Results tagged “paris”

In her ambitious new book, The Walkable City (Véhicule Press, 2008), Mary Soderstrom writes: "The walkable city, the oldest kind of city is going to be the key to whatever success we have in meeting the challenges of the future."

Photo of the T3 Tramway from *** Fanch The System !!! ***.

Whether we like it or not, some of us will be in Toronto all summer, with nary a trip or vacation elsewhere in sight. As a remedy, we've created Tourist. Every weekend morning, bright and early, of the summer we're featuring a photo (or two) from a globe-trotting photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool.

Mayor David Miller unveiled a YouTube video asking Canadians to sign an online petition urging Ottawa to ban all handguns in Canada. While most handguns are already illegal, the gesture would serve a powerful symbolic purpose by pushing the blame for Toronto gun violence onto the feds.

This evening, Toronto Culture and Fort York are unveiling a permanent public art installation under the Gardiner Expressway (off Fort York Boulevard, between Bathurst and Fleet Streets). In WATERTABLE, Toronto artists Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak use video and lights to create the effect of rippling water on the underside of the highway—a reminder that the Gardiner runs along what used to the original shoreline of Lake Ontario. Ever wonder why the the Toronto Harbour Commission building is notably not on the harbour? It used to be surrounded by water on three sides!

Say hello to a "prudent" budget. Stéphane Dion criticized the bill for being ineffectual, but of course not so ineffectual that the Liberals would vote against it and force an election. (Elsewhere, Thomas Walkom points out that the budget includes a new system of income tax shelter that will, and I am sure you are surprised by this, primarily benefit wealthy Canadians.)

If you're like most snow-hating Torontonians, your weekend plans are changing with the weather. Suddenly, the thought of spending Friday night in high heels and club lineups has all the appeal of an ice bath. Forget new outfits or dinner spots, you're looking for new releases instead.

Selected quotes from "Toronto's Type and Tile Heritage" by Edward Keenan, from the November 14th issue of Eye Weekly:

Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset.

In an age of hipster irony and shirts to match, the Joy T-Shirt Project and its slogan, "Wear the World on Your Heart," seem impossibly sincere. But the "we're all connected" paradigm rings true: each shirt features the face of a real person—not Paris or Perez, but Sonya from Toronto or Sabry from Algeria, or one of over a hundred others in the online catalogue—hand-drawn and silk-screened over the wearer's heart. "It's more than just...

London's transit story of the week—if not the year—was Tuesday's re-opening of St. Pancras rail station after £800 million (that's $1.6 billion) of renovations. Not only does the station provide London with a new terminus for a high-speed 300km/h rail link to Paris and Brussels (with a planned stop at the 2012 Olympics site in east London along the way), but it also upgrades the city's regional and suburban rail connections and improves access...

Torontoist is one of fourteen cities in the worldwide Gothamist network. Once a week, the editors of each site—from LAist to Londonist—compile some of their most interesting posts into a brief blurb. It's Elsewhere In The Ist-A-Verse, and it appears, across the network, every Sunday.

So, Molson Canada decided to do a "Twist and Score" promotion and offer the winner an iPhone. Cool, right? There's only one little problem. They said the phone would be available in January on the Rogers Wireless network, which Rogers is denying—they claim there was never a deal with Molson and they refuse to comment on whether Rogers will be the official carrier whenever the iPhone finally comes to Canada. Rogers spokeswoman Odette Coleman basically says that Molson is full of it; her actual words were, "We heard the news this morning and said 'What?'" Molson Canada spokeswoman Marie-Helene Lagace explains the fumble: "There seems to have been a misunderstanding with our agency."

Last night, entertainment upstart CiRCA faced one of its toughest challenges yet: how can a club, especially one of its size, impress or even satisfy a massive crowd of rockers in Toronto? Well, Torontoist reader skeptical, it is our pleasure to report to you that it passed with flying colours.

Repo! The Genetic Opera!––the upcoming musical about an organ donor program that goes horribly horribly wrong––is (surprise!) filming in Toronto. Though there are a bunch of other half-decent actors in the film, Repo! is most notable for its star: Paris Hilton. Sooooo...yeah. That's something.

Finally, another excuse to write about La Blogothèque's Take-Away Shows. The last time we covered the France-based music filmmakers, they were psyching us up for the Arcade Fire's May concert with the best concert footage we've ever seen of the band. Before that, they won us over with The Hidden Cameras parading along boardwalks. Now they've given us Owen Pallett plucking away at two songs––"Your Light Is Spent" (above) and "Horsetail Feathers"––in Paris. If you've always wanted to hear "Your Light Is Spent" sung by an out-of-breath Owen running down a Paris street to avoid the noise from traffic, consider your wish fulfilled.

Torontonians aren’t that cold, even if we have to be given a reason before hugging a stranger. If you’re tired of handing over cash every time you simply want someone to gather you in a warm embrace, or you’ve collected so much money from selling hugs that you want to do some charity work, then luckily for you the Free Hugs Campaign has unofficially deemed September 10 International Free Hugs Day (one of many). It’s the one day across the world when hugging passersby without charging a fee will not be ridiculed. Paris. London. Seoul. Copenhagen. Hong Kong. Come on, Toronto, everybody’s doing it—join the global cuddle movement!

Warren Kinsella has a diatribe in today’s Post (that’s National, not Midtown) about trashy celeb magazines. Their circulation is up, Time’s circulation is down, more people care about P. Diddy than national politics, yada yada yada. At the end he encourages us to "pick up quite a few more copies of The Economist and U.S. News and World Report. And the National Post, naturally."

Last week, because we were completely distracted by Dock in a Box, we didn’t mention our sadness at the loss of both Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. We also couldn’t think of a Director bad enough to lament the continued existence of in the same breath.

The Toronto Star published a good article Sunday revealing that "the city's Waterfront Secretariat is now reviewing the recommendations and cost estimates of recent waterfront task forces on the fate of the Gardiner." Torontoist hears you asking, wasn't this the whole point of the Gardiner Report released last September? Now that the city has all but canned plans to tear down the elevated highway due to lack of funds, however, discussions are focussing on how to make the best of what we're stuck with.

Apparently, we really really really wanna zig a zig, hah.

The city of Paris has recently been courting tourists from London, England with a new series of ads that look like this:

You want a greener city? Prepare to pay $4 million per year in taxes to plant and maintain trees. Alternatively, you could covertly plant them yourself with your own funds. We hear that chicks dig tree planters.

Yahoo! just released a new entertainment blog/website-thing called omg!. The enthusiastic exclamation-pointed acronymic name—and pink-on-black elements of its colour scheme—should be familiar for anyone who's ever read Toronto-based celebrity/entertainment/queer blog !! omg blog !!. Now, Frank from omg blog is accusing Yahoo of ripping him off.

In this column in Saturday’s Globe, our girl Leah McLaren takes Paris, Lindsay, and Nicole to task for their crimes. No, silly! Not their DUI's—she's talking about their sartorial offences! Taking a page (or two, or three) from the Fug Girls’ book, Leah catalogues the celebs’ offences one by one.

“What’s going on this week in cinema, Torontoist?” you might be asking, as you normally would when faced with another Film Friday column. “Well,” we'll respond, “If you want to know what is hot, you only have to look at a couple of earlier posts this week.”

If you were one of the many Arcade Fire fans not lucky enough to grab tickets to one of the band's Massey Hall shows on May 15 and 16, we can but offer two paltry consolation prizes.

Each weekday morning, we pick a recent image from the Torontoist Flickr Pool and feature it here on the site. It's our way to give the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention they deserve!