SHADES OF THE TRUMAN SHOW:
NYU Writer, Cultural Critic Andrew Ross Gives Insider's View of Town That Disney Built in York U. Lecture, Living with the Mouse: A Report From Celebration, Florida

TORONTO, Feb. 12, 1999 -- Cultural critic, writer and self-proclaimed iconoclast Andrew Ross will deliver the 1999 Wendy Michener Lecture on February 24 at York University. His talk, titled Living with the Mouse: A Report from Celebration, Florida, will focus on his year of living and observing the ultimate planned community: the "real-life small town" built by The Walt Disney Company.

From his eye-witness perspective, Ross will ruminate on what went right and what went wrong in our consumer society's latest version of the American dream.

"The residents spent a good part of their first year here trying to prove to themselves and to the outside world that this was a real place, with "real problems" and not a theme park village, cooked up by the Imagineers," said Ross.

The town of Celebration lies about six kilometres south of Disney World's Magic Kingdom. It features a 19th century ambiance combined with cutting-edge fibre-optic technology. Built on the personal vision of the late Walt Disney, it boasts an all-star list of architects. Disney himself once said, "you can dream, design, create and build the most wonderful place in the world, but it requires people to make that dream a reality."

Celebration's residents, more than 2,000 and rapidly growing, are attracted to the idea of escaping the cheerless alienation of suburbia and reconnecting with their neighbours in small- town America. The urban plan recreates all the good attributes of small-town living: walking distance to all amenities; a downtown complete with housing built over shops; and a general white-picket-fence feeling. On closer inspection, however, it turns out those white picket fences are made of plastic.

Ross is Professor and Director of the American Studies Program at New York University. An astute social commentator, he helped pioneer the relatively new interdisciplinary field of Cultural Studies with its emphasis on popular and marginal cultures - everything from Star Trek zines to MTV. His latest book is Real Love: In Pursuit of Cultural Justice, a collection of essays published in 1998. His other books include The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature's Debt to Society (1994) and Strange Weather: Culture, Science and Technology in an Age of Limits (1991). He is the editor of Science Wars (1996) and co-editor of Microphone Fiends: Youth Music and Youth Culture (1994), Technoculture (1991) and the journal, Social Text.

The annual Wendy Michener Lectures were instituted at York University's Faculty of Fine Arts to commemorate the late Wendy Roland Michener, a noted Canadian arts critic and journalist.

Living with the Mouse: A Report from Celebration, Florida is presented as part of the Culture, Technology and Nature seminar series of the Faculty of Environmental Studies and the Science, Technology, Culture and Society Program, Bethune College, York University.

The lecture is Wed., Feb. 24, 7:30 p.m. in Curtis Lecture Hall "L" at York University, 4700 Keele St., Toronto. Admission is free. For further information, call (416) 736-5136.

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For further information or to arrange interviews with Andrew Ross, please contact:

Carol Bishop
Communications, Faculty of Fine Arts
York University
(416) 736-2100 ext. 20421
email: cbishop@yorku.ca

Sine MacKinnon
Senior Advisor for Media Relations
York University
(416) 736-2100 ext. 22087
email: sinem@yorku.ca
YU/010/99