Video Review - 'London: The Cradle of Canadian Mediocrity.'

Yo - long time since I last rapped at ya, but I've been busy reading. A book. It's called 'She - A History of Adventure.' By H. Rider Haggard. It's set back in those olden days about the time of Indiana Jones and it's darned good.

I actually saw the movie version starring Ursulla Andress when I was about 10 or 11 in the mid-1960s and if memory serves, it was that movie that convinced me that I was a man. Or that I could be if I thought about Ursulla Undress hard enough.

But the movie is next to impossible to find so I thought I'd read the book because even though 'She' will always have a warm wet spot in my heart, I'm not going to drop $50 bucks for it on Ebay. But the book is proving to be a lot of trouble. Over 300 pages, all in small type and I have to keep going back to the glossary to figure out the references from those olden days. The movie was a lot less complicated. A white goddess named Ayesha and she lives forever. I think me, Anne Rice and Whit Streiber must have all seen the movie at the same time.

And I've also been reading the newspaper. Particularly Ian Gillespie's column in last week's London Free Press in which someone who was hired to film some of the segments of the 'Ambassador London' promotional video was making sport at how chaotic the whole experience was and he jested that for $51,000, the end result is mediocre at best. And that the in-town advertising agency that made it came up with a product that a bunch of first-year film students could have made for about the cost of the film and an editing suite.

So I was intrigued enough to check it out on YouTube. I had to go there because if you go to their website, ambassadorlondon.ca, you can't just download their video. That would be too easy and make it too accessible. No, first you have to send in a request for it - submit a form giving them your email address and the reason you want to view the video.

I figured that if I told them I only wanted to see it so I could give it some decontructive criticism and make sarcastic comments about it on my blog then they wouldn't let me see it. Sorry, permission denied. But if you go to YouTube and do a search for 'Ambassador London' you will find it under a vague description. But it will be the only entry that doesn't show the Mayor or some guy in a suit making a speech at the Ambassador kick-off party last spring at the convention centre.

When I read about it the video in Mr. Gillespie's column and then more about the subsequent kerfuffle in his Free Press blog, my first thought was $51,000 for THIS?!? But now, having seen the video first hand, I have to ask - $51,000 for THAT?!?

I was totally underwhelmed - $51,000 worth. To call it mediocre is a compliment. It's more like just another typical-London example of how to be lame.

The video itself is harmless enough of course, but what really gets my dander up is that if these 'professionals' can't come up with a better video for $51,000, then why, oh why is our City Council about to give this brand new organization $100,000 to come up with a business plan? Why would you hand over that kind of money to fiscal incompetents while you nickel&dime every worthy social agency in town who comes to you with a genuinely needy hand out?

Well, the answer to that is - because we're London. We have an inferiority complex and will have it until we get a Performing Arts Centre or until the day Toronto gets nuked and we can reclaim our proper title of The Capital of Upper Canada.

Anyway, here are some highlights.

Visually, it's all pretty pictures of what could be Anytown, Anywhere, U.S.A. Lots of happy children, happy people and they let it hang out at one of our summer ethnic festivals. In fact, the one black person in the video seemed to be having a heck of a time. But, then, he was a vender at SunFest, just passing through and had to be there.

But it's the voice-over narration to the visuals which provide the real eye-opening laugh-getters.

Did you know that London is "a city that never forgets its past"? I think of that fun-fact every morning coming home from work and I drive past the rubble being bulldozed from what was once Locust Mount, the home of our first mayor - but more importantly, once one of the most distinctive of all the pre-Victorian homes in the downtown neighbourhoods.

Our city council and city staff revere our heritage so much that they let the developer who owns it let it just sit vacant and unprotected for seven years until the inevitable fire(s) set by homeless transients destroyed enough of it that it could be torn down so those condos on the blue-prints could finally be put up. The same sort of intentional demolition-by-neglect that I'm reminded of as I travel further down the street and see what was once the Talbot Hotel, now Disneyfied onto the facade of a hockey arena. All of which was done under the watchful eyes of City Council, city staff and the developer who owned the property.

Did you know that London is "where cultural development starts at the ground level"? Viewers learn this as they see a young woman doing a large chalk sidewalk drawing at one of our summer festivals.

What it doesn't tell the viewer is that, sure you can get the education to be an artist here - but once you do become an artist, don't expect to be encouraged or even acknowledged. Our one daily newspaper doesn't even have an Art critic. So even if you do manage to get your own exhibition, don't expect to see your work reviewed. Consider yourself lucky if you get a two-sentence mention of it in the monthly round-up of some of the art shows in town.

This is why anyone who does graduate from one of our fine art colleges, immediately leaves for Toronto or Montreal. However, if what Ambassador London means by "cultural development" is - 'being ignored and left alone to do your own thing as long as you don't call attention to yourself or annoy anyone' - then London is your town.

Did you know that London "is where Johnny Cash proposed to June Carter"? If you are a Londoner, chances are you have - because apparently, it's the only interesting thing that's ever happened here. Luckily for us, Johnny was feeling bold that night when his band passed through on tour three or four decades ago. If he had waited a day longer to pop the question, Brantford would be making that claim.

Surprisingly, when it comes to music, there's no mention of London being the hometown of Guy Lombardo, whom I'm told has sold over two-million records even though he's been dead for decades. Although, Guy's nick-name in Big Band circles is 'The King of Corn,' at least the guy actually was born and raised here.

Not the least bit unsurprisingly, when it comes to music, there is no mention of The Demics, London's first punk band who were once voted in a poll by our nation's music critics to have recorded the best Canadian single EVER.

It's title - 'I Wanna Go to New York City,' says everything you want to know about what a dead lame-ass town this is. For anyone who has ever been young and spent a summer hanging around downtown, the song sums everything up with - "I'm damn pretty bored - AND I WANNA GET OUT." If you are young and in possession of a functioning brain and soul, how could you not relate to that? That line alone says volumes more than those two million Guy Lombardo records ever could.

But judging by their video, Ambassador London isn't trying to attract young people to London - just businessmen who want to move their head office here and take out a mortgage.

It certainly isn't aimed at the young people who are already here and keeping them here. In this town, if you are young, it's a foregone conclusion that you're already planning on leaving. And you've been dreaming of it for at least a decade.

That's one reality you will never hear about from Ambassador London - that if you are under the age of 30, there are far more reasons to leave than to stay.

And if you happen to be a young out-of-towner, the only reasons to come here - even as a tourist - are only for school or a mandatory job transfer or in a plane crash.

F.Y.I. - the Ambassador London group are a pretty thin-skinned bunch. They don't like negative criticism. They defensively point out that before you put something down, you should have a better solution to offer -

So here's mine - whenever Ambassador London makes a new video or inevitably retreats to the editing suite to fix the current one, I offer this suggestion to make it viewer-friendly -

More show-tunes. And it wouldn't hurt to show a few good looking broads either.