Category: Toronto

"It makes me aerodynamic, for fighting."

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We saw Pineapple Express (imdb | rotten tomatoes) yesterday. I guess I liked it…I wouldn’t say it’s a great movie by any means, but it was very funny at times. I probably would’ve been confused by the movie’s style had I not known David Gordon Green was the director. He injected some of his style into an otherwise typically Rogen/Goldberg script, which worked for some scenes and made others feel odd. It gave the movie a pretty uneven feel, but the funny moments were good enough to make up for it. Some surprisingly prolonged fight scenes too.

After that we met up with CBGBLB and some of CB’s family for dinner at beerbistro. Much tastiness ensued…for the second straight night. I watched a little Olympic action and then slept like the dead, fortunately nowhere near all the explosions. Check out the pictures and video of that at Photojunkie.

[tags]pineapple express, beerbistro, toronto propane explosions[/tags]

It is with mixed emotions…

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Earlier in the week Torontoist reported that Yorkville’s Cumberland Cinema will soon be demolished.

The Cumberland Cinema is being demolished to make room for another towering condo development. We don’t know yet when it is going to happen, but we do know that this is a terrible shame: while the loss of the theatre isn’t significant from an architectural or stylistic standpoint, it’s a saddening blow to independent movie fare in the downtown core.

I’m torn about this news. On one hand, as Torontoist points out, the Cumberland shows a lot of first-run indie films that tend to start there, move to the Carlton and then disappear. It serves the niche of films that are a little too indie for the Varsity, and much to indie for the Scotiabank or Yonge-Dundas 24, but not so indie that they go straight to the Bloor. Put another way: I’m pretty sure every Wes Anderson movie had its Toronto debut at the Cumberland.

On the other hand, the Cumberland is a shite theatre. The screens are small, the sound is awful, the sight lines are bad (especially for my vertically challenged wife), and it’s always cold enough in there to chill white wine while you watch a film. I suspect I’ll miss the niche the Cumberland filled more than I’ll miss the Cumberland itself; my hope is that the Varsity picks up a little of the slack. It is, in my opinion, still the best theatre in Toronto.

Just a note: I was going to list the four movies currently playing at the Cumberland to demonstrate the quality of movies they usually show, but the lineup this week is Man on Wire, Closing the Ring, Step Brothers and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2. That’s one well-reviewed documentary along with three pieces of crap. Maybe I’m not so torn after all…

[tags]cumberland cinema, torontoist[/tags]

Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum

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A few notes before I slip back into MBA mode (last assignment woooot!):

.:.

I’ve acquired a metric shitload of reading material: I just bought And Then We Came To The End by Joshua Ferris and The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda And The Road To 9/11 by Lawrence Wright. I also have the latest issues of The Economist, Toronto Life and Adbusters to get through. That issue of Adbusters is weird reading, since it goes from right to left, but it’ll be worth the effort when I get to the article entitled “Hipster: The Dead End of Civilization”. Just a few pages in and I’m captivated by the story on China’s approach to global politics.

We’ve reached a point in our civilization where counterculture has mutated into a self-obsessed aesthetic vacuum. So while hipsterdom is the end product of all prior countercultures, it’s been stripped of its subversion and originality, and is leaving a generation pointlessly obsessing over fashion, faux individuality, cultural capital and the commodities of style.

Right now, in between magazines and MBA cases, I’m reading God Is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens. Mark Kingwell said that “[p]reaching to the choir…is corrosive of courage and reason: it makes you soft-bellied and soft-headed” but sitting in the atheist choir is fun when it’s Hitchens at the pulpit.

.:.

Somehow Anya Yurchyshyn ties her hatred of marketing to a book about 20th-century totalitarianism in an article called “Adolf Hitler Was A Marketing Genius“.

Although I think advertising/marketing/branding are evil industries (that help to supply my paycheck), I’m not about to compare the people who work there to Nazis or fascists or even Satan’s gleeful minions. Some of my best friends work in advertising! But it is scary that there’s a superstructure that is trying to control us, and most people have stopped questioning it. Advertising is a part of the landscape; it’s weird when it’s not there.

Somehow I agree with her.

.:.

Toronto made Forbes’ list of the world’s ten most economically powerful cities.

Growth and quality are as important as size in our rankings, so smaller but briskly growing economies like Seoul, South Korea, and Hong Kong also make the list. North America, with relatively lower growth areas, still boasts a number of cities in the current power list, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Toronto, the latter of which squeezes past Madrid, Spain; Philadelphia and Mexico City, Mexico.

[via Creative Class, Accordion Guy and a slew of others]

[tags]joshua ferris, lawrence wright, adbusters, christopher hitchens, mark kingwell, anya yurchyshyn, forbes, economically powerful cities[/tags]

The Life and Death of a Great Toronto Neighbourhood

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In an article (bearing the same title as this blog post) on the Dooney’s website today, Max Fawcett describes the slow decline of The Annex, my old neighbourhood.

It might be time for Toronto’s urban geographers and city planners to add the term un-gentrification to their lexicon, because that’s precisely what’s happening in the Annex, one of their city’s oldest and most famous neighbourhoods. Unlike other neighbourhoods in the city that are being bought out and up by neo-yuppies, who spark the transformation of old carpet stores and empty storefronts being into painfully hip clothing stores, espresso bars, and of-the-moment restaurants, the Annex is sliding in the other direction. Where the neighbourhood was once a bohemian haven defined by a decidedly middle-class ethic it now is rapidly becoming nothing more than an upscale student ghetto defined by fast-food restaurants, ten dollar martinis, a dwindling clutch of futon stores, and a startling increase in the number of vacant storefronts and the homeless people that populate them.

Fawcett seems to be speaking specifically about the commercial strip of Bloor between Spadina and Bathurst. I agree that it’s always seemed a confounding stretch — never as annoyingly cool as Little Italy but never as annoyingly boho as Queen West either. It always just seemed rather bland and utilitarian. If anything, since we moved away and the changes seem more stark on each occasional visit, it’s gotten more bland, and I think that’s Fawcett’s point. When the night life of the neighbourhood (provided there’s no one good playing at Lee’s Palace) is the awful Brunswick House, that’s not a good sign. And he’s right: for every bakery or BMV that goes in, there’s another place selling schwarma or wings or cheap Korean barbecue.

Really, what’s happened to that piece of Bloor is studentification (admittedly, that’s not a word, but it’s as valid as “un-gentrification”) which had been fairly constrained to the Madison in years past. Like it or not, U of T is getting a retail ghetto, and Bloor Street from the JCC to Honest Ed’s is it. I don’t have a particular problem with this — neighbourhoods change all the time, and every time the people lived there before turn up their noses at the interlopers — except that blandness should never be something for a neighbourhood to aspire to.

[tags]dooney’s, max fawcett, bloor street, annex neighbourhood, university of toronto[/tags]

Metrocide

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This week Torontoist is running a great series of posts about murder statistics in Toronto. Much needed, in my opinion, given the attention-starved headline on the latest issue of Toronto Life with a cover story light on data. The Torontoist series (researched and written by David Topping) has featured simple but helpful stats, much more helpful in identifying an actual trend than listing victim stories.

On Tuesday the data showed number of homicides, homicide rate and homicides versus traffic fatalities. Side note: what happened after 2002 to cut traffic fatalities nearly in half over five years?

On Wednesday the focus was central Toronto, as well as the downtown core, showing just how few homicides occur here — despite what media reports might suggest — compared to the rest of the city and the GTA.

On Thursday Toronto was lined up against other Canadian cities (Toronto has a lower homicide rate than Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Trois-Rivieres, Regina, Sudbury and Vancouver; its rate is the same rate as Saint John and just higher than Halifax) and North American cities, against which it barely registers:

Toronto’s numbers absolutely pale in comparison to American cities. Its metropolitan homicide rate in 2006 was lower than every American city with a population above 500,000 (charted above). And of the seventy-two American cities with populations over 250,000, Toronto’s 2006 metropolitan homicide rate (1.8 per 100,000) was lower than every other city except for Plano, Texas—the wealthiest city in the United States—which had a homicide rate of 1.6 per 100,000.

There’s far more information, nuance and source reference in the full articles, so I urge you to check them out. The commenters registered the the usual complaints — why all this analysis? more than zero is too many — with which Topping agrees, but data and information like this is crucial in addressing problems accurately in a rational way, rather than emotionally. Don’t get me wrong, emotion has a place in fighting violence, but it has to be tempered with reason. Topping and Torontoist have done a great job of that this week.

[tags]torontoist, david topping, toronto life, gun violence, toronto, homicide rate[/tags]

This is our house.

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Today we went to our first Toronto FC game down at BMO Field. The weather called for showers and possibly even thunder & lightning, so we fully expected to get wet. I also expected to see a win, since FC were playing the expansion San Jose Earthquakes.

We took a streetcar packed with red-clad fans down to the exhibition grounds and found our seats; good view of the field, right in the middle, good sightlines. Last time I was there (for a non-FC game) I was on the other side, so it was good to get the other angle. We were in one of the calmer sections, far from the likes of the Red Patch Boys, U-Sector and North End Elite.

The game itself ended in a 0-0 draw, a disappointing result for Toronto. San Jose (more often than not described as “lowly”) mustered only a few moments of offense, so the game was Toronto’s for the taking…they just couldn’t find any scoring touch. Several failed runs, lots of crosses sailing right through the box with no one to put a head to it, even a missed penalty…nothing went right. The crowd was pretty vocal about their disappointment. It’s hard to watch your team struggle like that. They were also pretty vocal about the officiating, which was…questionable.

We lucked out with the weather. It never did rain, beyond a few sprinkles here and there…not enough to really get wet. And it didn’t get too hot either; when the sun finally broke through, the breeze from the lake kept it tolerable. A few minutes after we got home it really started to pour…glad it held off.

Pretty fun time, all in all. We have tickets for one more game in September, after the MBA is done and the film festival is over. I look forward to not having any pressing deadline on a Saturday afternoon other than getting to the soccer pitch on before the first goal.

[tags]toronto fc, san jose earthquakes[/tags]

Well, there goes the neighbourhood

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Torontoist is reporting that an Ikea (of sorts) is opening on King Street East, just around the corner. Actually, I can see it from here. Seriously, right from where I’m sitting.

King Street East is known for its high-end furniture retailers like Roche Bobois and UpCountry, so it’s a bit of a surprise to see the logo for everyone’s guilty pleasure, IKEA, on a classy King Street storefront.

Torontoist reader Sofi Papamarko asked us to investigate this mysterious downtown presence of the eco-conscious Swedish giant, suggesting that it could be an office furniture location or a boutique IKEA (similar to the Leon’s planned for the Roundhouse or the downscaled Brick store at College Park). The windows at 143 King Street tease a date of July 31, 2008—which curiously is the same day that IKEA releases their annual catalogue.

“It’s not a store,” a rep for the company told Torontoist, “but it is a place where customers can check out products from the 2009 catalogue.”

But will they have the cheap breakfasts?

Also up for betting: Sam Javanrouh bikes past there every day; how long before he posts a picture on Daily Dose of Imagery?

[tags]ikea, king street, sam javanrouh, daily dose of imagery[/tags]

The clone wars

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Attention Toronto douchebags: you need a new wardrobe.

In the short time it took me to run three miles today, I saw four of you walk by wearing exactly the same thing: camouflage cargo shorts, pastel polo shirt w/ popped collar (this is crucial; the popped collar elevates one beyond the level of plain old wannabe and into the douch-y heavens), flip flops and aviator sunglasses. You also all had the same spiky hair.

While I admire your willingness to beat down any niggling scrap of individuality or free thinking you might’ve once been infected with, you may have taken it too far. I don’t think that even your mother could pick you out in a crowd anymore.

Baaaaaaa.

[tags]douchebag, popped collar[/tags]

Cry havoc…

Dan DickinsonLeave a comment

…and let slip the dogs of my brain dump:

  • Tonight we dined at Lobby with T-Bone for Summerlicious. Meh. Not great, and the service was a little sketchy. Plus…$80 for a bottle of wine that tasted like water? Alrighty then.
  • I bought tickets for 50 TIFF films today. I look forward to being able to use them some day. We had to buy a weird combo…30 pack plus two packages of 10 rather than the 50 pack.
  • I hope the rumours about Apple punishing Rogers are true. It’s rare to see condemnation so universal as what Rogers has been enjoying the last couple of weeks. I’ll be curious to see the uptake of the iPhone this weekend; I’m pulling for New Coke-like sales figures.
  • Someone’s affixing stickers to Toronto Sun newspaper boxes describing the contents therein. Where can I donate labels & toner?
  • I’m with Michael Arrington: voicemail should die. Until every voicemail system in the world is converted to unified messaging (like my home phone, which emails me with the wav file when I get a voicemail), I will continue to ignore my voicemail messages until people stop leaving them for me.
  • I can’t wait for the new David Simon (writer of Homicide and The Wire) HBO series Generation Kill. Check out the trailer yonder. [language NSFW]

[tags]summerlicious, lobby, tiff, apple, rogers, toronto sun, voicemail, generation kill[/tags]