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Torontoist Patio Series: Wednesday, August 5 @ The Globe Bistro

By David Topping

200907patioseries.jpg
Photo from June’s patio series event at the Pilot in Yorkville by Andrew Louis/Torontoist.


The fourth edition of Torontoist’s patio series—where staff and readers and commenters gather under the late-afternoon sun on the city’s finest patios to mingle—heads east to the Globe Bistro (124 Danforth Avenue, right by Broadview Station). Join us this Wednesday, August 5, starting at 5:30 p.m. We’ll see you then!

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  • http://undefined montauk

    I am motherfucking attending. And I’m bringing at least two other Torontoist readers with me.

  • http://undefined accozzaglia

    Fourth ring of hipster hell.
    /me shudders in cold sweats

  • http://www.bitpicture.com Marc Lostracco

    I think you’d be surprised at how not-true that is. We’ve had readers from their late teens to their sixties, from artists to lawyers show up. Neither our staff nor our readership is as remotely hipstery as people think. I’m certainly not.

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    /me has chattering teeth and can’t keep warm under the eiderdown.
    I don’t think you are. I do think others definitely are. I also find that few recognize it in themselves and are loath to concede what others plainly see in them. And a few seem to wear it like some badge of honour. It’s the zeitgeist of now.
    (the Patio Series™ photo is enough for me to want to sit before a wood-burning stove to try to shake off this clammy, cold fog from the River Styx)

  • rek

    I’ll be there.

  • http://undefined montauk

    What bothers you about hipsters? Why are you averse to them? God knows I have my own gripes, but I’m curious to know yours. You should probably throw up your definition or conceptualization of “hipster” too…

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    Our photographer (and social media dude) Andrew Louis has a few more photos from the last event, including the one I threw text on top of above. They’re not totally representative of everyone who was there, but you are nonetheless free to inspect the photos carefully and at a higher resolution for signs of so-called “hipsters,” which you seem to be using as a liberal synonym for “regularly-dressed youngish people.”
    A warning, though, before you click to view the photos: while I am wearing a plain black shirt in them, it is from American Apparel, so you may want to proceed with caution.

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    Enough about hipsters bothers me. This forum demands brevity, and that can’t really happen here. Wanna get a beer in about a week or so and have a conversation picking up from here? My treat.
    [And no, not the Patio Series™ — not only for the above feverish chills, but also I'm going to be seven hours away for the next week. So the week after.]

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    A-ha. David, having looked at these pictures, I do believe you were at a speaking event last October where, inter alia, Richard Florida and Paul Bedford were on the panel, yes?
    [Also, "regularly-dressed" is subjective and predicated on life experiences as all get-out, and we both know it. :) ]

  • http://undefined rek

    My money says accozzaglia is the hipsterist hipster who ever hipstered.

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    Come have a beer with me as well, and you will promptly grok how poorly I resemble that thought. Since you’re a betting man, I think you’ll probably wanna buy us a pitcher rather than pay me outright.
    Beer is more fun anyway. You in? :)

  • http://undefined montauk

    That’s a good idea. In fact, let’s all have a beer and assess each other’s various hipster qualities or lack thereof. Say, Wednesday at 5:30, at the Globe Bistro?

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    See above: seven hours away. Translation: Montréal.
    Also, no reason why you can’t have beers twice in two weeks. What’ll it be?

  • http://undefined Svend

    Do they serve Pabst Blue Ribbon?

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    I do believe you were at a speaking event last October where, inter alia, Richard Florida and Paul Bedford were on the panel, yes?
    I am not sure if that is some sort of joke—we all know how much hipsters love ironic things like jokes!—but no, I think you have me confused with someone else. I have been on panels, but not that panel.
    [Also, "regularly-dressed" is subjective and predicated on life experiences as all get-out, and we both know it. :) ]
    Sure, okay, yes, any hyphenated compound that has the word “regular” as the basis of its first word is going to be subjective and debatable, and yes, in saying “regularly-dressed” I am also making an implicit hierarchy where I am ranking my “regularly-dressed” self above those who are irregularly-dressed. And yes, there is no such thing as “regular” unless there is also an “irregular,” and even then both terms can be further torn apart to show that they are fluid, changeable, positional, and socially-determined, as all words ultimately are. And yes, to some extent, by even suggesting the concept of something “regular” I am turning whatever and whoever is not “regular” into the irregular Other, which brings with it a whole host of other, more insidious problems. And yes, by writing this down, I am engaging in another sort of hierarchy wherein I privilege written language above speech, which itself privileges the writing-centric world that is Imperialism. And yes, of course, I realize that life experiences determine what a person would see as social norms (and thus what is or isn’t “regular”)—I am writing this comment in English, the only language I’m fluent in, which is a direct result of my parents being only fluent in English, and my being born into a society where it is the primary language and having not lived anywhere where that was not the case. And, ultimately, there is really no such thing as objectivity anyway when we have to communicate that objectivity in language, which as a form for communication, like all forms of communication, is inherently subjective; even the definitions of the words “subjective” and “objective” are subjective, and each gain power from being opposed to one another, just as regular and irregular do.
    So, yes, I have read semiotics theory, literary theory, and art theory, too. But sometimes a black t-shirt is just a black t-shirt, and sometimes suggesting that a t-shirt is a thing that many people would wear in the summer in Toronto is not a necessarily wrong thing to say. Maybe—just maybe—your use of the word “hipster” to dismiss, negate, and ultimately marginalize a group of unlike people (in age, race, gender, sexual orientation, background, hometown) who most likely don’t fit whatever definition of the word “hipster” you can offer anyway, however flippant and jokey that dismissal is, is more of a problem.
    Boom, roasted. And I don’t drink beer.

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    I as referring to in the audience, not the panel, David. Relax, okay?
    At that panel, where the prof I had that term was a featured speaker (Paul Bedford of JGI454), I arrived late and sat in an open aisle seat, next to a guy who was with his friend. I recall this guy looking just like these pictures of you wearing black. If this wasn’t you, then don’t sweat it. Doppelgängers happen. I used to have one in Ana Gasteyer. I’ve never been invited to speak on and probably never will be, so you’re a better person than I am.
    In re: semiotics theory, it was a POSt I dropped after year two. But I will refer to what I said earlier about this discussion being endemic to the zeitgeist of today. I could not fathom having this conversation in 1989, 1994, 1999, or even 2002. The ingredients, context, and shared comprehension were simply absent then. The currency of “hipster”, writ large, is enrobed in social values of class irony, appropriation of that irony, and a novel devotion to social networking media heretofore unknown. Privacy is no longer considered of such high, intangible value as it once had. This is not really all-encompassing, but it should get the cognitive juices flowing. It is, arguendo, a generational shift — one which is a bit foreign to me and somewhat alienating given my own life experiences.
    So if you find contempt in my voice towards the notion of a demographic of people, doing one or many of plugging away on iPhones, possibly riding a spanking-new fixed gear bicycle (yet couldn’t fathom being a messenger on that bike in the dead of January), raiding certain retro themes into fashion pastiches that never co-existed in the past, and/or as Svend wryly added, consuming PBR/Milwaukee’s Best in stylish places that draw a clientèle which Mr. Florida would be best disposed to describe, it’s because I do find a sense of uniformity, peer-biased compliance, “fitting in”, and collective ideas that look and feel alien to what I personally know in myself or many of the people I’ve known before this now became what it is.
    I have no idea whether that made sense or not, but I’m trying to frame this with some perspective. If I missed, then I missed.

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    [correction: "speak on panels", that is. I apparently deleted that key word.]

  • http://undefined montauk

    Wow, Sir Topping, that comment was like a savage little alien tearing itself out of your placid, unsuspecting stomach.
    I agree that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. I don’t agree that accozzaglia is “marginalizing” anyone, however. I think that sort of dilutes what marginalization is.
    I would also like to submit that being in perpetual ivory tower grad student mode is, in itself, like rolling around lustily in your own class and academic privilege issues. Accozzaglia, why do I feel like “having a beer” with you would more strongly resemble “showing off our academic chops in a fierce semantic duel”? Are you as critical of theory and the academic industrial complex as you are of hipsters? Don’t answer that, I don’t need more analysis – I just want to say that sometimes discourse gets old and so does disdain.

  • http://undefined rek

    tl;dr

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    PA.

  • http://www.torontoist.com David Topping

    Lest anyone be discouraged from attending on Wednesday, we will most definitely not be discussing theory, though there will hopefully be many roasts. Quite possibly in panel form!

  • http://flickr.com/aged_accozzaglia accozzaglia

    Yep, discourse does get tired. I’d much rather keep it simple (stupid), as the saying goes. I hadn’t planned to take this in that direction, but I wanted to respond to David rather than “tl;dr”-ing it (qualifying as classic passive-aggressiveness, as no one but yourself needs to know that it was too long for you to not bother reading — hi t-rek!).
    I guess the only thing I can add to this, montauk, is that I am constantly aware of the privilege it was to even be accepted into university at all. I didn’t get that chance after high school, or soon after, or even a while after. I carved a career typically requiring bachelor-or-higher degrees — but I did so with no such thing. And invariably, you get paid a lot less despite demonstrating you can do exemplary work versus a newly-degreed person with no experience in the same field. So after a decade of that, homelessness, blah blah, I applied to uni on a very long shot. And to my genuine disbelief, I was admitted. I didn’t believe it for months — not until I moved and my first course’s lecture literally began. So I guess if that’s an issue, then a great many of degreed people have comparable issues with their creds as they plough through high school right into post-secondary, get a degree, and then wonder wtf they really wanted to do. I’m just grateful I can carry my own fairly OK now when this kind of intellectual wankery crops up, when before I would just sit there mute and hating myself for feeling so stupid. Or maybe just ignorant — just not blissfully so.
    You know what I miss most when around the presence of hipstery folk? The absence of candour. That’s why I get the chilly shudders.
    Also, I’m sorry I offered you the beer. I’ll find someone else to share it with.

  • http://undefined shelland

    This comment stream is fantastic.
    Yet the entire time I was perusing the rhetoric banter above, I couldn’t help but return frequently to the image and stare at the dude right in the middle of the “P” in “Patio Series” (not to mention the guy sitting behind him).
    I certainly wouldn’t deem him a hipster, but who knows? Maybe his white hair is ironic, his shirt cut by Penguin, and his perpetual mind soundtrack includes Phoenix, Of Montreal and Animal Collective.
    Damn, I’ve been out-cooled again!

  • http://undefined rek

    Damn, I forgot an appointment at 6. Don’t know if I’ll make it now.