It's always 1973 in Bert Xanadu's Toronto. As its longest-serving and longest-suffering mayor, he presides over a city as fantastical as a drip-dry shirt, and a cinema --- the Imperial Six --- as glamorous and subdivided as Ethel Merman's last will and testament. He does it with panache, impatience, and dyspepsia, but who's counting? From the thousands of scintillatingly coherent pronouncements he has made, these are truly the most available!
"@MOVIEMAYOR makes me genuinely laugh out loud."
--- Actor and Comedian Brent Butt
"Bert Xanadu is to Toronto what Dame Edna is to snobbery: a satire more accurate than the real thing."
--- Giller Award-Winning Novelist & Poet Michael Redhill
"As if Groucho Marx had a Twitter feed! Bert Xanadu is reckless, imaginative, unpredictable. An immensely gifted creation."
--- Anthropologist & Author Grant McCracken
In I OWN THIS TOWN: THE MAYOR BERT XANADU XANTHOLOGY, Mayor Xanadu, Toronto's foremost movie showman and sole mayor, presents a sexily official selection from the thousands of municipal missives he issued to his citizens in 1973 (through his state-of-the-art Telex machine, the Thought Lathe), the year some call his most triumphantly expressive and non-linear. From the preface by TV Star of Note and Former Voice of Doom Lorne Greene, through such chapters as 'That's A Lovely Rotunda You Have There', and 'Does Toronto Exist? And If So, Why?', you'll find the reasons why some are saying it's as if Groucho Marx had a Twitter feed. And so on and so forth.
The slim volume, which reminds one of Bert's own slimness circa 1933, also includes several readable essays and typewritten thoughts from the Dominion's own Bürgermeister of Buttered Popcorn (i.e. Bert) on such serious topics as imperceptible transit delays, the Simcoe St. Goatworks, product endorsements, streetcar fumigation schedules, steamship arrivals of Hollywood stars like Morey Amsterdam and Shelly Winters, zeppelin sightings, nude projectionists' lawsuits, City Hall laughing gas leaks and just what Raymond Burr is doing in town this week anyway – all the things that make Toronto one of the most recent of world-class cities.
Dash. Panache. Class. Sass. Pulchritude. Cravat. Mere words, but when applied to Bert Xanadu, they exhibit all their meanings, dictionaries be damned. In Bert's short bursts of enthusiasm and slightly longer rage-filled exhortations one can see the inner man, and the city he wears like a heavily starched tuxedo. We may be the cummerbund, but what a view.
@MovieMayor
