By the end of the opening credits of the first episode of MTV’s The Buried Life, the concept seems so attractive, so engaging, so right now, that it’s easy to imagine the studio meeting where it was pitched:

Okay, here’s the setup: four twenty-something guys make a list of 100 things they’d like to do before they die, and we send a film crew to capture their exploits. Maybe they’re in a van — no, a bus — cruising, listening to hip hop. They’re kind of rascally, a little outdoorsy, a little West Coast. They’re smart, not self-indulgent. Maybe they’re even Canadian. Here’s the kicker: every time they accomplish something on the list, they help a stranger they’ve met along the way. Boom! — everybody’s happy.

Apparently, everybody was. MTV ordered a pilot, then a full eight-episode season, with premises ranging from standard-issue fluff (“ask out the girl of your dreams”) to the startlingly sincere (“help deliver a baby”). Since its January 18 premiere, The Buried Life has received killer promotion and, relative to cable standards, record-breaking audiences. In a front-page article, the New York Times cast the show as “MTV for the era of Obama.” (No kidding: tonight’s episode is about an attempt to play basketball with the U.S. president.) There’s nothing else like it on television.

The Buried Life is created, produced, edited and even promoted by its four stars from British Columbia: Ben Nemtin, Dave Lingwood, and brothers Duncan and Jonnie Penn. The bucket list? They started it in 2006, and crossed off twenty-four items in the making of an independent documentary that caught MTV’s attention. The show’s name? Inspired by an 1852 Matthew Arnold poem. The foursome’s bus, christened Penelope? They bought her from a nudist in Vancouver.

During a recent conference call with the castmates, Ben describes the eight-episode run on MTV as only the latest turn for a project that has already grown beyond the quartet’s wildest imaginations. “We were offered a show in 2007, but we turned it down because we weren’t going to be able to control the creative process. We started this [project] as a way to showcase the potential of a group of friends, and it was crucial for us to maintain that vision,” he tells me. “This time MTV came to us and said, ‘We want to pick up what you’ve been doing for the last four years, and we won’t touch it.’ So we produced it, we edited it, we chose the music. It’s still our baby.”

Indeed, The Buried Life has a degree of warmth and familiarity that’s absent from most of its neighbours in the reality television ’hood. (“We have difficulty calling this a reality show,” Jonnie politely interjects when I raise the term. “It’s more of a docu-series — Gonzo cinema.”) A few years ago, a series this earnest might have come across as schmaltzy. But the world is different now. “In the past two decades we’ve had boy bands and George Bush, and we know where all of that led,” Jonnie says. “Now people are asking for something else.”

The Buried Life might be the first big-deal youth program to focus on that “something” — to study it, cater to it, and harness its potential. From the very beginning, the group’s website has invited visitors to comment on the original list and, better yet, build new lists of their own. Related Facebook and Twitter pages offer additional means for contact. “People are craving a different kind of connection, a more interactive one,” Jonnie says. “It’s clear that young people want to participate; they jump at the opportunity to get involved. It’s not enough anymore just to watch.”

Each member of the group has his favourite list item and, likely, his favourite part of their newfound fame. All four have similar things to say about the way their list addresses happiness, satisfaction, and accomplishment. “Those things aren’t destinations. You don’t just get there and everything’s perfect,” says Duncan. “Maybe the thrill is in the chase, maybe it’s not, but that’s what was missing from our lives before — we didn’t take chances. We were craving the opportunity to do more, but we weren’t doing it.  Now we’ve made it to a different place.”

Jonnie concurs. “This is bigger than us, and it’s something anybody can relate to, connect to, interpret. That’s why the project found success: it transcends generations and gender,” he says.

Can it really be so simple? Ben reminds me about list item no. 53: make a television show. “We’re proud of what we’ve done, but at the end of the day [the MTV series] is just an item on the list,” he says. “Hopefully it will be a good way to get the word out on the project, but what keeps us going is support from our online community — people posting their own lists on our website or Facebook, the conversations we start and the connections we make.

“We’re just getting started. We’ve got big plans.”

(Image courtesy of theburiedlife.com)

More than a year after the world’s economy teetered on the edge of collapse, it’s difficult to read a magazine or newspaper without being reminded that we’re still in trouble. But for those longing to ditch the bulletin of the apocalypse in favor of a more hopeful headline, something winsome this way comes: Papirmasse, an art magazine cum old world broadsheet cum boho time capsule founded by Albertan painter Kirsten McCrea. Last January marked the beginning of McCrea’s “grand art experiment,” an art-by-mail monthly that arrives unbound and uncomplicated, just a folio of limited-edition prints with stories, poems, and interviews on their backsides. When I ask McCrea for a simpler description of her very ambitious project, she fails beautifully: “It’s a meeting point between a book of fine art prints, a magazine, a gallery visit, and a pulp novel. It engages in multiple ways.”

The genesis of Papirmasse dates to the spring of 2008, when McCrea graduated from the art program at Montreal’s Concordia University and returned to her native Edmonton to save enough money to paint full time. While working in a restaurant, she noticed that the walls were covered with paintings by an artist she knew. They were beautiful — and each one had a price tag of $2,000. Then McCrea thought back to her previous job, going door-to-door soliciting donations for Amnesty International. There, she recalled, it was amazing to see how many homes had completely bare walls. From this collision of unsatisfying circumstances — exorbitant art or no art at all — Papirmasse was born.

Right away, McCrea knew what she wanted: to make art for everyone. She chose the name Papirmasse after stumbling across the term in a printmaking class — in Dutch, it means “pulp,” calling to mind both the soft wet fibers used as the base material for paper and the mass culture art for which she hopes to cultivate a taste, a demand, and an audience. In keeping with her mission, McCrea knew she’d have to expand her repertoire of art-making techniques in order to produce the project. “I started thinking about offset lithography,” she says. “It seemed to be a good alternative to paintings and prints. If I could get machines involved, I knew I could keep the price down.” And while she clearly understands the importance of web publishing (she hosts much of Papirmasse’s content on her own impressive website, www.hellokirsten.com), McCrea has no plans to downsize her print production: “People who subscribe are really excited about getting something like this in the mail.”

Low production costs are vital to Papirmasse, she insists. Despite its dreamy feel, every detail of the magazine is curated in the name of accessibility — to wit, most of the art thus far has been McCrea’s own (“Free content,” she quips). Early plans to mail Papirmasse in cardboard tubes were scrapped when postage quotes outstripped her working budget. A twelve-issue subscription was originally $72; now it’s $60. “The less the magazine costs,” she says, “the more people have access to it. And so many people are shut out of the art world already.”

But — perhaps in an ironic gesture — Papirmasse is subscription only, and each issue has a limited run of 1,000 copies. It’s a question of productive exclusivity, according to McCrea. “I wanted the magazine to feel special,” she says. What she doesn’t want is to feed the contemporary art-world trend. Even in the slipstream following a decade-long march of art as spectacle — with jeweled skulls and shambolic bedroom scenes leading the way — McCrea says the art world still commands a steep cost of entry. In a way, she says, Papirmasse has the potential to capitalize on the same force of nature that slowed the acquisition and sale of most other art in 2009. While the recession certainly highlighted the difference between luxury and necessity, McCrea aims to shift the general perception of art away from the former and toward the latter. “I’m an artist,” she says. “I’m obsessed with art. I need it in my life. But you walk into a gallery and a starter painting by an emerging artist is $2,000, and most people find it alienating to be around something that expensive.”

As she attempted to understand and resolve that alienation, McCrea was drawn to artistic manifestos, ranging from “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” to the Crude Art Manifesto to the Cheap Art Manifesto to Stuckism. She began to see these statements as central to her magazine’s identity, but the relation was unexpected. “It’s kind of tongue and cheek, what I’ve done with these classic manifestos,” she says. “It was really interesting to find my own thoughts echoed back at me from the past. I found a mission statement ready for me, one that was voiced really, really beautifully.” And it is this amalgamation of high and low taste (one imagines Frankfurt School Marxist Walter Benjamin and Medway punk poet Charles Thomson, arm in arm and smiling) that gives Papirmasse its shape and direction.

In her dream scenario, McCrea says, more contributors would get involved. She’d love to see her magazine filled with the work of a new artist every month, someone she’d entrust with addressing the question of accessible art however they wanted. Ultimately, she says, she hopes her subscribers don’t automatically love every print she sends them. Instead, she craves a deeper, more critical engagement. McCrea hopes that in the course of a year-long subscription, “everyone gets a piece they love and a piece they hate. Give the parts you don’t like to your friends.” Spoken like a true revolutionary.

(Papirmasse images courtesy of Kirsten McCrea)

What do Jack Layton and David Byrne have in common? Sure, Layton’s Twitter account tells us he’ll be busking on the Danforth this Saturday, but at press time, the range of his musical talent remains untested. No, it’s a shared interest in the future of cycling that unites the current NDP leader and former Talking Head, who will participate in an October 24 panel discussion at the International Festival of Authors. Along with Toronto Cyclists Union executive director Yvonne Bambrick and urban designer Ken Greenberg, Layton and Byrne will discuss the potential of urban planning — specifically, bike lanes — to improve the political climate of cycling in Toronto and around the world.

Walk a block in Toronto’s downtown core on any weekday afternoon, and you’ll see the strain of cyclist-motorist relations from the belly of the beast. Drivers roll their eyes and drum their fingers, and many cyclists ignore red lights and stop signs as traffic allows. At its worst, the drama plays out with fatal consequences, as it did in late August, when a downtown road altercation involving former Ontario attorney general Michael Bryant, who was driving a convertible car, caused the death of bicycle courier Darcy Allan Sheppard. Toronto cyclists rallied for bike lanes in the wake of the incident, insisting that separate roadways guarantee safer transit, especially in regions where traffic is busiest. Drivers and business owners, however, have been less willing to accept bike lanes as the solution, citing slow commutes and limited street parking, respectively, as evidence that city roadways have already been compromised enough. So with cyclists getting killed and drivers getting angry, what’s a judicious citizen to believe? Can’t we all just get along?

If recent history is any indication, the answer is no. And there’s more trouble coming: the newest version of the Toronto Public Works and Infrastructure Committee’s official Bike Plan — a strategic proposal with a mission to introduce cyclist-friendly policies and programs — details measures to advance bike culture in six major areas. First up? Launching a public bicycle system by spring 2010.

Toronto’s updated plan, modeled after Montreal’s two-year old BIXI and the 20,000–strong Vélib “shared bicycle” program in Paris, proposes a start-up service area bounded by High Park in the west, Broadview Avenue in the east, Bloor Street in the north and Lake Ontario to the south. The projected system — roughly 300 rental stations with an initial capacity of 1,000 bicycles, to be increased to 10,000 over the next decade — will inevitably place a greater number of commuters on some of the city’s busiest roads. As a public transportation venture, a bicycle system presents a unique safety imperative. But are bike lanes the solution? Beyond their formidable logistic and financial considerations, would separate lanes ease the competing interests of cyclists and motorists?

I call city councillor Adrian Heaps, chair of the Toronto Cycling Advisory Committee. Beyond novelty users at the program’s inception, he expects that a public bicycle system will appeal to three distinct categories of riders: those who typically use taxis to travel short distances, those who currently use car-share services for shopping trips, and, in non-winter months, tourists. Ultimately, the councillor says, the TCAC’s goal is to reduce car traffic in the downtown core, not to convert drivers outright. Ideally, cyclists and drivers would learn to share without incident. Heaps, though, is skeptical about the partitioning of bike lanes on existing roads as an easy remedy. “Putting a bucket of paint on the road doesn’t make a safer bike corridor,” he says. “It comes down to mutual respect.”

Still curious, I contact Christopher Sumpton, co-producer of Pedal Power, a documentary recently commissioned by the CBC to examine the shifting tides of bike culture around the world. What would happen, I ask, if 10,000 public bicycles descended upon Toronto tomorrow? “I think it would work very well,” he answers. “Toronto is a city of cyclists.” Sumpton makes repeated references to cities like Paris, where the Vélib program generated 120,000 trips a day in its first year of operation. He says the “dramatic immediate effect” of a public bicycle system will be a societal awareness of cycling, a “push to the process of mental change that bikes are a serious part of the transit system.” Moreover, he says, more bicycles and less cars in the downtown core will improve the quality of street life; Torontonians will experience “more human interaction, with people able to stop at shops and cafés instead of going by in a bus or car.”

Still, Sumpton says any higher-order change to the city’s transportation system requires the support and acceptance of most its citizens, not just those who cycle. “That’s where it gets messy right now,” he allows. “When you unleash a greater number of cyclists on the roads, you have to have some sort of provision for them.” In the shadow of the Sheppard-Bryant affair, and with the debut of Toronto’s public bicycle system on the horizon, Sumpton believes the bike lane debate is a study in prevarication. “Sure, a public bike system really ups the ante for safe cycling. Ultimately, that means providing bike lanes. But bike lanes are shorthand for a lot of things: rational traffic systems, advanced stop lines. A lot of imagination has to be brought to bear,” he says.

Next, I call Richard Poplak, who has written about bike culture for Toronto Life magazine and is currently at work on a graphic novel about bicycle hoarder Igor Kenk, the “Fagin of Queen Street.” As an authority on sharing the roadway, Poplak’s credentials certainly pass muster — he estimates that between commuting and training as a UCI–licensed racer, he spends twenty-five hours every week on a bicycle. Poplak is doubtful that the riders who use Toronto’s new public system will amount to a meaningful increase in the number of regular bike commuters, or a meaningful decrease in the number of cars downtown. In the meantime, he calls for improved road infrastructure (“so that bicycles can safely traverse the streets without having to dodge lake-sized potholes”) and a large-scale safety campaign targeting cyclists and drivers alike. I ask whether Toronto’s public bicycle system should underwrite an expanded network of bike lanes, and can almost hear him shaking his head from the other end of the telephone line. “What bike lanes don’t do is enshrine cycling as a right,” he says. “What they do do, is enshrine the primacy of the car.” Like Heaps, Poplak believes cyclists should simply obey the rules of the road: no more rolling through red lights as they see fit. As well, motorists should recognize cyclists’ right to share their roadways. “Cyclists have the right to be everywhere except the 401 [highway] and the Don Valley Parkway. End of story,” he says. “We have rules — all we need to do is enforce them.”

Whether enforcing the rules will neutralize the discord remains to be seen. What is certain, though, is that no one, whether they travel by car or by bicycle, has the prerogative to ignore where and how their fellow commuters take to the road. Just before he signed off, filmmaker Christopher Sumpton put it to me this way: “It’s like the weather. Everyone has to deal with transportation.” Poplak was more frank in the last email he sent me: “No matter how much you may loathe cyclists, you’d have to agree that something has to be done, and pretty fucking quickly. Painting white lines on the road and/or handing out bikes isn’t the solution. Making sure we all understand the rules of the game, however, is.”