Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
Toronto’s new mayor, Rob Ford, wants his city to be a graffiti-free zone. Back in October, when he was still just a candidate, he spoke to the Board of Trade about how he wanted Toronto to be clean and safe, how he wanted Toronto to sparkle for the 2015 Pan Am games.
There was a time when fiction writers from Toronto were self-conscious about setting their stories in Toronto. Our city was too provincial to be real. It was urban enough, but had no credibility. It was still too close to its parochial roots.
As preparations got underway for the G20 Summit in Toronto, one of the fears critics had expressed was that heightened surveillance would become a permanent situation for residents after the event was over.
Opened on June 21, 2007, Ireland Park is a small memorial to the 38,000 Irish refugees who fled the potato famine of 1847 and were received in Toronto (which then had a population of 20,000).
I celebrated Canada Day by engaging in the highest form of patriotism which, according to Howard Zinn, is dissent.
On Friday June 25, 2010, the day before the G20 Summit, I accompanied my wife to her place of work on the northern limit of the secured zone in Downtown Toronto. I went partly out of concern for her and partly out of curiosity.
We (my wife and I) went down to the planned protests at Queen’s Park. It was moving to witness all the different concerns/causes/stories/sufferings people brought into this public space.
Since my post on Monday, the mood in downtown Toronto has changed. For one thing, it’s empty. The people there are either police officers and security personnel, or they are people like me who have come to gawk. It’s a show. A spectacle. It even has its own posters hung from the street light poles — like Miss Saigon or Legally Blonde.
Me and my camera spent yesterday wandering around downtown Toronto to see what we could see of preparations for the G20 summit which will be blessing this fair city on the weekend.
Last night me and my camera walked a section of Yonge Street to see what we could see. I walked from Cummer Ave. south to Empress. I like Yonge Street because there’s lots of traffic and lights. In other words, it’s visually interesting.
A place becomes real as it becomes storied. When I was in high school, my home town, Toronto, was about as real to me as Pluto. My English teachers nurtured a quiet bias for writing that came from any place but Toronto. Nothing good ever came from Toronto.
From the age of twelve until I started university I took piano lessons from a man named Alan who loved to read and always had a book in hand when he rode the subway. I remember after one lesson, maybe in ’78 or ’79, when we were chatting about — who knows — life, the universe and everything — when Alan laughed and told me he was reading Death in Don Mills, by Hugh Garner.
I paid a visit to Pages Books & Magazines yesterday, kind of a farewell book-buying junket, a personal ritual of mine to acknowledge that one of Toronto’s last great Indie booksellers will be closing its doors on August 31st. I happened by while an emergency vehicle was parked outside. Unfortunately, the patient will not be revived.
Rob Ford’s graffiti Nazis are fanning out like pesky little rodents through all the streets of Toronto. I just saw my first “Stop Graffiti Vandalism Now” sign. We have our very own war on terror, but scaled down for the suburbs.
Going “off the Bloor Street viaduct” used to be a fairly common event. In his novel, In the Skin of the Lion, Michael Ondaatje imagines the first such going “off the Bloor Street viaduct.”