Culture: July 2009 Archives

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Viral marketing, eh? It’s generally annoying, but sometimes genius. In fact, sometimes it’s too genius, because Funny People’s viral pièce de résistance, Raaaaaaaandy is clearly ten times funnier than the film it’s supposed to be promoting. Starring Aziz Ansari and supposedly not a razor-sharp takedown of comedy’s bête noire, Dane Cook (hmm, we’ve gone a bit French today), it's still perfect if you read it that way. God, we hate that guy.

Mystery solved (sort of). According to Nathalie Karvonen, the executive director of the Toronto Wildlife Centre, and Ralph Toninger, senior project manager of restoration services at the Toronto and Region Conservation Authority, the naked (and rather terrifying looking) creature that’s been seen skulking around Parkdale is indeed a raccoon, and come winter, one that's in grave danger.

After passing the hat around Torontoist HQ all week, we just couldn't get up the funds to purchase the above Craigslist item of our dreams, not in this economy. So we officially—and ruefully—open it up to you, lucky reader: one ninety-gallon "custom built, Lord of the Rings inspired fish tank by a local artist i.e. my boyfriend."

Two years ago, we asked TTC Chair Adam Giambrone about whether increasing the amount of advertising on the TTC would be a way to make the organization a bit more money. He told us then: "I think we have an acceptable level of advertising. Could it be less? Absolutely. At this point any reduction would be a budget reduction, and I'll tell you I'm not really prepared to reduce the budget of the TTC to reduce the advertising. At the same time, I think we certainly have enough advertising. Many people would say too much, and even if we went all-out, the money is just not the solution to our city's budget woes." In November of 2007, we polled our readers on whether there was too much, just enough, or not enough advertising on the TTC, and 51% of you said that, then, there was too much.

It’s a surreal experience—interviewing a guy about an online “lifecasting” experiment and unwittingly becoming a part of it. But if there’s one lesson we can take away from the hour we spent with Hal Niedzviecki and his surveillance equipment (in his home, no less), it’s this: we should probably get used to it. That is, we should—and you should—probably get used to being watched.

With a tentative agreement reached and partially ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been checking in on garbage and recycling bins around the city throughout the strike, an attempt to follow the tangible effects of the strike and complement our other coverage.

Toronto International Film Festival announcements come thick and fast in the months leading up to the festival each year, and it quickly becomes hard to work out just what’s being announced and why you should care. After all, it’s not until the festival’s been going for a few days and enough buzz has built that you realize that you’ve got tickets for exactly the wrong unheard-of director, or this year’s un-coolest country, or all of the films that Cameron Bailey selected (that last one’s a killer). Yeah, if we could bet on TIFF, I’m sure we’d end up broke—did you foresee Slumdog Millionaire winning everyone’s hearts and minds at Toronto only to go on and nab a ton of Oscars a couple of months before TIFF 2008 even started? If so, you should let us know what your picks are (maybe in the comments? Actually, no, wait, just tell us, the Oscar odds right now must be insane). Anyway, we’re going to try to pick over the announcements so far and work out what’s interesting before we reach the festival, which runs this year from September 10 to 19. Warning, though: we’re going to concentrate on the best-known names because in most cases they’re all we have to hang on to.

With a tentative agreement reached and the deal waiting to be ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been checking in on garbage and recycling bins around the city throughout the strike, an attempt to follow the tangible effects of the strike and complement our other coverage.

Hamilton gets a bad rap, much of it based on the only view of the city most Torontonians get: overlooking the steel factories from the Skyway Bridge. While Toronto sometimes bills itself as a "City Within a Park," the moniker is actually more apt to our Steeltown neighbour to the west, which repeatedly kicks Toronto's ass when looking for ways to get back to nature. Seriously.

Ordinarily we take a dim view of sensationalism and fear-mongering here at Torontoist, but we hope, in this case, you'll forgive us for asking: WHAT THE HELL is that naked beast and how can I protect my [-self, child, community] from it? We haven't felt so scared of (and strangely drawn to) a piece of wildlife photography since last year, when the Montauk Monster washed up on that Long Island shore, and into our hearts.

              

Emma Flannery Lawrence Healey and Richard Rosenbaum are at it again. Last summer, they constructed faces along Queen Street West by sticking googly eyes on inanimate objects; this summer, they've done the same along Bloor Street West. "We decided to do this when—about a year ago—we realized that there is literally nothing that cannot be made more hilarious with the addition of googly eyes," Healey told Torontoist. "We look either for things that look like they need eyes (certain objects, like newspaper boxes or crosswalk buttons, fit this description perfectly) or things that already have faces where we can just place the googly eyes. The thing is that once you spend enough time scouting out things that look like little faces, you start seeing them everywhere. I've been fighting off the urge to stick googly eyes on all of my belongings, the back of my cat's head, [and] the Queen on every twenty dollar bill..."

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The Junction have always been lumped into a scene that their radio-friendly rock-tinged indie pop didn't necessarily "fit"; rarely are 905 emo mainstays such as Moneen or the defunct Cain and Abel (reincarnated as the wonderfully riff-heavy Ulysses and the Siren) mentioned without also dropping the Brampton trio's familiar name. Another Link In the Chain, released independently today, is an aptly named album that may lack in songwriting innovation, but makes up for it in an audible forward momentum and maturity. It's a fitting addition to a catalogue that documents the band's old-fashioned, hard-earned place in the city's—and the country's—independent music consciousness.

With a tentative agreement reached and the deal waiting to be ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been checking in on garbage and recycling bins around the city throughout the strike, an attempt to follow the tangible effects of the strike and complement our other coverage.

Little-known fact: during the construction of the SkyDome, so many people stared down at the rising stadium from the CN Tower that the landmark occasionally came to life, with binoculars in hand, to see what all the fuss was about. Reports of the tower leaning over at a precarious angle were written off as mass hallucinations or proof of too much partying.

In September, Toronto will get a new free daily evening newspaper called t.o.night. According to the newer of the two media kits provided to us (one, from this month, by the paper itself; the other, from June, by another source), t.o.night will be "distributed in the downtown core," and will "deliver stories the direct competition [Metro and 24 Hours] does not cover until the next morning, while helping readers plan their evenings," modelled after other evening newspapers worldwide, like the Australian mX. The paper will be filled with content "from newswires combined with unique content from the web." From who on the web? No, no, not us. BlogTO, for one; Tim Shore, BlogTO's publisher, announced the new paper on Monday afternoon, saying that "Not since the rise and fall of Dose has a publication surfaced in the city threatening to shake up the print media landscape."

With a tentative agreement reached and the deal waiting to be ratified, we'll be glad to stop accumulating photos of accumulated trash—soon. Torontoist's photographers have been checking in on garbage and recycling bins around the city throughout the strike, an attempt to follow the tangible effects of the strike and complement our other coverage.

Last Friday, Torontoist visited Google Canada’s headquarters in the Toronto Life Square Complex to discuss Toronto and Google Maps with Mike Pegg, Google Map's product marketing manager and the founder of Google Maps Mania (a blog devoted to Google Maps mashups and tools) and Tamara Micner, Google Canada’s communications officer. For the last few months, Google has remained elusive about its plans for Toronto's Street View, and we were hoping that our meeting might shed some light on its "impending" release. But unfortunately, we couldn’t pry a date out of our hosts. "We want to launch as soon as we can," said Pegg, somewhat ambiguously.

Each week, Torontoist examines the upcoming TV listings and makes note of programs that are entertaining, informative, and of quality. Or, alternately, none of those. The result: Televisualist.

WHERE: Dovercourt Road, near Dundas Street West.

WHERE: Keele Street and Glenlake Avenue.

If you were a retailer looking to launch a new department store chain in the early 1960s, the discount market appeared to be the way to go. While Toronto did have one-off discounters (Honest Ed's) and lower-priced annexes of existing retailers (Eaton's), businessmen looked at the prosperity of American discounters like E.J. Korvette and saw potential for setting up similar chains in Canada. For several years after Towers opened its first store in Scarborough in the fall of 1960, discount chains with varying degrees of longevity made their debut around Metropolitan Toronto. One of the splashiest openings belonged to Sayvette, who promised to shake up the department store sector. In its two decades of retailing, Sayvette went from grandiose dreams and promising new retail approaches to dead weight on the balance sheet of one of the country’s largest food merchants. Along the way Sayvette experienced little profitability, speculation over its ownership, unrealized expansion plans, and a constant search for where it fit in the retail landscape.

WHERE: Bremner Boulevard and Lower Simcoe Street, and Queen's Quay West and Rees Street.

              

If you've never been to a library opening before you might be surprised to realize that they tend to attract crowds. At yesterday's reopening of the Bloor/Gladstone branch, for instance, a throng of eager readers was waiting in the rain a half-hour before they were to be let inside, and once the doors did open it took twenty minutes for the line to clear. Kids ran downstairs to check out their colourful new play areas, longtime patrons set off to find the new locations of their old favourite sections, and the social butterflies settled into the sparkling computer lab for a status update or two. You could hardly blame them: they'd been without their library for nearly three years, and the enthusiasm with which the branch was welcomed back was delightful to behold.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Are you sick about being told to watch The Room, yet? If you'd personally known us across the last few years—and you still hadn't seen it—you would be. An almost personal crusade of Torontoist is to show it to as many people as possible (heck, we even asked Edgar Wright about it, just to be sure), there is no film ranked higher in our esteem as just a real good time (other than possibly Commando), and the only thing that surprises us about there finally being a big screen showing for the film tonight at the Royal is honestly that we didn't set it up (congratulations to the other local fans who did).

"Nothing ever ends," the bright blue Doctor Manhattan tells Adrian Veidt towards the end of Watchmen, the seminal graphic novel about costumed heroes. Consistently emotionally unaffected, Doctor Manhattan thinks in purely logical terms, and Veidt, the world's smartest man, has (spoiler alert!) just killed millions in an elaborate plot intended to rescue a deteriorating world. For the first time, though, Veidt seems in some small way insecure about whether that end justified the means, and asks Doctor Manhattan if he "did the right thing," because "It all worked out in the end." "'In the end'?" Doctor Manhattan replies, "Nothing ends, Adrian. Nothing ever ends."

Standing on the industrial site known as East Bayfront, which extends from Jarvis to Parliament streets and south from the rail lines to Lake Ontario, Mayor David Miller addressed a crowd gathered in the rain on Thursday morning to witness the groundbreaking of Sherbourne Park.

WHERE: Trinity Bellwoods Park.

Are you suffering ill effects from the temporary disruption of your yearly prescription of trips to the Toronto Islands via the Sam McBride or the other ferries? Do you miss riding your bicycle from Hanlan’s Point to Ward’s Island, hearing the sound of children playing at Centreville, or other island-centric activities? True, you can hop on a water taxi or find your own means of crossing the harbour, but those methods of transport cannot handle the crowds the islands are accustomed to seeing at this time of year. Fear not if you are suffering withdrawal symptoms (or feel, as the blood-red headline in yesterday’s Sun shouted, that CUPE killed your summer)—cultural archivist Retrontario provides you with a minute’s glimpse of how the islands normally look at this time of year. This provincial ad first aired around 1980 and enticed visitors from all corners of the province to check out, in the narrator’s words, “a walk on the grass kind of place.”

WHERE: Lake Shore Boulevard West and Burlington Avenue.

It's 6 a.m. in Kensington Market on a Sunday morning, with the sun out but only barely, and Eric Cheung and Sean Martindale are busy planting flowers. At College and Augusta, on the two large posterboards on the west wall of Sam's, they cut the outlines of large triangles deep into the thick layers of posters, through and past the topmost movie ads for The Ugly Truth and District 9 on one board and the PSP on the other. Then they pull those triangles out, folding and curving them into a pocket that's shaped like something between a cone and a pyramid, using a staple gun to firmly attach it to the wall. When all the triangles across both boards are cut and folded and curved and stapled, which won't be for another few hours, Cheung and Martindale will fill each pocket with dirt and place a plant inside, spraying it with water.

We're the first to admit when we're slow to catch onto something, and especially if it's something this good. Now that we've taken a second to swallow our new-release flavoured pride, we'll get back to listening to Zeus's already-month-old EP, Sounds Like Zeus, the next sure-to-be success story for Arts&Crafts. Lucky for us, they're not going anywhere.

                            

This past weekend one of Toronto's most vibrant events, the Festival of India, was forced from its traditional venue on picturesque Centre Island by the ongoing city workers' strike. Unable to transport as many as forty thousand people across to the island, organizers relocated the festival to a car park at the foot of Yonge Street on the lakefront. The hard asphalt ground, pock marked with cracks and repairs, and the sometimes sickly sweet smell of the nearby Redpath sugar factory, both did nothing to diminish the enthusiasm of attendees.

Back when Parliament Hill was in the throes of its last electoral shake-up, Bill C-61, An Act to amend the Copyright Act, was nearly forgotten, buried beneath all the high-stakes drama of a government on the brink. When Governor General Michaëlle Jean dissolved the thirty-ninth parliament at Harper's request on September 7, 2008, the legislation died, with a promised—or threatened—resurrection should the Conservatives win re-election.

WHERE: Yonge Street and Eglinton Avenue.

If Listerine can freshen your breath and kill bacteria in the mouth, why can't it do the same to the rest of your body? It's safe!

We won’t pronounce the 2009 Toronto Blue Jays dead…yet. But if the team’s going to accomplish anything this season—and even if they aren’t—then this is going to be a big week.

The Taking of Pelham 123 remake got us thinking about pointless-but-passable remakes of 1970s flicks with numbers in the title, and that got us to thinking of 2005's Assault on Precinct 13.

One of the less expected results of the city workers' strike, about to enter its second month, has been that its most visible effect—you know, the garbage on city streets—has not accumulated consistently across neighbourhoods, even neighbourhoods adjacent to one another. Our daily Strike Watch feature has demonstrated as much: while some stretches of the city's main streets seem to only get progressively dirtier, others seem to have their level of cleanliness ebb and flow, and others seem to have never gotten near dirty in the first place. While some credit for the cleanliness should go to the elusive but much-heralded management staff tasked with cleaning up parks and streets, some of the city's Business Improvement Areas (or BIAs)—the organizations that watch over commercial strips across the city—have been quietly stepping in and up, too.

WHERE: Dundas Street West and Kensington Avenue.

                     

Toronto's Caribana parade is known the world over, drawing more than one million revellers every year for its bumper crop of imagination; it is spectacle after sparkling spectacle, accompanied by joy-inducing, waist-winding, and inhibition-loosening calypso/soca music. Of lesser fame is the Junior Carnival parade—which this year was held in the under-celebrated Jane-Finch area—but it remains fertile ground for future generations of mas masters.

In the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum, the crowds marvel at the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls. They peer at the tiny Hebrew words, which form excerpts from the Bible and the Psalms. Upstairs on the museum’s third floor, an art installation explores the power of the word in a modern context.

Each week, Torontoist examines the upcoming TV listings and makes note of programs that are entertaining, informative, and of quality. Or, alternately, none of those. The result: Televisualist.

Upon completion of their degrees, twelve students who met in the sculpture studio at York University decided to destroy their artwork, many wielding the same tools that they used to create the pieces, and share the broken pieces with the public.

WHERE: King Street West and Bay Street and Wellington Street West between York Street and Bay Street.

In 1921, the Ontario Department of Education selected Charles William Jefferys to illustrate George M. Wrong's Ontario Public School History of Canada, a textbook being published under Lorne Pierce's Ryerson Press imprint. Upon their first meeting, the English-born artist—whose family had bounced around the northeastern U.S. and Ontario before settling in Toronto around 1880—and Pierce, a former Methodist minister, hit it off immediately despite a gap in age of twenty-one years. In Pierce, Jefferys found a kindred spirit who shared his ambition to excite nationalist sentiment among Canadians. He wanted to popularize Canadian history as an epic and romantic story by bringing historical characters to life through his illustrations. The long friendship and collaboration between artist and publisher, which resulted in a number of books, proved so successful that Jefferys's images became instantly recognizable, Canadian icons that shaped more than one generation's understanding of Canadian nationalism.

WHERE: Bay Street and King Street West.

Toronto Life Square—the massively unattractive ogre on the north-east corner of Yonge and Dundas, which houses not only a Future Shop, Google's local offices, and an AMC that uncomfortably doubles as Ryerson classrooms, but also a vast and ever-growing pool of all of our tears—is "broke," according to the Globe and Mail. What's more: Toronto Life, who scooped up the naming rights in 2007, "has been locked in a months-long legal dispute to remove its name from the project." (Perhaps the magazine finally realized the irony of suggesting that the building that loomed over Dundas Square added anything to Toronto life.) The Globe notes that, under the building's original owners, a subsidiary of PenEquity, it racked up some $280 million in debt, and has now been placed in receivership, meaning that it'll soon change ownership but not, unfortunately, disappear altogether. That fate will, for now, remain confined to the dreams of those who want to believe Toronto could have done so much better.

Once a week, Vandalist features some of the most interesting street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

WHERE: Keele Street and Sheppard Avenue West.

The problem with discussing a new Harry Potter film—such as the just-released Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince—is that there’s no way to win. If you’re in favour of the series, you’re an adult in arrested development reading poorly written nonsense for kids. If you think it’s poorly written nonsense for kids, you’re a heartless curmudgeon who can’t see all the hidden depth. So to be honest, we’re just going to leave it completely alone. You pretty much know if you want to see it if you’re a fan or not, right?

It's not often you see a textile artist take part in an architectural exhibit. But Thea Haines's installation fits perfectly at Building for the Economy, the latest in Harbourfront Centre's series of untraditional and interdisciplinary architecture shows. Dispelling the notion that an economic downturn need only spell doom and gloom, her repurposing of tea towels and napkins of all types and colours—some still stained—suggests we rethink what we consider luxury versus necessity and return to a time when "making do" was common. The recession can, Haines suggests, provide artists and designers opportunities to seek beauty in frugality. That each piece of linen is embroidered with a single letter to spell out synonyms for "save" that are both contemporary ("scrimp") and archaic ("stint") suggests looking to the past to solve present-day concerns. These are all themes addressed by the three participating architectural firms.

            

While walking around the city recently, we couldn't help but notice the abundance of non-Summerlicious restaurants advertising prix fixe promotions with names that reference the City's program, but carefully avoid infringing on the trademark. It made us wonder just how difficult it is for restaurants to get accepted into the 'liciouses, and how the City decides who's in and who's out.

If you happen to look up, just slightly above eye level, at hydro poles and streetlights around Toronto lately, you might notice some misplaced Trans-Canada highway signs. No, Yonge Street isn’t becoming a part of the Trans-Canada, and yes, the Spadina Expressway is still dead. These are not the work of some signage installer for the city who has gone rogue, but a project called Art + Identity created by Toronto’s own Ella Cooper.

We’ve heard a fair bit about the state of Toronto’s parks during the current municipal strike. Most tales have tended toward the negative, from fears of contamination stemming from temporary garbage depots to the unattractive aesthetic state that some green spaces have fallen into. But what if the withholding of certain services led to a positive effect on the local environment?

WHERE: Bloor Street West and Brentwood Road South.

The Eglinton was the grandest of Toronto's Art Deco movie houses. People from all over Toronto flocked to Eglinton near Avenue Road for the grand opening showing of King of Burlesque. Kaplan and Sprachman, the prolific pair who would design over one hundred cinemas in Canada, won the Governor General's architecture award for the building in 1937: although it was asymmetrical, its elegant design and fine interior detailing invested a trip to the movies with an aura of sophistication, its defining feature the colourful, neon-lit marquee that's been a neighbourhood icon for generations.

The city workers' strike has been a hardship, for sure. Toronto's parks are starting to look like garbage barges run aground, non-union city employees and private citizens alike are dirtying their hands and straining their muscles to keep our streets somewhat presentable, and the striking workers themselves have had to go all this time without drawing their usual paycheques. But brilliant coping strategies have a way of flourishing in times like these, like fruit flies on discarded banana peels. There is probably no better example of this than our new friend Todd. (Not his real name; a nom de grime.)

Overheard by reader Mike Linkovich on the Ossington bus, surrounded by five- and six-year-olds on a field trip.

Well, kind of.

The Ontario College of Art and Design’s two gallery spaces are intelligent by simple virtue of their physical locations. One, the OCAD Student Gallery, is located at street level in a store-front on Dundas Street West. This takes student work, typically contained within the walls of the university, out, around the corner, and right to the public. The OCAD Professional Gallery is the inverse. Housed on the second floor of the school, it brings the work of established artists into academia, and also invites the public into this realm with programming that seeks to engage a broad audience.

            

For those who enjoy Herculean challenges, a dare: see if you can find even one non-assembly-line person who doesn't like robots. And as those Sisyphean fools sail off to begin their labour, let Torontoist introduce the rest of you to a rather down-to-earth artist-tinkerer, Thomas Girard.

WHERE: Queen Street West at Markham, Bathurst, and Spadina.

WHERE: Cavell Avenue, Mimico.

Anyone who follows this sort of thing probably remembers the oohs and aahs that followed after The Most Serene Republic signed to Arts&Crafts; they were the first non-Broken Social Scene-affiliated band to do so, but their inclusion was a natural fit. The Milton, Ontario, septet drew both praise and criticism for their proggy art-pop likeness to their label daddies, and on their new release, ...And the Ever Expanding Universe, they don't seem to be in a hurry to change many minds ("Phi 2").

Canadians are an odd people when it comes to our cultural exports—we apologize to the world for Celine Dion, are ecstatic about the BlackBerry, and we're defensive about Tim Hortons. So it's with a sense of cautious pride that we watched Tim Hortons open nine of twelve new locations in New York City yesterday, including three in a co-branding test with Cold Stone Creamery, because we Canadians know our Maple Dip.

Based on the illustration, is it really the bride’s happiness that’s at stake or is it the cook in the background’s satisfaction with the proper food preparation equipment? Or is the artist depicting the bride having a vision of her happy homemaking, which shows her as someone who remains cool and relaxed after her Happy Thought got her through the third meal of the day (and the rolling pin maintained discipline in the house)? Could we be looking at two neighbours exchanging knowing glances at each other, possibly because they bought Happy Thoughts before everyone else on the block?

Shhh—listen, do you hear them? The silences echoing through the air are the songs of the bluebirds, wrens, swallows, and purple martins, migratory birds whose populations are declining at alarming rates. Before stepping into the sunlit gallery at the Toronto Botanical Garden, you might go to the grocery store, the gym, or the pub oblivious to the plight of these birds, blithely accepting the pigeon as our emblematic avian.

       

The situation in Toronto this summer is grim, but it was much worse in 1906, when Toronto faced a crippling piano workers’ strike that was so thoroughly devastating that it was commemorated in a postcard (somehow, we don’t think this year’s city workers’ strike will get the same treatment). This quirky postcard is just one of the thousands of old Toronto-themed postcards, matchbooks, and menus that can be found on John Chuckman’s Toronto postcard blog. Since 2006, Chuckman, who professes to love history, has posted more than two thousand images in five volumes. According to his website, his catalogue "may be the largest collection of Toronto postcards on the Internet." And while the collection is somewhat dulled by low-quality images (there are some great old aerial shots of Toronto that we wish were bigger) and an awkward labelling system, those are minor shortcomings in what's an otherwise fascinating reminder of Toronto's rich history.

              

This past Sunday on the Harbourfront Sirius Stage, B-boy and B-girl crews from all across Canada faced off for the final rounds in the sixth annual Pop, Lock, and Load competition. Crews bounced, broke, jumped, spun, and twisted to the great beats of DJ Serious as veteran breaker Benzo—of award-winning crew Bag of Trix—played host. Rude Bwoy Posse took home the fifteen-hundred-dollar cash prize.

WHERE: King Street West and Bay Street.

After twelve days, this year's edition of the Fringe has drawn to a close. While most performers return to their day jobs or plan their next theatrical endeavour, seven lucky productions will be remounted as part of the "Best of the Fringe" series running at the Berkeley Street Theatre from July 15 to 25.