It’s difficult to know what to say.
Some things simply can’t be ignored.
–Fiddlers and tap dancers, all dressed like it was 1988 and they worked in a Scottish themed punk bar in Montreal, tap-synched and fiddle-synched, as if in an Off-Broadway production of Lord of the Dance.
–A W.O. Mitchell inspired aerial phantasm of a young girl growing up on the prairies, featured a young man pretending to be a girl, floating about the stadium to the Joni Mitchell classic Both Sides Now, as sung by somebody who might not have been Joni Mitchell.
–Hockey star Haley Wickenheiser, alongside the Chief Referee of Short Track Speed Skating, who apparently has been accorded significant cultural status, swore an oath in opposition to blood doping.
–Games organizer John Furlong made a speech in which he spoke of “the magic of television” beaming the games into our homes, while many watched online and Twittered away to one another.
–A Slam poet from the Northwest Territories, in performing a kind of Joe Canada rant, rapped that “Canada is the what in what’s new.”
—-Conjuring Spinal Tap, the five Stonehenge hydraulic things that were to house the Olympic flame, would not ascend on cue. People stood around looking scared. Eventually, after they had lit most of them, Wayne Gretzky was dispatched, via the back of a pick-up truck—after having to wait in an air lock– through the rainy streets of Vancouver, to ignite the external cauldron.
Watching, I found myself becoming increasingly preoccupied with the winter gear that everybody was wearing and the fake snow that lined the floor of BC Place. Later, when they were struggling to light the Olympic flame and the emotional sweep was supposed to be at it’s greatest height, fake snow began to fall in the domed stadium as music that sounded like it was lifted from a Steven Spielberg film, swirled about the climate controlled stadium.
It seems a first principle to me that the Winter Olympics are born from circumstance. An individual masters skiing or speed skating largely because they live in a Northern climate, and when life gives you lemons, well, you better learn to make lemonade, right? I mean, that’s an important lesson right there. But Vancouver chose to remove the very essence—–the natural climate and native landscape—of the Winter Olympics from the opening ceremonies, and so the spark that originally ignited the games was extinguished, and for expediency and convenience, winter was merely simulated for a global audience, as if this was just another glitzy Las Vegas show, Disney theme park, or a big-budget Christopher Guest movie.