Flashback: Ups and downs
6 days ago
This month, roller-coaster fans stood in line for hours to try AlpenFury, a new ride at an amusement park near Toronto. One of them told CBC Radio's As It Happens he liked the feeling of doing "something death-defying," and this felt safer than stunts like skydiving or bungee jumping.
In 1990, host Knowlton Nash of The National introduced an item about " North America's first legal bungee-jumping centre" in Nanaimo, B.C., and in the report, the CBC's Bob Nixon said he was stupid enough to try the $95 ($199 in 2025) jump.
"Here's my cameraman, Pat Bell — he's also stupid," Nixon said as Bell prepared to take the plunge with a camera strapped to his body. We'd call the resulting pictures proto-GoPro cinematography.
A different angle
A snapshot of the Winnipeg Film Group
6 days ago
" The universe begins for me in Winnipeg," said Matthew Rankin, director of the 2024 movie Universal Language, in a recent CBC Arts piece. "That exerts great existential pressure on my meaningless life, which I think is true of a lot of Winnipeggers."
The feature — on the city's tradition of "off-centre filmmaking" — also mentions filmmakers John Paizs (who was noticed for his 1984 film Crime Wave) and Guy Maddin, who writer Matthew Teklemariam says is "perhaps Winnipeg's most celebrated filmmaker."
In 1991, Maddin (whose latest film at the time was Archangel) told the CBC's Beth Harrington about the city's benefits. "Making films [in Winnipeg] is very easy," he said. "You get lots of money; there's not that much competition; everyone's really helpful; and rent is cheap for equipment and for space."
For the love of cats
Ottawa man cooks for Parliament Hill cats
2 days ago
Retiree René Chartrand cares for a colony of nine feral felines that live near Parliament Hill. Aired on CBC's Midday on Feb. 22, 1989.
Coal, the last survivor of a group of feral felines on Parliament Hill, has died at 17, CBC News reported recently. He had been cared for in a sanctuary until 2013, when it closed and all of the cats were adopted.
Before the colony was dispersed, volunteer René Chartrand prepared meals for the cats and took a bus to visit them daily, according to a 1989 report on CBC's Midday. Reporter Cory O'Kelly said Chartrand spent "a small fortune" on food and welcomed donations.
"René has even built a plywood home for the cats and added insulation," O'Kelly said. "Blankets from his home help the cats survive the bitter cold."
Hail no
Damaging hail the size of golf balls hit the Calgary area last week, and locals shared photos of the aftermath with CBC News. When another form of precipitation — snow — fell on parts of Alberta in 1999, residents took it in stride.
A taste of history
Canada's Jersey Milk chocolate bar, originally made by Neilson, is no more, the Financial Post reported recently. Neilson also marketed the Crispy Crunch bar and even tried selling it in the U.S., as the CBC's Venture reported in 1991.
A summit in space
Cosmonauts and astronauts to meet in space
50 years ago
CBC reporter Lloyd Robertson visits Star City, home of the Soviet space program, in 1975.
Last week was the 50th anniversary of a meeting in space between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts, the New York Times reported. When the Soviets invited reporters to the cosmonaut training centre in Russia before the 1975 event, Lloyd Robertson was there for the CBC.
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Abel Tesfaye returns to Toronto to kill The Weeknd
Social Sharing Unlike Taylor Swift's meteorite-like crash landing in the sweaty city of Toronto, there were no friendship bead-wearing police horses at The Weeknd's first showing in the Six. Instead, a more subdued air surrounded Rogers Centre as fans funnelled in: Low-key Starboy tracks warbling into the 30 C drippingly-wet air blanketing the stadium in the heart of The Weeknd's hometown. But that doesn't mean a lack of excitement, despite the weather. "God damn, it's hot," Canadian producer and DJ Kaytranada even exclaimed, towelling himself off onstage during a well-done if not earth-shattering opening. That was as sweltering fans at the first of four sold-out nights in the 50,000-seat venue braved the heat in requisitely dark clothes to match the R&B superstar infamously dark music. Just a day before, Mayor Olivia Chow dubbed the preceding days "The Weeknd weekend." That was because, she said, "Abel (The Weeknd) Tesfaye represents the best of our city." The Scarborough-raised artist also received a key to the city. And it was all just before audience members, eager to experience what is often still described as a once-in-a-lifetime concert experience, were uncharacteristically chatty with journalists — throwing themselves into on-camera interviews instead of waiting for the insistent coaxing of harried producers. "Everyone here, we are The Weeknd," a fan named Perry told CBC News. "He represents Canada." But as Tesfaye took the stage, the seemingly incongruous mix of emotions instantly made sense. Decked in a black robe encrusted with glittering gold rhinestones and a golden half-mask, you could see he embodied that caustic mix of the charismatic and subdued that, for anyone else, would not fit in the same person at the same time. As he has proven since releasing anonymous and unsettling dance-themed mixtapes in the 2010s all the way to this seemingly last tour under The Weeknd moniker, this is the space where Tesfaye thrives. While not retiring from music, he plans to no longer perform under the name he has become famous for. A return home Quickly barrelling through classic tracks The Abyss to Wake Me Up to After Hours, he was flanked by similarly masked, enrobed backup dancers — moving in unison around a slowly spinning golden statue of a giant, nude woman (imagine a female Oscars statuette, but with visible nipples). They stood beneath large gold rings, in front of a mocked up golden skyline of a crumbling city. Even Tesfaye's microphone was gold, a particularly heavy-handed metaphor that, early on, he stumbled chaotically toward. While roughly 30 women walked in sync around the statue and then behind to him, and as jets of fire shot up 20 feet into the air, Tesfaye held his hands up to the mic as if in prayer. None of them had to dance or even move much to earn the deafening applause that came next, as Tesfaye revealed the tiniest bit of his face, slightly peaking over the top of the mask. "Well that's a warm welcome home, isn't it?" he asked to another roar. It wasn't the last call out to his hometown. Later, he remarked the stadium is where he used to come to watch Blue Jays games "as a little baby," let out a long and extended "Toronto" in the middle of his track Sacrifice and managed to sneak both CN Tower and Rogers Centre references into São Paulo. But the focus was the gold, the ceremony and the performative reverence of it. The effect is impressive if eerie. A consummate musical professional with four Grammys under his belt and more Junos than anyone but Anne Murray, Tesfaye knows how to set a scene. He also knows how to sing, and — more than that — perform. He never failed to lead the tens of thousands of cheering attendants in song or just rapturous applause. It all gives the impression of some club-themed religious ceremony: A gigantic and enormously budgeted cultic worship service, except here the god is hedonism, sex and all the more outrageous scenes of Wolf of Wall Street. Of course, this is by design — both why The Weeknd can define himself as a generational sex symbol without gyrating or even revealing a sliver of his body under baggy robes and ostensibly why he's choosing to leave the schtick behind after this tour. In his shows and music, he's playing a club kid, fame-obsessed semi-satirical character invented way back in his debut mixtape House of Balloons days — itself a mask, Tesfaye explained in a 2013 Reddit AMA, he chose in order to hide his name and, by extension, himself. Vanity and nihilism In person, it all comes together like a magic trick. At a Weeknd concert, we're both sick of materialism, and sick of being sick of it. We're letting go of every inhibition, forgetting love, revelling in sex and giving up on self-control. It's all a statement about nihilism, you see. Or maybe, it's not. "It seems exorbitant when it all ends. A pointless, uncomfortable exercise from an artist who believes vanity means no stone of excess can be left unturned," music journalist Hanif Abdurraqib wrote of a 2013 Weeknd show in his book They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us. "The Weeknd tells the same tale: It's never about love, but then again, how can it be about anything but love, even if the love is just the love you have for your own ravenous desires." How much the separate entity of The Weeknd exists for Tesfaye to explore and mock his most self-destructive tendencies — instead of just revelling in them — isn't exactly clear. You would've been hard pressed to find any hints of displeasure from the seemingly ecstatic Tesfaye on Sunday. He hit hits old and new out of the park, and was grinning ear-to-ear as he held the microphone to nearly fainting fans, screaming out the ad libs of Out of Time. Still, it's perhaps a strange message to brand, as Chow did, the best of the city — and a strange one to have drawn as many barely five-foot middle-schoolers as Sunday's all-ages show did. At the same time, it's a theme that has offered diminishing returns. There was the 2022 Los Angeles concert in which Tesfaye infamously lost his voice due to stress. Then the ill-fated series The Idol, a Tesfaye-fronted series about the relentless pursuit of fame that was widely panned by critics and even The Weeknd himself. And then there was Hurry Up Tomorrow, the absurdly, incomprehensibly stupid filmic tie-in of his most recent album. Intended to further explore his falling-out-of-love with The Weeknd after the L.A. show, instead it only managed to compete with Megalopolis as the most offensively boring movie to premiere in the last 12 months. But perhaps these failures were because Tesfaye was performing to the wrong crowd, on the wrong stage. His messy, introspective and vague metaphors work better in song lyrics than dialogue; better sung in front of a stunning pyrotechnic flame and fireworks show than on a film screen. If Sunday's show proved anything, it was that. And even if on the inside he's done with The Weeknd, it proved he can certainly still fake it.
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