“The weather is fucked!”
Maggie MacDonald is concerned. It’s the end of January and the temperature outside is a balmy 12 degrees Celsius-that’s 18 degrees above the seasonal norm. At the same time, Russia is experiencing the deepest chill in a generation.
“The weather systems are just changing really rapidly, and we don’t know what’s going to happen. We can’t just say that everything is getting warmer, because some places will get warmer and others will get colder; it’s just going to get less predictable, and when it’s less predictable it’s going to be harder for us to adapt and survive,” worries Toronto’s busiest singer/author/playwright/revolutionary, who’s hot off the sold-out premiere of her rock opera The Rat King.
With her trademark intensity, she offers: “What we’ve already done is enough to completely fuck us.”
While all this might sound like the paranoid ramblings of a modern-day Chicken Little, MacDonald’s idea of the apocalypse plays out T.S. Eliot-style, with fatal problems accumulating over time, or, as Samuel Beckett puts it, “grain upon grain, one by one.”
But, as MacDonald points out, this slow death is actually a blessing in disguise.
“I don’t want people to lose hope-I think that it’s important that we think we’re fucked, but at the same time, we still have to do something.”
The bottom line is that there’s still time to save ourselves, and MacDonald has made it her mission of mercy to motivate the masses into an act of mutually assured salvation.
The former U of T political science student and current Hart House writer-in-residence has devoted much of her time to exploring the curious place where art and politics meet. Originally from Cornwall, Ontario, over the last few years she’s set herself up as a major triple threat, successfully taking on Toronto’s literature, theatre, and indie-rock scenes simultaneously.
Her critically acclaimed first novel, Kill The Robot, was published last month by McGilligan Books. The story is a sci-fi tale of technological alienation as experienced by a teenage girl who’s got a secret interest in all things nuclear. MacDonald’s also a successful playwright, winning the coveted Robertson Davies award in 2001 for
her play A Clockwork Gorbachev.
In Toronto’s blooming indie-rock scene, MacDonald’s political prowess and endless imagination once again set her apart from the rest of the pack. Having already toured internationally as a member of Joel Gibb’s homo-hymn folk explosion the Hidden Cameras, MacDonald moved on to a new band, Republic of Safety, who have been garnering all sorts of national attention-their widely acclaimed Passport EP has just been shortlisted for CBC’s Galaxie Rising Stars Award.
With ex-Wavelength honcho Johnny Dovercourt on guitar, and Diabolos’ hunky barista Evan Davies on the drums, RoS make sexy, political punk music that shoots straight from the hip.
“North of the nation of fear, we have a responsibility to build a republic… of… safety!” MacDonald screams on their anti-free trade ditty “Get Your Horses Back.” Her dark obsession with a potential nuclear holocaust surfaces again on the EP’s standout track “The Roaches Will Not,” in which she laments, “In North America, already more radioactivity than we can count for centuries,” which is followed by a grim civil-defence-style countdown: “10, 9, 8, 7-duck and cover, go to heaven.”
Her latest artistic venture, the theatrical musical The Rat King, touches on many similar themes found in her writing and music: a dystopian future finds an isolated family disintegrated and clutching desperately to the last dying embers of their former social ideals.
“The people in this play-there’s been no nuclear war-they’re just living in the waste of the twentieth century, and that’s enough to have people lonely and dying,” MacDonald notes.
Her overarching fixation on nuclear war aside, her point this time is actually that the threat of instant annihilation has blinded us from the fact that massive, damning damage has already been inflicted.
“It’s the DDT that’s out there, the radioactive waste that’s out there, there are all these things out there that we’ve already created, and it’s enough to create this slow, whimpering death,” she states matter-of-factly. “Hundreds and hundreds of nuclear weapons have been detonated in our atmosphere, and those materials stay with us.”
Spoken with the zeal of a true revolutionary. So it’s not surprising to learn that MacDonald has already tried her hand at the frustrating world of Canadian politics. Back in 1999, she ran for a seat in the Ontario legislature as an NDP candidate in the riding of Stormont-Dundas-Charlottenburgh, an experience she describes as “really intense.”
With a head full of political theory, the then 20-year-old set forth to canvass her hometown, an adventure that brought her face-to-face with some stark realities: an elderly illiterate man tragically trapped outside of the political process, a person stranded in the middle of a complex gender reassignment procedure due to government funding cutbacks, and, worst of all, “a lot of poverty.”
In a close race against Liberal incumbent (and eventual victor) John Cleary and his Progressive Conservative challenger Noble Villeneuve, MacDonald placed a respectable third.
Looking back on her expedition into the often rough political landscape, MacDonald notes that there is a need for “people who care about politics to gear themselves towards the people who are implicated in politics,” arguing that the reason for rampant apathy amongst younger (generally left-leaning) voters is “not because it’s their problem, but because politics are boring [to them] at this time.”
As a youth candidate, she was able to get a glimpse beyond the political theory that dominated her university studies.
“You just see how politics operates in the world, and that’s very different from how it operates in the books,” she reflects.
Institutional politics behind her for the time being, MacDonald’s many successes in the avant-art world are stacking up nicely. With all six performances of The Rat King packed to the rafters last week, MacDonald is now looking for an opportunity to remount the show, noting that she hopes to expand the musical component by adding more musicians to back up renowned composer and keyboardist Bob Wiseman, and add some songs that had to be cut due to time constraints.
As for the future of humanity, MacDonald isn’t entirely sure we’ll make it, but emphasizes our collective responsibility to at least give it our best shot.
“It’s a gamble to say, ‘Let’s spend our energy on trying to change our ways, and trying to survive, and to make a world that we can actually live in,'” she says, “but let’s at least try to make life livable.”
Check out some of MacDonald’s many creative endeavours at:
ratking.ca
republicofsafety.ca
mcgilliganbooks.com
