There’s no good reason for a 37-year-old man to visit the Canadian National Exhibition by himself on a Sunday afternoon, unless it involves wearing a shoe-cam to gather material for an upskirt video. But seriously, the CNE has stayed alive by asserting its family image — young women dressed immodestly have enough other places in town to hang. So while it once might have enticed adolescent boys with two weeks and change of non-stop salaciousness — if just represented by screaming rides, shouting carnies and all things rock ‘n’ roll — any implication of sex has been completely extricated from the Ex.
Nowadays, the fair is clearly a big destination for families rarely sighted elsewhere in downtown Toronto — the kind of families with numerous offspring, from mothers wearing jilbabs, saris, or long skirts. Not much to entice a pervert with a mirror on his toes.
But with the Exhibition grounds continuing to take up space increasingly considered as livable as the neighbourhoods surrounding them, it seems a long way from the era where the CNE was a carnival psychologically detached from the rest of the town, save for those remaining undesirables in nearby Parkdale who’d presumably be subsidizing their entire year’s supply of meth by renting out parking spaces on their rooming house lawn.
Heck, the Ex was considered long past its due date in 1992, when this correspondent visited for an EYE WEEKLY cover story, “JUNK CULTURE SHOCK.” This surely read like a lame Cultural Studies 101 term-paper, back in the halcyon era when it was a novelty to seek deeper meaning in a midway. A decade-and-a-half later, the more sobering assessment is that mass-appeal crap is usually just that.
What one isn’t inclined to do at age 21, though, is saunter around the Ex to observe parenting skills. Two sweeping generalizations: women not from an identifiable ethnic group are more likely to be herding their spawn around the CNE in a state of disciplinary crisis; men with menacing tattoos are kindest to their kids.
Nostalgia has kept the place ticking into its 130th year as a temporary installation, of course, to the point where it’s disorienting to look up and notice elements that weren’t there a decade or three ago, back when the now-replaced Exhibition Stadium had its long-necked lighting towers, the Tip Top Tailors sign wasn’t ludicrously tilted atop condo lofts, and there were fewer tall buildings between the CNE and the CN Tower.
But for every aging Gen-X memory, there’s a contingency that longs for an era even long before that. A small exhibit dedicated to decades of “Women’s Work & Child’s Play” at the Exhibition perpetuates the thinking that nothing memorable happened here after Bob Hope stopped being the annual star attraction; a Grandstand rampage after Alice Cooper was too chemically impaired to play his show in 1980 is therefore not featured in the forefront of the CNE Archives.
Did the relocation of big-ticket concerts to a footbridge-walk away at the Molson Ampitheatre in 1995 really kill the lascivious spirit of the Ex? Certainly, it’s hard to imagine an exhibit called “Sitting Pretty: A History of the Toilet” mounted in the era when it would risk being infiltrated by a steady stream of scatalogical stoners from Scarborough. That such a display — earnestly curated by four Ontario museums — is highlighted as a draw for the $14 adult admission leaves one wondering exactly what motifs sustain a broad multicultural reach in a way the beleaguered ROM currently cannot. We all use the washroom, right?
Threading society together in this century, of course, are the comforts of familiar corporate brands. But because loud logos and free samples and promotional events have become a fixture of every intersection, park and public-square, it leaves the CNE stuck between the downmarket and the homespun.
The conflict is most glaring in the Direct Energy Centre, designed to give the grounds a contemporary year-round purpose, but nonetheless co-opted for the Exhibition. Cleaning product hucksters, artisan kitsch booths, and pompadoured Elvis and Mozart impersonators shilling for Moses Znaimer’s “Zoomer radio” rub shoulders in a four-section facility that feels like Honest Ed’s inventory shoved into present-day Dufferin Mall.
A sign of the times might be the fake-counterfeit 5-for-$20 DVD racks, clearly meant to simulate a pirated operation, which turns out to be authorized copies of every flick you would never want to own. Stocking up on tube socks from one of the tents in the shadow of the Princes’ Gates surely holds more appeal.
Meanwhile, the Better Living Centre — which once housed all the latest innovations in garburators, defibrillators and adjustable beds for far-flung fair visitors who lacked access to a department store — is divided between a casino and “The Farm.” Displays celebrating agriculture have, in the effort to relate to suburbia, reduced to a white minstrel show. (Most notable is the continued resonance of the Dairy Farmers of Ontario’s “Milk” logo.)
Naturally, displays of where food comes from is trumped by the appeal of actual food. Retro tastes are the only thing that distinguishes the Food Building from every shopping mall common area that came along since. But, even if a trademark no longer exists in real-world Toronto, the likes of H. Salt Fish and Chips offer reassurance. The stand still dishing out Styrofoam bowls of 99-cent Spaghetti trumpets ghetto generic brand Smart Choice spaghetti sauce as a selling point. And whoever “Tiny Tom” actually was, that he figured out how to turn the dough of two donuts into a dozen small ones — making it seem like a bargain at thrice the $4.50 price — still deserves a marketing gold medal.
But the eats lack meaning without the midway, where the space-trend continuum continues to transcend time, due to the CNE inching forward in 18-day increments. Therefore, what seemed played out a year ago might actually take two decades to be reflected in its signage, prizes, and overall theory of fun. Skee-Ball and Star Wars shares space with Garfield the Cat and Dora the Explorer, hip-hop hoop shoots alongside dusty old Guess Your Weight game scales.
This seemed like a quaint throwback in the last century. Now it risks feeling a tad pathetic. The trickiest game of so-called skill — the one that involves flinging a tiny hoop over bottlenecks that are possibly too big — offers a prize represented by a blurred-out sign resembling a myopic iPhone. (A cheapo MP4 player, really, while other games boasting of “IPOD” prizes were also likely lying.)
Stuffed animal prizes were once an indicator of the latest animated trends since the previous year. The evolution seems to have sputtered to a halt with Stewie Griffin from Family Guy — leaving the genre with nowhere to turn but Charlie the Tuna dolls.
Meanwhile, the trademark of Conklin Shows has been phased out — although its sinister clown logos still live on the booths selling ice cream waffles. New corporate operator North American Midway have installed antiseptic hand-cleansing stations, extolling the virtues of not touching a carnival ride and candy apple in rapid succession. Did anyone ever die from doing that?
Yet the most enthusiasm late on a Sunday afternoon could be found at the Canadian Forces interactive display. Consistent with their emerging reputation as a non-joke — as recently affirmed by The Economist — the Ex-goers of all ages seemed positively thrilled to hang around the hardware used by soldiers to kill people and break things, proving that there’s no substitute for heavy artillery.
Maybe what the CNE needs, in order to secure that ever-elusive future, is a whole lot more of that danger.
scroll@eyeweekly.com