The Challenge of Organizing Arts Events in Ottawa: The Nomadic Bill Brown

As much as it pains me to say it, the next edition of Bill Brown's 1-2-3 Slam originally scheduled for Thursday, October 7 may not take place.  This is because The Cajun Attic, the venue where the BB123 Collective has been hosting the show for the past year, closed its doors for good yesterday.

Our poetry series has been a classic example of why it can be very tough to create and sustain an arts event in the city of Ottawa.  The show began at the Umi Cafe in Chinatown in September 2008.  In its first season, it provided a launching pad for a number of Ottawa's current crop of incredible spoken word artists - Graeme "Loh El" O'Farrell, Sean O'Gorman and Hyfidelik are just three of the slam newcomers who first got comfortable on the BB123 stage before moving on to brighter lights of Capital Slam and Urban Legends Poetry Slam.

But we experienced a difficult situation with double-bookings that led to the cancellation of the June 2009 show and the decision to move to Avant-Garde on Besserer Street. In the three months we were there, we had trouble finding traction and lost much of the audience we had built at Umi.  Our first anniversary show in September 2009 (where we introduced the 1-2-3 head-to-head format to Canadian slam) was our last hurrah.  We moved on to The Cajun Attic in October 2009, and hoped never to look back.

The space had most of what we needed - it was wired for sound, people could purchase food and drink, the stage and seating areas were in a nice physical layout, and for the most part things were smooth between the Collective and bar management.  Outside of one unfortunate double-booking incident, our year at the Attic was a fruitful partnership.

But bars and restaurants are capitalist creatures and this one didn't do enough to get its bills paid, so now that it's closed we are once again looking for another home.

The worst part of this is the extreme difficulty I have found over the last seven years, first with Capital Slam and then with Bill Brown, of finding solid, reliable venues of the proper size.  We are not music and our needs are different.  People having multiple conversations isn't considered polite at a poetry show.  Our events are usually best in rooms seating between 50-200 people, and there is a severe dearth of decent venues of that size in this city.  We are not theatre so most venues of that sort are inappropriate to the needs of a monthly poetry show.  The challenges are legion.

Capital Slam was nomadic for three and a half seasons before it moved into Mercury Lounge, and Bill Brown is suffering a similar fate.  Anyone got a 100ish seat venue with sound that might be open to hosting a poetry series once a month?  The challenges of organizing artistic and cultural events for Ottawans continues ...

Why Micheal Ignatieff Should Cheer for Tim Hudak

The Ontario government led by Dalton McGuinty is in trouble.

According to recent polling, the Liberals have fallen into a double-digit hole in voting intentions behind the PC opposition, and 7 out of 10 Ontarians think the government is on the wrong track. A series of missteps and the enduring unpopularity of the HST are behind the doom and gloom for the governing party.

Federal Liberals, take heart. The tide is turning in your favour.

Historically, the inhabitants of Queen's Park and Parliament Hill tend to be of differing political stripes. When the Tories were dominating provincial politics during the Davis years, Pierre Trudeau's Liberals was holding down the federal fort. When Frank Miller tripped on his own feet and lost Tory hegemony in Toronto to David Peterson, Brian Mulroney was running things in Ottawa. After Jean Chretien won power and Tories everywhere were in the doldrums, Ontarians took a chance on Bob Rae's NDP. And when Ontario soured after five years on its traditional third party, they yanked hard right with Mike Harris.

Now with the Harper Tories in federal power at the same time as the provincial McGuinty Liberals, Ontario is poised for another traditional shifting of political loyalty. Ontario holds its election in a year from now, and all current trends point to the PC's under Tim Hudak taking over at that time. I personally don't see how the Liberals avoid their fate -- no matter if their decisions turn out to be sage or folly, I believe the public has formed its enduring impression and will toss the bums out next fall.

Only the good Lord knows when the next federal election will finally happen, but I'd wager Harper would prefer to have it after the October 2011 Ontario vote. The irritants with the federal government are accumulating, though at this point it hasn't coalesced into a serious problem for them. At least not yet. 

But I think a time of accounting is coming for the Conservative Party of Canada. The Liberals seem to have finally comprehended that opposition status requires opposition action, and recent noise around the long-form census and the long-gun registry has exposed the government's wedge-sharpening, deaf-to-reason approach to their detriment. People are starting to look harder at their options, and as this continues I believe the Tories will begin to slowly bleed support to the other parties.

But ultimately, as history shows, a change in government at one level is usually followed quickly by a change at the other shortly thereafter. Ignatieff might want to send Hudak some clandestine encouragement, a Christmas card and well wishes this December.