Culture: November 2009 Archives

On September 10, 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King officially declared war on Germany. Toronto was impacted by the war almost immediately. Drawn by patriotism, adventure-seeking, or just the lure of a job after nearly a decade of the Great Depression, thousands of young Torontonians spilled into recruiting stations and from there into manning depots. In Bill McNeil's Voices of a War Remembered (Doubleday Canada Limited, 1991), Torontonian Ella Trow recalled how every family was touched by the Second World War. "My brothers and my husband went into the services," she wrote, "and most of my friends were in the same boat."

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

Last week, Live Green Toronto, the City of Toronto’s website for eco-friendly living, launched a new transit shelter advertising campaign with a unique twist: passersby can flip a giant switch that turns the ad on or off. The ad’s text encourages readers to "switch this poster off," and to switch on Live Green’s website for information about saving energy and living green. The ad was designed by Agency59, a Toronto-based advertising agency, and installed by Astral Media, the company behind Toronto's street furniture. While it’s undeniably clever, the execution is a little flawed.

"I probably don't even need this microphone, to be honest!" Frontman Odario Williams and the rest of his genre-bending hip-hop group Grand Analog launched the Toronto Public Library's current Make Some Noise series straight from the kids' section of the College/Shaw branch last night, and the alternative venue proved a somehow very fitting setting for an affair that's typically relegated to dark clubs at late hours that no adorable two-year-old would ever be able to attend.

When Matt Greenwood saw this video on YouTube last year, he didn't just gawk in a rude fashion (as we did). Inspired by people's responses when confronted by a camera sans photographer, Matt sought to expand on an idea previously touched on only by self-timers. And when he happened to come across a disposable camera, idea met material and art was born.

As anticipated by transit watchers, the TTC is proposing an across-the-board fare hike, effective January 3, 2010. That hike, to be decided on at the commission's November 17 meeting, would see adult cash fares rise from $2.75 to $3.00, tokens rise from $2.25 to $2.50, and adult Metropasses jump from $109 to $126. A full list of the proposed changes are here; the immediate reasons for them are—as they always are—myriad. (The Star and Globe both take a look at some of them.)

Everybody panic! It's the H1N1 über-lethal supermegavirus plague! Actually, it's just the regular ol' flu, but simply a mutation that is infecting more people because most of us don't have sufficient built-in immunity for it. And while health authorities started the flu season wondering how they were going to convince people to get themselves vaccinated, the tragic death of twelve-year-old Evan Frustaglio may have been the tipping point that immediately clogged clinics and depleted vaccine supplies. Though enough vaccine is being produced, the bottleneck is in getting the vials filled and shipped quick enough, as well as prioritizing people in higher-risk demographics. Meanwhile, as all of this is going on, corporate executives are paying $2,300 each to step to the front of the line at Toronto's private Medcan Clinic, according to the Star. With three thousand doses of the H1N1 vaccine shipped to Medcan so far, these corporate clients are getting the shot as part of their "enhanced annual checkups," immediately, in the comfort of a warm doctor's office instead of waiting hours in a line with the commoners. Pay-for-privilege bypasses Ontario's single-tier health care laws for procedures considered "medically unnecessary," in the same way Ontarians can pony-up $500 for a quickie MRI across the border in Buffalo.

On Monday, Torontoist spent the day at the Toronto Innovation Showcase at City Hall, learning about data sets, queues, and civic engagement. At the top of the agenda was the unveiling of toronto.ca/open, Toronto’s new open catalogue of city data, ranging from—as Mayor Miller explained in a press release on Monday morning—"apartment inspection data to child care availability to dozens of GIS mapping data that will enable a broad range of location-based applications. And yes," he added, "our initial data offering also includes the TTC’s scheduling data."

Last night's episode of the increasingly addictive Being Erica sent its eponymous protagonist ten years into the future, where she proclaimed that 2019 was pretty similar to 2009. And indeed it was, save for a bad haircut and a few subtle embellishments that we're really looking forward to a decade from now.

Why is Jonas Bonnetta so damn disarming? His debut full length as Evening Hymns—essentially a fleshed-out version of his real-monikered earlier release—oozes a level of granola that could cause discomfort for hyper-aware, self-conscious indie rock fans; the album is called Spirit Guides and much of the lyrical content is about the forest and there's a full track just of a rain storm and have you seen that eerie, foggy mountain on the cover? Somehow, though, there isn't a pretentious note on this record.

Believe it or not, music videos still exist. Sound Tracks trolls the internet to find the best and the worst of local artists' new singles and the good, bad, or otherwise noteworthy visuals that accompany them.

Isn’t it wonderful when four stereotypical figures can come together in perfect harmony thanks to a humble can of spaghetti? We never suspected that the finest spices from Asia lurked within our sloppy Saturday childhood lunch.

In the two rooms of Gallery 44 at 401 Richmond Street West, you can see planes take off from Chicago’s O’Hare and Tokyo’s International Airport at the same time. The gallery’s current exhibition, entitled "Google Earth"—running from October 23 to November 28—features a handful of the millions of images captured by the aerial photography internet program.

This is a movie about a taxi/limo driver, played by Jackie Chan, who wears a magic suit that makes him do kung fu shit, and he fights evil criminals with help from a scientist or secret agent or something played by Jennifer Love Hewitt. Yeah, this is precisely the sort of movie that usually gets shot here.

Waste not, want not—so the old saying goes. Taking the adage very much to heart is a fledgling non-profit and its several hundred volunteers, who have been plumbing our city for hitherto forgotten bounty for the past couple of years. The organization is called Not Far From The Tree, and its mission is to rescue fruit growing in Toronto that would otherwise go to waste.

Enza Anderson waits at a bus stop on the west side of Bay Street by City Hall with a tall shovel in her hand. The bus to Queen's Quay pulls up and all eyes fixate on her as she boards. Walking towards the back, an elderly passenger comments, "A bit early for shovelling the snow off your driveway, isn't it?"

Yesterday afternoon, hundreds of people who were way cooler than Torontoist came out to the Gladstone Hotel to see the 175 independent publishers, artists, and writers at Canzine, Canada’s largest zine fair and festival of alternative culture. The day-long event was organized by Broken Pencil, the quarterly magazine dedicated to all things underground culture and the independent arts.