Torontoist » “Works Committee”

KAMP: Horrors at the Hands of Humans

Carly Maga — Fri, 24 May 2013 17:30:28 +0000

Three puppet masters portray a day in the life of Auschwitz through a detailed miniature construction of the grounds and thousands of tiny handmade puppets.

When telling the story of the Holocaust, one effective way to overcome our sheer inability to comprehend the scope and scale of such atrocities is to zoom in on one or two stories: share one particular experience, in all its brutal specificity, and we have at least a small way into the event—the small details illuminate the larger whole.

One theatre company from the Netherlands, Hotel Modern, takes a related approach in KAMP (CAMP). The production depicts a typical day at the Auschwitz concentration camp, but instead of zooming in into a closeup, it shrinks everything down, literally, into miniature. It’s the accumulation of thousands of small details that has the impact in this case.

Ontario Bike Summit Aims to Change the Conversation on Cycling

Chris Dart — Fri, 24 May 2013 15:30:00 +0000

Bike Summit organizers say that drivers and cyclists are often the same people.

Eleanor McMahon thinks it’s time to change the conversation around cycling in Ontario.

McMahon is the founder of the Share the Road Cycling Coalition, who will be hosting the fifth annual Ontario Bike Summit this week in Toronto. She says that we need to stop talking about things like bike lanes and other bicycle infrastructure as a zero sum game between cars and bikes.

“We do polling, and our polling tells us that 89 per cent of Ontarians are both drivers and cyclists,” she says. “The notion that it’s cars versus bikes is overblown, and it’s really not working anymore. Deciding to change the conversation means going out of our way to poke holes in that idea and say from the get go ‘We don’t buy into that philosophy, and just because you say it, doesn’t make it true.’ ”

Leader of the Pack

Jonathan Goldsbie — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 14:30:00 +0000

The cover of the June 17-30, 2004, issue of fab Magazine.

The first item on the agenda for the April 8th meeting of City Council’s Public Works and Infrastructure Committee is headed “City of Toronto Receives the Canadian Motorcycle Association Government Award” [PDF]. As the agenda was released Wednesday, we considered it an April Fools’ joke, in the brief moment before we remembered that bureaucrats don’t have a sense of humour.
The Canadian Motorcycle Association (or “Canmocycle,” as its url abbreviates it), whose “Government Award” is given “for actions taken or policies, laws, statutes and the like implemented that have benefited motorcyclists and the use of motorcycles” [PDF] is quite pleased, you see, that the City of Toronto offers motorcycles free streetside parking [PDF], something we’d never really thought about before. Turns out that this policy was a result of a September 2005 motion by Councillor Case Ootes, the “taciturn Dutchman,” who sold it primarily as an environmental initiative—his resolution cited both the Kyoto Protocol and the One-Tonne Challenge—but was really about the fact that pay-and-display metres are useless for regulating vehicles on which you can’t securely display a printed ticket: “other motorists often steal their Pay and Display parking receipts,” Ootes wrote [PDF].
Sigh. The Toronto Parking Authority is probably happy, though. That the epic failures that are the pay-and-display machines have inadvertently netted the City an award is probably the TPA’s greatest accomplishment in years. The photo that will be taken of committee chair Glenn De Baeremaeker with the CMA representatives is sure to be a thing of beauty, though. Let’s hope Miller lends him the jacket.