SuperSmall 2014

photo: Ralf Vandermeulen

My biggest complaint about Hamilton’s Supercrawl is strangely enough also my biggest compliment. It goes like this: I don’t ever get to enjoy the headline events 'cos I get sucked into a haze, wandering with no intention, talking to a zillion people, getting distracted by a myriad of tiny moments.

In fact, every year I grow a little more convinced that there are actually two events going on, one that features rock and noise and fire and bombastically complicated food, and the other that just features people absorbed in multiple acts of subtle communion.  But the two events somehow need each other.  The spectacle and chaos somehow allow the tinier moments to occur without them getting too precious.  If there wasn’t a constant throbbing din, it would be just a bunch of people standing around telling each other how much they love each other, and that would feel weird.

Conversely, the communal spirit humanizes Supercrawl in a way that doesn’t often happen with festivals of that scale.   I mean yeah, the GreenBelt Harvest Picnic is communal and beautiful, but it is also a more sedate setting, a more homogeneous group of people, a single tribe who agree on a rootsy backbeat in both their music and their food.  So it makes sense.  

photo: Jeff Tessier

Supercrawl is bigger, more urban, more diverse, with no single point of focus, and worst of all, it generates these nerve-wrackingly tight throngs of shoulder to shoulder people.  Supercrawl has the bad paintings, the super-precious busker-singers, and hucksters who sell magical pieces of fuzzy crap on an invisible string that your children will lust over and never ever get to work.  It has the guy with drill and the potato and the deep fryer who makes some kind of twisty soggy french fry pinwheel abomination.  So much to panic and fume over, yet the pervasive neighbourliness is never shaken.

And that neighbourliness gives you the will to root out those moments of craft and polish that count: Rudi's boutique popsicles, or the zippy screen prints of the Jelly Brothers, the fashion of Vespidame or Blackbird, or the ragtime washboard zeal of the Vaudvillian, holding their crowd without a stage.   

The opening gesture of my 2014 Supercrawl experience was my ten year old son prostrating himself to kissed the road.  “That’s what I’m talking about’, he says.  And this is what’s great about kids, is that they don’t put their pleasures in a hierarchy.  Getting to walk down the centre of the street was as palpable a thrill as Circus Danger, or whatever they were called  (I didn’t get to see them because I was chatting).  My other son went into a twenty minute epiphany because someone had propped a bubble machine in a second story window. 

For seven hours on Saturday, I had the pleasure to be the MC at the Supercrawl fashion stage.   It initially felt awkward –I have virtually no relationship to fashion---but then became nearly sublime.  The stage set up was relatively humble, and at full tilt could only service a crowd of maybe two hundred people.  And yeah, you had to pump out thumpy rock or disco music to make it work, yeah I had to yell like a tent preacher, but only to initiate a fairly intimate ritual of people just carefully looking, appreciating these details and tiny flourishes that can make clothes and people so interesting.

And speaking of interesting clothes, twice over the weekend I put on one of Andrew McPhail’s anxiety t-shirts (he bedazzled the word of a number of personal fears—'moron', 'cad', 'twat', 'wimp', etc.—and loaned the shirts out for the weekend).  I liked this project because it obligated you to be a disseminator of McPhail’s premise; it became something you had to explain to people in your own words.  And his premise was precisely the opposite of the ‘plop and drop’ works that vie for attention by concentrating themselves into a single declaration.  McPhail succeeded through dispersal, a thousand disjointed messages wandering every which way.

photo: Andrew McPhail

On Saturday night,  walking home with my family along Barton St we come across a handwritten sign on cardboard in front of All Souls Catholic Church.  It read ‘tacos 2$’.  We went in, had a brief tour of the church’s awesome ceiling murals and then went down to a basement joyously occupied by a chunk of this city’s Latin Catholic community.  Disco salsa on the dance floor, families convened around tables, a bevy of Mexican women serving traditional food in the kitchen.  It was the festival in microcosm:  Grand art, loud music, hot food, but at its heart, just a bunch of people happy to hang out. 

And if we didn't catch sight of that tiny crappy carboard sign outside the church, we would have missed it.