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Wal Of Noise

In the current issue of Toronto Life, Philip Preville attempts to argue for a big-box store in Leslieville. It's no easy task, but Preville's argument is pretty sound, resting on convenience (it'd be close to where people live), location (what else is going to go in its place?), cost (cheap!), and—oh yes—the environment (less driving = less pollution). Preville also says about the smartest thing we've yet heard about the development, which is that "instead of trying to keep the downtown big box free, we’d be better off figuring out how to make large-format retail compatible with a mostly walkable, constantly improving, ever-greening city in which many people still shop in their cars." NOW's Susan G. Cole obviously takes issue with Preville's argument—as many surely will—but the best argument she can muster in reply is to say that Wal-Mart, the crown jewel of the project, are just a bunch of fascists who want us all to conform. Um, okay.

Vegans Love (at) KFC

We all know the Four Seasons is soo last year for weddings, but what's the number one place to say your wedding vows this year? Why, KFC of course—nothing says "I love you" like a hefty carton of deep-fried chicken. And the best part? They cater, too—even if you're vegan.

KFC Canada has got one wing up on its competition—it's where vegan PETA member Alex Bury wed her fiancé Jack Norris earlier today inside of the 466 Queen Street West location. Rumor has it that the flower girls dropped drumsticks instead of flower petals. But really, attendees were treated to a veritable fast-food feast of "chicken" burgers, the newest addition to KFC's Canadian menu. And from what we've heard, they're absolutely scrumptious.

After more than five years of petitioning against Kentucky Fried Cruelty, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has won the war against KFC on the grounds of chicken abuse. According to PETA, KFC is now committed to using controlled-atmosphere killing, "the least cruel form of poultry slaughter ever developed" and an animal welfare advisory panel, among other things. They've even introduced a new, cripsy-on-the-outside, juicy-on-the-inside, unchicken sandwich to 461 Canadian stores. The U.S. has yet to follow suit, but PETA plans to continue boycotting and petitioning in the States until KFC changes its slanderous ways.

Vegan purists, however, might be wary of trusting a company known for its greasy, breaded chicken. Any crispy sandwich must be deep-fried—whether chicken or unchicken. And, as reported by Ecorazzi, all the patties swim in the same grease. That means your soy-based patty could be sizzling in the same sauce as a cruel chicken patty had done seconds before. Now that's what we call tainted meat.

Photo by SqueakyMarmot. Thanks to the Post for the tip.

The Most Dangerous Animal

In the epic battle between shark, bear, and wankster, there can be be no winners.

Last Friday night at Wrongbar, Kavin Wong—the photographer known best for his party shots on Shark Vs. Bear—had finished up taking photos for the night and hopped into the washroom. As he wrote in a particularly dramatic Facebook note, he found himself cornered there by "half a dozen wanksters," one of whom was none too pleased about being photographed earlier and wanted the shot vanished. Wong "showered him with apologies and complied to delete the photo. But he wanted to make sure I never [did] it again, ever." So the guy took matters and Wong's camera into his own hands, grabbing the Canon EOS 5D and fumbling around with it, trying to delete the photo. When he couldn't figure out how to, he chose the next most logical route: he slammed the camera into the toilet and flushed it. Then he picked the camera up out of the toilet, threw it to the ground, and, with his friends helping and Wong helpless, kicked it around a little. All told, the lens, flash, and body were totally ruined, their total value well over $3000.

Wong is not only a great photographer—in the vapid world of party photos, his shots are far better than they ought to be, their prettiness transcending rather than simply mimicking the prettiness of his subjects—he is also a really, really nice guy with lots of friends, and a lot of them are pretty angry about the destruction of his gear. So, this Friday, those with Kavin on their minds will descend on the scene of the crime, Wrongbar (1279 Queen Street West), for a fundraising party thrown in his honour. Hosted by Pink Mafia, it'll feature Mansion, Shit La Merde, Syntonics, and Nasty Nav. Drop by after 10 p.m. with at least $5 if you wanna help right the Wong.

Photo courtesy of Kavin Wong

We Don't Need No Sex Education

Photo by cl-s from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Sex was perhaps best summed-up by Sarah Michelle Gellar in the timeless cinematic touchstone Cruel Intentions when her character explains to Selma Blair's that "everybody does it, it's just that nobody talks about it." Here to remedy that very problem is the University of Toronto's own Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity, now the first institution in Canada to offer a graduate program in Sexual Diversity Studies. The advent of a program like this a big deal, and the news has certainly been making headlines. The Globe and Mail, for instance, had a particularly choice one: "A PhD in Putting Out." While the article itself (sorry, but you do have to pay five bucks if you want to read it) is for the most part well-written and thoughtful, the editor who wrote that headline added a certain tone of disrespect to the piece—a tone readily picked up on by internet commenters, whose mostly-critical responses on the semi-moderated board tended to consist of typical anti-academic bitching about wasted taxpayer dollars, useless degrees, and some pretty grade school-appropriate jokes about "oral examinations."

Scott Rayter, acting director for the program, told us he liked the article, but agreed that the headline was slightly problematic. "It seems to make light of the work we do and feeds the kinds of criticism one saw on-line," he said. "My sense of the criticism about the article is that it needs to be broken down. Some was just blatant homophobia, others talked about programs like this, saying they were just as useless as those about Equity or Women’s Studies." And what about the other comments? Is it true that a Master's in Sexual Diversity Studies is a "useless degree"? Says Rayter:

First off, respondents like this don’t see any value in learning for the sake of learning, about those who want to know about history, anthropology, sociology, who we are, where we’ve come from, how and why we do the things we do, and how art and culture are ways of addressing these kinds of questions. They fail to see that knowledge for its own sake is a worthy pursuit, and in that quest, one also acquires skills that are necessary and useful to any future employment, e.g., critical thinking, writing, and synthesizing, processing, and communicating ideas and information, to those who both share the same discourse, and to those who do not. Students of English literature and philosophy, for example, tend to do fairly well and have an advantage in writing the LSAT and getting into Law School. They acquired the tools—and have become experts—by taking courses such as ours. The other issue—again a conservative one—tends to be that education should be purely utilitarian, which leads one to ask why have universities at all, and not simply training colleges? I’ve outlined above what students get from a general BA, but would also ask, following this kind of reasoning, why watch TV, go to movies, read books, attend a play, socialize, etc? Is everything in life supposed to help you in your job? The argument strikes me as reductive & ridiculous.

Now there's an encouraging thought for those of us who really enjoyed our Joint Specialists in English and Drama but noticed potential employers hadn't exactly been banging down our doors. But what about the accusations of wanton hedonism? The suggestion that students will do little more "research" than watching lots of porn?

Some email responses see studying sex as simply watching porn, or engaging in various sexual practices, whereas this is obviously a misguided and limited idea of what we do here. That said, given the billions of dollars invested in pornography—indeed technological advancement in DVD culture, for example, has been driven by the porn industry—seems an important area of inquiry. Much online technology has been developed with pornography and its dissemination in mind. To take it further, how, one might ask, has porn changed the way we have come to think and feel about sex, our bodies and those of our partners? At no other time in history has our sense of sexuality (and sex, and sexual identity) been so mediated by technology and visual imagery... What do people learn about sex and about themselves when they encounter and/or watch the porn that is so readily available? What do they learn about gender, about race? Class?

All new disciplines of study receive criticism when they first get added to university course calendars—it's practically a rite of passage. But it's upsetting to see so many close-minded responses to a university program that is arguably one of the most relevant to every person on the planet. Sex is the reason we were all born. Sex is the reason many of us will die. Most of us have sex. All of us, whether we want to admit it or not, have a sexuality. The real question people should be asking about the concept of Sexual Diversity Studies is not "why?" but "what took so long?" And maybe "why do you have to wait until university to take it?" And that's a question the graduate students of this program just might be able to answer. One of the 12 students enrolled in the program's inaugural year is writing her thesis on revamping our somewhat-pathetic public school sex ed curriculum. Here's to a new generation of tolerant, educated and sex-savvy teens. May they roll their eyes at Cruel Intentions.

Street Hassle

Top: Erica Gosich Rose painting a legal mural. Bottom: a photo by May Karp of that finished mural, for sale at StreetSpeaks. Photos courtesy of Simon Cole.

Though it probably wasn't her intention, photographer May Karp could not have picked a better way to demonstrate just how messy it can get when street art and commercial art collide.

Her exhibit at the Moore Gallery, StreetSpeaks, featured photographs Karp had taken of legal street art and graffiti from a number of places around the world, including Toronto. Though costs of prints of the work exhibited drifted into the thousands, Karp provided no compensation or credit to the artists behind the work she photographed, nor did she seek or gain permission from them. But as she must have known as a fan of the genre for some thirty years, street artists almost always work fast, and it took less than a week for some of them to force Karp to end StreetSpeaks altogether.Simon Cole of the Show & Tell Gallery was one of those responsible for getting Karp's show shuttered. "I think it is great that [Karp] appreciates graffiti and documents it," he says, "but I do have an issue with her selling the photos and not giving any sort of recognition or compensation to the artists who created the work." Cole, who commented about the show when we first wrote about it on Torontoist, sent a cease and desist letter to the Moore Gallery last week on behalf of nine artists. As he sees it, Karp and the gallery are profiting off of work that others have created for nothing; she is "breaking the law and exploiting these artists"; "she is selling someone else's work."

While some post-modern art does wholly and intentionally appropriate the work of others (see Richard Prince), May Karp seems to think of StreetSpeaks as more of an archival project than anything else. It was her intention, she announced in a press release, to "preserve these amazing works from the outdoor elements, from the white-wash brigades, even from other artists who paint over them. It is now possible for artists who follow the principles of good art to come in from the outside and show their work on gallery walls." Or, at least, have their work shown for them.

Karp's lawyer, Andrew Bernstein, notes that the process Karp went through to make and mount the prints cost her hundreds of dollars, but allows each one to last at least seventy years. "This was intended to honour this art and these artists, and it was intended to preserve this art, which can be erased, painted over, whitewashed, all sorts of things," says Bernstein. "She thought she was preserving it and honouring it."

But for Cole and the artists whose work appeared in the exhibit, StreetSpeaks is appropriation, not preservation. As Allan Ryan told the Post, "I should be honoured, but also compensated if you're going to charge that kind of a fee for this work....I went in and saw all this stuff and it's a blatant rip off of everybody's work. Just a straight shot of somebody's graffiti that she's blown up into these huge posters." Bernstein says that the lack of credit, at least, wasn't intended: Karp was unable to interpret the "symbols" and "underground signatures" on the pieces and simply had no idea who the artists behind them were, though she "did offer...to give credit to anyone who came forward and identified themselves as a creator." But as the wait-and-see approach to dealing with potential copyright infringement claims often works, artists who discovered their work for sale wanted not just credit, but money. As Cole puts it, "Someone could have bought these artists' entire catalog for the price of one of those prints [that] the Moore gallery is selling."

Bernstein is guarded about what defense Karp could have in court if any kind of suit goes forward, but offered one example: the "provision in the [copyright] act for fair dealing for the purposes of criticism and review." But a quick glance at Canada's copyright act reveals that even if you accept that photographs of street art without comment or context count as criticism or review—we think that in some cases they might, and Wooster might agree—fair dealing requires naming the source of the work and crediting its creator. (A similar clause applies to news reporting, which is why CityTV got in trouble for running photographs of an attempted burglary without crediting the photographer, Joel Charlebois.)

It is undeniable that Karp's stated goal of the exhibit—to, as Bernstein put it, "bring this art form to the gallery-going public who may not appreciate it, who may not see it in its native environment"—is admirable, even if it does totally recontextualize "street" art. But even if you accept Bernstein's claim that Karp "wasn't in it for the money, not even a little bit"; that "she wasn't trying to rip anyone off"; and that, as Karp put it in a press release announcing the closure, she was "deeply saddened" and "heartbroken" by having to close up shop, it's difficult to argue the underlying point, Cole's whole reason for taking action: that Karp was selling prints of someone else's work.

When Bernstein mentions artist's rights, though, he means those of his client—specifically, Karp's "right to express herself as an artist." But when we asked him if Karp's rights to express herself didn't seem to be at odds with the rights of the street artists whose work she had photographed and was selling, Bernstein only echoed that the copyright act is full of tensions, and that, again, Karp never intended to do wrong.

Bernstein hopes that litigation won't go ahead, that the controversy ended when StreetSpeaks did. Cole has other plans: he's planning to head to the Moore Gallery this week to "discuss compensation for the artists whose work sold and ask for a public apology," and has organized a fundraiser on the evening of September 25 at Charlie's Gallery (112 Harbord Street) to bring attention to the cause, to sell prints, to auction original pieces of some of the artists whose work was photographed for StreetSpeaks—and to cover forthcoming legal fees.

Photo of the interior of Moore Gallery by Pat Young.

The Triple Threat

Photo by Michael Chrisman from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

How the tides have changed in Canadian federal politics. Much like the right-wing votes the Reform Party and the Progressive Conservatives split in the mid- to late-1990s, the Canadian left now faces fractured support split across multiple parties. With an election just two weeks away and polls showing that the Conservatives are on the brink of a majority government, the concept of uniting the left is starting to receive the media’s attention. To the dismay of some Canadians, the left-of-centre party leaders haven’t taken the bait just yet: announcing their support for unity could result in political suicide only fifteen days away from the election.

Faced with this political gridlock, Avaaz Canada, a group of 300,000 individuals working to fight poverty, advance human rights and democracy, and stop climate change, has taken the matter into its own hands. On Thursday of last week, the group launched its "Save the Planet: Stop Harper!" campaign, which seeks to ensure that "Harper pays the price at the polls for his reckless and un-Canadian climate policy." Echoing the media's attention on uniting the left, Avaaz Canada is urging Canadians "to come together across party lines for the sake of our planet." Their plan is simple: target three electoral ridings in which Harper's top MPs are running, and support the candidate who has the best chance of beating the Conservative. The campaign currently supports Green Party leader Elizabeth May in Central Nova, New Democrat Mike Bocking in B.C.’s Pitt Meadows-Maple Ridge-Mission riding, and Liberal David Pratt (running against Environment Minister John Baird) in Ottawa West-Nepean.
Photo by ayndroid from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The tri-party campaign is raising money to distribute ads that will inform the targeted ridings of just how environmentally irresponsible Avaaz Canada believes the Conservatives have been. To date, the response has been overwhelming. Upon launching the initiative, the group hoped to raise $50,000 in total; that goal was met in less than 24 hours. Without missing a beat, Avaaz Canada has continued to fundraise and has decided to spread its campaign to more ridings across Canada. This approach just might affect some GTA ridings, considering Minister of International Cooperation Bev Oda is the MP for Durham (Ontario) and Minister of Finance Jim Flaherty represents Whitby-Oshawa. In line with Avaaz Canada's intentions, both of these ridings could have new MPs if the Greens, the NDP, and the Liberals work together on October 14. Based on last election's results, a combination of just the Liberal and NDP votes in Durham would have beaten Bev Oda, while Jim Flaherty is at an even greater risk of losing his riding. In 2006, Flaherty won his seat by 5% of the total vote and it would have taken only half of his riding's NDP votes to give the Liberals the win.

With two ads ready for distribution in the ridings that were initially targeted, the group is moving quickly and asking for all the support it can get. A new fundraising goal has been set at $100,000, and as of Tuesday afternoon, over $96,000 had been raised. If you happen to live near these ridings, or you just generally believe in putting party pride aside because the environment is more important to you, donations can be made online. Although the campaign is being run without the explicit approval of Jack Layton, Elizabeth May, or Stéphane Dion, the operation demonstrates that an online community's directives may just trump the top-down instructions from political parties. Power to the people.

Blue Banana You Ho This Is All Your Fault

Have a closer look at the posters on 234 Augusta Avenue after the jump.

Photos by Jonathan Goldsbie.

The Daily Photoist: September 30, 2008

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve.

Street Focus, PS Kensington & Summer....

BY TOMMS

Is There a Good Date With Stephen Harper?

The artists hate Stephen Harper. And it's not hard to understand why. His recent cuts to important arts funding have shocked and frightened the arts community (if you were fooled by his claims made at the Leadership Debate and elsewhere that his government actually spent more on the arts than the Liberals, check out former Torontoist Arts and Culture editor Karen Whaley's excellent explanation of how that is a big lie).

In retaliation against the positively terrifying notion of a Conservative majority government, groups like Vote For Environment and the Department of Culture have sprung up to take the battle to the blogs. You might have heard about a concert happening tonight at the Phoenix called This Is Not A Conservative Party! featuring performances by Dave Bidini, Jason Collett, Stars, Ron Sexsmith, and (yes, it's true!) the fricking Parachute Club. The DOC is behind this show; it's just one of several campaigns they've got going to encourage people to vote with their mind on the arts. Since this is 2008, this means a viral video campaign is absolutely necessary. Since last week, the DOC's blog has been featuring videos of so-called "Bad Dates With Stephen Harper," created by such theatrical talents as Alex Pugsley, Rosa Laborde, Alex Poch Goldin and Linda Griffiths (the one at the top of this post is written by Rick Roberts and performed by Philippa Domville). A press release from the DOC describes a few videos yet to be featured on the site, including one written by actor/playwright Michael Healey (hopefully this one doesn't require him to yell "fuck my wide ass!" like a certain viral video campaign involving similar people we remember from a couple of months back.)

The quality of the videos vary, but it's a fun concept, and each "date" manages to be informative about an aspect of Conservative leadership failure as well as entertaining. But perhaps most effective in terms of a message is another video featured on the site that just went up yesterday. Stephen Harper has put a considerable amount of effort into portraying artists as "rich elitists" who don't have anything to do with the "ordinary people" of Canada. The short video, which features different people giving their name and saying "I'm an artist," speaks volumes in its simplicity. Wherever you stand on the political spectrum, it's impossible to look at the people in this video and not notice their strong resemblance to... ordinary Canadians!

I, Jörg

This is Jörg Cieslok. He runs Titan Outdoor Canada. He is six and a half feet tall and has a thick German accent. He has a low opinion of "grassroots groups" like residents associations. He regularly calls up Rami to yell at him. He is more responsible for illegal billboards in Toronto than almost any other individual. He claims, under oath, to have lost $1 million due to sign bylaw enforcement. He threatened to sue Rami and is currently suing the City. And last night I learned that he is also an amateur paparazzo.

One of the first people to speak at the City Hall consultation on the new sign bylaw was Joe Clark, who began by explaining that many people are very cynical about the consultation process, and that one way for the Project Team to show they are serious about public input is to start discussing the possibility of enacting a virtual billboard ban, similar to Oakville's. At this moment, Jörg walked directly in front of Joe (who was sitting in between Rami and me) and, keeping his camera at waist level, took several flash pictures of him (us?). What made it extra weird was that he kept walking as he took the photos, as though it were one fluid motion, a bungled attempt to be casual about it. Jörg kept on going, right out the door.

Then, as Joe explains on Flickr, "I followed him out to the hall, and found him walking right back into the room. I took his picture." (The above, after he retook his seat.) Joe and Jörg got into a bit of a tiff in full view of everyone. City staff immediately stepped in to calm things down, and Joe and Jörg returned to their seats. Security was called and stayed posted near Jörg for most of the evening. The consultation, swarming with industry folks, continued as normal, with everyone behaving pretty well.

Until the end, that is, when a member of the City Hall press corps had his own run-in with Jörg, but you'll have to wait for that writer's own account of it.

In the meantime, try to make sense of this.

Photo by Joe Clark.

In the Face of Violence, Voters Carry On

Photo of Carolyn Bennett by Jerad Gallinger/Torontoist.

If residents of the midtown Toronto riding of St. Paul's were to have an official motto this election, "Keep calm and carry on" would be it.

The World War II-era slogan, a copy of which sits prominently on the desk of Lynne Steele, campaign manager to Liberal incumbent Carolyn Bennett, is good advice in any election. But the words have taken on a new significance in recent days, which have seen Grit supporters in St. Paul's and the neighbouring constituency of Parkdale–High Park (profiled yesterday by Torontoist) targeted by criminals in a rash of politically motivated vandalism.At least thirty residents displaying Liberal signs have had their houses spraypainted, cable and phone lines severed, cars keyed, and brakes sabotaged. In the most serious incident, vandals cut the brake lines on the car of Bennett's official agent, causing him to careen through a stop sign and narrowly avoid slamming into a bus. And on Monday, several Liberal supporters received anonymous phone calls making the chilling proclamation: "Take down your sign or you're next."

Voters are doing their best to keep calm in the face of this political intimidation, Bennett said yesterday in an interview with Torontoist, "but people are just shocked, really sickened by it, and it hasn't really gone away. People just don't want this in Canada."

"I don't think it matters what sign was on anybody's lawn," she continued. "This is a horrific attack on democracy."

Local residents of all political stripes are standing together in the face of these attacks, and Bennett has received more than one hundred new requests for Liberal signs since the first incidents were reported. Some supporters already displaying signs have boldly asked for even larger ones, and a few residents with no intention of voting for Bennett are requesting signs nonetheless, outraged at those who would use violent means to take away their neighbours' democratic rights.

"If people think that this works, in terms of intimidating people, it isn't," concluded Bennett.

Two blocks away from Bennett's Eglinton Avenue West campaign office, crossing guard Eve Christodoulou said that she will vote Liberal, threats of violence or no.

"It doesn't matter what [the vandals] are doing," Christodoulou declared. "Whatever they want to do, they're going to do it anyway. But they're not going to change the mind of people who want to vote for somebody."

Keeping calm and carrying on. That's Toronto. That's true grit.

Bottom photo by Jerad Gallinger/Torontoist.

On Gas Prices, Let's Serve People Over Politics

Photo by functoruser.

The dramatic rise in gas prices has the prime minister wannabes speaking out against it. However, as much as they talk, like our mamas taught us, actions count for more than words. And we're willing to gamble that not a single leader has had to pump his or her own gas in recent months.Otherwise, why the inaction over the arguably number one thing on the minds of Torontonians—and Canadians—for the past year: gas prices, gas prices, gas prices. Watching as the price of gas goes up while the price of oil plummets is the cruelest joke, and citizens from across the GTA from Mississauga to Vaughan to Pickering are suffering prices of $1.38 per litre. (Forget the politico-babble trying to divide small towns and cities: across Ontario—from Chatham to Nepean—jaws dropped as the numbers outside petrol stations surged 9%. Anyone can see we're all being equally gouged, city folk and country folk alike.)

What are the Canadian political parties planning to do? Don't bother looking on their websites; there isn't any information worth the pixels it's shown on. On the Conservative website, click under "Key Issues." Did you know that gas at $1.40 a litre is not one of them? Funny: listen to the conversation in offices, in restaurants, and in homes. It's a key issue. Move to the Liberal website: anything on gas price concerns? Not anywhere easily found. (At least Dion is supporting a new refinery out east, which could reduce price volatility.) The Greens are too busy patting themselves on the back for getting in on the debate. Et le Bloc Québécois? Rien. Only the NDP mentions stopping gas price gouging, via an ombudsman to follow up on complaints—a step in the right direction, but not nearly specific or aggressive enough.

Photo by photojunkie from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The only relief Canadians got was the cut in GST by 2%. Unfortunately, that's only two to three cents per litre. The jump in gas prices overnight was up to 600% that amount. People might say that it's better than nothing, except in this case it actually is nothing. On gas, the government charges tax on top of tax. According to the CAA, gas prices are made up of 30 to 40% taxes, including a federal government excise tax of 10 cents per litre. The government then applies the GST on top of this total gas price, which means the government gets an extra two to three cents per litre in tax-on-tax, which washes out the GST cut. Some tax relief. Why did Jim Prentice get his underwear in knots over incoming text message costs when, for over a year, Canadians have asked for more reasonable gas prices?

We're not suggesting that the politicians are incapable of finding a solution, we just believe that these elections reek of cheap parlour games: the political parties spend hundreds of millions of dollars playing Musical Chairs with the music so loud they can't hear what we're saying. (Why else are the Conservatives holding off on revealing what they'd do, instead "hinting" that they had a plan? Why serve the people ahead of the politics, right?)

How about bumping up the number of refineries in Canada so we're not sitting ducks every time hurricanes L, M, N, O, and P hit the Gulf of Mexico? How about stopping the tax-on-tax so that the government isn't stealing pennies out of one pocket and placing them back into the other pretending it's tax relief? How about not belittling the Canadian public with ads on bird poop when that money—every last cent—could have gone into plans to fund alternative energy sources to oil, like solar and wind, to create the desperately needed manufacturing jobs in Ontario?

Without any strategies from Ottawa, drivers can expect painful gas prices for the near future. Last week, energy expert Joanne Hruska predicted on BNN's Market Call that oil prices may increase during the winter period. When asked if the public could expect a similar 9% drop in gas prices once the worries over Ike are over, Hruska replied: "Come on." Gas prices never go down in the same way they go up, she noted. Come on, indeed.

Blight Me!

Three months or so after the Toronto Star predicted that it might save the “blighted” intersection of Bathurst and Queen, Starbucks is finally open on the northeast corner, the former site of a doughnut store/hangout for what outsiders regarded as degenerates, dope fiends, and all-round ne’er-do-wells.

Beauty, as always, is in the eye of the beholder. But after a couple of weeks customers seem thin on the ground, and the corner—which fond locals still regard as the true centre of Queen West—shows no sign of gentrification. The Star story called the intersection “a windswept tangle of streetcar wires and tracks, home to a Pizza Pizza, the Big Bop music venue—a hulking presence in peeling blue paint—and The Meeting Place, a drop-in centre for the homeless that attracts as many as 200 clients a day.” None of whom seem to be patronizing the new Starbucks. Queen and Bathurst is just as windswept as it always was; the streetcar wires and tracks are just as tangled. A new fence has gone up outside the Meeting Place, but people still hang out on the steps, socialize, and split a bottle if anybody has one. Panhandling is an official TMP no-no, so any that goes on is quite discreet.

“Last year,” the story continued, “after a visitor from St. Catharines was stabbed to death near Bathurst and Queen...” In fact, the killing took place several blocks away outside Trinity Bellwoods Park near the intersection of Queen and Niagara streets, which just happens to play host to another Starbucks (the chain being very fond of corners). This could prompt the chicken/egg question: Which came first, Starbucks or the blight?

The new coffee house at Bathurst looks grey and forbidding on the outside and, from casual observation over the course of a day, doesn’t seem to be attracting a huge number of people, unlike the Tim Hortons a couple hundred metres north on the corner of Bathurst and Dundas streets, which usually has a lineup at the counter.

Back in 2001 a proposal to put a Timmy's at Queen and Tecumseth, about the mid-point between the two current Starbucks, was shot down by neighbourhood protesters, led by businesspeople who were already seeing the upmarket potential of the block and didn't want the double-double crowd cheapening the deal. As the march of progress heads relentlessly into the setting sun (any time now, Mimico realtors will be listing houses in “Queen West West West”), it may be time for a rethink and a freshly baked maple-glaze. Seattle-trained baristas need not apply.

Photo by Bill Taylor/Torontoist

Keeps On GOing And GOing And GOing...

Starbucks Coming to Kensington?

The Post is reporting that talks are currently underway with Starbucks to rent the former home of J & J Fruit Market—on the corner of Augusta and Nassau and thus smack-dab in the heart of Kensington Market. Some Market residents who the Post interviewed were unsurprisingly ready for a fight, and, as the property is partially on city land, Adam Vaughan has said that it will require neighbourhood approval anyway and will become a "very public and pitched debate." That, and he wants Kensington composed of "small, family-run businesses.” So: probably not gonna happen. The winning serve comes from i deal coffee owner James Fortier, who tells the Post that he has no issues with Starbucks coming; he just thinks that the big chain won't make any money if they do. There's the rub: if, by some miracle, Starbucks gets its wings and opens up shop in Kensington, against the violent protests and certain vandalism from the locals, it could still only survive as long as customers' demand for it did.

Love And Caring

As of Friday, the epic, two-year-long dispute between Trevor Brown and Crystal Castles over the band's unauthorized use of Brown's image of Madonna has quickly and decisively come to an end.

Brown announced on his blog that the band's new worldwide managers, James Sandom and Paul Everett of the London-based SuperVision Management Group, sent him a letter apologizing on behalf of the band, then quickly made him a new offer, and, when the terms were agreed upon—the band now has full rights to the image, Brown reproduction rights—promptly followed up with cash in hand within twenty-four hours.

In what Brown calls a "happy ending finally," he wrote that Crystal Castles have "at last...woken up to the fact this was their mess to clean up—it was pissing on their career more than mine—the negative press was never going to stop." He has a point: we've heard whispers that the band's extracurricular activities barred them from getting nominated for this year's Polaris Prize, and the fight certainly didn't help their reputation, especially after the news jumped from here to Pitchfork and beyond. The grudge on Brown's end is over, though: as he wrote, "Absolution can never be absolute of course—but I think Crystal Castles have paid the penalty for their indiscretions."

Brown told Torontoist that he's "just happy to plant a flag of victory on top of the huge mound of excreta left by the armchair analysts and ex-manager," those last words a parting shot at Mikey Apples, who Sandom confirmed has been moved by Crystal Castles out of management and "into a new role." (We emailed Apples last night for comment, but he has yet to reply.) As Sandom puts it, the resolution marks "a very calm conclusion to a situation that became unnecessarily inflamed in the past." Amazing what a change of management can accomplish. Now, about that other thing...

Thanks to rek for the tip.

But Is It Art?

If dropping stuff off of a building is too high-concept for you, or if you still haven't decided whether or not to go see Blinkenlights at Nathan Phillips Square tonight for Nuit Blanche (or any other nuit until October 12) and that amazing iPhone app wasn't enough to sway you, boy, have we got the video for you.

Shot yesterday, not only does it depict the full awe-inspiring spectacle created by hundreds of remote-controlled lights filling the windows of our City Hall, it also might just be, as the poster of the video claims, the biggest Rickroll ever. Now there's a real reason for civic pride.

Nirvana the Band the Show the Interview

When we last left Nirvana the Band, they were hot on the trail of the Rivoli’s hilariously-dubbed “booking book.” The duo, of Illustration Sunday fame, make an interesting musical team: Jay McCarrol, the reserved piano-savant who, in his words, was "born into consciousness on the keys," and Matt Johnson, the volatile fedora-wearer who, in his words, "doesn’t really know how music works." The newest episode of their web series Nirvana the Band the Show, which went online this week, continues the band’s never-ending pursuit of major stardom. Off-camera, however, Matt and Jay react to the success of their comedy act with slight unease.
"Everything we do on the show is so illegal," Jay blurts out, as he and Matt share a look, wondering if this is something they should be more concerned about. "And we love it. We film people and then put it on the internet without their permission."

It’s this cavalier mentality that makes the team’s comedy so intrepidly funny. When asked if they had difficulty getting permission to film their various exploits inside the Rivoli, Matt smirks: "We don’t get permission. We just sneak in there and film it." Everything on Nirvana the Band the Show seems real, because it is real—or at least painstakingly crafted to appear that way.

The group embraces the city around them, using Toronto landmarks to make the scenes feel more honest. Each episode is bursting with the city’s landscape, from recognizable stores on Queen West to the familiar locale of the back of a streetcar. "This show couldn’t happen anywhere else," the guys agree. "Just try going to New York and filming for forty-five minutes on public transportation without anybody noticing."

Following in the tradition of shows like Curb Your Enthusiasm, the guys believe in comedy without jokes and are critical of punchline-based humour that taps audiences on the shoulder. "That’s the last generation’s comedy," Matt explains. "Nowadays the funny thing to do is to act dramatic and serious, and never say it’s a joke." The result is comedy that is formula-free: one of the group’s videos consists solely of the pair singing along to the Wii Shopping Channel ("Update Day"), while another boldly ends with the entirety of the Bruce Lee 120 minute pseudo-documentary Dragon, the guys’ self-proclaimed favourite film ("The Piano Lessons").

The on-screen interactions between Matt and Jay ring so true, viewers may wonder whether the childhood friends are acting at all. On or off-screen, the pair lovingly cut one another down with boisterous irreverence. [Matt: "I don’t respect Jay at all on the show." Jay: (stunned) "Well... you respect me a bit."] Their real-life conversations are fuelled by the same pop culture touchstones from their adolescence that drive their comedy. Indeed, the team cites David Mamet, The Onion, and Final Fantasy as major influences, and list Alec Baldwin as their dream collaborator. Even the group’s name speaks to this cultural framework. Nothing screams the '90s like Nirvana: "When I was growing up, I didn’t listen to music," Matt confides. "I was scared of Nirvana. I saw a grade eight girl having sex on a park bench; I thought that was Nirvana."

Despite the fact that the show continues to gain popularity—or perhaps because of it—Matt and Jay have decided to retire Nirvana The Band on its one year anniversary this December. As their faces become more and more familiar around the city, it interferes with their ability to capture reality while shooting. This has left the comedy team with a slightly strange wish: "We’re just hoping the show doesn’t get too popular before we finish it."

Images from Nirvana the Band the Show.

Historicist: Titillating and Terrorizing Toronto

Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

Front Page of the Globe and Mail from September 9, 1952.

On September 8, 1952, four men sawed through the window bars at the Don Jail and crawled over the wall to freedom. The jailbreak of the Boyd Gang—Edwin Alonzo Boyd, Leonard "Tough Lennie" Jackson, Willie "The Clown" Jackson (no relation), and Steve Suchan—set off the biggest manhunt in Canadian history with a jaw-dropping reward of $26,000 offered for their capture. The metropolitan area was locked down, and police were given orders to shoot to kill. Squads of 20 or more officers, armed-to-the-teeth with rifles, shotguns, and sub-machine guns, raided known underworld haunts and scoured the Don River ravines, which had long been a refuge for drifters and anyone else who wished to remain missing. For 10 months, the Boyd Gang had reigned as Canada's most notorious bank robbers with brash escapades straight out of James Cagney movies. Their bravado, violence, and entourage of beautiful women kept the public enthralled. The media gaze on Edwin Boyd and his colleagues was so intense that it was difficult to separate the "ego-driven psychopath"—as a 1998 Life and Times episode uncovered him to be—from the media-inflated myth of a gentleman bandit.Early in life, Edwin Boyd (born in Toronto on April 2, 1912) turned his back on his policeman father's religious influence to seek adventure during the Great Depression. He rode the rails, spent time in jail for minor offenses, and lived off the charity of gullible women. During the Second World War, he served overseas as a military policeman and trained as a commando. So, after he returned to Toronto, his mundane life as a streetcar driver soon grew tiresome, and a restless Boyd began looking for another way of supporting his war bride and three children.

What's known for certain is that on September 9, 1949, Boyd robbed a North York branch of the Bank of Montreal. But details are murky as to the motives for his first bank robbery. According to one account—the version Boyd himself boasted to the Fifth Estate in 1996—Boyd heard a story of an autistic kid holding up a bank without even using a gun. If it's that easy, Boyd asked himself, "What the hell am I workin' fer?" He grabbed a gun and downed so much liquid courage that he claims to have blacked out a few times during the hold-up. In another version of the tale, Boyd covered his face with makeup and puffed out his cheeks with cotton for a disguise, and he was so cocksure of his infallibility that he returned to the scene of the crime a few days later.

A good-looking man with dark eyes and a square jaw, Boyd quickly developed a reputation for leaping over bank counters with pistol brandished. In the days of vigilante bank staff, Boyd's robberies sometimes ended with bullets whizzing by his head when tellers pulled concealed revolvers or chased him into the streets. Between September 1949 and October 1951, Boyd pulled at least six bank heists, sometimes alone and sometimes with a partner. The latter didn't really work out when, under intense police interrogation after a botched robbery, Howard Gault ratted out Boyd as his partner-in-crime.

Image of the Don Jail from 1949 or 1950. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1244, Item 1152.

Now a resident in the Don Jail, Boyd began comparing notes with Leonard Jackson, who had been pulling off heists with another, quite violent gang of bank robbers. They were soon joined by another bandit, Willie Jackson. With hacksaws hidden in Lennie Jackson's wooden foot—the result of an earlier encounter with a train—the trio got through the bars and scaled the jail walls to escape on November 4, 1951. As an indication of their level of fame at the time, the reward offered was a meagre $500 per head. They were supposed to have been picked up by Steve Suchan—born Valent Lesso and one of the more violent members of Lennie Jackson's gang—but he'd been so occupied with entertaining his girlfriend that he'd forgotten. Within two weeks, Willie Jackson was recaptured at a Montreal restaurant. The rest of the group, however, held up the Bank of Toronto near Dundas and Roncesvalles in late November 1951 to kick off a four month streak of robberies netting a loot totalling over $75,000. They even staged what was then the largest bank robbery in Canadian history when they made off with $46,000—according to The Boyd Gang by Marjorie Lamb and Barry Pearson (Peter Martin Associates, 1976)—from the Royal Bank's Leaside branch.

In another era, the Boyd Gang—as they had been christened by Toronto Star reporter Jocko Thomas—might've been mere common criminals. But they appeared at a time when the Toronto newspapers were locked in a circulation war. The added attention made them media stars. (It was later said that Boyd was such a publicity hound that he'd go to the library to read his own clippings, and that he once tried to enlist Gordon Sinclair to write his biography as the "adventure story of a bank bandit.") In reality, it appears that the gang was a loose amalgam, sometimes using other partners for stick-ups. And, as police discovered in later questioning, Lennie Jackson was probably the true brains of the operation. But, to the newspapers, Boyd was more charismatic, and the unusual biographies of his fellow hoodlums gave the press fuel to celebrate their infamy. Lennie Jackson, a hairdresser from Niagara Falls, was driven to crime when he grew envious of the cars and cash flaunted by criminals in a bar where he worked. Steve Suchan had been a multi-talented musician who gave up his dreams of earning a living with his violin to rob banks. Even Boyd's beautiful wife, Doreen, became a common presence on the front page. Staid, quiet Toronto was so titillated (and terrorized) by the gang's activities that the foursome achieved a near folk-hero status until one fateful encounter on March 6, 1952.

On alert after the broad daylight robbery of a Bank of Montreal at College and Manning, Detective Sergeant Edmund Tong and his partner, Roy Perry, pulled over a suspicious black Mercury Monarch at College and Lansdowne. Had he known the vehicle carried Suchan and Lennie Jackson, Tong would've been extra vigilant—he'd have easily recognized Jackson, who he'd previously arrested. As Tong approached from the rear driver's side, Suchan rolled down his window and unleashed a blaze of gunfire. With Tong crumpled to the ground, the desperate bandits continued to fire on the police cruiser. Tong was mortally wounded—he would die on March 23—and Perry was shot in the arm. Suchan and Lennie Jackson fled to Montreal, where they were both eventually recaptured in separate incidents and sent back to the Don Jail to await trial. On the assumption that Boyd was also in Montreal, Toronto policemen were attached to the force in that city.

Working off another hunch, Detective Adolphus 'Dolph' Payne kept Boyd's brother Norman under surveillance until he led to Edwin Boyd's hide-out in a second-floor apartment on Heath Street. Wanting to avoid a shoot-out, Payne waited until the crack of dawn to sneak into the apartment. Finding the bandit asleep in bed, Payne aimed his revolver at the outlaw's temple and yelled, "Give up!" A startled Boyd surrendered without incident, which was lucky because, in addition to a briefcase containing over $25,000 cash, there were five loaded automatic weapons beside the bed. Boyd was held in the apartment until Allan Lamport, the grandstanding mayor and police commissioner, could arrive with the media for photos.

Reunited in the maximum security wing of the Don Jail, Boyd, Suchan, and the two Jacksons began plotting their escape almost immediately. Lennie Jackson's hollowed-out foot had been confiscated by prison officials, so they had to become more inventive with their efforts. An early attempt was thwarted when a guard admitted he'd smuggled a screwdriver to the quartet of prisoners. Whether through bribes or cunning, the gangsters either procured or fashioned a copy of their cell key so they could sneak out and systematically chip away at the bars in a hallway window with a hacksaw until their escape on September 8, 1952.

Mayor Lamport was outraged and called their second escape "the most shameful thing that has occurred in the city." He told The Star that the administration of the jail "sounded like the operation of a bunch of morons." In the aftermath, the warden and several guards would be suspended, but Lamport also tore into bank officials whose cavalier attitude towards security, he felt, put the public at risk.

Once again, the media ramped up its salacious reporting—almost hopeful that it would all end in a grisly Hollywood shootout. One of the first news broadcasts on the just-launched CBC television network covered the ensuing manhunt, complete with imaginative reenactments and overly dramatic Hitchcockian theme music. In The Star Gordon Sinclair claimed that the Boyd Gang "had active plans...and may still have these plans...to stick up two, three, or even four banks at the same time in the Toronto district." The prevailing public mood was gloomy and fearful. One police officer predicted: "These men have nothing to lose. Two of them were in the shadow of the noose. They'll shoot anyone who gets in their way. There'll be a lot of killing before this is over."

Given all this hype, the gang's actual demise was anti-climactic. While police and reporters swarmed the jail yard right after the escape—on the mistaken assumption the escapees were hiding on the roof—the fugitives were very slowly limping their way through the nearby Don River ravines. (Lennie Jacskson was missing his wooden foot after all.) They slowly made their way to a barn near Yonge and Sheppard where the gang hid out for days. Their arrangements with accomplices on the outside had apparently fallen through. Working off public tips, the police stormed the barn and arrested the convicts without incident on September 16.

Within two weeks, the trials began. Suchan and Lennie Jackson were both charged with capital murder and were found guilty after an exasperated Jackson broke down under cross-examination. They were hanged back-to-back shortly after midnight on December 16, 1952. Boyd was sentenced to eight life sentences on an assortment of bank robbery-related offences. (Much later, when being interviewed by Brian Vallee—the author of Edwin Alonzo Boyd: The Story of the Notorious Boyd Gang [Doubleday Canada, 1997]—Boyd may have cryptically admitted to escaping justice for a gruesome double homicide.) Willie Jackson got thirty years. Both were paroled in 1966. Boyd lived under an assumed identity in British Columbia until his death in May 2002.

Front Page of the Toronto Star on September 8, 1952. Mug Shots from the Globe and Mail on September 9, 1952. Image of Police Constables (July 7, 1949). City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 41, Item 422. Diagram of Escape Route from the Globe and Mail on September 9, 1952.

The Daily Photoist: October 9, 2008

knots and swirls 1

BY BOMB_TEA

Vandalist: One Ring To Lock Them All, And In The Darkness Bind Them.

Once a week, Vandalist features the best street art and graffiti from around Toronto. You should contribute.

Artist Unknown

NEAR CRAWFORD AND DUNDAS
PHOTO BY STEPH

My Shoes Are Canada Council

Torontoist would like to apologize for the post we ran yesterday implying Stephen Harper's cuts to the arts were ill-advised or that the Department of Culture was right about anything at all. We've seen the error of our ways and, thanks to our new favourite band Hooded Fang, have grown to understand that arts funding is for rich and beautiful people to buy the shoes to wear to and the drugs to take at parties we will never be invited to because we aren't elite enough. Let's go burn some books!

Local Music Sketchbook: Bottom Feeder

Every Sunday, Torontoist features an illustration of a concert from the past week, with a focus on local talent.

PhotoTO: Off Piste

These skiing-related signs appeared yesterday along Macdonnell Avenue in Parkdale, between Queen Street and Garden Avenue. This doesn't seem to be an installation with any purpose or meaning, and there's no particular irony in this residential setting. It's amusing but random. Is there a wider message?

Thanks to David Giddens for the tip.

Local Music Sketchbook: Timber Timbre

Every Sunday, Torontoist features an illustration of a concert from the past week, with a focus on local talent.

Get Rizzeal!

Illustrations by Jake Bauming

Historicist: Politics and Performances at St. Lawrence Hall

Every Saturday morning, Historicist looks back at the events, places, and characters—good and bad—that have shaped Toronto into the city we know today.

Photo by Metrix X from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

The mid-nineteenth century rise of Toronto as a city of industry and importance brought its citizens increasing wealth, education, and sophistication. No longer content with the amusements of a colonial backwater, Toronto's culturally maturing society demanded more refined entertainment. So after the Great Fire of 1849, which destroyed much of the Market Block, the rebuilding plans included a new theatre. St. Lawrence Hall was built at the southwest corner of King and Jarvis streets in 1850.

Designed in the Renaissance Revival style by William Thomas, an immigrant from England who made his name as an architect and city engineer in Toronto, the exterior ornamentation included sculpted heads of the deities of the St. Lawrence and Niagara rivers and Lake Ontario, as well as carved fruits and flowers. Its Corinthian pillars and impressive cupola made it one of the most imposing public buildings in Canada. Inside, the Great Hall—with a high-vaulted ceiling, peach-coloured walls, and ivory woodwork—could seat one thousand people. St. Lawrence Hall was, literally and figuratively, the centre of the city.
Photo of St. Lawrence Hall (circa 1860) from Wikimedia Commons.

It was the city's main public meeting hall. Sir John A. Macdonald, Thomas D'Arcy McGee, and George Brown addressed Toronto audiences here. In addition to the regular meetings of the Anti-Slavery Society held there, the 1851 North American Convention of Colored Freemen brought some prominent abolitionists to the city including Frederick Douglass and Samuel Ringgold Ward. Beyond politics, St. Lawrence Hall was the main venue for musicians and other performers visiting Toronto. Opera singer Adelina Patti performed there, as did P.T. Barnum's diminutive star, Tom Thumb. The biggest act to play St. Lawrence Hall, however, was the world-renowned Swedish soprano Jenny Lind.

From Scandinavian roots, Lind's fame grew across Europe as she performed before royalty and sold-out audiences. She was a muse for Hans Christian Andersen—her many suitors had also included Felix Mendelssohn and Frédéric Chopin—for "The Ugly Duckling," "The Angel," and "The Nightingale." The latter was the source of her nickname, The Swedish Nightingale. Although P.T. Barnum, the American showman and impresario of inventive attractions, had never heard her perform, he saw the money-making potential of a North American tour. In early January 1850, Lind accepted Barnum's offer of $1,000 per night (plus expenses) for an open-ended engagement of up to 150 concerts in the United States, Cuba, and Canada. To secure the necessary sum of $187,500, which Lind insisted upon being given in advance, Barnum had to mortgage all his commercial and residential properties.

Raising promotion and publicity to the level of "conceptual art," Barnum advertised Lind, as one historian put it, "more on the basis of her virtue than of her talent." His press releases reiterated her record of giving benefit concerts for hospitals and orphanages. Although she'd been a complete unknown in North America before Barnum, by the time Lind arrived in New York in September 1850, she was such a household name in North America that forty thousand people greeted her at the pier.

She was mobbed every place she visited on her North American tour between 1850 and 1852. Toronto was no different. Nordheimer's Music Store, the only place in town to buy tickets, had to call in the police to erect barricades to control the crowd. According to John Goddard and Richard Crouse's history of the Toronto music scene, all the seats were sold within two hours for her three shows at St. Lawrence Hall on October 21, 22, and 23, 1851. The proceeds from her first appearance were donated to the mayor for a Protestant orphans' home. Her concerts, which featured a slightly different programme each night, also included supporting performances from Italian baritone Giovanni Belletti and the accompaniment of a young pianist, Otto Goldschmidt, whom she would marry before returning to Europe. The operatic portion of her shows included themes or arias from Handel's Messiah, Bellini's La Sonnambula, and Meyerbeer's Robert Le Diable. But she always closed her shows with more populist fare, such as Scottish ballads "John Anderson my Foe" and "Comin' through the Rye," and "The Echo Song," a Norwegian melody. Lind was so popular with Canadian audiences that there's even an island in Nunavut named in her honour.

The Lind concerts represented the St. Lawrence Hall at a peak of its social importance. As the city's development shifted towards the north and west in the 1870s and it was surpassed by a number of larger and more modern theatres and ballrooms, the St. Lawrence Hall entered a long period of decline. While it was home to the National Ballet, the building became one of the first causes adopted by local preservationists. In 1967, it was restored as a centennial project and designated a National Historic Site. Although its days of hosting the world's biggest stars, such as Jenny Lind, are behind it, St. Lawrence Hall enjoys new life as the site of countless weddings and as the headquarters of Heritage Toronto.

Concert advertisement from the Globe and Mail on October 21, 1851.

Like The Deserts Miss The Rain

Oh, Sally, that heartbreaker, dream maker, love taker. She'll pick you up when the chips are down, only to drop you like a hand grenade come daylight. And the older you get, the harder it is to recoup your investment in her. Art? Viral ad? We're unsure. But if Sally is acting single these days, we'll be drinkin' doubles.

Spotted at the corner of Heartbreak and Regret.

Photo by Marc Lostracco.

Unlucky Number Seven

At just about noon today, Jesse Ship was walking along Spadina on his way to lunch with a friend when he spotted something slightly less appetizing in the window of Happy Seven restaurant, at 358 Spadina: a rat. He snapped the photo above, of the rat conspicuously beside a Toronto Public Health DineSafe Pass, and sent it to us and to BlogTO immediately, and recorded the video above on his cellphone. As it turns out, he wasn't the only one to see something: CityNews got footage of not one but three rats roaming the store, presumably taking a break from teaching fine cooking to the clumsy but ultimately endearing cooks.

The restaurant has received unconditional green passes in all but one of their past seven inspections, but Toronto Public Health—unlike the last time we contacted them about an unwelcome guest spotted by a reader—have still not shut the restaurant down as of 9 p.m. tonight, and the operator we spoke to on the phone said it could take until as late as mid-day Friday to send an inspector (though a public health manager told the Post that they're investigating). When Torontoist dropped by the restaurant this evening and attempted to speak to the restaurant's management, they told us they had "no comment." CityTV had similar results when their report aired at 6 p.m., but were later told that the restaurant "was aware of the problem and were bringing in pest control experts in the hopes of eradicating [it]."

Photo/Video by Jesse Ship. Additional reporting from Jonathan Goldsbie.