squiddity.

The Squiddity years

2011-05-19T13:46:00.002-04:00

This blog is no longer updated (as you may have noticed); I felt that it had run its course. I'm leaving it up; feel free to leaf through the back issues, so to speak. I am pondering some new online project, though I'm not sure yet what form it will take; when I figure it out, I'll link it here. Much appreciation to everyone who read and commented on Squiddity over the years!

Holiday '08

2009-01-12T23:11:00.002-05:00

I went some places over the holidays! I took some photos!

The Canadian Museum of Nature, where I was awed by dinosaurs as a child, is undergoing massive renovations. Part of it is still open, and I revisited the giant skeletons, above. Also, my mom curated a nifty show there -- paintings by Barbara Gamble, juxtaposed with century-old plant specimens collected & pressed by Catharine Parr Traill (sister of Susanna Moodie).

Mom, Rene and I went to Montreal for the weekend, where we visited Rene's sister & went to the Canadian Centre for Architecture. There's a fantastic show on until April 19 called Actions: What You Can Do With the City. It's an encyclopedically thorough collection of urban interventions -- performance art, guerrilla gardening, parkour, anything you can think of in that vein -- from cities around the world.

Then we went to Rene's little house in Cornwall, which is stuffed with an eclectic collection of outsider (and insider) art and toys.

The next day, we toured a semi-derelict cotton mill, part of a complex where Rene dreams of creating a private museum, which would be like his house, but larger & open to the public.

Full photoset here.

Hannukah party at Jonathan's

2008-12-22T20:24:00.001-05:00

At Jonathan's, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Hilary plays the Hammond organ; Eric looks thoughtful; Ron cooks vegetable soup in the kitchen.

What has happened to this blog? We're on strike at York, and it's been a really weird few months. I've been doing less walking, & have become lazy about taking photos. But I do have more things to show you! Keep squiddity in your RSS feed, and who knows what will happen?

England, part 8: The beautiful cat endures

2008-11-17T00:55:00.002-05:00

It was my last afternoon in London, and I went to Highgate Cemetery, which was quite close to my hostel. Karl Marx is buried there, beneath an enormous likeness of himself, and there's an odd assortment of other prominent people: George Eliot and Douglas Adams; the father of Virginia Woolf, and the baron who oversaw the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway; the inventor of Hovis bread and the doctor who devised the vaccine against typhoid in WWI, and a great many artists and firefighters. In late summer, in the brilliant slanting sunlight of late afternoon, it was an uncommonly beautiful place, and I wandered around taking dozens of photographs.

As I pondered the headstone of Herbert Spencer, a group of women and little girls clustered around a gravestone nearby. One of the children wants to know why the dead person wasn't there -- the inscription said he had "gone home." The adults laughed, and one explained that people don't like to say someone died, so instead they say that person "was called home" or "went to his rest" or "fell asleep." But what it really means is that the person is dead.

The little girls wandered around looking at headstones, and one of them found this one:

They clustered around it and conferred.

"It's a dead cat!"
"No it isn't!"
"It is! Look, it says, 'The beautiful cat endures.' It is a dead cat."
"Mummy! Mummy, come look! Mummy a cat died and it's really sad."

This concludes my account of my trip to England! (And it only took me 2 months to get through all the photos!) The whole photoset is here -- do have a look at the photos of gorgeous Highgate, in particular.

England, part 7: Hampstead Heath

2008-11-10T19:57:00.002-05:00

My last day in London, a Sunday, was brilliantly sunny and warm, and I went for a long walk on Hampstead Heath. My destination was Kenwood House, but it took me awhile to get there, as I kept getting lost; twice I realized that I'd been walking for 20 minutes in a direction opposite to where I should have been going. But I didn't really mind; I was having a great time rambling around, soaking up the sun and eavesdropping on English people.

Two men in their 40s, walking with wives & strollers.

1st man: ... which worked well with my assistants in Hong Kong, but then it didn't work at all with my assistants in Japan.
2nd man: You have to find a balance. That's the key, finding a balance.

Man in his 40s to female friend: [Happily and somewhat bashfully] ... smart, funny, and she's half-Jewish. Her father's Jewish.
Female friend: [throwing up hands and laughing] Wow!

Londoners make enthusiastic use of their outdoor public spaces in fine weather, I noticed. Both the Heath and Waterlow Park, which I walked through later that day, were full of people having picnics, jogging, playing with their dogs, or just lolling on blankets reading paperbacks.

Full photoset here.

England, part 6: Looking at London from the Tate Modern; Aren't birds brilliant!

2008-10-27T15:08:00.001-04:00

I followed up the Tate Britain with a visit to the Tate Modern the next day. I loved the eclectic collection; I was particularly mesmerized by the room of portraits by mid-20th-century West African photographer Seydou Keïta, and by a room in which all four walls, from floor to 20-foot ceiling, were covered with original Soviet propaganda posters. And the Tate's worth visiting for the building alone, a former power station with a vast Turbine Hall at its centre and a 99-metre-tall chimney, from which you get the spectacular city view in the photo above.

The Thames Festival was on, and the riverfront was crowded with people. Directly in front of the gallery, a bandstand and outdoor dance floor had been set up, and a beginners' tango lesson was in progress. I snapped some photos from the chimney with my zoom lens.

In front of the gallery, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds had set up a booth & were explaining to people that a pair of peregrine falcons had built a nest way, way up in the chimney. There were binoculars at the booth through which you could look at the nest, though both of the falcons were off hunting when I was there. This was one of a series of RSPB events called "Aren't Birds Brilliant!" You really have to say that out loud with a British accent.

I walked to the British Museum after that; I've been before, and I got there only 30 minutes before it closed this time, but I love the British Museum and it was good to spend a little while poking about in the Enlightenment Gallery. There was a big exhibition on about the Emperor Hadrian, and it was "Roman Life" day at the museum; people dressed as centurions were wandering around having their photos taken with tourists.

Photoset here.

Next: getting lost on Hampstead Heath.

England, part 5: London! Portobello Road, and the first Tate

2008-10-18T16:41:00.002-04:00

I took a coach into London on Thursday, did some laundry in my hostel that night, and set out Friday morning. This was my third time in London; I seem to wind up there about once every ten years. I've seen the big tourist draws before: Tower Bridge, St. Paul's, Buckingham Palace. This time, I headed first for Portobello Road. Looked at lovely piles of ephemera and junk; bought a china phrenology head! I am going to put it in my office next term & scare my students with it. Here is what it looks like now, ensconced on my bookshelf at home:

I'd seen ads in the Tube for a big Francis Bacon exhibition that had just opened in the Tate Britain, so I went there next. The permanent collection closed earlier, so I looked at that first. I was standing in the big central hall when a guy in running shorts went tearing past me at top speed, vanishing around a corner at the end. I thought, "Well, that was odd," then when it happened again 30 seconds later I thought, "Aha! Art." I asked a nearby guard about it, and he explained that indeed, the sprinters were part of Martin Creed's Work No. 850. I stood for a few minutes & watch them sprint through at regular intervals. It was pretty great: a nice conceptual counterpoint to all the gorgeous yet static Turners and Rossettis in the galleries.

After that I wandered through the Bacon exhibit. Large canvases of screaming eyeless popes and mashed chimpanzees. This being only the second night, and a Friday, the exhibition was well-attended. There were a few tourists in windbreakers, walking through silently, having run out of things to talk to talk about with their travelling companions; a lot of giddy boys in tight t-shirts, flinging their arms around each other; middle-aged men unremarkably holding hands.

The electricity went out for several minutes. Only the last of the daylight, filtering through the skylights, illuminated the gallery. The handful of tourists were all "What's happening? What's going on?" but the Londoners seemed to take it in stride, like they're used to things fucking up randomly on a regular basis. Soon enough the lights came back on.

All my England pics, including more from Portobello Road, here.

Next: The view from the Tate Modern.

England, part 4: The conference, a castle, random Oxford

2008-09-24T13:59:00.002-04:00

The conference, an interdisciplinary meeting on the topic of madness, went very well. The range of presenters -- both geographically and in terms of the kinds of work they were doing -- was remarkable, and at the same time the conference seemed very coherent, as everyone was concerned with the same broad set of questions relating to mental illness and its troubled connections with agency and creativity. This is not an academic blog, though, so I'm going to talk more about the building and the food. The building was Oxford's Mansfield College, a late-Victorian neo-Gothic structure that would not look out of place on U of T's St. George campus. Dinner on the first day, and lunch on the subsequent days, was included with conference registration, and was served in a dining room with vaulted, painted ceilings, halfway up the college's central tower. The food was marvellous: roast lamb with mint sauce, chicken-and-mushroom pies, piles of steamed vegetables, golden roasted potatoes, and for dessert: bread-and-butter pudding with stewed apples and little pitchers of clotted cream. I have nothing bad to say about English cuisine.

Post-conference on the second day, some of us went for dinner at The Big Bang, "Officially the Finest Sausage and Mash in Britain." They serve nothing but mash (potatoes and/or turnips), and sausages. If you are vegetarian, you can have vegetarian sausages. It's a small place, and about a dozen of us descended on it unannounced and were served by a flummoxed but cheerful waitress who seemed to be channelling Emma Thompson circa 1990. I have no idea whether the sausages were indeed the best in Britain, but they were good.

What else did I do in Oxford? I visited Oxford Castle. Its central tower was built by the Normans in 1071, but as I learned on the tour, archaologists now believe there was already a Saxon structure on the site which the Normans took over and built up, and that the Saxons in turn had built on a pre-existing, pre-Saxon burial ground. So: Really old building. It was a castle & a keep, then it was used as a jail for 700 years, decommissioned only in 1996. Now it is partly a museum and partly a "hotel and leisure complex"; you can stay in a jail-cell-turned-hotel-room for up to £300/night, and there is a posh restaurant and a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts.

All my Oxford photos are up now. Next: On to London!

England, part 3: There's the dodo! -- and other scenes from museums

2008-09-20T13:28:00.001-04:00

The weather was pretty awful -- rainy and cold -- but that made it a perfect day for checking out some of Oxford's fantastic museums.

First: the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. This is a Victorian neo-Gothic museum -- opened in 1860 -- stuffed with dinosaur skeletons, insect specimens, cephalopods in jars, and all kinds of other relics of the natural world that are interesting to look at. It was the site of the famous (if largely apocryphal) debate about evolution between T.H. Huxley and Samuel Wilberforce, and there's a statue of Darwin and a display about evolutionary theory. Also, the museum houses the Oxford Dodo -- the "most complete remains of a single dodo" extant today, along with a model of what a living dodo likely looked like.

Excitable small British child in the Museum of Natural History: "Where's the dodo? Where's the dodo? Where's the dodo? THERE'S the dodo!"

Then I moved on to the Museum of the History of Science, which is apparently "the world's oldest surviving purpose-built museum building" and was "the world's first museum open to the general public" when it opened in 1683 to showcase the collection of Elias Ashmole. (There is now a New Ashmolean, a different museum, which I didn't get to this trip.)

The focus in the History of Science museum is on esoteric and wonderful antique scientific devices of all kinds: clockwork models of the solar system, early cameras and microscopes, the second-oldest grandfather clock in England, etc. Also, a chalkboard which Albert Einstein wrote on when he gave a lecture at Oxford in 1931, which someone had the presence of mind to take down & cover with glass before it could be wiped clean.

More museum photos.

Next: The conference, and random Oxford photos.

England, part 2: Canal, houseboats, friendly cat

2008-09-18T10:14:00.001-04:00

I had one full day to explore Oxford before the conference began. I didn't have any kind of plan, but Oxford's pretty small, and I figured it wouldn't be hard to find things worth looking at. I was really jetlagged, but, bolstered by that impressive hostel breakfast, I went out and started walking.

Almost immediately I happened upon the Oxford Canal. Did you know Oxford has a canal? And it's lined with houseboats!

I walked along it for awhile, taking pictures of the houseboats. I saw this cat perched on one of them & tried to take a picture of that, but as soon as the cat saw me, it hopped down onto the path and presented its belly to be rubbed, and then it followed me for awhile, purring.

More houseboat pictures here.

Next: Museums!

England, part 1: Getting to Oxford

2008-09-17T13:25:00.001-04:00

I have no fear of flying. We flew to Holland regularly to visit family when I was little, and it was always a big treat for me -- I still have the KLM "Junior Stewardess" pin I was given on a flight in 1974 -- so I have all these pleasant childhood memories of being on airplanes. However, every single aspect of getting on and off a plane -- from buying the ticket, to getting to the airport on time, to running the gauntlet of customs and security checks, to standing by the baggage carousel hoping one's suitcase is here & not in Budapest -- scares the living crap out of me. So many opportunities for things to go catastrophically wrong!

A few things nearly did go wrong on my way to Pearson. At Kipling I somehow got on the 191 bus instead of the 192, and if a kind West Indian lady had not leaned over & said, "Are you trying to go to the airport?" seconds before the bus took off, I would have wound up way the hell out on Steeles instead. Then I couldn't figure out which stop to get off at when we got to Pearson, and the driver was having a screaming argument with the father of a family of four over the fare, so it was impossible to ask, and I wound up at Terminal 1 when I needed to be at Terminal 2. But I was still about an hour early, and I took the nifty airport monorail to where I needed to be.

And then my carry-on was too heavy but the nice check-in guy let me keep it anyway, and then I was finally on the plane, watching the sun rise over the Atlantic.

I took a coach from Gatwick to Oxford, through green countryside dotted with pheasants and red-brick farm buildings, and checked in at the Oxford YHA. It was spartan, but quiet and clean, and in the mornings they had the most amazing breakfast buffet, included in the (very low) accommodation price. I have no idea why the colours came out so horribly in this photo -- the breakfast was much more appetizing in real life.

Note the sausage, which was fresh and delicious, and the grilled tomato. A grilled tomato on your breakfast plate = surefire sign you are in England.

More photos here.

Next: Houseboats!

Here we go

2008-09-05T00:53:00.002-04:00

This is what Ward's Island looks like from the 44th floor of a posh downtown hotel. Kim's a juror with the Toronto International Film Festival this year, and they flew her in from Vancouver and put her up in this great room, and she invited some of her friends, including me, up to check it out. I hadn't seen Austin and Leslie in ages; they'll be spending a lot of time at the Festival as well, Austin in particular, as the production company he works for has 3 feature releases in TIFF this year -- including the gala opener.

And I'm going to miss it all -- because I'll be in England! I'll be presenting a paper at this conference in Oxford next week. Leaving tomorrow. Wow.

So there's a real sense of It's All Really Happening Now in the air these days. It's going to be a busy year for me. This blog will still be updated, though. How often? What will I post here? Not sure yet. Check back and see.

More photos from the 44th floor here.

Dark water walk

2008-08-25T14:55:00.001-04:00

On Thursday, I got a new camera (my brother gave me a gift certificate from Henry's for my birthday!), and then took it on a psychogeography walk, my first in ages. I didn't use the camera for much of the walk, because we went into some dark, dark places. We gathered at Warden Station, and the sun had gone down by the time we started out. We went into the Warden Woods and headed south, in the direction of the Harris filtration plant.

We came out of the woods to troop along Victoria Park Avenue, where we stopped briefly for soft-serve ice cream at a McDonalds. Then onto Kingston Road, where presently we came to the densely wooded Glen Stewart Park. There was a sign saying Eastern Ravine, and a wooden staircase leading down into the forest. We started down the stairs. The trees immediately swallowed up the light from the street, and the further down we went, the darker it got. The stairs seemed to go on and on, turning this way and that. Some of us took out cellphones and held them up to try and light the way; they looked like blue fireflies in the blackness. When we finally reached the ground, it was so dark we could barely see the trail. We moved along it, feeling as much as seeing our way, the ones in front yelling out a warning to the others when they hit a tree root or a mud puddle. As we walked, Eric told me about a restaurant he went to in Montreal last week, called Eau Noir, where diners sat and ate in a room that was completely dark. You read a menu before you went into the dark room; you could choose from a selection of appetizers and entrees, or ask to be surprised. Dinner was served by a waiter named Mathieu, who was perfectly comfortable working in the dark room, because he was blind.

Black water gurgled and splashed in the creek that ran alongside the path. For some reason, the ravine smelled faintly and pleasantly of cucumber. We all noticed this.

We reached the water filtration plant, which is finally accessible again after months of construction work. A big waning moon hung over it. We walked through the grounds and down to the inky lake, and threw rocks in. I took photos; I have not yet figured out all the available settings on my new camera, so there's an odd painterly effect in a lot of the photos, like we're wandering around in a de Chirico picture, which is actually what it was like.

More photos here.

Swallow swarm on the Islands

2008-08-22T16:46:00.002-04:00

I was out on the Islands again on Wednesday, and I walked from the Ward's Island ferry docks all the way to the snack bar at Hanlan's Point, then back again. The weather was about as beautiful as it could possibly be. On the rocky southwest shore, I found the carcass of a fish as big as my thigh. I investigated Gibraltar Point Beach, the one I hadn't been to before, and found it to be smaller than Hanlan's, quiet and shady.

Walking back, I found myself in a clearing on the south shore, near where the boardwalk begins, late in the afternoon. There were a lot of tiny gnats in the air, and these had attracted dozens of swallows, which were all darting and swooping and chirping madly. I stood in the middle of the clearing and they flew all around me, and just above my head: I was standing in a cloud of swallows. It was impossible to photograph, since they moved so quickly, but I shot a video that maybe gives you some idea:

Photo set here.

Jesse and the Curta Calculator

2008-08-18T23:51:00.001-04:00

Jesse and the Curta Calculator, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

At Monday's Trampoline Hall, after Jesse's lecture on The Curta Calculator: Its Construction, History and Aura, audience members cluster round for a closer look at the amazing artifact from some alternate-universe twentieth century.

Hilary and the cicada

2008-08-18T17:10:00.001-04:00

Hilary and the cicada, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Hilary ponders a dead cicada she found. She took it with her, to show her nephews, when she went home to Newfoundland this weekend.

More photos from Friday afternoon.

Rainbows, butterflies, and tacky souvenirs: this must be Niagara Falls

2008-08-17T17:44:00.003-04:00

On Thursday, Maggie and Stuart read as part of the Virus Readings series, in the Book Nook at 4555 Queen St, Niagara Falls. Stuart's friend Heather and I came along, and we made a day trip out of it.

We stopped in Grimsby to eat lunch and check out a nifty thrift shop Stuart knew about, and got to Niagara Falls sometime early in the afternoon. Heather went off on a bike ride, and Stuart, Maggie & I went looking for the Niagara Parks Butterfly Conservatory.

Now, Niagara Falls is the kind of town where there are a lot of tourist attractions of dubious interest, with long lineups and inflated ticket prices. The Butterfly Conservatory, on the other hand, is totally worth your 12 bucks. It's a huge greenhouse filled with lush, blooming tropical plants, and giant, drifting, fluttering, jewel-coloured butterflies. There's a hatchery where you can see chrysalids (above), and watch butterflies crawl out of them and spread their damp new wings.

There's also, as you might guess, a hideously tacky souvenir shop, where these magnets seem to be popular:

That's a found poem, right there.

Then we went and looked at the Falls themselves, which are of course beautiful, and are also a Baudrillardian essay in hyperreality, the real thing being effaced and superseded by its signs, the mediation of experience through technology, etc. Maggie said, "You can tell we're the intellectuals because we're the ones taking pictures of the coin-operated binoculars."

The cultural-theory field trip continued as we ventured into the Clifton Hill tourist area, which is a kind of insane, disorienting sensory-overload environment, like a mini Las Vegas. There are a lot of wax museums, and a lot of attractions advertised as "4-D", as if the same old 3 physical dimensions were just not exciting enough anymore & a new one has been added to jazz up the carnival rides. Seriously, we have no idea what "4-D" was supposed to mean. Also, the Tourist Area is just crawling with robots. There are animatronic figures rappelling up the sides of buildings; disembodied voices boom from every storefront, hyping the wonders within; and sometimes the animatronic figures speak in recorded voices, trying to entice you inside. Robot barkers! Impervious to boredom, heatstroke or laryngitis! Also, you see the word FUN a lot.

Tired out by the heat, loud noises & flashing lights, we met up with Heather and were happy to stumble upon Basell's Diner, where we had classic diner food and beers and I GOT CARDED, much to my delight and the astonishment of everyone else. (Maggie: "I can vouch for her being really, really old.") Someday I want to have breakfast at Basell's; they have those little single-serving cardboard boxes of Kellogg's cereals, and they also have three kinds of pancakes:

Then on to the reading. We had been speculating all day about what kind of arts community or neighbourhood Niagara Falls might have: it's a pretty small city, built around tourism, with no universities, though I'm told it does have some good community colleges. Who would show up to a literary reading?

It turns out that much of the arts community in Niagara Falls (as far as we could make out) revolves around one nifty building, 4555 Queen St., affectionately known as The Four-Triple-Five. A former nightclub, it's got a cafe, an art gallery, a music performance space, and -- up a flight of stairs, in what was once the VIP lounge -- an adorably cozy little second-hand bookstore, which is where the reading took place.

If you're ever in Niagara Falls, and if you're the kind of person who gets migraines in Tourist Areas, escape from Clifton Hill and check this place out.

The reading was intimate, the small audience attentive. Maggie and Stuart both read substantial, sometimes intense sets, impressive given how wiped out they were feeling in the late afternoon. I was intrigued by Tanis Rideout's work-in-progress, a nearly-completed novel based on the true story of a failed attempt to climb Everest 30 years before the Hillary expedition.

All my Niagara Falls photos here.

The heat is making people weird

2008-07-18T16:19:00.001-04:00

The Scream is over, and desultory monthly-ish posting will now resume here on Squiddity. I was in Kensington getting groceries today, and there was a busker in front of the bakery again. Today it was a young white woman in an ankle-length African-print muumuu, singing "Walking On Sunshine" very loudly, unaccompanied, not particularly well, into a carrot. Yup. Bouncing from side to side, holding a jumbo carrot as if it were a microphone, and singing into it. This was unusual even by Kensington standards, and people half a block away were standing on the sidewalk staring at her. The ladies in the Patty King across the street were talking about maybe calling 911.

A futile quest

2008-07-11T13:45:00.003-04:00

Today someone found this blog by searching on the term "how to impress hipster boys."

Hah! Hipster boys aren't impressed by anything.

Squiddity at the Scream

2008-07-05T16:52:00.002-04:00

The Scream Literary Festival is on now, with events every night until the mainstage in High Park on the 14th. I'll be blogging on the Scream website about events I attend throughout the festival. Do drop by!

Birds, cats, fluffy white clouds

2008-06-26T00:09:00.001-04:00

I know it's been a month, but this blog isn't dead, it's just resting! I'm going to two conferences in the fall, and I'm pretty busy these days making travel arrangements & working on my presentations. Keep me in your RSS feed and hopefully you'll see photos from England and Texas later this year.

I did get out to the Islands yesterday, to enjoy the first decent weather in what feels like weeks. Ward's Island is still my favourite place in Toronto to spend a sunny day: cats, bicycles, little cottages, a nice pecan tart at the cafe. It appears to be poplar fluff season on the Islands right now: see photo below. Is it poplars that produce all that fluff? It's everywhere you look: on the ground, in the air, in the water, where the geese and ducks graze on it happily.

Also, I saw several brilliant orange songbirds, and wondered what they were. I thought they might be scarlet tanagers, but they had black heads, and tanagers don't, as a quick Google search revealed. Some more Googling, and I figured out they were Baltimore orioles. So pretty!

More photos here, though none of the orioles -- they're too quick for me.

Now growing in the Sculpture Garden

2008-05-27T18:20:00.000-04:00

Katie Bethune-Leamen puts the finishing touches on "Mushroom Studio," a 20-foot structure that will be on display in the Sculpture Garden on King East for a year. Bethune-Leamen will regularly be found inside the sculpture, working on new sculptures.

It was Doors Open this weekend, but most of the walking around I did was unrelated. I saw some frisky baby goats at Riverdale Farm -- I highly recommend dropping by soon, while they are still tiny -- and the new statue of Al Purdy in Queen's Park. More photos.

To the lighthouse, and back

2008-04-30T23:37:00.002-04:00

Four of us explored the Leslie St. Spit on Saturday -- an epic 4-hour psychogeography walk. The Spit, as you Toronto people already know, is an entirely manmade peninsula a bit east of the Toronto Islands. It's been constructed over 50 years from the rubble of demolished buildings, and the soil and rocks dug up in the construction of the subway system. (Lots of interesting background on the Spit can be found in this hugely informative Toronto Star feature -- be sure to check out the PDF info-graphic.) It's now a city park and bird sanctuary, but truckloads of rubble are still being added every week. So the Spit is an unusual hybrid: both nature reserve and junkyard. A lot of the old building detritus looks curiously organic; it's really interesting to see how the natural and the artificial blend together out there.

We saw a beaver lodge, rabbits, a hawk that glared at us but did not fly off when we walked up close enough to see its talons, pretty blue-backed songbirds nesting in birdhouses, and the famous double-crested cormorant colony. Also, the Quonset hut referenced in Spacing's April Fool's gag this year. And the lighthouse at the end of the Spit.

I took LOTS of photos and have put them up on Flickr with notes: click here.

It's time for another installment of Toronto's Hipster Boys Say the Darndest Things

2008-04-24T16:19:00.002-04:00

Bakery section, Dominion. A nerdy hipster boy in a leather jacket is talking at a pretty girl with an eyebrow piercing, who is ignoring him and browsing the selection of day-old bread.

Hipster boy: ... an unethical idea: I steal holy water and mix it with Jaegermeister.
Girl: [in deeply bored voice, still looking at bread] That's disgusting.

Hipster boy then pulls out his cellphone, checks it, and announces he has just received an "awesome" text from a friend who is in a bar getting drunk on "Jaeger bombs". The girl, unimpressed, says "He's getting drunk at 3 in the afternoon?" The boy says, "I think he's drunk already!"

Update -- Later the same day:

Driveway of Olivia Chow & Jack Layton's house. Two guys are sweeping up leaves & debris & putting them into boxes in a truck.

One yardwork guy to the other: Thinking and self-reflection are the only tools we have for self-regulation. Use them always!

Sunday at the diner

2008-04-14T14:17:00.001-04:00

Can there be a more generically-named eatery in Toronto than People's Foods on Dupont? It's a great place to go for a classic diner breakfast, though.

These vintage table-top jukeboxes apparently still work, although we didn't try putting a quarter in. Laura and Jake noted that every time they're in there (which is often), someone at one of the tables is listening to "Sweet Child of Mine" by Guns & Roses.

That was the week that was

2008-04-13T15:20:00.003-04:00

It's been an unusually busy, interesting week, though I didn't take many photos. A brief summary:

Monday: Visited Paul and Allysun and their tiny, brand-new daughter River. I believe that was the first time I've ever held a newborn baby.

Tuesday: Saw Nancy Cartwright talk at U of T, then went over to Trinity College to see Maggie, who is doing an M.Div. there, give a thoughtful and impassioned sermon on the metaphor of God as food. Appropriately enough, as part of the service I took communion, another thing I had never done before. The wine was sweet, the bread was wholewheat and chewy.

Wednesday: Coach House Books spring launch! A lineup of excellent readers, including Maggie, who read from her new novel, Girls Fall Down. Saw tons of book people I hadn't seen in forever. Jude's friend Katie is building a 20-foot mushroom in the Sculpture Garden. Sharon's wrapping up work on her "I Love You" book. Sean Dixon says he's writing a children's novel in which "a leaf dies and it's very sad," which led to Carl and I trying to explain to him what "emo" means. Etc.

Thursday: Long psychogeography walk, to commemorate Shawn's birthday. Started on Bloor, at the windows of Holt Renfrew (currently featuring an odd and underwhelming display involving lots of neutral colours and giant insects), meandered through Rosedale and into the ravine, all the way to the Brickworks, then on to Cabbagetown and Church St. A woman visiting from Scotland, a friend of one of the regular walkers, was with us, and expressed astonishment as we descended a flight of wooden stairs into the dark ravine: "You would NEVER do this where I'm from! You'd be robbed and killed instantly!"

(Above, a photo of office towers taken when we climbed to the top level of a Yorkville parking garage.)

Friday: Philosophy department end-of-term party at York, followed by end-of-term-party afterparty at the Duke of York, followed by several of us grad students (and one intrepid faculty member) roaming the dark streets of Toronto at 2 am. I led everyone down bpnichol lane and showed them the Coach House. We peered into the windows of the print shop and the bindery, and saw Rono, the elusive night guy at the Coach House. I have heard about Rono for years, but had never actually seen him before. He had a lot of shaggy grey hair, and he glared at us. I felt like we had glimpsed the Yeti.

Best overheard line of the week: A U of T undergrad to her friend, walking down St. George one afternoon: "I mean, even if you thought it was a dead balloon, why would you pick it up?"

The part of Buffalo with people in it

2008-03-31T21:49:00.001-04:00

I was in Buffalo again on Saturday with Jamie, Alison and Hilary. We didn't get to poke around inside Buffalo Central Terminal like we did last time, but we did see a fantastic exhibition by Jennifer Steinkamp at the Albright-Knox Gallery -- huge dim pillared rooms awash with gorgeously coloured, precisely rendered video projections. Many of the pieces use multiple projectors, so that odd things happen to your shadow as you move around the space. Go, if you get the chance.

Also, this time we saw a fair number of actual Buffalonians. They were out enjoying the sunshine in the Elmwood neighbourhood, which, as I'd been told, turned out to be a pleasant place to walk around, full of nifty shops like the vintage clothing place pictured above.

We also went back to that massive Wegman's we visited last time, because we cannot get enough of the strange exotic American groceries. This time we found -- on sale -- butter lambs, a Polish Catholic Easter tradition, apparently, manufactured every spring for nearly 50 years by the Malczewski family of Buffalo. Here is a photo of a lamb made of butter:

Click here for more photos from the supermarket and an enormous mall we also explored.

Winter on the Islands

2008-03-20T19:48:00.002-04:00

This happened almost a month ago (yikes!), but I want to post about it before winter melts away. If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you know how I love the Toronto Islands. But I'd only ever been there in the summer -- until the Saturday last month when Jude and I ventured over, hoping to go skating on the lagoon.

Most of the water that loops through and between the Islands freezes solid in the winter, and the Ward's Island locals keep a rink-sized patch cleared of snow. We found it, but couldn't skate on it because an all-day pick-up hockey game was in progress. We didn't mind, though; we stayed and watched a while. Maybe a dozen people were playing -- many in t-shirts, because the day was so mild -- and about twice that many were hanging out rinkside, watching, chatting, and drinking out of thermoses. Dogs ran around greeting everyone. For Island residents, it was clearly the place to be on a Saturday afternoon.

We walked along the trail till we got to the church. We could see Centre Island, the amusement park all shut down for the winter, the rides silent and still. But there were lots of sounds drifting over to us: barnyard animal sounds. Well, of course -- all the animals at Far Enough Farm were still there. "Let's walk over!" I said. "I want to see the lowing beasts."

We crossed the nearest footbridge. Centre was deserted, but the animal sounds were getting louder. We reached the petting farm and saw an enormous flock of ducks and geese. The ducks were all dozing peacefully on the ice, but the geese waddled up to check us out.

The doors of most of the barns and stalls stood open, and the animals -- donkeys, ponies, horses -- were outside enjoying the sunshine, but there were still no people to be seen, with the exception of one farm worker, busy at the far end of the horse corral, who waved to us. It was as if all the humans had left the park, and the animals had taken over. It was like downtown Buffalo on a Sunday, but with livestock.

We left the farm to walk along the boardwalk on the south shore, and look at the wild shapes the ice on the trees and rocks had taken.

The Islands are as gorgeous in the winter as in the summer, it turns out. If you're hoping to have lunch at the Rectory Cafe (the only year-round option), call first -- they're open on & off in the winter.

Full set of photos here.

More skating

2008-02-17T18:18:00.001-05:00

I'm not very sporty, so I'm pleasantly surprised by how much I like skating. I was back at Harbourfront on Friday. There's no free hot chocolate during the day, but the cafeteria serves really good french fries.

Went down to the water's edge and looked at the ice. It's noisy; it creaks constantly.

Ranjit visits

2008-01-31T23:54:00.000-05:00

I've known Ranjit via Flickr, mainly, since 2005, but he lives in Brooklyn and I'd never met him. Last weekend, he was in town, helping Jessica Thompson present her FreeStyle Sound Kit workshop. I went to the workshop on Saturday & then we explored Toronto a bit on Sunday.

At the workshop I learned how to use a soldering iron and make a basic sound circuit; I got to play with a glue gun and mess around with sound samples. My finished soundkit didn't really work -- it was supposed to be triggered by stepping on a contact mic, but wasn't, and it seemed to go off randomly sometimes for no reason -- but I still had fun.

On Sunday, Ranjit, his cousin Alex whom he hadn't seen since Alex was eight, Hilary, and I had brunch at Aunties and Uncles, then wandered through Kensington Market, where I tried to explain the cultural significance of the statue of Al Waxman: "Imagine if there was, I don't know, a statue of Archie Bunker from All In the Family... Trust me, this is probably the most Canadian thing you will see all day."

The one thing Ranjit really wanted to do while he was here was visit Active Surplus, which, oddly enough, I'd never been to in all the years I've lived here. I think I thought it only sold electronics stuff, or something. Wrong! It sells everything: hats and mitts, a dozen kinds of rope, a Visible Man, glass vessels of every description, ribbon, many objects I could not identify at all, and a wide range of odd clever gadgets I never realized I needed. (I wound up buying a pair of sound-cancelling earphones for my iPod, which work great on the subway.) We had a great time poking around. Here, the selection of electrical components transforms Ranjit into a blur of excitement:

The store is worth visiting for the signage on the bins alone; here's one of my favourites:

More pictures from the workshop here, and lots more pictures from Active Surplus here, including more fun signs.

Making the best of January

2008-01-28T20:38:00.000-05:00

It's cold and dark, I know. But there are lots of things to love about this month.

First of all: Robbie Burns Night!

I went to the Duke of York again this year. Tim, Jamie and Hilary came with me, as well as Nick, our token Scot, who, ironically, was also our token vegetarian, and had the veggie burger while the rest of us had the haggis dinner. We enjoyed the Address to the Haggis:

Nick pronounced it perfectly authentic, and was a bit disappointed: "I was hoping the Canadians would get it comically wrong and dress a man up as a haggis, or something." He did point out that a truly authentic recreation of a contemporary Scottish national holiday would involve a lot more public drunkenness, brawling in the streets, etc.

After the delicious haggis, the buttery tatties and neeps, and the sticky toffee pudding with lashings of ice cream and whipped cream, we really needed some exercise. Which brought us to another lovable aspect of January: Skating!

Jamie, Hilary and I headed down to the rink at Harbourfront. I hadn't been skating in about ten years; Jamie had never been on skates before. In the locker room, Hilary and I laced up our trusty old white figure skates, and Jamie rented a snappy black-and-red pair:

A few people had warned me that skating isn't like riding a bike: even if it was second nature to you in the past, there's no guarantee that you'll be able to get right back into it. I stepped out onto the ice, and my ankles wobbled. The ice was slippery! How was I even supposed to stand up? Hundreds of people glided effortlessly past: teenaged couples and groups of girls all holding hands, herds of boys chasing each other and laughing, a serene woman with her hands clasped behind her back. It looked so easy. I clung to a post, wanting to shake my fist and yell, "I skated the entire length of the Rideau Canal once!"

I remembered a beginner's trick, from years ago: keep one skate on the ice, and push with the other foot. I shoved off from the post, and began nudging my way along. And pretty soon I was able to push with both skates. It was all coming back to me! I joined the crowd and skated around the rink once, then again. I was pretty wobbly and slow, but I could still skate! Jamie was intrepidly making his first cautious attempts, aided by Hilary. Jude and Lynn were there too. Sean skated up and said hello: it was only his second time on skates, but he was doing at least as well as I was. He fell down, got up, dusted himself off, and said proudly: "That was my first time falling down!"

The Harbourfront rink is open late, and some Fridays they have DJ nights, with dance music and free hot chocolate. Go on, it's worth a try!

The great IKEA label hunt

2008-01-22T00:37:00.000-05:00

Someone got Hilary a label-maker for her birthday. You know those ones that emboss block letters in white on little pieces of coloured plastic tape? So she's been labelling everything: her glasses, random body parts of friends, etc.

Today, Jamie and Alison and I had an evening trip to IKEA planned. Shelving! Cheap picture frames! Swedish meatballs! Hilary was going to come along to return a defective shelf, but wound up getting a ride from another friend & going earlier in the day.

Shortly before we left, an e-mail appeared from Hilary. I opened it, and nearly fell off my chair laughing when I read the first line:

"Okay, so I've distributed labels throughout ikea."

The hunt was on! She provided clues. The first one was fairly easy: "up the stairs there is a bin. in the bin there are bins you can carry with you and put other bins in. what nationality is this bin?"

What could it be but:

We collected that label, and combed the store further. We were initially baffled by a reference to "a sweet dessert, usually found at canadian fairgrounds. There is a bin of them outside the cafeteria." There were no food bins outside the cafeteria, but there were bins of stuffed animal toys: rats, hippos, beavers. We stopped thinking literally: Beaver tails! The label read, FOR YOU.

We didn't fare so well with the Ektorp Jennylund: we were able to locate Hilary's favourite armchair where, as promised, it "sits on the top shelf and thinks about neuroscience experiments," but couldn't find the label. Same with a cryptic reference to duvet covers. We found the office chairs, and Jamie sat, as instructed, in a nice blue one, from which angle he was able to see this:

We reported back to Hilary, who told us where the labels we missed were. So, if you happen to be in IKEA North York sometime soon, have a look just to the left of the pensive pink Ektorp Jennylund, and behind the catalogue stand in the duvet section. There might still be a label there... FOR YOU!

Another year up in flames

2008-01-17T18:08:00.000-05:00

I know a lot of people hate New Year's Eve, but I've always liked it, possibly because I've never been to any of those awful expensive bar parties (well, once, but it was an unmitigated disaster & I never did it again). I like the suspended-time feeling you get in the week leading up to it, and I like staying out late, and I always like a good house party with friends and interesting new people.

This year, there didn't seem to be much planned. Jim and Susan were throwing a party, which would be fun, but would be wrapping up early, in deference to their three-month-old daughter Sidney's bedtime.

I thought about it. What would be a good way to see out 2007? The last few months of the year had been really hard on a lot of my friends: marriages had ended, loved ones had died, jobs had been suddenly and unfairly terminated. Nobody would be sorry to see the year end. In fact, what if we burned it in effigy?

I sent out a message: "I want to make a paper effigy of 2007 and burn it in the park at midnight. Anyone with me?" It is a testament to how great my friends are that the response was an immediate, "Setting fires in the park in the middle of the night? OH HELL YES I AM SO THERE."

So, I made a paper doll to represent the old year. Here is what it looked like in my kitchen, early on the 31st:

I like to think of the expression on its face as kind of smirkingly half-apologetic, as if it is thinking, "Yeah, so, I kinda sucked. But what are ya gonna do?"

I went to Jim and Susan's, admired Sidney in her tiny party dress, and met up with Jude and Guy, and at around 11:30, the three of us walked over to Christie Station. Others soon gathered. I got out the doll and a Sharpie, and suggested that people write on the doll the names of all the things they wanted to see go up in flames. Alison, who really had a shitstorm of a year, particularly in December, scribbled frantically all over its back & then wrote "GENERAL FUCKWITTERY" across its front. Hilary was missing. We called her on a cellphone and discovered that she was working on her neurophilosophy paper & had lost track of time. She promised to hurry over.

We trekked into Christie Pits. It was about fifteen minutes to midnight, and snowing heavily, though it wasn't too cold. There were a few people tobogganing down the steep hill at the end of the park (another great way to spend New Year's, I thought), but other than that the park was deserted. Near the swings and the monkey bars we found a wading pool -- a broad circle of concrete, all covered in snow -- which seemed like a good safe place to set a small fire. The nozzle of the fountain in the centre made a perfect support for the effigy.

Midnight drew nearer, and still no Hilary! I worried that she'd miss the big moment. The someone saw her, alone at the top of the hill. She came skidding down in the snow, in her boots, parka and a full skirt. When she reached our lamplit playground, she yanked open the parka and flashed her satin ballgown at us:

What an entrance! And just in time! I distributed the sparklers, and got out a box of matches. At first the wind kept blowing them out as soon as I lit them, and I worried that this wasn't going to work. Then 2007's jaunty tissue-paper trousers caught fire, and up he went:

Everyone lit their sparklers on him, and waved them around. "Happy New Year!"

And a happy New Year to YOU, albeit a bit belatedly.

All my photos here.

Alison's photos here.

Christmas in Ottawa

2007-12-31T19:52:00.000-05:00

So, I went home to Ottawa for Christmas. It was pretty quiet. The biggest news was that the Giant Tiger nearly burned down. I may have mentioned Giant Tiger before: it's a chain of discount stores in Eastern Ontario. The branch near my mom's place has been there since I was in high school, and my mom does all, I mean ALL, of her shopping there. I was planning to stop in and stock up on socks and toiletries before heading back to Toronto, but then on Christmas Eve, my mom's partner Rene opened the Ottawa Citizen, and there, all over the top front half of the Local section, was a huge photo of the Giant Tiger with the windows all busted in and firefighters walking around inside. Biggest local news in Ottawa: FIRE AT THE HINTONBURG GIANT TIGER! OMG!!

Fortunately the fire, the result of some electrical problem, was contained to the basement. No-one was hurt, but there was smoke damage to much of the merchandise. A re-opening is planned for February, and my mom and her friends are already anticipating the fire sale.

On Christmas Day we went for a walk around the old neighbourhood, Hintonburg/Mechanicsville, which was very quiet. Have a look at my photos here.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Happy Solstice, etc.

2007-12-27T23:43:00.001-05:00

Dog watching crowd, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Kensington Market's Festival of Lights was really on this year: a big but not overwhelming crowd, mild weather (but lots of snow on the ground), and tons of performers, tableaux, etc. It was Hilary's first year at the parade, and I was glad her introduction to my favourite holiday tradition was such a good one. It reminded her a lot of the Hillside Festival, where she used to work. There's a similar dreadlocked-hippies-banging-on-drums-and-playing-with-fire sensibility to both events.

Most of my photos didn't turn out, but I like the one above, of a man holding his dog & watching the crowd.

This entry is a little late because I went to Ottawa early the next morning. Photos to come!

Googly eyes

2007-12-10T12:28:00.001-05:00

Googly eyes, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Someone added eyes to the crosswalk button at College and Beverley. Now you have to poke it in the mouth if you want to cross the street.

Winter drives us underground

2007-12-07T16:37:00.000-05:00

The last psychogeography walk, a couple of weeks ago, started at 401 Richmond, then meandered through the heart of downtown. Above, Shawn regards the Eternal Flame outside Metro Hall with some skepticism. We put snowballs on top of its cage to see if they would melt, but they didn't.

We went into BCE Place and then down into the PATH system, which is fun to walk on winter evenings -- it's warm down there, and eerily deserted after office hours. We wound up in Union Station, somewhere in the bowels of which we found the Amuse-O-Matic, an old-skool, scuffed-up games arcade. In addition to the pinball games and vintage Ms. Pac-Man, there was this very Japanese dance game:

Alison took a photo of it & later noted that "the Toronto version of Dance Dance Revolution should require only nodding." (If you've ever been to see a band play in Toronto, you know what she means.) I suggested that the Toronto version of Dance Dance Revolution should be called Nod Nod Incremental Social Change.

After blowing a few rounds of loonies and quarters, we wandered on along Front a bit, until the cold got the better of us and we took refuge in a Jack Astor's. I'd never been in one before, and it was exactly what you'd think it would be like. Todd did a quick tour of the crowded bar area and came back to announce, "There is WAY too much testosterone in there." There were two separate fights on the verge of breaking out: from the door, we could see a guy at the bar antagonizing the bartender (bartender, loudly: "Well now you're just disrespecting me personally!"), and farther back Todd had seen two suits being physically held apart by a third suit, who kept saying, "It's all love, man! It's all love!" There was some kind of sporting event on -- it was the Grey Cup, right? -- which may have been intensifying the atmosphere, and was probably the reason one man was walking around with half a watermelon on his head. We sat in the dining room instead, and drew on the paper tablecloth with the crayons provided.

More photos, mostly of pinball machines, here.

Jamie's detailed blogpost here.

Walking on Halloween

2007-11-01T23:08:00.000-04:00

Halloween's the perfect night for a long walk. I suggested to the psychogeographers that we start at Rosedale station, because I was curious to see what trick-or-treating looks like in the richest part of town. The trend in Rosedale seemed to be towards very large inflatable scary things on lawns, most notably a tarantula that must have been eight feet across. There weren't a lot of homemade decorations or elaborate displays, which seemed like a wasted opportunity, given that many of the houses had massive porticoes and looked like mausoleums to start out with. Several places did have impressive arrays of multiple jack-o-lanterns. We liked this one:

which seemed to stand as a warning to kids tempted to eat all their candy in one go. (I know, everyone was doing these this year. It was still funny.) No stand-out costumes, but lots of kids in sleek versions of the classics: princesses, pirates, zombies, teddy bears, vampires. One gaggle of girls were all dressed as '80s celebrities. The '80s seem very popular as a theme among people who were born after they ended.

By 7:30 there were big throngs of kids gathering at the intersections of Rosedale's twisty streets. Lots of locals -- groups of girls in Flashdance workout gear or elaborate '50s-housewife costumes, some with arms linked, some keeping up uninterrupted cellphone conversations about ongoing dramas at school -- but it also looked like a lot of older kids had made their way across Bloor from the St. Jamestown public housing development. Smart thinking!

We crossed the Sherbourne bridge and went into Cabbagetown, which Shawn had told us tends to be a hotbed of Halloween activity. By this time it was about 9 (we'd stopped for a bite to eat on Bloor), and most of the kids had gone home, but there were still a lot of yard displays to be seen. The pic at the top of this post is from Cabbagetown. Cabbagetowners get very creative with their Halloween decorating. We liked the straw man being eaten by a giant spider (lit with red spotlights, but too dark to photograph properly), the life-sized coffin (it had been full of candy at the start of the evening, the owner told us), and this ghoulish couple sitting down to their dinner of eyeball stew:

Next, it was on to Church Street, always the city's biggest Halloween party. Sure enough, the whole street was packed. There were some fantastic costumes: the S&M M&M was pretty clever, and the box of takeout Chinese food. We ran into a group of people we all knew slightly who were all dressed as Tetris pieces. And of course, it being Church St., there were lots and lots of fabulous drag queens, androgynous vampires, and Velvet Goldmine glam-rockers, and every Batman had a Robin (awww!). And excitable boys everywhere, running into their friends. (Typical overheard remark: "EEEE!! OMIGOD I AM SO STONED RIGHT NOW AND I HATE YOUR EYESHADOW!!")

I don't have a lot of photos for you, as I'm shy of asking strangers if I can take their photo, but when we made our way out to Yonge St. we saw these penguin dudes and I just had to stop them and snap this shot:

Afterwards, Dylan overheard one of them saying to the others, "Guys, this turned out way better than I expected!"

Maybe next year I'll actually get around to putting together a costume of my own...

More pictures here!

Stylish pumpkins

2007-10-30T22:24:00.000-04:00

I was walking through Mirvish Village on my way home from brunch on Sunday when I happened upon this pumpkin-carving competition for children.

"Can the judges convene here, please?" a woman was saying. "It's going to be hard to choose, they're all so good!" remarked one of the judges.

"It's okay if I don't win," a little girl announced to her mother. "I don't mind."

Happy Halloween, everyone!

Hipster boys say the darndest things: Special indie rock edition

2007-10-27T12:49:00.000-04:00

I haven't been overhearing many random remarks from Toronto's hipster boys lately: maybe I'm just not paying attention. Instead, here's some stage patter from concerts I have been to recently.

They Might Be Giants, Mod Club, July 23:
John Flansburgh: John, I don't understand what the hell you're talking about. Why don't you write about it on your blog?
John Linnell: [mysteriously] This is my blog.

Andrew Bird, Opera House, Sept. 25:
[Produces a See 'n' Say and points the arrow at the chicken. The See 'n' Say makes an inappropriate animal noise, like a moo or a quack. Exasperatedly]: This isn't a See 'n' Say, it's a time machine.

Shout Out Out Out Out, Lee's Palace, October 26:
Nik Kozub [to one of the 2 (!) drummers, who was nursing a torn rotator cuff]: Dude, your rotator cuff is so fucked, it has its own postal code.

I have never seen a Toronto audience get up and move like they did at last night's Shout Out Out Out Out show. There was a whole lot of sweating and arm-waving and jumping up and down. Plus, the band brought snacks. They passed one of those sectioned plastic supermarket trays of Halloween-coloured candies into the audience ("Crowd-surf the snack tray! Share! Crowd-surf the snack tray!"), and they threw bananas. I was there with Bret and Casey, and Bret caught one of the bananas and passed it on to me on the condition that I blog it, so here it is:

OK, now I have to go make this banana into a smoothie and finish grading midterms.

Ghost City, USA: A road-trip to Buffalo

2007-10-16T20:29:00.000-04:00

On Sunday, Jamie, Alison and I went to Buffalo, N.Y., for Doors Open Niagara (which included Buffalo as well as both the Canadian & American Niagara regions). I have spent a grand total of 4 days of my life in the U.S. -- a long weekend in New York City -- and that was 10 years ago, so I was excited about an American road-trip. I knew very little about Buffalo except that it's a mid-sized city with some great architecture, making Doors Open an ideal reason to go.

We crossed the border at Niagara Falls with no trouble at all -- the customs officer was actually pleasant to us, which astounded Jamie -- and headed straight for Buffalo. Entering the city, we drove up the Elmwood strip, which I'm told is the closest thing Buffalo has to a hipster neighbourhood. Soap bubbles hovered over an intersection; we saw a man blowing them out of a third-storey window. We waved to him, and he waved back.

We reached downtown quickly -- Buffalo's not big -- and parked near our first destination, the City Hall. We got out & wandered a bit, looking at a remarkably large jazz-age hotel. Something was bothering me from the minute we got out of the car -- something just didn't feel right -- but it took me several minutes to put my finger on it.

"Guys... where is everybody?"

"I noticed that too! I guess it's just quiet downtown, since it's Sunday."

"But it's not just quiet, it's completely deserted."

Once I'd noticed the absence of other people, it seemed stranger by the minute. With the dark, ominous weather, and the massive, stunning old buildings all around us, the effect was like being in a zombie movie -- the beginning of 28 Days Later, maybe -- or one of those old Star Trek episodes where the away team beams down onto a planet covered with the mysteriously abandoned ruins of a once-grand civilization. "Why did these people leave, Captain? Did they find a better world somewhere else? Did something... drive them away?"

The City Hall, above, was fantastic -- it looked like it ought to have Superman standing on top of it, cape flying in the wind -- and it was even more impressive inside. Look at this:

Upstairs, the ornate Council Chamber, with its magnificent sunburst Art Deco stained-glass skylight, was open to the public. And still, there was almost no-one else around. We did see a couple of people in the Chamber, and then a small group at the observation deck right at the top of the central tower, but mostly we poked around on our own, discovering oddities like a glass case displaying President McKinley's death certificate.

Check out the view from the tower!

Lunch consisted of excellent cheeseburgers and milkshakes at an authentic 1950s diner that had been relocated to Buffalo from somewhere in Pennsylvania; apparently there is an organization in the US dedicated to restoring old diners and moving them to different cities. We drove around a bit more. Outside of the downtown core, there were residential neighbourhoods. They looked very poor, but here we finally saw some people, albeit not very many. All of the people we saw outdoors in Buffalo were African-American, with the exception of a handful of white anti-abortionists who were picketing a women's clinic, and a dude with a huge cross on a chain around his neck and no front teeth, who was standing on a street corner talking on a cellphone.

We checked the Doors Open booklet and decided to have a look at the Buffalo Central Terminal. Now, I remembered hearing from Liz about a fantastic abandoned station somewhere in Buffalo, and seeing her pictures of an all-night art installation/party she went to there, but I wasn't sure this was the same place -- the listing in the booklet didn't say much. So we weren't sure what to expect.

What we found when we got there astonished us: an immense Art Deco structure, covering several city blocks and featuring a 17-storey office tower, all elaborately ornamented and completely derelict. We wandered around the outside of it for awhile, taking a lot of photos and saying "Wow" and "Holy shit" a lot, and then we went inside and were even more impressed.

The main hall looked like Toronto's Union Station might look a few years after the end of the world. Over the course of the day, the postapocalyptic atmosphere of Buffalo had become almost oppressively intense -- it was starting to get to me -- but this seemed to take it to a kind of gorgeous, melancholy logical conclusion.

And then we went shopping in the suburbs. We hit a Hallowe'en superstore, staffed by hilariously bored-looking teens (smoking cigarettes outside the front door, wearing pirate costumes; slumped melodramatically over the counter inside), and a Wegman's, and a Target -- all the only-in-America places. It was like being in a Rick Moody novel.

I took loads of pictures! Click here!

Nuit Blanche II: The sophomore jinx

2007-10-02T00:20:00.000-04:00

Okay, so if you didn't see it for yourself, you've probably heard by now: Nuit Blanche '07 was no Nuit Blanche '06. There were several reasons for this. A larger, rowdier crowd (many exhibits were too crowded to get into or see, and there were several reports of installations being stolen or destroyed before the night was over), and awful transportation didn't help. (The subway ran all night, but it was still hell trying to get around.) The most significant disappointment, as I saw it, was the lack of large-scale immersive installations this year. Last year's event featured a cloud of dense, illuminated fog in a campus park, Darren O'Donnell's ridiculously fun ballroom party, and 3 different exhibitions in swimming pools -- all astonishing, dreamlike environments you could get utterly lost in at unreal hours of the very early morning. There was nothing like that this year, or if there was, I couldn't find it.

Then again, if my expectations hadn't been so pumped by the gloriousness of last year's Nuit, I probably would have enjoyed this year's for what it was: a pretty good all-night art party. There were some fine highlights, and the whole thing was worth a recap.

8:30 p.m.: Having made reservations earlier, then wandered around a bit & looked at the nearby Cecil St. Community Centre, Leigh Anne, Alison and I check into the Dumpster Hotel. This is, in fact, a posh, one-suite hotel made out of a dumpster. It is located in a back alley at College and Spadina. Our lovely room has all the amenities, except a roof, which means that people on the outside can climb up the side of the dumpster and take photos of us.

We have been told we can call for room service, so I decide to give it a try, and pick up the phone that's lying on the desk.

"Hello?"

The concierge answers. I can hear his voice, and see a tiny, ghostly image of his mouth in a black & white viewscreen on the phone.

"Can I help you?" asks the mouth.

"Room service! We'd like to order room service!"

"Yes, very good, what would you like?"

"We would like some service! In our room!"

"What would you like them to bring you?" the mouth asks patiently.

"Snacks! And champagne!"

Seconds later, there is loud banging on the doors of the dumpster, and a voice bellows, "ROOM SERVICE!" The doors creak open, and women in sanitation uniforms bring us potato chips and sparkling apple juice, while a crowd watches from outside.

9:30: After our hotel stay, we head over to Baldwin St. to get something to eat. On the way there, we pass the beginnings of a performance/installation in which the entire contents of a Baldwin St. apartment are being transferred to the northwest corner of Cecil and Beverley; they will be put back when the night is over.

10:45: We pass Cecil & Beverley again; considerable progress has been made. There are places to sit now, and shelves of neatly folded clothing. Between this & the Dumpster Hotel, there's an interesting theme about the boundaries and definitions of indoors and outdoors, public and private space; unfortunately this doesn't seem to have been pursued much beyond these two pieces.

11:00: Kensington Market. We watch a Punch & Judy show put on by Clay & Paper Theatre. In this version, there's no Judy; instead, Punch meets Prime Minister Stephen Harpy, throws his Blue Book of government policy out the window, then beats him to death with a broomstick. An RCMP officer, a hangman, the Devil and, finally, God meet similar treatment. "I don't know why," Alison observes, "but there's something endlessly entertaining about little puppets hitting each other with sticks."

We run into lots of people we know. Ron joins us as we wander up Kensington Ave.

11:30: A man in a dapper uniform and impressive moustache glides by on a bicycle, then turns sharply and brakes near us. He leaps off the bike and runs up to us, crying "Telegram! Telegram delivery!" in a Pink Panther French accent. He rifles through his bag, and produces a telegram for Ron: it is actually addressed to Ron.

Tino, it turns out, is on a mission to deliver 50 (or was it 100?) telegrams to people he knows, whom he hopes to find wandering the streets this evening. It's his own independent project: he calls it Nuit Noir. (This was one development I liked this year: the proliferation of guerilla indie knockoff groups and projects. Margaux Williamson, Ryan Kamstra and some friends had one called Nut Bland; the TPSC's was called Not Blanche. Also, Jonathan deserves some kind of prize for suggesting the Toronto Tree Tour's Nuit Blanche event should have been called "Blanche Du Bois.")

12:30: I've gone to Queen West by myself. There are thousands and thousands of 20-year-olds here.

1:30: I meet some friends and watch a bit of Misha Glouberman's Cobra event at Mercer Union, but other than that, nothing is really grabbing me in this neighbourhood. I get a cup of coffee and decide to head over to the Church of St. Thomas, up on Huron St., where Maggie has organized some stuff. Jordan Scott is supposed to be reading Thomas Merton aloud by flashlight for 7 hours, in a tiny back room.

3:00: Finally arrive at the church, having walked the entire way without seeing any streetcars or available taxis. Jordan Scott is stuck in an airport in Rome. The flashlight and books sit forlornly on a table in the tiny room. The church does have a very nice Levitating Rock, however, billed as the Eighth Wonder of the World.

Maggie says people have been coming in and telling her all night that this year's Nuit Blanche is a bit of a disappointment. She's only seen the Lower Bay installation, and says that was underwhelming too. I decide to walk over & see it anyway.

4:00: Apparently, earlier in the evening people had to wait in line for a full hour to get into Lower Bay, but by the time I get there, there's no line at all & I walk right in. I'm afraid Maggie was right, though. The installation consists of low, rhythmic thumping noises. With the dim lighting, large security guys, and throngs of 20-year-olds, the overall impression is of a fashionable but dismal industrial-themed nightclub, missing only the overpriced fruity martinis.

And honestly, Lower Bay has lost a lot of its mystique, for me. What with the Bloor trains being routed through it for a month earlier this year, the constant film shoots, and its routine use as a training area for new drivers, it's not a Ghost Station so much as an auxiliary station. Now, Lower Queen...that I'd line up to see.

4:30: In Hart House, Darren O'Donnell's "Slow Dance with Teacher" looks, at this hour, like a '50s-style dance marathon on its last legs. Exhausted teachers and patrons cling to each other and sway to slow music. Half an hour later, when I look in again, there's no-one there. The exhibits in the rest of the building all seem to be video projections; the pool's not open this year, and there's no dance room. The posters advertise "Early Bird Breakfast from 4:00," but there's no sign of this anywhere; people keep coming in & asking the attendant at the front desk, who has no idea.

5:00: Wander around campus. "Event Horizon," the installation in King's College Circle, is just silly. Newmindspace's "String of Diamonds," a few blocks north, is minimal (I learn later that a lot of it was stolen early in the night), but peaceful. I watch the cluster of red and black balloons, with its long tail of little white lights, rise and fall in the breeze.

6:00: Back to St. Thomas for a reading in the garden by Sean Dixon, Mark Truscott and Jessica Westhead: a fantastic lineup at any hour. Also I get to meet Mark and Lisa's 3-month-old son Sam, who is fascinated by the sight of the trees above us against the pale dawn sky.

7:00: I am very, very tired, and my legs hate me. Fortunately, it's a short walk home.

Full set of photos here.

September

2007-09-28T14:24:00.001-04:00

...has gone by fast. I am wrestling with SSHRC and OGS applications, and hating it as much as I hate it every year. Oh, how I loathe filling out application forms. It's been a good, busy month though. I've been drinking with my fellow philosophers, and leading tutorials on ethics. On Tuesday I got to see Andrew Bird, currently my favourite singer/songwriter/musician in the entire known world, live at the Opera House, and that was fantastic. Also, here is a picture Jamie took of Hilary and me watching robots draw stuff at the Queen West Art Crawl:

Watching Robot Kits in Action, originally uploaded by jbcurio.

Nuit Blanche is on Saturday! Yippee! I don't know if I'll manage the kind of epic blog coverage I did last year, but I'll see what I can do.

Calm before the storm

2007-09-01T21:33:00.000-04:00

I was out on the Islands again on Tuesday. I saw these green hairy rocks by the boardwalk, then blundered around in the woods and surprised a little flock of swans in a quiet inlet. It was so shady there, and the swans were so white, that in this photo they look like they're glowing. At first I thought the bit of beach they were sitting on was covered in litter, then I realized it was swan feathers.

There's not much time left for bumming around on the Islands. It'll get chilly soon, and school starts next week. All the people I know whose lives are tied to the academic calendar have been as twitchy lately as cats and dogs before a tornado hits. You never really feel ready to let summer go. I'm going to try to head out to the beach at Hanlan's Point one more time tomorrow.

All together now

2007-08-22T13:38:00.000-04:00

I was at the Silver Dollar last night to see Saskatoon's Cracker Cats and local band Entire Cities. I suck at concert photography -- I'm no Carrie Musgrave -- but I had to get a picture of Entire Cities, because they have a girl playing a singing saw. I am enamoured of the singing saw, it is like a low-fi theremin.

I approve of these Toronto bands where there are like 10 people on stage and half of them are playing kazoos or washboards or electric xylophones or God knows what. It looks like so much fun! I'd like to join one. I can't sing or play an instrument, but I could bang a walnut against an oatmeal box, or something. Also I could jump up and down a lot.

(That pic is looking awfully small to me, so here's a bigger version.)

Comeback

2007-08-19T23:45:00.001-04:00

Comeback, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

A bumper sticker owned by Steve Venright (my co-host on the Scream nature walk), made by his friend Phil Milsyein.

I have the only copy of Therefore Repent! with a squid in it

2007-08-17T19:13:00.000-04:00

Went to the launch last night of Jim Munroe and Salgood Sam's new graphic novel, Therefore Repent!. It's about an oddball Canadian couple adrift in a post-Rapture Chicago where everyone is developing magical powers, dogs speak in the voices of the dead, and a merciless angel militia is roving around and mowing people down with assault weapons. Look what Jim & Sal wrote in my copy:

Hee! Pick up your own copy at TCAF this weekend.

Speaking of militias, I was stumbling home sometime well after 1 am (following many beers with Comics Jam people) when, across the street from my building, my way was obstructed (as frequently happens around here) by a film shoot. This new Incredible Hulk movie has basically taken over my neighbourhood; apparently if I paid attention I might see Ed Norton wandering around dressed like a pizza delivery boy, though I doubt I'd recognize Ed Norton if I tripped over him. What I saw last night was dozens of people milling about on the lawn, with a lot of huge lights and trucks and trailers and whatnot. When I tried to walk around it all, a perky blonde with a clipboard said, "Could you wait just a moment? We're about to roll," and then someone somewhere yelled "ROLL," and a number of tanks, as well as a platoon of American soldiers in battle fatigues and camo facepaint, stormed up from College Street and laid siege to the front entrance of the Koffler Student Centre. So, you heard it from me: Incredible Hulk has tanks and soldiers in it. I'm guessing no squids or gay angels, though.

Another walk, and a late-night book craving satisfied

2007-08-12T13:58:00.000-04:00

Last Thursday night we gathered at Old Mill station and walked northwest. I'd seen bits of the Kingsway before, but this was the first time I'd walked through and really experienced the bizarre ostentation of the neighbourhood: the blocks and blocks of massive faux-Tudor mansions. We went down a staircase through some trees, to the edge of the Humber River. There was a gravel path, pale in the darkness, that ran alongside the river, and the six of us walked along it for at least half an hour without speaking, listening to the steady trill of crickets and the rush of the water. The moonless sky was ribbed with clouds that glowed in the light of the city.

As the walk wound down, and our psychogeography group passed through Bloor West Village on the way to the subway station, I was possessed by a desire to go home and read the short stories of Haruki Murakami. I noticed that the Chapters on Bloor was just closing up. Hmm. If it's 11:00 on a Thursday night in Toronto, and you really want a copy of Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, where do you go?

The public libraries are all closed by 8:30, and the stacks at Robarts also close at 11. Book City? I got off at Bathurst Station and walked over to find it closed as well. BMV? Open, and there was a copy of the Murakami book, remaindered! Furthermore, they were playing vol. 1 of 69 Love Songs by the Magnetic Fields over the sound system.

Two staff guys were re-stocking the section near where I was standing, and one of them called out to the other, "Okay, Margaret Laurence is completely out of control." That made me giggle quietly for about ten minutes. That Margaret Laurence! You can't take her anywhere!

It was too dark down by the Humber to take any photos. However, at BMV, among the dollar books on the bargain/used table, I found this awesome drawing of an eagle:

With text on the flip side:

It takes a steady hand

2007-08-08T20:16:00.000-04:00

A couple of things I learned at the launch of new books by Stef Lenk and Shannon Gerard at the Gladstone last night: "Operation" is a surprisingly engrossing spectator sport when you play on a gameboard the size of a large door. Also, Stef Lenk is the unidentified woman with the awesome tattoo I saw at Scream. Another Toronto mystery solved!

Barefoot psychogeography

2007-08-07T13:37:00.000-04:00

Another day on the Island. From the Ward's Island ferry landing, I made my way to St. Andrew-by-the-Lake Church, where Hilary was helping set up the Sound Travels installation. I put up some signs outside the church and listened awhile to the murmur of secrets from Lori Beckstead and David Rose's "The Whispering Tree," but did not tell it any secrets of my own.

From there I walked to Hanlan's Point, took my sandals off and picked my way across the hot sand, through the throngs of people, till I found an encampment of psychogeographers, lounging under rented beach umbrellas. "We were just thinking of going for a walk," said Shawn, "want to come?"

We set off down the shoreline, clad only in our swimwear. Shawn wanted to show us a firepit he knew of, surrounded by rocks, which last year had been only a stretch of beach away. So much of the beach has eroded recently, however, that we had to climb up from the rocky shore and take a detour across the grass. We did make it to the firepit, and back.

Some of us plunged into the lake for a cheerfully inept round of water frisbee. The boats that Shawn was complaining about on Spacing last week were back in full force, about a dozen of them anchored right up in the swimming area, pumping out loud music. One big yacht in particular had three large stereo speakers on top of it, pointed at the beach and blaring deafening techno. Shawn waded out to it and yelled at its passengers, "PLEASE TURN DOWN YOUR MUSIC. EVERYONE ON THE BEACH HATES YOU AND THINKS YOU ARE ASSHOLES," and they actually turned the music down, and Shawn came back looking immensely pleased with himself.

The Sound Travels festival is next weekend on the Island -- August 10-12. Go for the installations, soundwalks, etc., then head over to Hanlan's Point for a swim! More photos from Sunday here.

Hidden Kensington

2007-08-03T19:56:00.000-04:00

We were standing around in Bellevue Square Park taking photos of the memorial statue of Al Waxman, when Jamie looked at the preview window on his camera and said, "The statue has redeye. How is that possible?" We examined the statue more closely and saw that someone had stuck red gummi bears in its eye sockets. This picture above cracks me up. Al looks like an evil zombie about to leap on me and eat my brains, while Shawn is all, "Whoa, hey, easy there, big fella."

When yesterday's Psychogeography walk struck out from Grange Park in the direction of Kensington Market, I figured it would be pleasant but devoid of surprises. I mean, I've been shopping for groceries and drinking pints on patios in Kensington for twelve years. I'm there practically every day. What could we possibly encounter that I hadn't seen before? To my amazement: plenty.

The discoveries began when we went up onto the roof of the parking garage, something I'd never thought to do. From here we could see the sukkah behind Anshei Minsk synagogue. I'd had no idea that it was there, nor even what it was; Jonathan helpfully explained it to me.

Todd led us down not one but two back alleys that forked into other back alleys and led, ultimately, to beautiful, architecturally-interesting new houses, hidden deep in the greenery behind Kensington's shops. Also, in plain sight on the roof of a house on Dundas there is a tiny handmade model of the CN Tower which I had never noticed before.

It was a hot, thick summer night, the weather driving people out of stuffy apartments and bedrooms and into public spaces. In the park in Kensington, a crowd of teenagers sat and lay about on the grass under the trees; one girl played an acoustic guitar, another had two cats on leashes. The city had declared a heat alert and so the swimming pool just south of Dundas at Bathurst was open till one; at ten it was full of splashing kids and old people. In the adjoining park, hipster couples, retired people and immigrant families with small children wandered through the dark in the dreamlike heat, or sat on blankets or benches.

We walked on, south. We found the beer garden at Factory Theatre & learned that Summerworks is just beginning. We roamed the condo-filled area south of King, and Shawn pointed out, as a spot of historical interest, the building that Owen Pallett's boyfriend was living in when Owen wrote "This Lamb Sells Condos." We saw a skunk, which luckily was wholly unconcerned with us.

A few more photos, mostly dark & grainy, unfortunately.

Free boyfriend parking

2007-08-03T19:35:00.001-04:00

boy bench, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Outside the newish little clothing boutique on Augusta, between Urban Herbivore and La Palette.

Birthday weekend

2007-07-30T01:18:00.000-04:00

I had a really great birthday. Some highlights:

I had an excellent dinner with Leigh Anne at La Palette on Friday, the night before my birthday. That night, I had a dream in which I was given a $1,000 gift certificate for a wonderful cafe/restaurant/bookstore. Also, there was a very well-dressed tiny person who lived in my purse and gave me useful and insightful advice.

On Saturday, brunch with Alison at the Red Tea Box, where we had these very pretty cakes:

In the evening, drinks with a crowd of good friends on a nice leafy patio. Serife gave me a sunflower! Andy gave me cookies from Queen of Tarts!

Sunday, it was warm and sunny and Leslie took me on a drive to Presqu'ile Provincial Park. We drove through lush green farmland and saw a lot of farm animals, including a herd of white goats, clustered on a kind of tiered climbing/feeding structure so that they looked like a goat wedding cake. We had club sandwiches and coffee at a roadside diner, and then splashed around in Lake Ontario and lay in the sun on the broad sandy beach. On the way back, we bought fresh raspberries from a stand.

And then in the evening: THEREMIN!

A performance by New York-based theremin virtuoso Dorit Chrysler at Mercer Union.

This is the second time I've posted a photo of a woman playing a theremin. (Longtime Squiddity readers may recall this picture of Margaret Atwood.) There is a reason for this. Can there be anything cooler than a woman playing a theremin? I think not.

And so, here is a picture of me playing a theremin!

Ms Chrysler was kind enough to let audience members try her instrument out after her performance. It was my first-ever hands-on theremin experience! (My thanks to the woman in black who took these pictures for me, but whose name I did not get.)

Also: During my walk home, I walked past a fire station, and a cute firefighter said hello to me.

More theremin photos here.

Staring therapy

2007-07-27T17:18:00.000-04:00

I was walking through Kensington Market with Alison and Torquil last Saturday when we happened upon a gazebo in the middle of Nassau Street, containing the above tableau: a woman was holding up a succession of small, random objects, and a man was staring intently at each of them through a decorated cardboard tube. A sign said STARING THERAPY. In the adjacent front yard, a yard sale seemed to be taking place -- mostly CDs and records -- and lots of people were hanging out. I spotted Seth Scriver, and asked him what was going on. It turned out to be a fundraising sale for Staring Therapy, a group show by Toronto artists in a Philadelphia gallery: they need money primarily to cover shipping. "There's also a Value Village in the basement," Seth noted, and lo, there was:

I went down and poked around and talked to the guy who had set the whole thing up, who I'm guessing was Sandy Plotnikoff, though I forgot to ask his name. He told me that in the fall, he will be teaching a thrift shop course at U of Guelph. It'll be a visual arts studio course, with studios set up in 3 shops around the town.

I got a nice embroidered jacket and a piece of vintage print fabric for a grand total of $5, then caught up with Alison and Torquil, who had moved on to the patio at Ronnie's, across the street. "That was seriously the Most Hipster Thing Ever," I said.

If you want to help out an artistic cause, pick up some great vintage clothes & indie music cheap, and experience the concentrated hipsterness for yourself, they'll be doing it again this Sunday, July 29th. Nassau St. across from Ronnie's, near I Deal Coffee.

Pigeon parents

2007-07-24T15:24:00.000-04:00

I have a backlog of stuff I want to post about, which is likely to appear here in random, non-chronological order, quite a while after it actually happened. I am so glad I don't have an editor to answer to. For now, please enjoy these photos of nesting pigeons. One nest (on U of T campus), two pigeons: they appeared to be co-parenting.

The perfect Scream

2007-07-23T12:56:00.000-04:00

I am a little late in posting about the Scream, but it's worth noting that it went really well. Really, really well. So well that by the end of the Mainstage, event coordinator Maggie was saying she had a overwhelming sense of existential closure, and maybe we should just scrap the Festival for next year and start from scratch. That may just have been the sleep deprivation talking, however.

These are a couple of shots from the book-length reading, which went spectacularly well. Christopher Dewdney read A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario at the Brickworks, as the light faded & swallows swooped over the pond behind him. The work and venue could not have been more perfectly matched, the dinner was lovely, Dewdney's reading was superb. The only flaw for Hilary and me was that we'd forgotten to bring sweaters, but when night fell and it grew chilly, Sharon fetched a sleeping bag from the trunk of her car & kindly loaned it to us to huddle under -- another appropriately outdoorsy touch to the evening.

I don't have photos from the nature walk, because I was busy hosting it! Jamie was there and took a few pictures. This event, too, was a roaring success. Beginning at the Coach House, Steve and I led a group of maybe 25 people through the Annex, encountering wild poets in their natural habitats along the way. Highlights included a poet lurking at the bottom of a gopher hole in the Huron/Washington parkette (William Davison recorded himself reading, then dug the hole & secreted a tape player at the bottom of it), the capturing and tagging of the migratory Hugh Thomas in Gwendolyn MacEwen Park (achieved using a quantity of garden netting and a "transmitter" made out of a flashing LED rave toy + a dog-collar purchased at Dollarama), and a poet mating ritual on the terrace of an ice-cream booth, which began suddenly and unexpectedly & visibly startled the lone patron who was there when we arrived.

And of course, at the Monday night mainstage, it did not rain! There was a slight sprinkling at one point, but our intrepid audience pulled out their umbrellas & stayed put.

Click here for all my Scream pics.

Scenes from a village

2007-07-12T12:53:00.000-04:00

I spent the July 1 long weekend up in the village of Wakefield, Quebec, a short drive from Ottawa. My dear friends Paul and Allysun got married there on the Saturday, in a gorgeous ceremony on a covered bridge. (You can see the covered bridge in the above picture, to the right.) Sunday was Canada Day, an occasion that Wakefield famously goes all out to commemorate. There's a flotilla of local boats on the Gatineau River, the centerpiece of which is the raft, above. Every year the local teens build the raft (this year's was apparently unusually small; Paul swears the one last year was 4 stories high), and then they all crowd onto it on Canada Day, barbecuing things over an open flame and drumming on barrels. You can hear the beat from way downriver. They throw parties on it all summer, then tear it apart & burn it in a bonfire on Labour Day.

While the flotilla drifted by on the water, the parade proceeded down Riverside Street. A highlight for me was the Man with a Tea-Cozy On His Head:

Allysun told me he's the village poet, and he also raises chickens. If you order a dozen eggs from him, he will throw in a free poem.

Astonishingly, right in the middle of the parade, ten Snowbirds in perfect formation thundered out of the sky to the south, swooped over the village and then vanished over the horizon again. It all happened so quickly I didn't manage to get a photo of it. The other indication of the village's proximity to Ottawa was the brief appearance of Stephane Dion at the outdoor roast chicken dinner later that day.

I spent the day wandering up and down the main street with Allysun, who was congratulated by practically every person we encountered (she's a Wakefield local), and riding around on the river in best man Ryan's motorboat. Then at night there were fireworks, and Wax Mannequin opened for Fiftymen at the legendary Black Sheep Inn. By that point we were all completely exhausted, but in a good way.

Lots of photos here!

Poet-watching

2007-06-23T23:54:00.000-04:00

I photographed this faintly luminous apparition of bp nichol at the Coach House last week, as Steve Venright and I scouted for locations for our Scream Festival event, "Poets in their Natural Habitat: A Field Trip." If you're free around lunchtime on July 7, come to the Coach House and let us lead you on a poet-watching ramble round the Annex. As our blurb explains, "Many Scream events feature well-known poets in captivity. This event offers you the rare opportunity to observe wild poets in their natural habitats!"

I've just uploaded a backlog of photos on Flickr, if you want to go look. There's a set of pictures from Paul Jay's bachelor party, which was laid-back, devoid of obnoxiousness, and mostly involved Paul, his friends, and his many brothers playing bocce in a park. Paul's getting married in a week! Also, a few pictures from a Psychogeography walk where we investigated Luminato installations at Union Station and Harbourfront.

Its a feeling like this that makes you architecture.

2007-05-29T18:56:00.001-04:00

The lions emerged looking bright and clean., originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

I found this remarkable text glued to a wall in Kensington Market the other day. At first glance, it looks like a classic specimen of paranoid schizophrenic writing. (Bizarre coincidence: I spent some time casting about on the web looking for a sample of a paranoid schizophrenic text, gave up, and then someone posted one in the comments section of my last blogpost. So for a very fine example of the kind of thing I'm referring to, just click back one post.) On closer examination, though, it lacks many of the hallmarks of texts of that kind. There's very little reference to massive global conspiracies or thought control, and little sense that the writer feels persecuted. Instead we have what sound like fragments from promotional, journalistic and literary writing -- that might even be a Ulysses reference in the lower left-hand sheet. Pathology, or procedural poetry? Anyone want to hazard a guess?

Why Pocky never caught on in Quebec

2007-05-24T12:01:00.001-04:00

Why Pocky never caught on in Quebec, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

I was in the Japanese shop in Kensington Market with Emily and baby Clara on Tuesday, and Emily spotted this strangely unappetizing French translation on a box of Pocky.

Layers of posters past

2007-05-22T14:58:00.001-04:00

layers, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Someone knocked over one of those poster display things on St. George the other night. You can see years' worth of accumulated posters from this angle. For some reason the bottom looked singed. Lying on the pavement, the thing looked like the discarded shell of a space shuttle booster rocket, or possibly a huge burnt-out Victoria Day firecracker.

Draw on the walls at the Koffler Gallery!

2007-05-20T13:59:00.000-04:00

So, as I mentioned in the last post, I visited the Koffler Gallery last weekend. It's pretty far out of the way, but it is transit-accessible, and the current shows are worth checking out. "My Square Foot" is a "collaborative drawing installation," a lot like a comics jam. Four artists have begun drawing on the walls; visitors are encouraged to contribute. I particularly liked Jon Sasaki's contribution. He's painted a wide stripe of blackboard paint around one of the rooms, and plotted out the stars on it in glow-in-the-dark paint; you're invited to connect the dots in new ways, and invent your own constellations. That's mine above. I don't think those are actually the Pleiades, and I realized afterwards that a Pleiadosaur ought to have flippers rather than legs, but you get the idea.

If you go, go outside & have a look at Simon Frank's installation Imprint also. Frank poured sawdust on the early spring grass in the shape of trees, leaving shadowy tree-ghosts when the sawdust was swept away a few weeks later.

Square Foot runs till July 15, and Imprint to September 9, so you have plenty of time.

So that's where they went

2007-05-19T11:40:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday, in Etobicoke, on the bus that took us to the subway station, there was an angry bearded man yelling into his cellphone. At least, we initially thought he had a cellphone. Dylan was the first to notice that the man was just holding his hand up to his ear with his thumb and pinky extended. At first I thought I'd misheard what the man was saying, but he kept yelling the same thing over and over, so there was no mistaking it:

"I got sidetracked, and I left my socks in a tree! I am disturbed in my mind! And I LEFT MY SOCKS IN A TREE!"

The next day I took the Performance Bus up to the Koffler Gallery to see the "My Square Foot" exhibit. (More on this later.) 3 of the 4 artists in the show were also on the bus. It's quite a long ride from OCAD to North York, and some of the artists brought refreshments to share, because they are nice like that.

Jon Sasaki: I have a bag of sesame cookies, does anyone want one?
Kathryn Ruppert-Dazai: I have a big pack of gum, if anyone wants some.
Seth Scriver: I have a bag full of socks!

It was true, he did. A lot of socks. If you are missing socks and you can't figure out where they went, they might be in Seth Scriver's duffel bag. Unless you left them in a tree.

Escape from YYZ

2007-05-15T14:04:00.000-04:00

Most people are only ever in the airport on their way to somewhere else. On Saturday, the Toronto Psychogeography Society decided to make Lester B. Pearson our destination. For one thing, we wanted to check out the newly expanded Terminal 1 -- and the closed, scheduled-for-demolition Terminal 2. For another thing, we wanted to try walking away from the airport. Generally, one leaves the airport in a limo, bus, car or plane. Would it even be possible to leave on foot? We were going to find out.

We started out in Terminal 1. I haven't flown since early 2001, and I felt like a hick tourist from the 20th century, gawking at the newfangled computer check-in stands. We were mesmerized for awhile by a sculpture filled with water and plastic cubes stirred constantly by jets of air. Then we went looking for an exit. We went into a parking garage, down a very long stairwell, and... out the door. That was easy!

We found ourselves in a green space, underneath a tangle of overpasses. There were no sidewalks or footpaths, but nor were there any signs saying DON'T WALK HERE. So we walked, and soon came to the disused roads leading into Terminal 2. Acres of empty tarmac, cracking in the sun, with weeds growing up through the cracks; meticulously landscaped lawns and gardens starting to look overgrown.

We walked on into Erindale, in the heart of deepest Etobicoke. It was a glorious day, all the trees and tulips and daffodils were in bloom, and the dandelions were at their peak. The suburbs looked like suburbs are supposed to look: lush, quiet, with children playing in the streets.

Liz had a pedometer, which told us that by the time we got onto the bus that took us to Islington subway station, we'd walked over 12 km! It was epic. Lots more pictures on Flickr! Also, click here to see psychogeographer Charles's pics from the walk.

High upon the church grounds

2007-05-13T22:27:00.000-04:00

Tons of pics from this weekend to upload, but I thought I'd get these stragglers from last weekend up first. After our visit to the donkey sanctuary, we went to Guelph for burgers and beer (and nostalgia -- Alison and Jamie went to Guelph U). These are photos of Our Lady Immaculate Church, in the heart of Guelph. (The church itself is completely encrusted with scaffolding right now and is not very photogenic, so you get pics of the grounds and a closeup of the facade.) The great cultural significance of this particular church is that its grounds are where the young folks of Guelph go to drink and smoke up. If you're talking to someone who went to school in Guelph and they start reminiscing about evenings spent "up by the church" (which they probably will), this is that church. It has even been immortalized in the Hidden Cameras song "High Upon the Church Grounds." (The audio stream of this song on that page doesn't seem to work anymore, but you should click the link anyway to see the terrific animated video for "Death of a Tune".)

When someone saves your ass, this is where it ends up

2007-05-09T19:44:00.000-04:00

OK, I'm back again! With pictures of donkeys!

On Sunday, Alison and Jamie and I went on a road trip to the Donkey Sanctuary of Canada, near Guelph. You wouldn't think Canada would need a donkey sanctuary. We were joking about it on our way down. DONKEY ABUSE: OUR NATION'S HIDDEN SHAME. But apparently donkeys fall victim to the same problem that affects many other pets: people buy them for their kids as cute little foals, and then neglect them as they get bigger & turn out to be a lot of work. Also, they're still used as work animals in rural areas, and sometimes their owners overwork & mistreat them. Over 50 rescued donkeys, mules and hinnies currently live at the Donkey Sanctuary. ("When a male donkey is bred with a female horse, the offspring is called a mule. When a male horse is bred with a female donkey, the offspring is called a hinny." Just one of many fun donkey facts on the Sanctuary's website!) Also, sheep and goats.

You can go right in to the barn and fields with the donkeys, and scratch their ears and groom them with brushes. They're very docile and friendly. One donkey decided it looooooved Alison & put its head on her shoulder:

If your nerves are frazzled from Toronto living, I highly recommend a road trip to the Sanctuary, especially if the weather is gorgeous like it was on Sunday. The rolling farmland is lovely and tranquil to look at and wander through, and the donkeys are usually snoozing or grazing, and it is all so relaxing you could fall asleep standing up.

Click here to see more photos.

As promised: Baby goats

2007-04-12T00:21:00.000-04:00

Yes, I went back to Riverdale Farm with Alison on Tuesday to look at the baby goats. Here are two of the five of them, being watched over by their proud mum. Bonus cuteness was provided by a visiting three-year-old boy, there with his mum and little brother, who kept coming over to us with earnest reports on the baby goats: "They are very cute. They are having their nap time. They are very cute! I am going to look at the sheep, want to come?"

Alison photographed the animals and then showed them the pictures. Most were unimpressed, but this chicken seemed rather keen:

Some more pics on my Flickr page, as usual.

Snowbank redux

2007-04-08T22:48:00.001-04:00

Snowbank's end, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

The buckets that we carried from Christie Pits to York University were put on display on April 4 at AGYU, along with a video of their epic journey. The pile of white buckets looked a little like... a snowbank.

Escape from the Blob

2007-04-05T14:19:00.000-04:00

These pictures of people emerging from a giant inflated burlap blob were taken yesterday at the "Activate the Park" event in Butterfield Park, the little parkette next to/underneath OCAD. OCAD's first-year Interaction Design students are obviously having way too much fun.

Another highlight was the human foosball table, which actually seemed to function really well as a game. Could be the next big thing! Look for it at your summer corporate picnics!

Signs of spring

2007-03-30T23:45:00.000-04:00

Okay, I'm back, finally. On Wednesday I had my last class. EVER. I've still got a couple of papers to write and a lot of grading to do, but then it's straight on to the dissertation proposal. I can't quite wrap my head around that yet.

Today, I took the day off and visited the Allan Gardens Conservatory, and then Riverdale Farm. I hadn't been to either in months, and saw reasons to go back to both soon. I'll want to drop by Allan Gardens again to see how the banana flower is doing -- as you can see in the above photo, it's about halfway along to becoming a banana bunch. Meanwhile, at Riverdale Farm, it's baby animal season:

A pair of calves are already out and about; today they were nursing hungrily:

More plant and animal photos here.

Semi-regular posting will now resume!

Invertebrates invade InterAccess

2007-03-03T01:20:00.000-05:00

Yes, it's another blog lull, brought on by another big work crunch. Things are going to be sporadic around here for about another month or so.

I've been so busy I'm only just now getting around to uploading my pics from the opening of the ZOO show at InterAccess a month ago. The good news is that the show runs until March 17, so you still have time to check it out! Above, gallery-goers peer into Amy Youngs' "Holodeck for House Crickets".

I know the picture below is a little fuzzy, but it's a picture of a giant hissing Madagascar cockroach controlling a robot. In the dark. That's "Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot #3" by Garnet Hertz.

And I somehow managed not to get any decent pictures of "Digital Crustaceans v.0.3: Homesteading on the World Wide Web" by Ingrid Bachmann, but do click on that link to check out the website.

It's a ridiculously fun show -- it's worth going just to look at the live crabs and bugs -- but also full of ideas. I was intrigued by the fact that all 3 pieces incorporate living things that are wildly different from humans, but the artists seem compelled to assign human qualities to them. Amy Youngs, designing a cushy dream-home for crickets, gave them a fake waterfall and a holo-view of a meadow -- but admits that they probably don't care and that this is a "human conception of an ideal home for crickets." Garnet Hertz has helpfully provided his cockroach pilots with a flickering light-screen that they can use to navigate -- but notes that cockroaches don't actually use visual information much at all, relying instead on vibrations and smells. (In fact the cockroach doesn't even have a brain -- just several clusters of ganglial cells distributed around its body -- which helps explain why it can live for so long with its head cut off.) Ingrid Bachmann's hermit crabs have their own avatars on Second Life! Obviously, this is something the artists were very conscious of. I think it's interesting that when we try to interact and engage with the natural world, what we often seem to wind up doing is picking out entities in that world and treating them like people. Even if these entities did have subjectivities like our own, their experiences would be unknowable to us. What is it like to be a cricket? There's a paper in this somewhere, but I'm too busy to write it.

Ducks of Scarberia

2007-02-16T13:58:00.001-05:00

Ducks encroach, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

I trekked out to Scarborough to visit my dad yesterday, got off the 54 Lawrence bus a couple of stops early (it turned off Lawrence and I didn't know where it was going), and walked through what my map tells me was the Curran Hill Ravine. Houses back onto it on either side, and a creek runs through it. The creek is home to a large flock of ducks who are obviously accustomed to getting snacks from their human neighbours. I stopped walking to take a couple of photos, and as soon as the ducks noticed this they all came flapping and waddling over to sit in the snow around me & eye me beadily.

It was so cold my hands hurt after a couple of minutes without my mittens, so I had to stop taking photos. Immune to the cold, the ducks paddled happily among floating chunks of ice. Look how many there were!

Click here to see lots more duck photos.

What's in all those buckets?

2007-02-04T13:51:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday, I took part in Diane Borsato's "Snowbank," which I wrote about on Torontoist last month. At the time I wrote that post, it looked like the winter weather was never going to get here, and Diane was considering possible sources of artificial snow. Luckily, January soon reverted to type, and by Sunday there was fluffy, all-natural snow piled in banks all over Toronto, and more coming down for good measure.

Our group, made up mostly of York dance students, gathered at Christie Pits early in the afternoon. We packed a snowbank (really, only a tiny fraction of one: it was a huge snowbank) into white buckets, then carried it onto the subway, to the puzzlement of passers-by. We transferred to a bus at Downsview and bore the snowbank triumphantly to the AGYU, serenaded all the way by the trumpet stylings of Emilie Le Bel. It is a rare and special pleasure to listen to live trumpet music on the subway.

The piece was conceived as a work of choreography -- a dance made out of everyday movements -- and as an exercise in exhuberant, organized absurdity. The now-melted snowbank (it is being stored indoors) will be reconstructed into "a large-scale installation" at the AGYU, opening April 4.

Click here to see my photos of the snowbank's crosstown journey.

Great chieftain o' the pudding-race!

2007-01-26T12:59:00.000-05:00

Leslie and I went to the Duke of York last night for Robbie Burns' Night. They piped out a haggis in the traditional manner, and a man in a kilt read Burns' "Address to a Haggis" over it. (I didn't get a good shot of both haggis and piper, so I'm experimenting with the Blogger picture option.) Here (left) is a picture of the piper.

And here (right) is the haggis, borne out by a server, in all its veinous glory. Yum! Seriously! People go on and on about how disgusting haggis is, so when I finally tried it for the first time a few years ago, I was amazed to discover that not only is it not disgusting, it's delicious. We ate big plates of the stuff, with neeps and tatties (mashed turnips and potatoes) and wee drams of Scotch. We may not need to eat again until next January.

Clearly, there is something wrong with the Internet

2007-01-15T16:53:00.000-05:00

Squiddity is currently the top hit on Google for the search term "hipster boys."

Most inexplicable t-shirt yet

2007-01-12T18:47:00.001-05:00

Most inexplicable t-shirt yet, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

...And this is why I love the t-shirt rack at Goodwill.

Right, can any of you read this and tell me what the hell's going on here? I've also posted it to a translation group on Flickr in the hope of finding some answers.

Update: In the comments, Lumpkin points out that the girl in the lower right-hand corner is probably a ganguro girl. Also, Torontoist contributor Aaron has a friend working in Japan who submits the following:

Somebody apparently imagined a scenario in which the Yellow Pages is a guide to finding yellow things around town, hence the high-school girl who is distressed to have bought the same yellow bra as her mother (and dad really likes it, too...) and the human-trash kogal who is using a yellow marker as make-up.

I think it makes less sense now than it did when I did not know these things! If you can shed any more light on this, please do.

Beyond Squiddity

2007-01-09T19:10:00.000-05:00

Just thought I'd mention here that I'm now an occasional contributor at Torontoist. My first post, a rewrite of the Shelf Portrait post below, went live today. Yay!

Reluctantly festive gargoyle

2007-01-07T23:26:00.001-05:00

"Yes. Ha ha. See the gargoyle in the stupid Santa hat. Very funny... Dammit, people, Christmas is over. OVER. How long do I have to go on wearing this frickin' thing?!

"It's not even cold enough for a Santa hat! It's all wet and clammy from the rain! I think I'm getting a rash on my forehead!

"...Gah. Stupid humans. How I hate you all."

Spotted perched over the side entrance of a CIBC on St. Clair West. Nothing else about the building is remotely Gothic -- the gargoyle's obviously a recent addition, easy to miss if you don't look up. Someone at that branch has a sense of humour.

A library liberated

2007-01-06T21:44:00.000-05:00

Robin Pacific's Shelf Portrait installation at Red Head Gallery has been drawing a lot of publicity in the weeks leading up to its opening. It's not every day that someone decides to give away her entire collection of books, and even rarer that such a decision spawns "an exhibition that renders an act of generosity into a work of art," as the gallery's flyer explains. On my way over to 401 Richmond this afternoon, I wondered how Ms Pacific and the gallery people were going to handle the mob scene that the opening would undoubtedly turn into.

Very well, as it turned out. Realizing that they were going to draw a crowd, they'd imposed a limit of 4 books per person, and printed up tickets for admission at half-hour intervals -- sensibly eliminating the need for attendees to wait in line for hours. Arriving at 1:30, I snagged a 3:00 ticket. I did a little shopping, and returned at 3:00 to find throngs of people milling about, some being interviewed by crews from City-TV and CBC Radio (Nora Young was there).

The show deserves to be a huge hit. It highlights, I think, a point about second-hand books that has intrigued me for awhile: they are artifacts that often have little or no monetary value, but enormous cultural and aesthetic value. They are so plentiful and easy to come by that people are unwilling to pay very much for them, yet many of us will always stop to dig through them when they're piled up at yard sales, or set out in boxes at the curb with signs saying "FREE." (I have no time to read for fun anymore & yet I am forever hauling the damn things home: books picked out of recycling boxes, bought for a few quarters at campus booksales, left on the swap shelf in my co-op's laundry room.) Shelf Portrait picks up on that, and it's also the sunniest, most positive thing I've seen in a gallery in awhile: a formalized, unqualified random act of kindness.

My 4 picks:

Waiting, Ha Jin
Meshugah, Isaac Bashevis Singer (I got this intending to pass it along to my brother, but might read it myself first)
Illuminations, Walter Benjamin (This contains "Unpacking my Library," his famous essay on book collecting, which just seemed way too appropriate to pass up)
The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry (This is the one I was most excited to find: have been meaning to look it up & read it)

You see what I mean about value? Amazing!

More blogging soon. I have to go read now.

Nativity, with chicken

2006-12-24T16:52:00.000-05:00

Nativity, with chicken, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

"After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, chickens from the east came to Jerusalem and asked, 'Where is the one who has been born king of the Jews? We saw his star in the east and have come to worship him'." (Matthew 2:1-12, NPV [New Poultry Version])

Seen outside a house on my mom's block here in Ottawa. To those of you who celebrate it, a very merry Christmas!

Our nation's friendly capital

2006-12-23T18:35:00.000-05:00

Satisfied customer, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Finishing up my Christmas shopping today, I came across this scene in the Byward Market just outside the Bay. Apparently this "Free Hugs" thing is a worldwide internet meme that started in Australia, so not an Ottawa thing, specifically. But Ottawa seems to have, erm, embraced the idea. Lots of people paused to hug the huggers during the minute or two that I watched.

Less appreciated was the guy on Rideau Street in front of the entrance to the Rideau Centre mall, who was wearing an elf hat and playing Christmas carols very badly, and very loudly, and seemingly interminably, on a slide trombone, cheerfully undeterred by people at the bus stop across the street screaming "SHUT THE FUCK UP!" at him.

Goats from the past

2006-12-22T20:50:00.000-05:00

The Three Billy Goats Gruff, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Here I am in Ottawa, blogging from my mom's computer. When I was a kid, my mom made dozens of these papier-mache-head puppets. We lived in a small town, and she would put on puppet shows at the library sometimes. These are the Three Billy Goats Gruff, in case you couldn't guess. She made them about 25 years ago. Sometimes in the show, my brother would play the troll under the bridge. (Heh heh heh.) The goats are currently on display in my mom's living room.

It's still mild and green and snowless here. In Ottawa! This just seems wrong. But it is nice to be able to walk around without getting frostbite.

A festive flock of Elvises

2006-12-20T22:49:00.000-05:00

Elvii at Ed's, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Elvii?

Seen at Honest Ed's.

Happy holidays! I might post from Ottawa over the next week. Or not.

Not procrastinating

2006-12-15T01:56:00.000-05:00

Just taking breaks from grading tests, which is such an onerous job. Today, I wandered into Perola's with Alison to check out the impressive selection of dulce de leche and real Latin American hot chocolate. She pointed out the above sign, which we think should be taken generally: You shouldn't let your kids play with beans. They'll just wind up having a contest to see who can stuff the most beans up their nose.

And Wednesday night I was at the Comics Jam holiday get-together at the Artful Dodger pub, watching this meticulously detailed fairytale cityscape flow from the pen of the amazingly talented Alan Bunce:

I need to start going to the Jams again in the new year, I miss drinking and doodling.

This week on Hipster Boys Say the Darndest Things

2006-12-09T19:25:00.000-05:00

(Magpie Cafe, around 11:30 on a Friday night. I'm in the women's washroom; 2 hipster boys are waiting out in the hall to use the men's.)

HB1: Well, you know, people like to talk. It's easy to talk.
HB2: They just talk and talk and never shut up, man, it's like all they do.
HB1: Words flow as easily as my urine.
HB2: That's a good analogy, actually.

(This was followed by a long discussion of the difference between metaphor and simile.)

The Kraken wakes

2006-12-08T17:32:00.000-05:00

Or, at least, rolls over and mutters something in its sleep.

Sorry about the unscheduled month-long blog hiatus. It's been a busy term. Grading and essay-writing are dragging on, and I just haven't been getting out much. I will be back, though! More squidness soon!

Interesting news tidbit: One of my photos appears on Rolling Stone's Rock and Roll Blog today, illustrating a story on "annoying rock cliches". It's a pic from the Arch Enemy show I went to with Bill last year. I don't find the devil horns particularly annoying or tired, but I might feel differently if I'd been to more than one metal show in my life. Briefly today, my photo was the first thing you saw if you went to the Rollingstone.com frontpage, which is just not somewhere I ever would have expected a photo of mine to be. Rock on!

Crocheted cephalopod!

2006-11-10T18:31:00.000-05:00

Meet squiddity's new mascot! Alison made him/her/it for me as a present to celebrate the fact that I've (finally) finished my M.A. (This degree doesn't seem like as big a deal as it may sound, given that 1. the actual graduation isn't till April, 2. I'm currently in the second year of my Ph.D. and up to my neck in coursework and grading, and 3. it's, erm, my second M.A. But still.) I have attempted to simulate the squid's gloomy underwater habitat by surrounding it with dark-coloured library books and photographing it at night.

The squidlet needs a name! Any suggestions?

Codename: The Squid

2006-11-03T21:41:00.000-05:00

The e-mail from Sean began:

Your mission, now that you've accepted it, is to meet at the north-west corner of Yonge and Eglinton at 11:30 hours. Each of you will be given a walkie-talkie and assigned a corner. You are to monitor the corner, take notes, communicate to the team on interesting things you see, and generally be a silent nuisance. We can also make jokes about the people we're documenting.

We assigned ourselves codenames: Alison was Raccoon, Sean was Banana, Liz was Hootenanny, I was (unsurprisingly) The Squid. Dale didn't propose a codename for herself, and Liz threatened to start calling her YoYo.

We were very excited about the walkie-talkies, but not so brilliant at actually using them. Much of the conversation went like this:

"Can you hear me?"
"What?"
"I can't understand a thing anyone's saying."
"Sorry, could you repeat that?"
"Raccoon, can you hear me? Sean? Where are you?"
"Alison's Raccoon. Sean's Banana."
"What?"

etc.

It was a busy intersection, full of people on their way to somewhere else, most of them pausing only to use one of the ABMs. It was a windy day. Lots of the passersby were wearing poppies. Swarms of teens from the nearby high school, dressed for much milder weather, appeared around noon, carrying pizza and McDonald's takeout bags and complaining about the cold. I wrote in my notebook:

11:55: MadVac driven by guy in neon yellow coveralls
12:05: Young black woman walks by reading paperback of The Godfather by Mario Puzo
12:15: Goth boy all in black; baggy pants, tusklike mouth piercing
12:35: Terrier in cute little plaid jacket
1:00: Man in TTC jacket with long grey ponytail

Also, I noticed these pigeons in the desolate concrete square on the northwest corner. They looked like they were waiting for something to happen:

Freezing, we surrendered out walkie-talkies at about 1:15, and Alison, Sean and I repaired to the What-A-Bagel!, which I'd been gazing at longingly from my post at the corner. I had a really delicious, hot-from-the-oven bagel with cream cheese and slices of lox. Sean told this story about his son:

Jackie, whom I've already long suspected of harbouring plots to take over the world, is currently in junior kindergarten at a downtown alternative school. He is going through a phase where he's completely obsessed with Darth Vader. His aunt bought him a fancy Darth Vader helmet that he wore for Halloween. Last week there was an assembly at his school; all the lower grades were there, maybe two hundred kids. There was a discussion period during the assembly when kids could raise their hands and say something: ask the principal a question, raise a concern, etc. Jackie raised his hand.

Teacher: Yes, Jackie?
Jackie: [solemnly] You do not know the awesome power of the Dark Side.

BEST. NON-SEQUITUR. EVAR.

Sean's going to compile all our observations into a "Day In the Life of an Intersection" article, which Matt Borrett will illustrate. Watch for it in the next issue of Spacing!

Your worst suspicions confirmed

2006-11-02T22:38:00.000-05:00

I did in fact get out to Canzine, albeit briefly. I happened upon the startling revelation above in the Life of a Craphead & Art Metropole room. Other highlights:

--Hung out with Dave Howard and Dalton Sharp at the Don't Touch Me table
--Free grilled cheese sandwiches in Jonathan Culp's room! I put slices of apple in mine
--Scored a Dinosaur Comics button!
--Picked up an extremely promising preview excerpt booklet from Therefore Repent!, the graphic novel Jim Munroe has written that's being illustrated by Salgood Sam
--Got a new comics zine, "The Nervous Party," by Ethan Rilly. Does anyone know anything about Ethan Rilly? Last year I got a comic of his called "I Am Normal" which I love to death. This one is awesome too. But he's never at his Canzine table when I'm there. Google is not much help. Mysterious!

The discovery of the day, for me, was finding out that Megan Griffith-Greene has started up a music magazine called The New Pollution, with contributors including former Scream Festival volunteer-in-chief Jeromy Lloyd. The website is worth checking out because it features a monthly new-music podcast, and the print issue is worth picking up because it's full of gorgeous illustrations by Megan.

I saw this setup in Mark Laliberte's Pop Noir button room:

and thought, "Ooo, I want that machine!" and then thought, "Wait, what would I do with that many 1" buttons?" I already own far more than I can actually wear. It looks like a fun toy, though.

Hallowe'en walk

2006-10-29T12:11:00.000-05:00

Footbridge at night, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

We wanted to walk somewhere spooky on the last Psychogeography night before Halloween, so we started at Davisville station & wandered along the perimeter of Mount Pleasant Cemetery. But that wasn't nearly the scariest part of the walk.

We found the nifty semi-covered footbridge pictured above, then went under it into the Rosedale ravine, which we followed to the Brickworks, where we've walked before. Looking for an area of the Brickworks that we hadn't explored, we followed a trail up the perfectly hill-shaped hill next to the ponds. There was a spectacular view of the night cityscape from the top of the hill, and as we followed the path, it kept getting better and better. Presently, however, we realized a) we were awfully high up, b) we were in a small forest without flashlights & it was very dark, and c) it would be difficult to retrace our steps, as we'd blundered down some steep and mud-slippery inclines that would be much harder to go up than they'd been to follow down. We looked at the steep drop before us, the lights of the bank towers in the distance. We were in Toronto: how lost could we be? But how were we going to get down?

We could see the lights of houses behind us, so we pushed through the underbrush towards them. A flagstone footpath appeared! We ran along it, alongside someone's house, and emerged onto a posh street in the heart of Rosedale.

In Rosedale, many houses had elaborate Halloween displays up already: life-sized wooden coffins lay on lawns, zombie grandmothers rocked in chairs, gremlins infested well-trimmed trees. We've walked in other wealthy neighbourhoods, but only in Rosedale would you see an SUV, a lime-green VW bug and a SmartCar all in the same driveway.

On a completely unrelated note: Click here to hear the song I am currently addicted to. Now you can be hooked too! I bought the CD, and it's really good.

Empty nest

2006-10-21T13:08:00.000-04:00

I'm still here! I'm just very, very busy with school. Sixty midterm tests to grade and 2 seminar presentations to give this week.

I went to Black Creek Pioneer Village on Thanksgiving with my mom & her boyfriend. Above is a picture of a swallow's nest we saw. I climbed up onto a railing and reached waaay up with my camera to get this shot of the inside of the nest:

Unsurprisingly, it was empty. Only a feather remained.

I do intend to make it to Canzine next weekend. Maybe I'll see you there!

The night is all right: Nuit Blanche 2006

2006-10-01T21:27:00.000-04:00

It was awfully nice of Toronto to plan such a large event especially for me, I thought. (I mean: performance and installation art? Walks around the city? From 7 pm to 7 am, because I'm a night owl & chronic insomniac?) But who else was going to show up? Well, everyone, as it turned out.

This is going to be the longest squidpost ever! You might want to get a cup of tea or something.

My nuit, in chronological order:

7:30: On the subway to my first destination: Off The Map Gallery. I'm fretting a bit about being half an hour late to get started, until gallery owner Antonia and artist Miroslav Pavlovic get onto my subway car. They're a bit giddy because they're coming from the official Nuit Blanche participants' party, where there was free wine & they got to meet the mayor.

No-one else is at Off the Map yet. The plan is for Miroslav to spend all night working on some of his three-dimensional paintings. I watch him set up, and he explains to me how he layers paint onto white bristol board & then slices the board up & assembles it into flat sculptures.

8:15: Man, that Lansdowne bus takes forever.

9:00: Having rushed down Queen, I arrive at Katharine Mulherin Gallery just in time. Ryan and Marlena are getting into costume and having strawberry-based fake blood applied to their faces and bodies. Margaux assigns jobs to those of us milling around in the small display room with the plate-glass window. My job is to draw pigeon masks on blue bristol board with a fat marker. Curious onlookers begin to gather on the sidewalk outside. There are about 8 of us inside, none of us 100% clear on what we're going to be doing.

"Why are they looking at us? Why are we interesting?"
"Can we moon them?"
"So, we're just going to stand around in here?"

9:15: Ryan's keyboard is set up on the sidewalk in front of the window; he begins to play, & he and Marlena sing. The group of us inside, all wearing masks, begin to sway to the music and act like pigeons. Much giggling ensues.

"Okay, everyone kind of huddle together here! Now let's all shuffle over there!"
"Let's press our faces right up against the glass!"
"Some of them look kind of hostile. Maybe they don't like pigeons."
"Everyone sink to the ground when they sing 'down down down!' "
"Can we moon them?"
"Conga line!"

I see lots of people I know among the spectators. Do they recognize me in my pigeon mask?

10:20: Talking to Misha and Carl outside on the sidewalk. Queen West, from Dufferin all the way to Trinity Bellwoods park, is thronged with people, many of them in odd costumes. "This is weird," says Misha, looking around. "It's like wartime. Or Halloween." I think "Hipster Mardi Gras" would be an apt description.

11:00: The area around OCAD is also thronged with crowds -- in fact, Amos Latteier's educational walking tour about rats is completely booked up. I meet up with Alison, and we decide to wander around & check out the installations.

11:15: Inside Darren O'Donnell's "Ballroom Dancing" performance/installation in University Settlement House. Wow, this is one huge, manic party.

We run into Ron and Himy. Children are DJing, and everyone is whipping rubber balls at each other, trying to bodysurf on the balls, and generally having a great time.

11:30: Police tango in the street at the intersection of McCaul and Dundas. Huge crowds of people watch. The policewoman is actually performance artist Diane Borsato, and I'm sure I recognize the policeman from a tango performance at the World Dance Alliance conference.

11:45: We drop in on the Tanya Mars performance on a traffic meridian in the middle of University Ave., but the crowd is so huge we can't get close to it. Who knew this many people wanted to look at performance art?

12:00 The streetcar back to Queen West is slooooooow.

12:30: Meet Mo in the lobby of the Gladstone. We scan the amusing exhibits of hotel ephemera from bygone decades, then have a look at the car wash across the street, where videos are being screened. The crowds on Queen West, like the ones we saw near OCAD, are a bit overwhelming. I have an urge to start flailing my arms and screaming.

1:15: We walk up Dovercourt, hoping the Dundas streetcar will be running more smoothly than the one on Queen. Dovercourt is deserted. Near Luna Cafe, we see this on a second-floor balcony:

An indie Nuit Blanche exhibit! We look at it for awhile and realize it's a film loop, not a slide projection; the image never changes, but the background kind of buzzes.

1:30: Is the Dundas streetcar still running?

1:45: Take a taxi back to the Zone B Hub at OCAD.

2:00: Walking tour led by Brenda Goldstein & Anthea Foyer departs from Zone B Hub. The crowds at OCAD have diminished only slightly, and the tour group is large, but we wander into Chinatown and Kensington, where it's very quiet. It starts to rain, and I realize I left my umbrella back in the Mulherin Gallery.

Brenda and Anthea stop us at successive parking lots to tell episodes of a long shaggy dog story about a putative ancestor of theirs who was a female chess prodigy in the 19th century. What does this have to do with our surroundings? We grow increasingly curious. At the second-last stop they tell us we are following the route traced on a map found among their great-aunt's papers; at the last stop, they unveil this lovely little room:

(You can see our tour group in the mirror.)

3:30: Alison has gone home, but loaned me her umbrella. Mo and I arrive at Hart House. There's supposed to be coffee and sandwiches here, but supplies of both have long since run out. I neeeeeed coffee. Mo tilts the urn and succeeds in draining about a third of a cup of coffee out of it, which he very kindly gives to me, since he's getting a beer from the still-open bar.

3:45: There's a kind of dance yurt set up in the Reading Room. Hart House is still pretty crowded.

4:00: We chill out for a bit at "Dark Hart," the Fastwürms installation in the Hart House pool. (I like saying "Fastwürms".) There are trays of candles all around the pool, and a video projection on the wall. We watch as two guys strip down to swimming trunks and jump into the dark quiet pool, which makes the lifeguards very angry.

4:30: We visit Fujiko Nakaya's "Fog in Toronto" installation, perhaps the most-photographed piece of the whole evening. An extremely dense, illuminated cloud of machine-generated water fog hangs over a section of Philosopher's Walk. The artist's statement calls it "a bonsai of atmosphere." As we watch, people keep walking out of it, like the returning alien abductees at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Inside the cloud, the fog is so opaque, you can barely see your own feet following the path that will lead you through and out.

5:00: Mo heads back to Queen West & his home; I arrive at the School of Continuing Studies, where Coach House's Night Bulb event is in progress. I walk in to see Steve Venright sitting up on a sleeping bag in the lobby, a sleep mask pushed back on his head. He was supposed to sleep through the night while somniloquist recordings played, but he's had insomnia, and has instead spent much of the night talking about 9/11 conspiracy theories with Jesse and Olia.

Sherwin Tjia, who was at the pigeon performance earlier, is here in costume as a Poetry Doctor, with Maggie Helwig in the role of naughty poetry nurse:

Sherwin will examine your sick poems, and can also tell your fortune using an enormous book he has brought with him. It contains 1200 of the pseudohaikus from his book, The World Is a Heartbreaker, one poem per page. The only reason it doesn't contain all 1600 poems is that the largest bolts they had at Canadian Tire were only long enough to bind 1200 pages together. Ask the book a question, let it fall open to a random page, and there's your oracular answer. Bibliomancy! Pseudohaiku prognostication!

There is COFFEE here, at last, and someone gives me a bag with a bagel and some fruit in it. Apparently Night Bulb was a mob scene earlier, like everywhere else, but by this hour it's pretty quiet. A good place to pause for breakfast.

5:30: Sherwin and Maggie nip out to visit the fog installation, leaving me to watch the big book and the Poetry ER tent. bill bissett materializes, wearing a sort of nautical jacket and flat-brimmed hat & saying "Excellent" a lot. A young man comes in looking for the poetry doctor, and seems disappointed that the doctor is out. I offer to tell his fortune with the big book.

"Just ask it a question," I say.
"Should I ask it out loud?"
"It's up to you."
"Okay, I'll think my question."
I hold the book, he points to a spot, and I open it. The poem reads:

I can see
why the monster
would want you.

"Yeah, that works," he says, pleased, and leaves.

6:00: It's still dark. bill reads out front, on the steps of the building.

6:30: Birding and poetry walk, led by Maureen Scott Harris, leaves from the SCS. Maureen knows all the wooded nooks and crannies of the campus, and the names of the birds that live there. In a courtyard of the Environmental Science complex, we glimpse a cardinal darting from tree to tree. The sky is brightening, a bluish light suffusing the familiar buildings and gardens. In the miniature forest next to the Social Sciences building, we see a tiny songbird. Maureen says it's a kind of warbler called an ovenbird. She tells us it's a ground-feeder, and it obligingly alights on the ground and hops about, pecking. I look at it through my binoculars: it has an olive back and a stripey breast. I don't think I've ever seen one before.

7:30: We've walked to within a couple of blocks of my building. I say goodbye, go home, take a hot bath & fall asleep.

I did it! I stayed up all night! It was so much fun. All photos here.

Inside the floating classroom

2006-09-29T22:08:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, some Psychogeography regulars (including me) led a pair of groups of students from the University of Toronto's Hart House to the Gladstone Hotel. On the way, our group detoured to investigate the new Leslie L. Dan Pharmacy Building. You may remember that some of us wandered onto the construction site & discussed the building-in-progress with a helpful security guard last winter. The building is finished now, and at night the giant white pods are illuminated in brilliant colours. The higher one, apparently a staff cafeteria, is inaccessible, but the lower one is a classroom, and it was open! Here is what it looks like inside:

It made me think of a CBC sound studio from about 1975. It's a room with no windows or straight lines and a kind of old-school sci-fi feel to it, like a classroom aboard the Starship Enterprise. More pics.

Tomorrow is Nuit Blanche! I am so stoked! There will be photos!

When sunflowers ATTACK

2006-09-27T15:56:00.000-04:00

Night of the Sunflower!, originally uploaded by jbcurio.

Photographic evidence that those Cabbagetown sunflowers can be dangerous. Pic (and Photoshop tomfoolery) by Jamie.

Our vegetable overlords

2006-09-22T20:17:00.000-04:00

Next: Cabbagetown!

Cabbagetown, of course, gets its name from the fact that it is ruled by a cabal of sentient cabbages. The likeness of the Glorious Cabbage Leader features prominently on the flag of Cabbagetown, which is proudly displayed by many households in the area, but which I did not get a good picture of during Thursday's walk because it was dark. The cabbages are benevolent, but their will is enforced by fearsome and triffidlike sunflower guardians (see above photo).

We walked all the way from Cabbagetown to the Danforth, where we had saganaki, which is Greek for "cheese that is on fire." The way it works is, you go to a Greek restaurant and order saganaki, and a man comes out with a piece of cheese on a plate, throws a shooter of ouzo over it, sets it on fire and yells "OPA!!", and it all happens so quickly you don't have time to turn your camera on. The cheese is delicious. Alison developed a sudden hankering for flaming cheese while we were in a parkette in Cabbagetown, and we were eating it less than an hour later, which is all the proof I need that I live in a world-class city.

Feeling the love in Parkdale

2006-09-22T19:54:00.000-04:00

Okay, it's been a while, I know. Did I mention I got a Mac? And school started again? Two posts today, in an attempt to make up for my negligence. First: Parkdale!

As part of the Queen West Art Crawl, there was a ROM-organized walking tour of historic sites in Parkdale last Sunday. It was interesting to hear about the earlier lives of some of the area's buildings and institutions: what's now a large rehab centre, for example, in the Victorian era rejoiced in the Edward Goreyesque title of The Parkdale Home for Incurables. But the buildings in Parkdale aren't nearly as fascinating as the residents. My favourite sighting was of the guy who stomped by us, grumbling, cap jammed over crazy hair, periodically stopping to replace one or the other of his filthy flip-flops, which kept falling off. The front of his T-shirt read: KISS ME. The back: I'M A PIRATE.

How cute is this car-free lane of wee Victorian cottages? I suspect they're a lot pricier now than back when they were built as cheap housing for labourers.

Mushrooms

2006-09-09T20:22:00.000-04:00

Mushrooms, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Here are some mushrooms we saw under a bridge last night, by the Humber River.

School started again this week, but the really big news around here is I've got a new computer, and it's a Mac. I switched to Mac! It is a time of new beginnings.

Live illustration

2006-09-04T23:04:00.000-04:00

Pontiac Quarterly illustrators, originally uploaded by squiddity of toronto.

Artists illustrate the August 30 issue of Pontiac Quarterly, the live-on-stage literary quarterly at the Drake Hotel. The evening's "special announcement" turned out to be that Pontiac founder Damian Rogers will no longer be organizing and hosting the event; she's turning it over to the equally wonderful Liz Clayton. And Liz is looking for submissions! E-mail her if you have ideas.

How I spent my summer vacation

2006-08-24T22:52:00.000-04:00

On Sunday I finally finished the massive paper I've been working on all summer, meaning that for the first time in 2 years I don't have anything due or overdue that I should be working on. Classes start again on September 6, so I get a summer vacation of about 2 weeks. It's not very long -- and I'm spending all day tomorrow at a conference on the history & philosophy of science -- but I did get to spend Wednesday on the Toronto Islands. I had a sandwich and coffee at The Rectory Cafe, and started reading Don Quixote. I explored parts of the Islands I'd never been to, and saw a knitted mooring cozy and a lovely wicker gate with spirals woven into it. I met numerous very friendly cats, and had ice cream, and took a lot of photos.

The muse snuffled

2006-08-20T15:18:00.000-04:00

I remarked on Gary Barwin's blog that I have always been partial to the word "snout," and he wrote a poem about it.