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This weekend Newmindspace had a vision. They had an epiphany. They had a will, and a drive, and a purpose. That purpose was seemingly to motivate Star Wars fans in Toronto to, one and all, beat each other severely with cardboard tubes. And it was so.

In front of the ROM (Royal Ontario Muzzizzium) an impossibly dense crowd formed by nine o'clock. They wore Darth Vader plastic masks and tinfoil robot hats. Many had brought their own lightsabres, the $200 dollar deals that make 'authentic' Lucasfilm goobering sounds when they clash and slash together. Skinny kids were up on obese shoulders. Hearty rounds of the Imperial Death March rose, impromptu, from the collective. Police lined the street, perhaps fearing for the safety of automobile traffic in the unlikely event of a violent Sith uprising. Nerds from all walks of life were boxed in, compounded, eager faces lifted to the night sky and to the neon hum of the black lights that poked gingerly above the crowd here and there.

We ducked our heads, every once in a while, to awkwardly spill our remaining beers towards an approximation of our mouths. Street cops. "It doesn't even matter, man," one nearby kid said. "STAR WARS!" As if Star Wars trumps Open Liquor. What Star Wars did give us, however, was a crowd so tightly packed that anybody looking to forcibly frown on our drinking would be thwarted by the complex path-making algorithms necessary to weave, shove and slide through such dense humanity. Still, poor policing.

So here we are, a game studies theorist (me) and a hyper-realist (Laura) and a whole shitload of people who are spouting off one-liners from a twenty-year-old movie. And we are all thirsty for each others' blood. We are the select subsection of superfans, the several thousand who choose to waste their Friday nights on an imaginary duel. Justyna (experientialism of blackout drunkenness) shows up and the battle is ON! Or would be, if Newmindspace had got things started on time.

In theory they were going to give everyone a cardboard tube, painted in some garishly fluorescent colour - just like in the movies! - and our mission was essentially to kick the shit out of each other en masse. Why? Because we're 'reclaiming public space'. In reality the public space to be reclaimed was far too small for the number of eager reclaimers present, and any lightsabre fights were seemingly to take place in extremely close quarters: with elbows, headbutts and snarls of Force-powered rage. The crush towards the distributed lightsabres/cardboard tubes was akin to that of an aid distribution centre in Rwanda, or a mid-sized metal show, or a frenzied mob looking to tear a fallen dictator apart with their bare hands. It was a masterful cross-section of twenty-first century living: we fought, tooth and nail, for a cardboard tube.

In the end I lost all my friends in the crush, shared a joint with some businessman-looking guy (poor policing), and helped organize a Red Army of Dignified Communists to make a run down the unguarded left flank towards the cardboard munitions. The sabres were all gone by the time we made it there, but as the carnage began tubes flew everywhere in various stages of unravellings and disrepair. I, for one, got hold of a half-sabre (lightdagger?) and got to work shanking people in the ribs.

As far as legitimate art or newsworthy goings-ons in Toronto are concerned, this wasn't 'it' in my opinion. This was some unorganized, imperative madness. But I suppose there is something to be said for a city that allows its citizens to peaceably gather... for the purpose of hyper-realized violence lovingly guided and inspired by Jesus-like Space Movies. That's benevolence. That's free speech. That's some real fucking indulgence.

They say Jedi shows up enough on census religion surveys to form a legitimate claim to legal deification: what I saw this weekend was a little less hardcore than eating the flesh of a god-child, but a little more hardcore than eating a piece of bread and pretending you're a cannibal. I think Star Wars would do very well as a fundamentalist religion: you've got more than enough zealots out there already. I'm still agnostic.

Posted by Chris at 02:30 PM >> Commentations (5)