Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
In the age of Trump, the startling rise in Ontario of yet another populist leader, nationalism, political fear-mongering, scapegoating, press-bashing, and power grabs by craven oligarchs, it’s important periodically to remind ourselves what it means to live in a free society. It’s likewise important periodically to test the limits of that freedom to make sure those limits haven’t contracted around us while we were asleep.
Is there a difference between the dirt-smudged smile pasted to a seven-foot face on a billboard and a Netflix scientist riffing on the stardust that lives and moves and shapes our being? The teeth survive the body; our dentists have seen to that. But they’re no match for the stars which wheel through our dreams…
I eat my lunch at noon and my supper at six. I go to bed at eleven so I can have a good night’s sleep. I like the regularity. It never occurs to me that I could disrupt this well laid pattern by snipping up a novel and pasting bits of it onto carefully selected surfaces. It might make me late for lunch.
The Swiss watch manufacturer, Breitling, has opened its official Canadian distribution headquarters at 250 Bloor St. E. I wouldn’t have noticed except for the bombshell sitting in the front window and blazing red in the late afternoon sunlight. They’ve propped up a life-sized, or somewhat (ahem) larger-than-life, mannikin of a blond woman in a red dress and riding a bombshell in much the same way as Slim Pickens rode the H-bomb to his doom in Dr. Strangelove.
In Toronto, on the corner of Avenue Road and Davenport, there is a billboard advertising the Galerie de Bellefeuille in Montreal. It’s positioned so that people driving their Maseratis north from Yorkville will stop at the lights and stare at work by the gallery’s latest darling. Currently, it’s photographer David Drebin whose work you cannot find by following the URL on the billboard because somebody fucked it up.
Canada has a long-standing official policy of multiculturalism and nowhere is that trotted out more often and with more self-congratulatory pats on the back than in Toronto. But a survey of our shop windows tells a different story…
The other day, I was eating lunch and looked out the window into a dreary rain/snow mix. I stepped to the window (as I always do when I’m wondering if I should grab my camera and go outside) when I noticed someone on the roof across the road.
Sometimes I wonder what the mannikins think of us as we walk by their windows. I’ve tried to put myself in their position (to empathize, if you like), but store clerks don’t like when I do that.
Autoshare — the car-sharing service — has made its 400 signs available to five street artists to liven things up.
Do photographs have a grammar?
There are all sorts of debates around street photography. One of them is the colour/black and white debate. There’s a convention that street photos should be in black and white. My own feeling is: it depends
This poster came down last week. It was on the south-facing wall of the new Holt Renfrew Men’s clothing store on Bloor Street. (In case you need to know, like for some trivia game, Holt Renfrew is ultimately owned by the Weston family.)
Ogden Nash wrote: I think that I shall never seea billboard lovely as a tree.Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,I’ll never see a tree at all. If Nash were alive today, he might update his poem: I think the billboard’s here to staywith its products on display.If you want to see a tree,try Home Depot, aisle…
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.” So says George Orwell. I don’t know where I first saw the quote. Maybe on Twitter. Maybe on someone else’s blog. Wherever it was, I immediately snapped it up for myself and used it in defense of my decision not to monetize my blog.
