A Video Born to Fail: On the Fame Gene and the Preservation of the Ordinary
Nobody is going to watch a ten-year-old, low-resolution video of winter driving in Toronto. The snow blurs past like cheap VHS, the engine hums under a sky the color of worn steel, and Peter Randel’s Raing Dogs murmurs beneath it all. The footage shudders and shakes, and yet it moves forward, insistently, faithfully. On paper, it is doomed. On YouTube, it is the definition of obscurity.
And perhaps that is the point.
There is something in human nature—the Fame Gene, if you will—that seeks applause, recognition, reward. It is in our bones, in our eyes, in the twitch of the nervous hand over a keyboard or the sigh that follows a glance at a social feed. The Fame Gene measures the world in clicks and likes, in momentary applause, in the short thrill of visibility. It thrives on the polished, the immediate, the easily digested. It does not notice the crooked streetlight, the frozen puddle, the pedestrian’s brief shuffle across a corner. It does not care for the ordinary, the overlooked, the slowly dying city.
But art, true art, does not answer to the Fame Gene. It thrives in its indifference, in the very moments when no one is watching. This video—the winter streets, the blink-length observations, the commentary that turns the mundane into the sharp and absurd—exists to witness, to preserve, to record. It is a defiance, small but absolute. It documents Toronto before change, before demolition, before disappearance. It does not strive to be viral. It strives to endure.
In this way, the video is a triumph of the unseen. The Fame Gene would have flattened it into highlights, trimmed it for mass consumption, erased the pauses and the silence. Instead, it retains the awkwardness, the grain, the texture—the lived-in quality of streets and snow and human gestures. It is a document, a memory, a fragment of life preserved in the amber of low-resolution video.
There is a certain melancholy in that defiance, a bittersweet charm that recalls Fitzgerald’s glances at lost grandeur, Dickens’s compassion for the overlooked, and Hemingway’s sparse insistence on truth. The Cane’s commentary flits through these frozen streets like a restless spirit, noticing what might otherwise pass unrecorded—the tilt of a mailbox, the arc of a snowflake caught in the streetlight. There is poetry in the failure of attention, a quiet victory in the refusal to conform.
To resist the Fame Gene is to embrace the ordinary as extraordinary. It is to record not for applause but for preservation, to insist that the unnoticed matters, that small gestures accumulate into history. This video, in its grain and its uneven cadence, asserts the enduring power of observation, the wildness of human witnessing. It is born to fail in clicks and likes, but it cannot fail in significance.
Toronto, 2009. Winter. Streets nobody cares about. Footage nobody clicks. Yet in its imperfect frames, the city breathes, survives, insists upon being seen. The Fame Gene can overlook it. Time will not.
And perhaps, in that quiet endurance, the true reward of art lies.
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