperbole implies a risk that is in fact fantastic and fictional: that if I push it too far, I will become mad.”

--Marc Richir, 2015

In some very tangible ways, this new book by Samir Sellami, Hyperbolic Realism: A Wild Reading of Pynchon’s and Bolaño’s Late Maximalist Fiction. is unavoidably elegiac, and rightly so, given that Robert Bolano was taken from us far too soon by a liver ailment in 2003 at only 50 years of age. But it’s also rather celebratory, since the erstwhile Thomas Pynchon has just released his ninth novel Shadow Ticket, and his first in a decade, at 88 years of age, on October 7 of this year. He thus carries the torch of challenging literature forward in a way that illustrates, as Sellami’s critical study shows so well, how important his labours and those of Bolaño have been down in the mines of innovation fiction. I readily admit that I prefer reading supposedly difficult books by supposedly difficult authors. Of course I concurrently acknowledge the skillful means of such masters as Dickens, Chekhov, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald, as well as the rest of the canon of pared-down-to-essentials normalcy. However, I just feel that somehow it’s a better use of my limited time and energy to forgo the dining and laundry lists of quotidian narratives and instead plunge headlong into the intense dreamtime of Joyce, Stein, Faulkner and Burroughs.

Love Affairs: The History of Sound and Downton Abbey: The Grand Finale

Josh O'Connor and Paul Mescal in The History of Sound. (Photo: MUBI.)

In The History of Sound Lionel Worthing and David White fall in love over a song. Drinking in a bar on a Saturday evening in 1917, Lionel (Paul Mescal) hears David (Josh O’Connor), a fellow student at the New England Conservatory of Music, play a plaintive folk ballad Lionel grew up with and drifts to the piano. David, an orphan who grew up in privilege in Newport, Rhode Island, is a competent musician whose passion for American folk obsesses him. Lionel is a singer whose gifts have taken him off the Kentucky farm where he grew up and all the way to Boston, and he knows at first hand most of the tunes David has been collecting in his brain. The night they meet, they play and sing until the bar closes; then Lionel walks David back to his apartment and they become lovers. After they graduate, David goes off to Europe to fight in the Great War while Lionel returns home to the farm and his family. When the war is over David takes a job as a music professor in Maine. He reaches out to Lionel, inviting him to join him on a trip through the forests and islands of the state recording music on wax cylinders to preserve it for posterity, and the two men pick up their relationship where they left off. But David is now prone to spells of melancholy, and after they leave each other at the end of their journey Lionel stops hearing from him. He continues to write monthly letters to him until he finally gives up trying, in 1921. It isn’t for years, after Lionel has become first a singer in a world-famous Italian choir and then, driven by his own unsettled nature, a choir director back in the States, that he finds out what happened to the man he fell in love with in that Boston bar.

Memory in Motion: Laurence Lemieux’s Anne

Laurence Lemieux in Anne: "...lives linger and ripple forward." (Photo: Jeremy Mimnagh.)

Laurence Lemieux’s Anne is a work of elemental courage and restraint, a memory piece where ancestry comes alive in the present and takes shape in the body. The world premiere, which opened at Toronto’s The Citadel on Oct. 1, begins in near-silence. Lemieux stands motionless on a reflective Marley floor, upright in wide trousers and a pleated peplum shirt, a costume that bridges eras. Then, almost imperceptibly, her spine creases and her form dips. The veteran dancer-choreographer seems to age before our eyes, centuries carried in a body overtaken by the past.

It’s Elementary: Gaston Bachelard, An Intellectual Biography

(Reaktion Books, University of Chicago Press.)

“An element, we take it, is a body into which other bodies may be analyzed, present in them potentially or in actuality, and is not itself divisible into bodies different in form. That, or something like it, is what all men in every case mean by element.”

--Aristotle, “On the Heavens,” 350 BCE.

Perhaps the most famous of the horde of books by the prolific French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) was his marvelous tome from 1957, The Poetics of Space. It was so popular that it almost accidentally became a bestseller, at least by the standards of rarefied French philosophers, so that Bachelard nearly achieved the same stature as the pop media philosopher Marshall McLuhan. It’s certainly the one that had the most lifelong impact on me personally, since I first encountered it many years ago on the nightstand bookcase of a youthful chum who was an architecture student at the time. He kept it in pride of place in a charming little shelf-like display that contained only about three or four books. I borrowed The Poetics of Space from his shelf (possibly without his permission) during one visit, and I didn’t return it for thirty years.

Barbra Streisand, Robert Redford and The Way We Were

I opted to listen to Barbra Streisand’s 2023 memoir, My Name Is Barbra, rather than reading it in hard copy so that I could hear her inimitable phrasing – the quality that made me a diehard fan of her albums when I started collecting them in 1964, at the age of thirteen. (The first one I owned, a gift from my aunt and uncle, was the original cast album of Funny Girl, which had recently opened on Broadway; I played “Don’t Rain on My Parade” through so many times that it’s a miracle I didn’t wear down the vinyl.) I was lucky: Streisand’s movie career began the week I started university, when she opened in the film version of Funny Girl, and I saw each of those great early performances – in Hello, Dolly!, The Owl and the Pussycat, Up the Sandbox and The Way We Were – as they came out, on the big screen. What I mostly desired from the memoir was information about, and her personal response to, her early triumphs on stage (her scene-stealing supporting performance in I Can Get It for You Wholesale led to Funny Girl), television (where she, Joe Layton and Dwight Hemion reconceived the variety special with the explosively inventive My Name Is Barbra in 1965), LP and film. My usual experience with the memoirs of performers I love is that they’re fun as long as they chronicle the origins of a career but run out of steam once the writer has made the leap into stardom. And this one comes in at a shade under a thousand pages! Plus I haven’t cared much for Streisand’s pop albums and found only a few of her later pictures interesting – though, notably, I’ve never missed one. (Her film career had pretty much faded by the early nineties.)

Stratford and the Shaw Festival: New and Old

The company of Forgiveness. (Photo: David House.)

Stratford’s production of Forgiveness (at the Tom Patterson Theatre), Hiro Kanagawa’s adaptation of Mark Sakamoto’s book Forgiveness: A Gift from My Grandparents, marks the Canadian play’s eastern premiere. (It has been staged in Vancouver and Calgary.) The play’s dual protagonists are Mitsue Sakamoto (played by Yoshie Bancroft), and Ralph MacLean (Jeff Lillico), whose lives were shaped irrevocably by their World War II experiences. Ralph grew up on the Magdalen Islands in Quebec and lied about his age to get away from his abusive alcoholic father and join the first Canadian unit stationed in Japan, before Canada and the U.S. declared war in the wake of Pearl Harbor. He was captured and spent four years in a Japanese POW camp. Mitsue and her Japanese family were deprived of their citizenship rights and forced to leave their home in British Columbia in 1942, first for an internment camp and then to harvest sugar beets on a farm in the Prairies, laboring long hours for a pittance; their initial “home” was a converted chicken coop. The ban wasn’t lifted until four years after the end of the war. What links these two stories together is the romance that flared up in Calgary, where the two main characters wound up, between Mitsue’s son Stan (Leon Quin at the performance I attended, standing in for Douglas Oyama) and Ralph’s daughter Diane (Allison Lynch). The author, Sakamoto, is their shared grandson.