Moby, as in the electronic-music god, is in Sook-Yin Lee's in-box every morning these days. Sometimes it's a passionate e-mail about his relationship with animals; in others, he's on about Thomas Edison's unwise championship of direct current power.
Ms. Lee, now well into her second season as host of the wide-ranging arts and culture program Definitely Not the Opera on CBC Radio One, admits to being a little overwhelmed by her new, very famous pen pals. "I mean, who would not be excited to have Yoko Ono write a letter in support of your right to make art?" she says, face lighting up.
Actually, Ms. Lee's face is pretty much permanently activated with enthusiasm, even over Jell-O salad and melon from the food court beneath CBC headquarters on Front Street. Last week's media storm over the CBC's hesitancy to allow her to accept a part in Short Bus, an explicit film by director John Cameron Mitchell, is just abating.
Mr. Mitchell has great art-house cred (he was nominated for an Oscar for the screen adaptation of his own play, which became Hedwig and the Angry Inch in 2001 and in which Ms. Lee appeared); his intention to shoot boundary-pushing sex scenes in Short Bus became the story and the presumed reason for the CBC's refusal to let Ms. Lee participate.
Ms. Lee wrote a few friends to say, "Omigod, that can't happen!" as she tells it now, and then went off to Mexico on vacation. When she returned, the e-mail had snowballed into a campaign. Mr. Mitchell had recruited his famous friends to blast the CBC -- a luminous list, including Francis Ford Coppola (who has since asked for a signed photo of Ms. Lee), Julianne Moore and Michael Stipe.
The "crazy, international incident," as Ms. Lee calls it, landed her on the infamous Page Six of The New York Post. "The sex and celebrities made the story juicier, but initially what got people's attention was a story about an individual standing up to a corporation," she says.
In the end, the CBC reversed the decision, for which Ms. Lee is grateful. "It was never my intention to burn anyone," she says. "I'm really happy the CBC is supporting me." The official line is that the issue the Corp. had was never about the movie's content, but only a concern about the amount of time Ms. Lee would be away from her job during filming.
What made the story stick? Sook-Yin Lee, who will say only that she is in her early 30s, has lived her life rejecting neat labels, and is continually creating and performing: From singer in an alt-rock band to VJ to radio host, her résumé is also peppered with performance art, solo albums and musical and theatrical experimentation well outside the mainstream.
Underground was where she started out, by necessity: Ms. Lee had never seen MuchMusic when she was "propelled" into the highly mainstream job of VJ in 1995. "I was living a very obscure existence, an acoustic lifestyle playing in my band, Bob's Your Uncle," she says. Having dropped out of school at 15, she was living in a collective in the Strathcona district of Vancouver, with a group of "artists and kids in a fluid environment."
"Moses [Znaimer] who is my mentor now, saw some of my performance-art work, sent out a camera and gave me 10 minutes," she recalls. In Toronto, she was a natural on TV, subverting the system and toying with the medium; turning the camera on its head, deliberately adding interference, using the time and space to talk to the friends she had left behind in Vancouver, to "ask them about their cats."
About her consequent approach to radio, DNTO executive producer Chris Boyce says: "Sook-Yin is game for any insane idea. She gets super-excited. For a Woody Harrelson junket, her whole interview was about how awful junkets were. She had him pick her questions from a bag. On another show, she interviewed celebrities after they had inhaled helium."
Outside the CBC, Ms. Lee lives a low-key life, commuting in all weather by bicycle to the office from the home in Kensington Market she shares with her boyfriend, Steve Cosens, a director of photography for films such as Seven Times Lucky, which just premiered at Sundance.
"I have a very deep relationship with my neighbourhood," Ms. Lee says. "I kind of create a village." Last week's DNTO segment on accents featured Mr. So from Kensington's Caam United Hardware, "who teaches me about plumbing," she explains. "We were asking him to speak Portuguese. Then Mimi, who is the daughter of my friend Cece [who manages Courage My Love, another market mainstay] was repeating Cantonese back to me and speaking it better than I was!"
For relaxation, she is most likely to hang out somewhere unassuming, like The Communist's Daughter on Dundas Street West, or go salsa dancing at El Rancho on College Street. She says she'll cross town for the French toast at Bonjour Brioche on Queen Street East.
With the acting imbroglio dying down, she was frantically preparing this week for what she calls an "improv opera," which she performed Wednesday night at the Art Gallery of York University. Waking Period, based on a screenplay she wrote, was done in collaboration with harpist Kristen Moss-Theriault. The gig came about when curator Philip Monk saw her perform an earlier work in which she conducted an orchestra that included an accordionist, a knitting section and a kid playing basketball, all cued by glass tubes she operated with light sticks.
On paper, it sounds a bit loopy; on stage, and particularly in conversation, Ms. Lee transcends this problem with a blithe intensity. She has an inspirational quality, and her street cred allows her to say stuff you'd normally expect from Dr. Phil: "The challenge is to embrace evolution and not be fearful. Fear debilitates us on a larger level. It makes us miss out on a lot of richness in life."
Her feelings are worn on her sleeve, and it's hard not to admire someone who managed a spectacular career trajectory in such a seamless manner. Nothing has been handed to Ms. Lee: In an essay in the 1997 anthology of writings by Canadian women, Click: Becoming Feminists, she writes about growing up in the Vancouver suburbs with a mother who fell, violently, under the sway of mental illness. It's a powerful tale, one Ms. Lee manages to tell without self-pity.
Chester Brown, author of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography, has been a friend since Ms. Lee wrote him a fan letter in the late eighties. "Sook-Yin is very good at drawing people around her. She has always had very diverse interests, all over the place, and the art develops pretty organically," he says.
She still sings, and has released two solo albums since her arrival in Toronto; she also works with a group called Slan, "a couple of boys and a fusion of a hip-hop, computer pop band."
Over time, she says, "I've been paring down. Basically, I didn't want to lug amps any more."
As for the movies, Short Bus, which starts rehearsals next month in New York, will indeed push boundaries: "It addresses, expresses the gamut of human sexuality," Ms. Lee says. "There is a lot of queer content, and the actors represent different sexual identities. It is a radical thing, but in the end, people will be able to see part of themselves, somewhere.
"Artists are the conscience of society. Your art is your life." And since risk and experimentation are the main threads running through the art of Ms. Lee's life, she puts it best herself: "I am a guinea pig in the science project of my life."