The closing ceremony of the 2010 Winter Olympics: You could plotz

The closing ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics effectively promulgated a bold new image for Canada in the 21st Century, and I’m wondering if it’s still possible to call a do-over. Mulligan, s’il vous plaît?

We’re no longer hewers of wood and drawers of water. That was a different role for a different time, born of a different economy that once was resource based.

Now, in this new Epoch of Info-tainment, Canadians have anxiously emerged as baggy-pants Jesters to the World, the light-hearted stoner sidekicks to the leading players of the day. We’re Zonker Harris to America’s Mike Doonesbury — or, Chong to the USA’s Cheech, which is perhaps the more apt comparison, given Tommy Chong’s Vancouver origins.

Once we thought we could lead the world. A couple of generations back, Canada played an essential strategic military role in defeating the Axis. We created and supplied important new medicines and surgical procedures, sent educators, economists and churchmen into the world, and dispatched our brightest minds to the United Nations, to steer the planet toward a new era of peace and understanding.

Now all we want is for the world to chuckle along with us. The easiest explanation is to blame the audacity of dope, courtesy of the ready availability of the so-called B.C. Bud, reportedly vended openly on Robson, Davie and Denman Streets, Vancouver. I don’t think that’s entirely what’s behind the giggle-fit, however.

Beside which, that sound of merry-making might not be so bad, except that they’re laughing at us. All, that is, except the monied leftists of London postcodes NW1, NW3, and NW8, who have placed Canadians high on their current roster of global scoundrels, based on our oil sands, and our seal hunt, and also based on their heads being jammed seven-eighths of the way up their own Primrose Hill arses. But why whisten to the angwy widdle columnists of the sewious Wondon pwess, when it’s so much more satisfying to just make fun of them? That, after all, is what jesters do, especially when they’re one toke over the line.

Last night’s extravaganza of not-quite-gut-busting in-jokes that spiced up the Olympic wrap-up smacked of those self-consciously hep 1970s TV comedy shows that were all written for export by Hollywood Canucks such as John Aylesworth and Frank Peppiat, or smugly performed by stay-at-home talents such as Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster — which is to say, I found it more depressing than funny. Possibly you have to have lived through the ’70s in Canada to not-get the humor.

Take that ultimate ’70s-survivor Bill Shatner. Please. He can be a laff-riot in those Priceline commercials, and, as he’s grown thicker of frame, more bulbous of nose, and more coarse of toupee, he has taken on a notable resemblance to the great comedian W.C. Fields. That qualifies him as an adequate buffoon, but you don’t want Emmett Kelly, Jr. or any entertainment figure whose last name is “The Clown” purporting to represent your country, for goodness sake. Yet, there he was, brazenly stealing the late Pierre Berton’s mediocre ’70s line about a Canadian being someone who can make love in a canoe, and claiming to be a graduate of the “University of McGill,” which, he neglected to add, is sometimes referred to as Canada’s equivalent of the “University of Harvard.” With three-and-a-half billion people watching on television, it should have been something other than a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for Bill to reprise his very worst work from “The $20,000 Pyramid.” (Transponder message to Capt. Kirk: It can’t be self-parody if no one’s laughing.)

Whatever Lola wants

You want to know who else wasn’t funny? Catherine O’Hara wasn’t funny. Here you have a gifted comic whose characterization of Lola Hetherington can make anyone roll on the floor, howling. But Lola stayed home, and instead Ms. O’Hara presented herself as your dipso grandma who imbibed a couple of Rob Roys at a wedding and imagines that she’s being high-sterical. A brutal tableau, if ever there was.

It was a moment that called for an eloquent summing-up before the world. Instead, Canada delivered a zany re-run of “The Trouble With Tracy.” Our national motto, not once referred to during the ceremony, is A Mari usque ad Mare. That translates, from the original Yiddish by Rummy Bishop, as: “What, you’re not funny enough to work the Catskills Borscht Belt? Listen, boychik, you could always try Canada.”

Gordon Lightfoot 3, Grim Reaper 0

Lightfoot, no longer fleet o` feet, but still kicking

Gordon Lightfoot, a folksinger and a preeminent cultural figure up here in Canada, last week suffered the unkindest death of all, which is the widespread assumption by his audience and countrymen that he had died. The phony news of his expiration was spread via Internet-borne rumors. Ersatz-death, where is thy dignity?

Rompin` Ronnie: Tell me, wha'd I say

A couple of idiots who get paid by large news organizations to know better reported the baseless gossip as fact on their newspaper and TV websites, and somehow managed to get Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins, the merry old rockabilly character, to confirm the faux-report.  The Hawk is like a current-day Gabby Hayes, the kind of fellow whose opinion you might seek if you were looking for an incoherent response along lines of, “Dad-gum the dasted durn ding-dong!” His confirmation, if that’s what it was, of his friend’s death made the tragedy true, but only for as long as it took Lightfoot to receive word that he had croaked. (I use ‘croak’ here in a colloquial sense, to mean ‘died’. I did not intend to draw attention to the singer’s long-diminished vocal prowess, but we’ll need to raise this unfortunate aspect in due course.)

Lightfoot claimed to be just leaving his mid-town Toronto office when he learned of his death. Artists in other places work out of garrets, but I love that folksingers in Canada have mid-town offices. “Miss Stitt! Take some dictation: ‘Sundown, you better take care, comma, if I find you been creepin’ round my back stairs.’ Make two copies, and then get me Cisco Houston on line four.”

As it happily turned out, Lightfoot wasn’t deceased in the slightest, to paraphrase Michael Palin’s landmark dead-parrot sketch. The singer was as vital — and outwardly amused by the incident — as you would expect from any plucky septuagenarian stroke-victim with a precarious medical chart.

Like many, I found Lightfoot’s close brush with death to be unsettling. I have longstanding ties to the Canadian music scene, having once been beaten up as a child attending Danesbury Public School by Murray McLaughlin, the famously sensitive songwriter who lived on the other side of Lyon Avenue. I forgave McLaughlin years after the incident when he recorded “On the Boulevard,” a fine song about workingmen killing time on Lakeshore Blvd. in Etobicoke, the street where Lightfoot once earned a DUI citation after catching Adam Timoon’s pub gig at the Seaway Hotel. (Adam Timoon these days occasionally entertains the residents of the veterans’ nursing home where they’re looking after my dad. Small world, ain’t it?)

Critics of the newspaper industry are making much out of how the incompetents at Global News obliviously circulated the misinformation, because, you know, the only thing lower than an employee of those olde-timey media corporations is a self-described Internet-based critic of same. These blogospheric nudniks would use the undead Lightfoot to make a point about how the New Media are cleaning the clocks of the old, but this is like the naturopath celebrating when the oncology surgeon fails to fully remove someone’s tumor. Call it unseemly. The lesson to be gleaned is that all you consumers of news and information should paste a warning sticker that reads ‘caveat-freaking-emptor’ to your I-pads.

The main thing is that Lightoot is okay. I took in a Jimmy Buffett concert back in November -– uneasily stuck in the middle of 16,000 or so rabid, exceedingly moist and garrulous parrotheads –- and, from the stage, Mr. Buffett announced between songs that he’d rather be attending the Gordon Lightfoot gig that was taking place across town, but, sadly, he “had to work.” It seemed like an unguarded comment to offer to your paying audience, but give Jimmy full marks for honesty.

Taking his point, when we got home, my wife found a pair of decent seats for the final night in Lightfoot’s annual series of shows here in his hometown of Toronto. He draws a far smaller and less raucous audience than Buffett, and the crowd was rapt to a fault, which is understandable with the man’s grandchildren in attendance. There was a striking contrast in the styles of ‘70s singer-songwriters, I must observe: Buffett onstage barefoot in what looked like bathing trunks; Lightfoot, post-aneurysm surgery, post-mild stroke, wearing the atavistic costume of a geriatric elevator-operator in a budget-friendly mid-Manhattan tourist hotel. He looked too much like Seymour Cassel in “The Royal Tenenbaums.”

Lightfoot, who underwent a tracheotomy a few years back, seems to have appropriated the recent phrasing and vocal approach of his chum Bob Dylan, making the most of his new rasp, and using muted whispers to a powerful effect. When the 71-year-old crooner, absent his baritone, sang my favourite of his songs, “The Watchman’s Gone,” well, you have to know it was an emotional moment:

“If you find me feedin’ daisies/Please turn my face up to the sky
And leave me be/Watchin’ the moon roll by
Whatever I was/You know it was all because
I’ve been on the town/Washin’ the bullshit down.”

That is telling them. Those incandescent lyrics, written when Lightfoot was 36, half his current age, foresaw the defiance of a man late in his life still able to sum up the grit and the vocabulary to tell the big cruel world to go screw itself. Hank Snow may be dead; Wilf Carter is gone, but Lightfoot and Lenny Cohen and Stompin’ Tom Connors are all still around to tell you what it is you need to know: Keep moving on, folks. Love calls you by your name, on a Sudbury Saturday night.

Lightfoot earns last word, this time, a perquisite of genius. “You’d better take care,/Knowing the watchman’s always there.”

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Continue to click, to enjoy more jolly tales about other musical stars of tomorrow, including Lotti Golden, Bob Dylan v. Elvis Costello, and Burton Cummings.

Introducing Vark.com: Why think when you can get a friend to do it for you?

My high school buddy – now a somewhat successful writer, then a surly malnourished misfit, as were we all – tells me he’s off tonight to some downtown hotel for an annual charity event called the Booklovers’ Ball. I could only respond with some high-school badinage on the level of, “You freakin’ aren’t!” But he freakin’ is, and took time to explain the problem this poses, since it’s a formal occasion and it seems he is no longer able to squeeze into his cummerbund, and evidently you don’t just show up at the Booklovers’ Ball wearing flannel over your Johnny Rotten T-shirt.

He tells me he is dreading the event for non-sartorial reasons, as well. At a previous shindig, he was seated next to the well-known local scribbler, Mr. _______-________, winner of the coveted Big Ass Prize in Canadian Letters (named to memorialize a distinguished Montreal poet.) I’m familiar with the acclaimed fellow’s work, having received a wrapped copy as a Christmas present from someone who apparently doesn’t know me very well. It’s a fact that, owing to an unusual eye-muscle reflex, I’ll read almost anything — cereal boxes, fine print on parking tickets, even, if stuck in the waiting room of the oil-change place, the Toronto Star — but, sakes alive, this book was drivel. My friend didn’t much care for the award-winner as a soiree companion, either, and describes him unflatteringly, using a raft of inventive writerly terms, two of which rise to the level of poetry: yutz, rhyming precisely with putz.

What ho, booklover!

I mention all this because there are fewer and fewer book readers out there – check it out here, if you don’t believe me – and those who stick with the practice are getting kind of defensive about it, which could explain the need to dress up in toff attire and declare one’s self as no mere reader, but a Booklover, and capitalized at that. Might as well go the whole hog. The thinking must be that books are on their way to extinction, and so are tuxedo-rental places. Under those circumstances, why not combine the two disappearing phenomena during one celebratory evening spent locked up with bores in a musty banquet hall?

Put it that way, and I’d rather be pretend-bowling on the Nintendo Wii. Or Twittering. Or Aardvarking, which is well beyond Twittering, and is the latest thing you can do on your computer in order to avoid having to make use of any of your brain cells.

Here is how Aardvark works: Suppose you need some information. We’ll assume, based on trends, that you’re way too lazy to read a book. You could always spend a few seconds seeking enlightenment through a computer search, but, face it, probably you’re no more self-reliant than you are ambitious, or knowledge-laden.

If you resemble this profile, you might just be ready for Aardvark. This latest wrinkle in social networking is designed to relieve you of the burden of having to know anything, by transferring the responsibility for correcting your woeful state of ignorance — to your friends.

At root, this offers some appeal. I was all set to try it out. I had my sample question formed and ready to roll: “What is the one beer to have, when you’re having more than one?” (Only possible answer: Schaefer is the one beer to have, when you’re having more than one.)

And then I realized that the Aardvark planned to send this foolishness out to everyone on my Facebook page. This concerned me. First of all, my Facebook page is a prank, just a no-class put-on, done under a pseudonym. All my Facebook friends, and there are scads of them, are unknown to me. They are strangers assembled by chance solely for unspecified experimental purposes.

Dale’s dictum: Don’t bother trying to win friends or influence people. That was it, right?

But the main thing is, I really don’t care what any of my actual or simulated friends have to say about most subjects — and I think I’ve demonstrated that to everyone’s satisfaction, time and again, over a sustained period. In doing so, I’ve possibly misunderstood Mr. Dale Carnegie’s established principles of abusing friends and antagonizing people, but all that’s in the category of water-under-bridge.

My fear is that if I turn now to my social network – or, even more perilously, to my mischievous alter-ego’s social network – and ask for a helping hand, they will respond as I would to their requests, with dangerous instructions intended to mess them up badly. The best way to clean a clogged garbage-disposal unit? Try jamming your hand in it, and then get someone to turn it on. Surgery or radiation? Neither; just follow the Suzanne Somers diet. Best place for fine dining in Montreal? Dic-Ann’s is pretty good.

It’s possible that Aardvark, whoever or whatever Aardvark is, may not have foreseen such regrettable tendencies in some users to mislead and deceive. Be that as it may, it is not as if anyone’s assistance is required to answer the one question I’m really dying to ask. And that is: Is it a good idea to pester those in your circle with pointless and unnecessary questions?

You needn’t rush to answer that.

Certainly. Surely, my fine Aardvarkers, it is always a good idea.