Vignette: Smoke and Mirrors

There appears to be an anomaly in the City of Ottawa’s anti-smoking by-laws.

Last week, the Ottawa Public Health Twitter account posted a link to information about the health risks of shisha.  As shisha (also known by a whole lot of other names) is basically molasses-soaked tobacco smoked through a communal water-pipe (known sometimes as a hookah), this is no surprise.  It is accepted wisdom that smoke inhalation carries with it certain inherent health risks.

Smoking in public places, such as shopping malls, has been banned in Ottawa since about 1995.  It’s been against the by-laws to smoke in bars and restaurants for a few years now; I think the last over-21 cigar lounge closed shop a few years ago (to be replaced with Yet Another Uns-Uns Bar).  Smoking is still permitted on unenclosed patios, but that’s being gradually phased out too.  You can’t smoke within spitting distance of a bus stop, a government building entrance (which could be anywhere in Ottawa), or a healthcare facility.  Within the year, it’ll be illegal in public parks as well.

In short, in Ottawa smoking—let alone smoking indoors—is officially frowned upon.

You may imagine my surprise, then, when I first visited Garlic Corner (at the corner of York and Dalhousie in Ottawa’s historic Byward Market) and found that, in addition to being licensed, this shawarma spot offered free shisha to its customers.  They just bring out a big ol’ hookah, put it on your table, light your choice of flavoured shisha, and you and your friends sit there puffing away on the damn thing.  It’s not a secret—in fact the large, full-colour sign advertising this free perk is as prominent as their sign advertising vegan breakfast.  (I used to live two blocks away.  I still don’t think I went there often enough.)

I had visions of sitting in the place, enjoying a Large (because their Really Large is actually Ridiculously Huge) falafel sandwich, when all of a sudden a team of by-law officers bursts in through the windows, wrestles a table of short-short–wearing Lebanese girls to the ground, and fines everyone for Conspiracy to Smoke Tobacco Indoors.

I figured it was only a matter of time.

On Saturday, my friend Jean-Pierre and I were kicking around in the downtown heat, looking for refreshment.  At my urging, we bypassed Dunn’s Deli in favour of Garlic Corner.  While he bought himself an iced tea and got us a seat with a view, I got in line to order a sandwich.

Behind two by-law officers.

Probably these gentlemen got the impression I thought they were cute, the way I kept sneaking sideways glances at them.  I was dimly aware that outside on the (enclosed) patio, a couple was smoking cigarettes at their table.  At any moment one of the officers would notice, and the other one would turn around and see the sign offering Free Flagrant Flaunting of Ottawa’s Anti-Smoking By-Laws.  Great, I thought, I’m not going to get my falafel sandwich because they’re going to shut the place down.  One of the officers leaned in closer to his partner.

“They have shots,” he said, pointing at a sign advertising the availability of cheap, colourful shooters in what looked like test tubes on a desert island.  The guy behind the counter was slicing off chicken for their sandwiches.

“Hey,” the other officer asked, “has your beer always been this cheap?”  He pointed at another sign.  ”How do the bars around here compete?”  I looked directly at them, and I’m sure my mouth was open.

“We probably shouldn’t have one,” said the first officer.  I was about to say no, you’re in uniform, when my eyes re-focused on the table between and behind the officers, where the waitress had just set down a hookah for a couple.

Here we go, I thought, the moment of truth.

Then: I’m not going to get my bloody sandwich.

However, the two by-law officers did not appear interested in the slightest.  There’s no way they could have missed the shisha—on the table, the whole contraption comes up to about eye-level, oh and it emits smoke.  But there wasn’t even a raised eyebrow.  They simply paid for their sandwiches and left.

So.

Either there’s a loophole in the by-law you could blow smoke rings through (which, as an inveterate pipe smoker and proponent of civil disobedience, fills me with hopeful optimism) or these guys are rather openly on the take.

I suppose I’ll have to read through the by-laws to find out.

In the meantime, I shall continue to enjoy the anomaly.

Ottawa Theatre Confidential takes a breather

Loyal fans (our metrics tell us there are nearly three dozen of you) of the Ottawa Theatre Confidential podcast will have noticed that, since our post-Fringe episode, we haven’t released anything.

Fret not!  Ottawa Theatre Confidential is far from defunct.  Tania (Levy), Heather Marie (Connors), and me (myself) are still very good friends and have not had more than the usual artistic differences (without which the podcast would be boring).  In this case, there are simply life situations that require the attention we would normally devote to putting together the podcast.  However, we have plans to resume producing regular episodes in September(ish).

To make up for the lacuna, we have a couple of improvements up our collective sleeve.  For one thing, we are in the process of moving the podcast to a more suitable host (there have been some persistent problems with billing; my bank has made an awful lot of incidental money off of this podcast but I’m not bitter).  This will likely be transparent to our loyal fans and subscribers (you do use iTunes, right?) but it will ensure that we can reliably and consistently deliver you a product worth listening to.

On that note, we’ve had various issues with sound quality in the past, seemingly intractable despite Heather Marie’s practical common sense suggestions and my efforts to correct recording issues with a barrage of digital effects.  Having had the recent opportunity to observe operations in a professional sound studio while recording voice-overs (I get all the cool jobs), I think I have a more solid idea of how to produce the best quality sound product we can with the equipment we have.  Will it work?  I guess we’ll all find out.

So, while you’re waiting for the next exciting episode of Ottawa Theatre Confidential to come down the pipe, why not catch some theatre?  Odyssey Theatre is celebrating its 25th Anniversary Season with their production of The Fan until August 21, A Company of Fools continues to present Antony and Cleopatra in parks across the city until August 20, or if it’s not quite a sit-in-the-park day, the Ottawa Little Theatre production of The Patrick Pearse Motel opens on August 16.

Plenty to keep you occupied.

Since They Can’t Take Grants for Granted…

The government you helped elect (perhaps not directly, if you’re actually reading this) is doing great things.

By now, you’re well aware of the federal government’s highly questionable decision to withdraw funding from Toronto’s SummerWorks Festival.  While I’m not quite ready to say that I categorically believe this was in direct response to the festival’s production of Homegrown, this is the same government that has a documented history of lying to the public, altering documents in a way that would get a private citizen thrown in jail, castrating organized labour, and blinding itself in both eyes by crippling its own Census.

So, you know, I wouldn’t put it past them.

Then again, there’s only so much grant money to go around, and more and more arts organizations competing for the same pool of cash.  It seems reasonable that established, successful concerns might see their funding fall off as the government tries to spread it around to encourage groups just getting their start.

One way or the other, the arts have to find a way to depend less on the financial support of a small-minded, dishonest government that seems intent on marching us straight back into the 19th century, and more on… well, us.  The general public.

It’s not a begging game.  The arts are more use to society—and individuals—than can be put into words alone.

For instance, there’s no better way to learn good, persuasive English (or any other language) than through the study of literature: poetry, plays, and novels.  Is it important to learn good, persuasive English?  Oh, I should say its rather important.  The number of people boasting communications degrees who can’t compose a single simple coherent sentence… why, I heard just recently on the CBC (what’s left of it) that they’re thinking of taking Shakespeare out of the Grade 9 and 10 curricula.  Yet almost every day I see someone on Twitter swept up in the throes of an epiphany, some new revelation about the human condition, that was eloquently summarized in a heroic couplet about 400 years ago.  It turns out that artists have been distilling human experience for as long as our species has been able to make marks on rocks.  Why ignore all that work?  It may be too late to redo high school, but if you read a little and go catch a little theatre, you might learn something and save time by not reinventing the wheel.

Any person involved in business should certainly experience, if not study, the performance arts.  I’ve been to too many truly awful presentations; the average person could stand to take in some theatre or some spoken word to see how it’s really done.  You’d be surprised what a little stagecraft or attention to cadence will do to your ability to influence a roomful of people.

By the way, have we thought of what we’re doing to the cultural record?  As it stands, if future generations write of us at all (provided they can still write), what will they say?  That our popular symbols included the Guy Fawkes mask, lifted wholesale from history?  That half of our correspondence consisted of repeating the same phrase over and over again with minor variations (I believe you call that a “meme”.  I recommend looking up “memetics”).  That people were willing to pay money to hear already well-known (misogynistic) rap lyrics overlaid on already well-known classic rock guitar riffs?  Will this be known as the Age of Copying?

Or dare we encourage the creation of something new?

How do we go about doing this?

Probably the most obvious way is to choose your favourite sector of the arts (theatre?  dance?  the visual or plastic arts?  music?  literature?  film?) and devote as much of your entertainment dollar as you can stomach to enjoying that art.

Maybe you can spare some of the cash you would normally export to the States by going to see shitty movies, and catch a local theatre production instead.  Or you could divert the forty bucks you drop on alcohol any given week to buy a locally-written book, throw five dollars in the box at an art gallery, catch a local band—and still have cash left over for a pint!  If you’re bound and determined to exchange your pay for a headache at the pub, you could at least buy beer from breweries that sponsor the arts (McAuslan comes to mind).

Speaking of sponsorship: if you own or operate a small or medium business, sponsor an arts organization.  Large businesses do; heck, the banks do, and nobody’s better at making money than the banks.  Follow their lead.  Most arts organizations will be more than happy to put your name on everything they print and the walls too if you help them pay the rent.  Artists are also fiercely loyal customers and clients with very long, accurate memories.

The greatest artistic renaissances in history occurred after periods of great oppression—helping to end them, and lift entire societies out of ignorance and economic depression.

I’d rather prefer we headed it off at the pass this time.