“Lake Shore offers the world a peek into Toronto’s not-so-seamless cultural mosaic - Toronto Star” plus 2 more |
- Lake Shore offers the world a peek into Toronto’s not-so-seamless cultural mosaic - Toronto Star
- "Joe Louis: Hard Times Man" explores life of boxer, cultural history - Atlanta Journal Constitution
- Takeout owner deals with physical, cultural barriers - Philadelphia Daily News
| Lake Shore offers the world a peek into Toronto’s not-so-seamless cultural mosaic - Toronto Star Posted: 10 Nov 2010 09:05 PM PST  The Toronto-based reality TV series Lake Shore has been criticized for stereotyping ethnicities, after a preview reel went viral Monday. Wayne SzetoChloé Fedio Staff Reporter Albanians do not back down from a fight. Vietnamese women are like cartoon characters. It's okay for Italian-Canadians to calls themselves wops. At least, that's what an upcoming reality TV series based in Toronto would have fans believe. Taking after the popular MTV show Jersey Shore, Lake Shore will follow eight young Torontonians as they party hard, hook up and try to get along under the same roof. The gel that holds the American series together — Guido pride — is notably absent from the Toronto version. In its place, however, is a multicultural cast of characters who threaten to clash in the most unCanadian of ways. The show's eight-minute trailer became a trending topic on Twitter after its release Monday night. Torontonians are concerned the show's unflattering stereotypes will tarnish its city's image as a vibrant, cultural mosaic. Each character in Lake Shore is labelled by their ethnic background. For Sibel Atlug, cast as "the Turk," cultural pride means denigrating everyone else. "I'm not racist because I hate everybody equally. Especially Jewish people," she reveals in the preview. The show won't start filming until early 2011 but it already has a fan base. On Wednesday, lake-shore.ca crashed after receiving more than a million visitors. The trailer has also grabbed the attention of broadcasters in Canada and abroad who want to get the series on the air, said Lake Shore's 26-year-old executive producer, Maryam Rahimi. "We could go into production as soon as next week. Everything is assembled and we're looking to get attached to a network," she said. "There's a demand for it." The show's concept a step away from Canada's tradition of producing socially minded "observational documentaries" in favour of American-style reality TV, said Peter Thompson, a professor of Canadian culture at Carleton University in Ottawa. But unlike the homogenous Jersey Shore, Thompson said its Canadian counterpart purposely invites housemates to draw ethnic lines during their daily dramas. "Maybe it will be harder to attack it because there are so many ethnic stereotypes circulating in the show," Thompson said. Italian-Americans criticized Jersey Shore when it first aired in December 2009, but its viewership continued to grow. Its second season premiered with 5.3 million viewers this past July. Will Canadians be able to resist watching the outrageous antics of a group of twentysomethings who live by the motto, "Every night is Saturday night?" Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, hopes so. "It's silly, puerile trash TV. … But it's sadly the kind of television and entertainment that seems to titillate people nowadays. You throw in a racist comment, or a sexist comment, or an anti-Semitic comment and it becomes provocative," Farber said. Stereotyping aside, the show does Canadian youth in general a disservice, said Martin Stiglio, director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Toronto. "I don't think the problem is ethnic — far from it — the problem is stereotyping of young people as empty-headed, soft-porn types of people who are always off and drunk in night clubs," Stiglio said. But for Rahini, who is enjoying attention from all over the world, it's easy to brush off the criticism. "We're creating entertainment," she said. "I think everyone should take this with a grain of salt. I don't think anyone should take it seriously." This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| "Joe Louis: Hard Times Man" explores life of boxer, cultural history - Atlanta Journal Constitution Posted: 29 Oct 2010 12:03 PM PDT For the AJC "Joe Louis: Hard Times Man" by Randy Roberts Yale University Press, 308 pages, $27.50 Joe Louis was a titan, the undisputed heavyweight champion for more than twelve years (and a record 23 title defenses) and, probably, the greatest American hero of the 20th century. And yet, oddly to those of us who grew up hearing him talked about as if he were a folk hero in the mold of John Henry, the memory of his achievement has largely faded from our collective consciousness. Why? Possibly because, as Randy Roberts points out in his exciting account of the great champ's life, "Joe Louis: Hard Times Man", the sport that Louis strode through like a colossus has been in decline for decades. "During the 1930s," writes Roberts, "in the United States five thousand to six thousand professional boxers practiced their trade annually, compared to half that number worldwide today." Another reason is harder to pin down: Louis's legend is sandwiched between that of the two great rebels of sport -- Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight champion (and the subject of a superb biography, "Papa Jack", by Roberts) and Muhammad Ali. Because of the flamboyant, divisive Johnson, no black boxers were allowed to fight for the heavyweight title from 1915 to 1937, when Louis knocked out Jim Braddock. His victory came only after years of mastering "the basic rules," both inside the ring and out. The latter included the proper decorum for a black man in white America, meaning no inflammatory rhetoric, no showy lifestyle, and above all, no fraternizing (as Johnson had openly done) with white women. Given the constraints society imposed on him, Joe Louis "transformed black into red, white, and blue. Probably never before in American history had a black man received so much praise in the mainstream press." Born in 1914 in a sharecropper's shack near Lafayette, Alabama, Louis's family moved to Detroit when he was twelve. Young Joe quickly discovered he had a talent for boxing – that he also took violin lessons (which his mother hoped would keep him out of trouble) seems like a scenario from a Hollywood melodrama. Guided by the expertise of trainer Jack Blackburn and black sportsman John Roxborough, Louis cut a swath through the amateur and then professional ranks. Joe was widely regarded as the uncrowned champion before he was finally given a title shot. In 1936, while still an undefeated challenger, he was beaten in a shocking upset by Max Schmeling, a former champion and native German. Louis rebounded to win the title, and then, in 1938, in the most widely anticipated sporting event ever held, got his revenge by KO-ing Schmeling in the first round. With the U.S and Nazi Germany on the verge of war, sportswriter Joe Williams dubbed the second Louis-Schmeling fight "The Battle of Awesome Implications." As Roberts describes it, "Activity inside restaurants, movie theaters, baseball parks and other public places stopped as people leaned into the airwaves." Nearly 100 million people tuned in on radio, including some black field hands who gathered in Plains, Georgia, to listen to the fight at the home of a local peanut farmer, Earl Carter, and his son Jimmy. "No event had ever attracted an audience that large, not a sporting event, a political speech, or an entertainment show." Like Roberts's "John Wayne: American", "Joe Louis: Hard Times Man" isn't so much a biography as a cultural history of its subject's life and times. Appropriately considering that Louis was the first black American to become a household name, Roberts is particularly sensitive to the issue of race. Nonthreatening as Louis was, newspapers of the time were filled with descriptions of him as something "not quite human ... out of the African jungle" and an "Alabama Assassin" who "stalked his prey like a jungle beast." But "Hard Times Man" isn't sociology. It's a thrilling account of an extraordinary life, one that needed to be retold to a generation to whom Joe Louis is no more than an occasional face on ESPN Classic. There was a giant in those days, and Roberts has reclaimed him for us. -- By Allen Barra, for the AJC This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
| Takeout owner deals with physical, cultural barriers - Philadelphia Daily News Posted: 10 Nov 2010 07:50 AM PST Posted on Wed, Nov. 10, 2010 IN THE West Oak Lane neighborhood that surrounds the Bo Shing Chinese takeout, Qinhui Chen stands behind a double-glass window that separates her from her customers. "In this day and age, a lot of stores do that," said Eugene Hailey, 44, who lives near the takeout. "A lot of Puerto Rican stores, a lot of mom-and-pop shops. That's for safety." The glass partition serves to protect workers from crime, but it also cuts them off from their customers - representing a literal and metaphorical divider between their two worlds. Chen and her husband, Jicun Wu, emigrated from China and opened their takeout on 66th Avenue near Uber Street a year ago. She has been running it on her own since her husband was struck in the back of the head and in his torso outside the store June 8. Five months later, he is still in the hospital. Hailey and a 71-year-old female neighbor both said they understand that the glass window serves as a safety barrier for store owners and aren't bothered by it, but others say that they find some Chinese-takeout owners to be rude and offensive. Standing at 66th Avenue and 20th Street, a man who gave his first name as Terry said: "Some treat you nice and respectful. Others are disrespectful, treat you like a dog. "They make money mostly off African-Americans who go in that store," he said of Bo Shing. He contended that Chen curses at kids. "She cuss them out in Chinese," he said. "You know when someone is cussing you out." Chen, when told this recently, replied in Mandarin: "They say I get mad at them? If they don't have enough money, they get mad at me with not-nice-sounding words." On one recent night, a couple of customers accused Chen of giving them the wrong change. Others were pleasant and friendly. "She's nice," Rayonah Walker, 19, said of Chen as she picked up her dinner. "I don't know what their problem is," she said of one boy who wrongly accused Chen of shorting him on change. Some customers laughed when Chen, 34, who speaks little English, didn't understand them. As one boy entered the green-tiled lobby, he slammed his hand against the glass partition separating the lobby from the kitchen to get Chen's attention. He asked for something, not speaking clearly. Chen brought him Twizzlers. "No Twizzler," the boy replied, as his friend, a red-shirted youth in low-hanging blue jeans, laughed. Then two other youths entered, and one boy, dressed in a hoodie, asked Chen to give him Fruit Roll-Ups for five cents less than the quarter price. Chen shook her head "no." "I'm always in this store," the boy groused before buying two smaller candies for 20 cents. Most of the customers who came into the takeout bought candy, chips or "blunt" cigars, with the occasional order for shrimp with broccoli, chicken wings, pizza rolls or spare ribs. When darkness falls, the mood gets a bit rowdier and the potential for violence rises. "Some people come in and just yell, 'Yo!' " Chen said. "The person hasn't come in, but the voice has." Other times, she said, "they scold us. They yell really loud. They hit the door. They spit." Chen added that since the attack, "sometimes I really think of going to China, but then I think in China, there is not much work." About 10:30 p.m., three young men in hoodies sauntered in. One, in a blue-and-gray hoodie, bought an ice cream, then asked if the Oreos "are fresh." Chen, not understanding, replied, "No." The man and his two friends burst into laughter. Fifteen minutes later, the trio returned. One, in a green hoodie, who didn't previously buy anything, told Chen, "You gave me two English coins," as he held up a silver- and a gold-colored coin. This entry passed through the Full-Text RSS service — if this is your content and you're reading it on someone else's site, please read our FAQ page at fivefilters.org/content-only/faq.php |
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