On Saturday, I was asked to appear on CTV Newsnet to talk about the Juno Awards. Although many people are unaware of this, I am considered one of the world’s foremost experts on the Juno’s, as I am a BIG TIME insider in the Canadian music scene. Did you know that the Mitsou song Bye-Bye Mon Cowboy is actually about me? It’s true. I was also briefly married to Sass Jordan, and I am proud to say that we still send one another cards at Christmas.
At any rate, the best part of the experience, as usual, was getting to ride in the town car they send to get me. I always feel like a gangster when I sit there behind the tinted windows with the city speeding by, and it turns out that I really enjoy that feeling.
The interview was scheduled to take place at 9:15 on Saturday night, at the studio out in Scarborough. The mood in the building was grim. Very recently, CTV, in an effort to consolidate their hemorrhaging enterprise, moved all of their employees from the Globe and Mail building downtown, out to Scarborough, which for media types is like being cast out to Siberia, I guess. The lighting was poor, and the skeleton crew that was present trudged about like zombies. Better things were happening in the city, and they knew it. They looked at me with some pity, like I, too, had been forced to come out there, or worse, that I had nothing better to do on a Saturday night than hike out to Siberia to appear on TV for two forgettable minutes.
The interview itself was speedy, perfunctory and completely devoid of any human interaction. I sat in a dark room, alone, and tried to answer a few questions asked of me through an earpiece, while staring at a camera that looked like a robot. Rachelle called to praise me, observing that, “you weren’t quite as twitchy as you normally are, and you only interrupted the interviewer twice!” In the context of my TV appearances, this was a victory.
The driver was chatty on the way home. He reminded me that it was Earth Hour, something I had forgotten. He had hoped that the city of Toronto would be shrouded in darkness, but it was exactly the same as it always was. He laughed ruefully, “It’s the rich people, you know. It makes them feel better to turn off their lights for an hour, but still they drive the big cars and live in the big homes. Really, they think the poor people in Scarborough are going to sit in holy darkness for an hour on Saturday night to make them feel better? They work all week for their Saturday night, they’re not going to sit there humming earth songs on their party night!”