Transit and Myth-Making: One Button at a Time

Posted on urbanphoto.net

The true mark of a city that has shed its pimply adolescent past and gained preeminence is the development of a larger-than-life personality, a personality that is based on layers of collective memories, recollections, human dramas real and ficticious, observed and enacted by oneself. A story of one’s adventures in Camden Town will almost certainly be echoed by someone else’s tale of a London romp; likewise, a hispter’s salacious anecdotes of Saturday night debauchery in the Lower East Side will solicit from others more than just a few recollections of the Lower East Side, and not just from fellow hipsters alone.

It is precisely here that Toronto’s city-building efforts flounder a bit, and the problem is certain even more acute for the multitudes of smaller cities that find themselves on the losing side of the battle for population and talents. Sure, the air might be cleaner, the people friendlier, the street safer, but what does all this matter if your place is constantly mistaken for Anyplace? The occasional appearance in Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje novels aside (and same goes for Montreal and Modeccai Richler/Leonard Cohen), does the Toronto myth mean anything to anyone?

What is particularly vexing about the city government’s shaky sales pitch for Toronto is their obliviousness towards a tremendous resource known as the transit system, which incidentally carries 2.3 million passengers every single day. A cross road in every sense of the word, it is precisely the kind of place where stories take place and memories build upon memories. For a good portions of the 2.3 million passengers, the TTC is an elaborate system of signifiers for their own lives.

For me, the culminative experience of riding the TTC has turned streetcar rides into–excuse the trite metaphor–trips down memory lane: early mornings on the College Streetcar recall brunches on College Street’s brunch row; “501 Queen”–the grandmother of streetcar lines–conjures memories of strolling on beaches near the far east end of that street, and hopping between galleries near the far west end; Dundas Station near Eaton Centre is a sometimes-almost-painful reminder of high school mall rat days.

Pooling such individual recollections can be an almost emotionally overwhelming experience, as a Toronto Star contest proved four years ago. In a competition for the best TTC stories, the entries ranged from the bizzarre (man on subway groping own balls under his newspaper) to the touching (couple met on Chaplin Estate bus, happily married for 25 years). The end result is a curious study of people’s hopes and fears, and the irrefutable proof that Toronto is capable of sustaining its own stories– stories that make outsiders and Toronto’s own inhabitants interested in the city.

Another part of that system of signifiers is physical design, an area in which the TTC has some inherent handicaps to overcome. The functional-utilitarian interiors of subway stations built in the 70s is a farcry from the grandeur of the Moscow system and has few details that make the NYC subway as intriguing as it is; the TTC logo is also not the London Underground Roundel. But as the TTC stations progress in age, the late modernism of their architectural design is gradually beginning to be appreciated. The special TTC font and its retro-modernism offers further opportunities for exploitation.

A shame then that when a TTC merchandise shop finally opened last year at Union Station, people could find nothing other than crappy t-shirts. What happened to the mugs, pens, specialty maps, books, napkins etc. that any tourist can find at Trafalger Square that bear the London Underground roundel?–Yet another case of squandered opportunity and lack of imagination.

Not all is lost though. Thanks to Matt Blackett of Spacing Magazine, these buttons bearing subways station names and the station’s special tile patterns became a runaway success and was dubbed the “civic pride fashion statement of the year”. Add to that the good work that has been done over at Transit Toronto, suddenly the effort doesn’t seem too bad.

A positive feature of the TTC may help also: the transit system in Toronto is not forsaken ground as far as the middle class is concerned, and is instead heavily used by all economic classes. The transit system thus functions more like the kind of civic hub it’s supposed to be, where one meets who he rarely expects to meet–and isn’t this spontaneity the essence of the urban experience?

I'm a Communist Kindergarten Survivor

Choosing not to work, as evidenced by two blog posts within the hour, at the busiest junction of the year, becomes a much less morally challenging proposition once you square it to yourself that you just.don't.want.to.work. Bullshitty excuses are a moral hazard on par with smoking, abstinence, and driving.

So Aliza and I went to a movie this past Saturday at the ReelAsian Film Festival. It was a properly Asian affair: we are both Asian, which was a start. We started the evening at Traditional Chinese Buns, patronized by an entirely Asian population save two white ass cracker Kensington Market transplants. We then made a quick hop to Chinatown Starbucks where I chatted up with the Asian barista. After that we walked back to the streetcar stop on Spadina Ave., which is basically the heart of emigre China this side of Lake Ontario.

I have a small confession to make: I used to dream about, and still occasionally does, of being a festival circus groupie--whoring myself out all day for free festival film tickets and sneaking peeks of Tilda Swinton's non-existent breasts at after parties so I can share salacious tales of her androgyny with my otherwise apathetic friends. Dreams aside, as it stands now I can only afford maybe four tickets at the International Film Festival each year. I briefly contemplated writing for Innis Herald again, in the slim hope that some magazine critic will pick up this quality paper one day (circulation 500) and contact me on the merit of my sharp and incisive writing.

Thankfully, these ReelAsian tickets for Little Red Flowers are only 7 bucks apiece.

It's, well, ironic, that the Chinese title for this film means "It Looks Beautiful", considering the first shot that greeted me when we walked into the theatre was a 5-year-old's penis. Points of subtle psychosexual interest recurred with unfailing frequency in this 90 minute film: a boy named Qiang Qiang (meaning "guns" or "pushka") was enrolled in a residential kindergarten in post-revolution Beijing; the highly regarded school was a place of toys and seemingly benevolent teachers, but also of regimented exercise routines, group bowel movement rituals, and a ruthless system whereby a child was awarded a little red flower for good behaviour. Soon, the spirited Qiang Qiang began to find himself at odds with people around him.

Kids lined up to take a dump every morning, and were awarded for shitting like clockwork

The film's director Zhang Yuan is supposed to be the first truly underground filmmaker in China, his work routinely censored for political reasons. That Little Red Flowers is a political satire on communism and its group psychology is beyond obvious. Like, the group shitting is totally a stab at the kind of cross-surveillance citizens of communism used to carry out on each other. When you've seen someone's privates up close like that you've seen everything, no?

Child actor Kan exposes his privates for art, and takes on the Chinese equivalent of the name Rammington Steel

It wasn't awfully original to situate a political satire in a communist boarding school; the individual in an authoritarian regime is a theme all too often explored, often with great mastery. Heck, even the spirited-boy-in-a-boarding-school franchise is a bit overdone. But lead actor Kan was a miracle, and for anyone who actually went to a communist kindergarten (me & Aliza), the film surely brought back memories.

It was pretty sad that as late as the 80s, things didn't change that much. The group shitting was abolished, thank god, but the nap rooms were still co-ed, with guys wearing pants that had a slit along the asscrack to facilitate easy transportation of goods. All this indecent exposure probably lead to psychosexual retardation at later ages, which explains why all these asian people have issues with their bodies. We still learned songs that ran something like the following:

Li and I are sharing apples;

there are only two left;

I give the bigger one to Li;

and keep the smaller one for myself.

Ayn Rand would have been livid.

But these are beautiful, sepia-toned memories through the filter lens of temporal distance, and both Aliza and I found ourselves oddly moved--half an hour after the movie we still found ourselves excitedly chatting about food in a communist kindergarten (corn gruel, white flour buns). It was then that I realized Little Red Flowers was bound for the Pantheon of Chinese cinema, not as a superb satire, but as a finely crafted keepsake, a little slice of history.

I tried to search through my memory to decide if I ever wore those pants with ass-slits and found nothing. The memory must have been subconsciously suppressed.

Miscellaneous Bits from the Santa Parade...

...which passed by my apartment this past (bleak) sunday afternoon, brought with it an army of screaming kids on curb side benches, and left in its wake an eerie, terrible void.

Sadly, the last time I saw the parade was last year, when I stood at University and Dundas, balancing myself on tip-toe, stuffing an 8-inch piece of street meat into my face.

This year, I decided to spend my time with more grown-up poise: I ran around in the apartment, panic-stricken in the face of impending doom in the form of a paper, sickishly awake due to previous night's insomnia and two cups of cheap brew from the west-end breakfast room Boom, hoping against hope that it would all become just a little easier to deal with.

Santa granted my wish in strange ways: Life brand earplugs, $2.99.

My Belated Two Cents on the Election

A very long-winded and badly improvised post on urbanphoto.net

"Those seeking thrill from Toronto’s municipal politics are advised to look elsewhere. In a city that at times seems to be in love with the status quo, the re-election of incumbent mayor David Miller is all but certain. But election 2006, which took place this past Monday, is worthwhile if only for what it says about the state of affairs in Toronto.

There was something almost messianic about Miller’s 2003 mayoral bid in a city still reeling from SARS, post-amalgamation fiscal hell, and bad governance. What he brought was a palpable sense of beginning anew and making big plans. Within a year both the Royal Ontario Museum and the Art Gallery of Ontario unveiled their starchitectural expansion plans, and urban issues became something they couldn’t have possibly been: hip—with the launching and subsequent success of Spacing magazine being perhaps the most telling sign of changing times.

To be sure, some of the campaign promises were promptly carried through: his first act as a mayor was cancelling the highly contentious bridge link to the Island Airport. Relationship with the city’s creative community also remained cordial, with Miller being a major proponent for a “creative city” and a regular attendee of “cool” parties.
But those enamored with Miller the visionary had good reasons to feel a little disenchanted. On the more strategic issues, little headway seemed to have been made. The TTC still consistent underperforms and, despite a Ridership Growth Strategy, raised fares twice. The much touted “Clean and Beautiful City” initiative also seem to have produced little effect as far as the number of unsightly newspaper boxes were concerned. Most importantly, the city’s neglected waterfront saw little action in the past three years besides incremental and piecemeal improvements; a verdict has yet to be reached for the much-maligned Gardiner Expressway, even though experts warn that, as highrise condos more and more overshadow the area, precious time is running out.

Nobody however doubts Miller’s will power and commitment to the city, and most opinions agree that unless the federal and provincial governments take up their share of Toronto’s money problems and shed their collective antipathy, not much can be done. Thus when Miller’s main competitor Jane Pitfield boldly promised 50km of new subway construction, 250 new police officers and a garbage incinerator, all with local money, she was hardly taken seriously.
The tragedy of the situation is that, in the face of provincial antipathy and fiscal holes, Toronto seems to have comfortably settled into a culture of resignation, taking what it can get and renouncing the rest without complaint, to the point where when the Expo 2015 bid was killed because nobody was willing to pay for it, few even noticed.

Yet all is not lost. That surge of civic optimism with Miller’s election in 2006 may have ebbed but is far from dead. The arts and music scene are thriving, and are increasingly cross-pollinating with the city’s youth urban activism. Once fringe organizations like Spacing and the Toronto Public Space Committee are just beginning to enter the spotlight. Architecture and design is all the buzz on university campuses and in local papers, and the city’s wondrous new cultural edifices (the just-opened opera house for example) all point to that heightened awareness.

Miller may be a “cautious mayor for a cautious city”, but frustrated ambitions aside, much is to be said for his part in ushering in a period in the city where one tangibly feels history been made and changes on the verge of happening. With the city’s first ever charter becoming effective next year, Miller will get more executive power and more room to act; much can still be done about the waterfront and the TTC. Torontonians maybe a resigned and at-times parochial bunch, but they are hardly pessimists. "

What I did want to say but couldn't find a way to incorporate into the article is that I personally find Miller a man of integrity, although sometimes more of a talker than a doer, not entirely through his own fault. He has also done something important that Mel Lastman couldn't have done: he trendified municipal politics and made it a cause celebre for the young 20-something set. Ok I know the public space "scene" is a little in-bred, but at least people are talking about the Gardiner and the waterfront and Regent Park and the TTC, and that's important.

More on K-Fed Becoming Fed-Ex

Ok, I didn't come up witht the clever title. Some wit at the Star did.

But seriously, what are all the nasty lives of celebrities good for other than as a source of witticisms? So, quoting another one from my friend (paraphrased), the only positive contribution Kevin Federline was able to make is to prove that anyone besides women could be gold-diggers.

YouTube Is the Shit!!!

As is the case with every technological fad in the past five year, I was a later comer to YouTube (I still don't have gmail). But an afternoon of aimless browsing has done nothing short of completely converting me. Ok, there are the requisite depressed-suicidal teenage girl videoblogs and Celine Dion sing-alongs. But there is also a lot of cool shit, like William Sledd "Ask a gay man", and hours upon hours of mind-numbingly funny physical comedy (fat kid on the roller-coaster, anyone?)

Even more surprisingly I came upon something other than mid brow schlock yesterday. Peter Watkins's War Game, the infamous 60s mockumentary that hypothesized an all-out nuclear attack on Britain, has been posted in its entirity in 5 parts. To think that only three years ago, people paid $20+ to go to Peter Watkins retrospectives to be able to see this movie!

Thank you YouTube for helping me discover my paranoid inner self.

Rick Santorum Out. Britney and K-Fed Split.

In other news, the sun rises in the east.

Urban Foibles (1)

While waiting for the lights to turn at College and Spadina today I all of a sudden became aware of the heady smell of burning weed wafting up my nostrils. Normally this wouldn't even warrant a turn of the head, but the smell was so strong that it smelt like someone was smoking up right under my nose--no--it smelt like I was the one smoking up.

Upwind was a curious-looking trio: 60-something 6' giantess with tied-back essex-girl hairdo in a dirty-biege puff jacket, and shrunken-faced 5'5'' hubby with walking cane, happily puffing away, glassy-eyed and dreaming of hippiedom past. Under their noses was a 8-year-old kid, semi-neatly dressed, busy as all 8-year-olds are with Biff or Tommy or whoever their imaginary friend happens to be.

I felt bad for the kid; really I did. I kinda wished for his sake that the old couple had been hippies who sold out as opposed to hippies who never did and ended up having to smoke up at College and Spadina in those dreadful clothes of theirs.

At least the kid will turn out to be interesting, I hope.

Here is Food for You, My Starving Child

Isn't it sad when the only consolation in life is that you weren't born in Africa?

So I was with a friend last night at the Green Room, downing a pitcher and eating a rather suspect chicken sandwich, and the general sluttiness and festiveness of Halloween sort of got to me--in a bad way. You know those few times when you are walking on a street full of happy people with the piercing realization that you are still as alone as ever? I went back home, took one look at my planner (which was incidentally full until the end of next week), and went on to bawl on my bed.

Yeah, I just admitted to crying to the entire cyberspace. It was that bad.

The end result of that rather cathartic experience was that I finally had to square it to myself that the past two years of living hell in engineering science might have been just one colossal waste of time. I need meaning; I need vindication; and I'm seriously going to consider getting out of this. I peg my chances of being in the Faculty of Arts and Science by January at better than 50-50.

I feel an ever greater kinship to Woody Allen and his whole persona of the cereberal frustrated manhood trapped in an existential crisis, which is why I went back to seeing Stardust Memories and decided it was one of his best movies. Of course his dilemma was way more delicious: he had to choose between Marie-Christine Barrault and Charlotte Rampling, but I hope the analogy is not completely lost.

On the same subject, I hope you all come out for Woody Allen's Manhattan on Thursday night. You may dismiss it as an example of flimsy psedo-intellectualism, but the cinematography is amazing, and the opening sequence of Manhattan scenery--I don't know how to put it better--is almost religious.

I once tried to picture how a Toronto-born auteur might shoot the same sequence, but quickly came to the conclusion why it wouldn't work. The whole sequence would be over in just 15 seconds--financial district, Queen St., Kengsinton Market (incidentally similar to Queen St.), Chinatown (messy), City Hall (ugly), the Annex (incidentally similar to Main Street, USA). What, are you gonna put a mall in there too?

Plus Toronto people are just uglier, no offence.