TCAF is over and summer classes have officially begun. To you summer school students, this means that, among other things, however much the sun might shine, however balmy the breezes might be, however sweet cold drinks might taste as you enjoy them in the blistering heat, you can never fully escape thoughts of homework and midterms and reading. But don’t despair, dear reader: we at blogUT are committed to providing you with information on all the best, most obscure ways to beat the summer school blahs. This past month alone we’ve given you a tip on some awesome theatre, an unusual contest, and the comics event of the year. Today, we’re following up on that grand tradition with the Lost Episode Festival Toronto.

The Lost Episode Festival Toronto (LEFT) is an artist-run, non-profit film festival which showcases independent productions of lost episodes. Artists’ projects are screened for the public in the weekend-long festival at the historic Bloor Cinema, where their creativity and quirkiness can be appreciated by all. For only $5, students get in to both days of the festival, June 1 and 2.

Although they already have some awesome-looking projects on the docket, including the Canadian premiere of Star Trek Continues and lost episodes of The Twilight Zone and Batman, LEFT is still looking for submissions. If you have some time, a camera, some friends, and an idea, you should totally give it a shot.

You’re twitching. You’re fidgety. You’re nervous. You know why? ‘Cause summer school starts next week. Sucks, don’t it? Only one measly weekend separates you from the tragic cruelty of summertime studies. “One weekend,” you say, “that’s not so bad! Maybe I can do something awesome in that weekend so that when classes start, I’ll feel like my vacation lasted more than two weeks!” That’s a pretty ambitious goal, friend. Fortunately, I think I may be able to help.

The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) is an annual, publicly-funded, entirely free event dedicated to supporting independent comic book makers and retailers from Toronto and abroad. Spread over two days at the delightful Toronto Reference Library (delightful because you’re at a library and you’re not studying! Ha!), TCAF attracts exhibitors from all over the world who set up their booths to sell their works, chat with fans, sign autographs, and doodle the occasional doodle. Most exhibitors are known only within small circles, so don’t be surprised to find a hidden gem (such as my great discovery of 2011, pictured right). Conversely, some guests are as famous as graphic novelists can be: this year’s headliner is Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winner of Maus, which also happens to be assigned reading to about five or six courses each year.

TCAF is large enough to take up almost the entire library, and it’s impossible to get through it all in one outing. Although entrance is free, you can’t really appreciate the event without bringing some money to drop on a beautiful new graphic novel or, if you’re feeling thrifty, one or two micro-comics (which were my great discovery of 2012, one of which is pictured left). There are also some free events, such as talks by the festival’s guests and book signings. Pins, buttons, and stickers are sometimes free but always awesome. In any case, it’s a big enough venture to be made into a day trip, and an excellent one to be had right before school begins all over again. (Caveat: Former/future students of ENG235 might not experience this as recreationally as others). 

As I sat in my seat in the beautiful new Daniels Spectrum theatre, excitedly awaiting the first act of the revolutionary musical Falsettos, I heard a man behind me say, “it still has that new theatre smell.” That it did, not yet one year past its opening, but what I found on stage was in startling discord to the environment in which it was presented: a musical, set in the late ’70s and early ’80s, that deals with coming out, psychoanalysis, the perils of Jews playing sports, and AIDS. It is, in short, a musical quintessentially of its time, a feature to which costume designer Alex Amini pays close attention with her period dress and hairstyles. Watching Falsettos at Daniels Spectrum felt like an invitation to compare two eras, separated by only three decades but a world of difference, and to determine what is still relevant and meaningful in a show like this in a time like now. It turns out, there’s an awful lot.

Falsettos, in the form in which it is currently presented (it has undergone many changes since it originated as a one-act in 1979), tells the story of Marvin, a New Yorker who, upon coming out as gay and leaving his wife for a young lover, tries to keep his unusual Jewish family together. His young son, Jason, is frustrated by the changes around him, which multiply when his father’s former therapist falls in love with and then marries Jason’s mother. The entire show is sung through, and although the styles of music vary depending on the content of the song, all orchestrations are centred around the staples of the era, with piano and drum playing the most prominent roles. Each scene is its own vignette; each vignette has its own theme, style, and purpose in the overall non-linear plot of the show. By the end, a series of explorations of love, lust, faith, marriage, monotony, and sanity converge upon the sudden contraction of an incurable illness by Martin’s lover, Whizzer. Although it spans a broad emotional spectrum, from humorous and kitschy to sombre and philosophical, Falsettos maintains a constant sense of humour and wit which make pleasant scenes more pleasant and bleak scenes, by contrast, all the more noticeably bleaker.

Falsettos is driven by stellar performances from its entire cast, among whom Eric Morin as Whizzer and Stephen Patterson as Marvin stand out for their power and tenderness, both emotionally and musically. Also always of note is young Michael Levinson, who once again impresses with his verve. Although all cast members sing well, it is the drama and theatricality, not musicality, that make Falsettos so notable. Tim French’s brilliant choreography bridges the play and the musical by turning the entire stage at times into an extension of the subconscious and, in doing so, draws out every inch of drama and profundity in the pop-inspired score.

Stephen Patterson, Eric Morin in Falsettos (2013). Photography: Joanna Akyol

Falsettos is difficult to categorize. Its components have been featured both on and off-Broadway; its style is comedic but its content is tragic; its music and plot seem antiquated even though they are younger than much of the cast. It is a musical of contradictions and eschewed binaries, the [only] kind of show that would make itself up of a deliberately bizarre assortment of people and then show that they are all one family. Even though coming out and AIDS are no longer quite as pressing as they were at the time of the show’s creation, Falsettos can be enjoyed for so much more than the things that happen to its characters. It is ultimately a musical about people who form bonds with each other, whether they want to or not, and then discover the strengths and weaknesses of those bonds when faced with the challenges from the world, and from themselves.
Note: Students receive 20% off the ticket price. 

Falsettos

music and lyrics by William Finn

book by William Finn & James Lapine

directed by Robert McQueen music direction by Reza Jacobs
choreographed by Tim French

starring
 Darrin Baker, Sarah Gibbons, Sara-Jeanne Hosie, Michael Levinson, Eric Morin, Stephen Patterson, & Glynis Ranney

set design Patrick Du Wors lighting design Kimberly Purtell 
costume design Alex Amini sound design Adam Harendorf

stage manager Melanie Klodt apprentice stage manager Rachel Dawn Woods
production manager Sandra Henderson assistant musical director Tara Litvack

We come to university to learn, or at least that’s what my dad says when he sees me blogging and shakes his head. It is true that classes impart a lot of useful (or not) information, but it is also true that much of what we learn comes not from lectures or exams, but from frantically preparing for lectures or exams. By half-way through their first year, the average student has mastered the all-nighter, the cram session, and the ability to meet a seemingly-impossible deadline on nothing but determination and Red Bull. We learn these skills to help us learn other things, of course, but it’s also so satisfying when we can apply them to other situations.

Take, for instance, Lost Episode Festival Toronto‘s upcoming 50 Hour Film Competition. A creative contest open to anyone and everyone with a camera and some friends, this local challenge encourages aspiring film-makers (or anyone else interested in winning terrific prizes) to re-create “lost” scenes from famous TV shows, or to make fake advertisements or trailers, all in only 50 hours. Remember those consecutive all-nighters for that econ final? Remember cursing the time and energy spent in learning something you thought could not have any practical application? Well, now you can put at least some of that experience to use.

The competition begins on the night of Friday, May 3, when each team is given a character, a line of dialogue, and a prop to incorporate into making a film. The teams then have only 50 hours to write, shoot, and submit their masterpieces. The entries will be evaluated by the festival’s judges and the winning teams will be awarded cash, prizes, and all the glamour and prestige that comes with winning a film festival. There’s also an audience choice award, for the film-makers who somehow manage to go commercial in under 50 hours. All entries will be screened in the big, beautiful, fully-licensed Bloor Hot Docs Cinema, only a few blocks from campus

To participate, simply sign-up on the festival website here. Participation costs less than a statistics textbook and is, I’ve been told, at least twice as enjoyable. Anyone of any level of skill and experience is welcome to enter, and a team can be of any size. It’s the perfect activity for those, like me, who have only a few weeks between the end of exams and the beginning of summer school to have a little fun. Or a lot of fun. Or 50 hours of fun.

First, I’d like to apologize. To poetry fans. To English students. To anyone who’s had any cursory exposure to literature and the search for deeper meaning in words beyond how nicely they fit into blog post titles. And of course, to Mr Eliot.

April is the cruelest month, though, at least for students. It’s exam and final essay time, that moment when the pedagogical procrastination that manifests itself as culminating assignments of obscenely high value rears its ugly head. Or ass. Excuse me; I’m frustrated.

I am frustrated because just yesterday I completed the first of my two exams this semester (the other is on the 29th; go figure) and just this evening I incorrectly answered a Jeopardy question about a topic that had been on the exam. Now, I’m almost certain I got that question right on the test, which means that in the twenty or since, I forgot something fairly important. Something fairly important that I learnt in a class that cost almost a thousand dollars. Something important and expensive that I spent twenty-four hours of class time learning and another thirty or so studying.

Rather than try to project my own experience on to you (I’m honest like that), I’ll ask you to think back to your winter examinations. If you had to take them again, right now, how much lower would your mark be? 10%? 20? “But of course it will be lower,” you say. “That was months ago.” “But,” I say, “why would you take a class if not to learn? And what is learning if not remembering and understanding after the fact?” And therein lies the problem: final exams are not conducive to learning.

They’re not necessarily obstructive, either; there’s no evidence to suggest that culminating exams encourage the forgetting of information, but there’s very little to suggest that they actually evaluate what students will retain. The most common form of preparation is studying all the relevant material at once, over the course of a few weeks or days. This leads to cramming, which, even when it does lead to higher exam grades – which is not as often as you might think – it almost always leads to lower long-term retention. This can be attributed to the distinction between long-term memory and working memory. (Here I apologize again, to psychology and neuroscience students.) Speaking generally, working memory lasts only in the short term, when the mind is focused on a project and the brain is employing all necessary processes and stressors to complete that project. Once that project is done, the memory is largely discarded as it is no longer useful.¹

Long-term memory, however, is not subject to the fallacies of short-term methods like cramming, and is activated by studying important material in smaller chunks over a large period of time. Think back to a class that had multiple smaller evaluations throughout the year. How well do you remember material from that course, compared to the others you took that year? I know that I can tell you way more about De Morgan’s Theorem than I can about religious imagery in Skyscrapers of the Midwest, and that I can offer much more insight into the influence of African culture in the Caribbean than I can to um, that Shaw play with the guns. Long-term memory is simply better stimulated through evaluations spread out across the year, rather than only once or twice.

These kinds of observations have not gone unnoticed. At Harvard University, for instance, only 23% of classes end in final exams.² Elsewhere in the world, universities are slowly turning to alternative methods to final exams, including the obvious choice of fewer, smaller evaluations. Not as always, the University of Toronto is fairly slow to catch up (that’s the closest thing to a compliment that I can give right now.) Although the percentage of classes with final exams is decreasing, they are still the norm and, in fact, mandatory in first-year courses.³ Welcome to UofT!

I recognize that there isn’t any actually useful information in here. Regardless of whether or not you know how effective exam studying is, you probably still have to do it. It probably still sucks. And you probably won’t remember much of it in a short while. Cruel, eh?

For those out of the social media loop, student news feeds were overrun today by links to a public Facebook note by Sana Ali, the unopposed Team RENEW candidate running for the position of VP External in the on-going UTSU election. In her note, Ali  forfeited the election and terminated her relationship with Team RENEW, and offered some heavy criticisms of the party’s practises regarding open discussion and diversity of thought. She describes attempts to “squash dissent and individuality”, and reveals that her official candidate statement was written for her by the team. She accuses Team RENEW of drastically altering their platform from past slates’, of choosing her because of her ethnicity, of restricting her communication with opposition, and of manipulating students’ ignorance and apathy so as to gain political advantage. Her criticisms are concise, clear, and specific; entirely unlike the whole of her former team’s platform.

At time of press, over one thousand students have liked Ali’s note, an impressive number considering how few follow student politics and how little time the content has had to spread. There are dozens of comments as well, almost all of which are complimentary, often lionizing. Ali’s note is being heralded by some as “an inspiration” and indeed it should be: she’s got us all caring, though perhaps just a little, about a one-sided election.

There is something unintuitive in commending Ali’s action, though. How, exactly, is forfeiting noble? Why are we commending inaction? The answer is both chilling and condemnatory, not of Ali but of the campus that has nurtured the rise of Team RENEW: our state of political affairs is such that the most brazen, powerful action taken by one of our political candidates in recent memory is refusing to take part in something unethical. Ali’s decision is impressive because it is brave and principled, but the consequences of her decision are important not because they are good but because they are not bad. So surrounded are we by the haze of political doublespeak and the murk of self-serving governance that plain honesty’s dim glow is enough to draw us near.

I’m not going to chastise a body of tens of thousands of students, including me, if only because I know it could do no good. We, students, are among the most opinionated and vocal demographics in the world; we are surrounded by geniuses and innovators whose insights we absorb and analyze daily. The discord between our beliefs and refusal to act on them is so immense that there must be an underlying cause so powerful it not only compels us to apathy but blinds us to the extent.

I don’t believe, as Ali suggested, that there is a campus-wide epidemic of mass ignorance. Nor I believe that we are too lazy to mobilize. Apathy is a thing of its own kind; it is emotional inertia. We act only when we care, we care only when we must. We are not an active entity conflicted by the obstacles of ignorance or oppression; we are a motionless body with no apparent incentive to get up and improve our environment. There is, fortunately, unfortunately, simply nothing so terrible or unjust to compel us to take action at all.

Yet.

The University of Toronto Drama Festival is an annual competition of student-written and -directed plays at Hart House Theatre. This year, blogUT is pleased to provide reviews and critiques of each show for your elucidation and entertainment.

The final night of the festival featured only two shows, which were as different from each other as possible. Fortunately, both seemed to be improvements of other night’s shows: Shazam! acts like the more self-aware brother of Flapjacks, while The Gully accomplishes the interpersonal drama so many other productions worked so hard to almost achieve.

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