FORGERY LEAGUE

Sunday 21 September 2008

The ring

Above: the ring, made by Sean, my sweetheart of nine years and given to me one week ago, on the beach at Ashbridges Bay, at midnight, while the remnants of Hurricane Ike whipped by.

The awesome Michele, who counts metalworking among her many talents, had invited him by her studio to learn some of the craft and create a piece of jewellery that day. Acting on a deep impulse he decided to make this for me - knowing that even though I never wear jewellery, I’m a big DIY nerd, and if there was one thing I’d never want to take off, it would be something made by his own hands. He made me a freaking ring. For about three days I couldn’t look down at it without starting to cry again.

It was pitch black. We had to use the light from my cel phone to see it. We sat with the hot winds buffeting us, eating pretzels and watching birds fly backwards. And then we got caught in a sudden downpour as we pedalled up Woodbine*, and ate terrible

Brekwiches at an all-night coffee shop. I spent equal time crying and laughing my head off.

The long and the short of it: we are engaged. Life just got a bit stranger and much more wonderful.

* Oh, did I mention? We got bikes a few weeks ago. It’s been great, and the wounds from our respective first accidents are almost healed!

Thursday 5 June 2008

A grand opening

Lots of good conversations at Open Everything today. The Toronto event took place today at the Centre for Social Innovation, a community space and incubator for social entrepreneurs, and further events around the world are scheduled for the rest of this year.

It’s all about the concept of “openness” - as in open source software, as in open models of government (check out Melbourne’s city planning wiki), as in the growing movement for open science.

Among other things:

• Dr Sara Scharf spoke about modern nomenclature in biology (you know - kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species) and how it came about through a process akin to open source today. I want to find out more about these parallel, failed attempts that tried to create unique names by encoding all distinguishing features of a species in the name itself, but I haven’t found anything online yet.
• Marsha Cummings is working on a documentary about Station 20 West, a community health and social services centre in Saskatoon, which includes a co-op grocery store in a neighbourhood where the last commercial grocery stores have pulled out.
• Jane Farrow spoke about Jane’s Walk, a day of self-organized neighbourhood walking tours in honour of the late Jane Jacobs. Held in May, the event has spread to other cities across Canada, and is starting to spread to the US as well.
• Mark Kuznicki told us about Metronauts, a unique experiment in civic engagement being carried out by Metrolinx, our fledgeling regional transit authority.
• Dan, one of the denizens of the Centre for Social Innovation, introduced us to the Open Salad Club. We’ve got a lunch club at my office, where several people take turns making lunch, but somehow the idea of preparing a big dish, even if it’s only every couple of weeks, seems a bit intimidating to me. But bringing in two ingredients for salad? Easy.

Perhaps most interesting of all was hearing from David Patrick about how he, a filmmaker by trade, happened to found the Linuxcaffe - to my knowledge, the world’s first “open source” coffee shop. Everything’s open - from the recipes to the software that runs the till. And naturally, there are open stage nights, not to mention DJ nights featuring Creative Commons-licensed music. But, I thought, what about a really open stage?

Some hastily scribbled notes: Collaborations of all sorts would be encouraged. Performers could share words and music, free for others to jam on, revise and rework. Recordings would be available online to listen to and remix, and on-line contributions could feed back into the open stage. There would be show and tell time for homemade musical instruments and other gear (not coincidentally, Richard Bishop has installed one of his wonderful basses in a lamppost just outside the Caffe). I’m not sure yet what structure, or how much structure, would be needed to get such an event to work well and flow. Just something to experiment with. Stay tuned…

Friday 11 January 2008

Glimpses of the past

(It’s been a whole month since I last posted, and what a month. Lots of things are up in the air, but in general it’s been going well. There are promising job leads, I’ve had time to reorganize the studio at last, and resume work on some projects, both musical and electronic - more about those soon. Meanwhile…)

The other day, while Sean and I were out for a bite to eat, we noticed a store sign across the street proudly announcing “Claremont Confectionery - Smoke and Gifts - Complete Line of Guns & Fishing Tackle” in handsome hand-painted lettering… might have been forty or fifty years old, by the look of it. The building is now a restaurant, but the owners had apparently liked the sign enough to keep it around. It’s not the only such “historic” sign on Queen Street, either.

I like this sort of nod to the past. I’ve heard it criticized as pretentious and empty - like “façadism” in architecture, where the front of a historic building is kept, and attached to a brand new, usually much larger building. You’re appropriating a cultural artifact that has its own layered history, the argument goes, presumably hoping that some of its essence carries over into your new enterprise.

But nah… it’s pretty neat that elements like this are being kept, however superficial they might be. If it’s done with a bit of reverence and respect, they can help connect us with our surroundings, and remind us that we’re all part of this vast stretch of history.

I once designed a logo for a friend, which was eventually made into a sign that hung over her storefront on Queen West. I’d designed logos before, and web sites and business cards, but this felt different - the first time seeing something I’d created become such a visible part of her shop’s public face, physical and permanent.

Well, not that permanent, of course. It’s been gone for years now. Dozens of signs appear on and vanish from that block alone every year, only slightly more permanent than the cards, posters and other ephemera that flutter through it. It’s cool that every once in a while one survives.

(Next: decay, ruins, and aesthetics.)

Friday 5 October 2007

Dorkbot

Dorkbot Toronto, the local chapter of the network of “people doing strange things with electricity”, has a new slate of presentations, and last night was the first.

Patricia Rodriguez presented some of her video work using all sorts of cameras - film, video, digital - and taking advantage of each one’s unique features and most interesting ways of failing.

Cary Peppermint and Christine Nadir’s work is about breaking down the perceived borders between nature and the human-made world, using electronic media installations in unexpected places. Wild Information Network, a solar-powered streaming audio server installed deep in the woods of the Catskills, plays sound pieces submitted by various artists, all with the notion of humans broadcasting to the broader environment, or vice versa. It and other pieces are catalogued on their site: EcoArtTech.net.

Stan Krzyzanowski showed his time-lapse work, ranging from handheld still camera shots, to mesmerizing animations created from successive sections of wood and other materials (notably vegetables and marbled cheese), to his recent projects involving cones from various sorts of tree. Pine cones, see, open up as they dry and fold closed again if you get them wet. And when sped up, the waving of a big pine cone’s scales takes on an eerie, almost animal aspect.

It’s beautiful stuff. Interval is a rather huge archive of all his experiments - click some of the “special sets” on the lower right. Most of the best stuff is on the “Favorites” page.

The sessions are held at InterAccess, a gallery at Queen and Ossington devoted to electronic media art. They offer a very cool series of workshops on topics like microcontroller programming, introductory electronics, pinhole photography, and hacking your bike to turn it into a mobile piece of sound art. I’m hoping to attend the ones on Pure Data and creating “resilient outdoor works”.

Sunday 30 September 2007

Nuit Blanche 2007

Once again, Nuit Blanche was a smash. I’ve never seen another event bring the city to life in the same way - nothing like the sensory overload of Pride or Caribana, though those are great in their own ways. The streets all over downtown were packed with people of all ages, wandering from one site to the next, bumping into friends and excitedly trading recommendations. And there was such a sense of curiosity and discovery in the air - what’s that weird light in the distance? What’s waiting around the next corner?

Wonderful things:

Swintak’s ThunderEgg Alley: A Dumpster Diver’s Paradise, wherein a dingy alleyway near Spadina and College was turned into a tiny hotel using found furnishings, complete with spa, boutique and a front desk clerk who asked if we’d like to book the room (a rather cozy-looking dumpster) for a ten-minute stay. The earliest slot available wasn’t until 5:45am, sadly - it would have been great to hold a room party.

Brian Cort’s It’s A Cloud: in the north atrium of the Eaton Centre, people lay on their backs in a meadow of artificial grass and shrubbery, watching the sky projected on a screen high above while oddly-shaped clouds drifted by. The clouds, in fact, were painted by visitors to the exhibit using black paint, then scanned and cunningly rendered by a Java app.

I still maintain that the best “interactive art” is usually the simplest. In front of the Italian Consulate, there was a giant sheet of phosphorescent paper on one wall, and a dude with a great big strobe light. Strike a pose and flash! - your shadow remained frozen on the wall. A circle had formed around the screen, and people stepped in and out: oddballs with flags who’d apparently drifted in from another performance, couples kissing (to general murmurs of “Awwww…”), dancers showing off their uncanny flexibility, half a dozen people hastily lining up to form a single multi-armed silhouette.

King’s College Circle, in the heart of the U of T campus, was a scene straight out of War of the Worlds or Quatermass - an apparent UFO crash site, surrounded by emergency personnel and people in hazmat suits. I understand there was more to the piece (Marman and Borins’ Event Horizon, pictured above) but we didn’t get to see that.

The park beneath Will Alsop’s famous “tabletop” at OCAD makes a natural and comfy hub for the central exhibit zone, and a nice spot to sit for a while and catch a few artsy short films (we saw one that was an adaptation of a piece by the wonderful troupe Corpus - organizers of the Dusk Dances festival every summer).

We didn’t check out The Ghost Station, a sound installation at the abandoned subway platform Lower Bay, because the lineup literally extended around the block, and by then I was starting to fade. Which meant that, sadly, we missed out on all the fun in the far west: the giant inflated locust at Lamport Stadium, the freaky looking animations at Massey Harris Park, the video projection-graffiti bike (based on that Graffiti Research Lab project), and Misha Glouberman’s Terrible Noises For Beautiful People: Music for a participatory noise choir.

It was barely 1am by the time I crashed. I’m determined to stay up later next year, and maybe bring a bike to get from one site to another. And more than that - to participate. To create an exhibit, or help out with one, or even just grab a guitar and busk somewhere. Dear city and sponsors: let there be a next year.

A friend recently gave me a copy of Municipal Mind: Manifestoes for the Creative City, an inspiring collection of short essays and manifestoes from Toronto’s Poet Laureate, Pier Giorgio di Cicco. Nuit Blanche is just the sort of thing he prescribes: a celebration that brings out the “elements one no longer dares to ask for – conviviality, joy, delight in wonder, the shared forum of imagining and play, of unreserved laughter and serenity ... the playful and ecstatic registers that justify city life, without which the city becomes a place of business, or indentured servitude.”

It takes a poet to say what planners and politicians almost never dare. It’s easy, especially given the City of Toronto’s precarious financial situation, to get lost in talk of dollars and cents. Art, creativity, love: these things are what make us - and our cities - human.

Photos at the Flickr pool.

Saturday 12 May 2007

Presonance at last

I’ve been messing about with Flash and Actionscript lately, and one of my big motivations was was wanting to finish the Presonance site.

Some months ago, I started trading files with Rezo Largul, and we decided to use the name “Presonance” for our collaboration, and “Mycestene” as a name for an eventual CD. So far we’ve completed four tracks and have a couple of others in the works. The finished ones are now up, along with some pretty little visualizations (yup, there’s the Flash programming coming into play). Spacy analogue waltzes, mysterious orchestral arrangements colliding with mad electronic rhythms, a dose of Casseiopean free jazz…

Have a listen! You can download the tracks there too.

And in the acoustic world, another Toronto lamppost has been graced with its own built-in bass. Now that I’ve got a new digital audio recorder I’ll have to pay the new “Garrison Creek” bass a visit. All hail RGB for bringing more music to our parks and sidewalks!

Monday 19 February 2007

Toronto notes

TTC oddities: Bay station will be closed for three upcoming weekends due to nearby construction, and Bloor-Danforth trains will divert via Museum station. The upshot: you’ll get to see the fabled Lower Bay station. It was closed to the public only months after it was built, but it shows up from time to time in films and on TV, often dressed up to look like New York or elsewhere. Transit Toronto has the lowdown; further details from Steve Munro.

Elsewhere, Steve ponders the challenges if the TTC were to run the Toronto Island Ferry (as it did, once upon a time): “If the Sam McBride is half way across to Centre Island, and is short turned, do the passengers have to get off?” Ouch. :D

In other news, the front of the Revue Cinema fell off yesterday morning. Ouch also.

Also, Matt Blackett is retiring his weekly comic m@b. I’ll miss it, but I’m sure he’ll have lots of other projects to keep him busy - and with a new issue of Spacing (the magazine he founded) in my mailbox today, I can’t complain too much.

Friday 16 February 2007

A new start

Last night we had one of our coffee chats, for the first time in months. There are about half a dozen of us, including everyone in the house, and we get together to talk about life and issues and philosophize a bit. And since the office where most of us work now shares a building with a coffee place, we’ve got a great place to do it. The talk last night centered mostly on “truth” and “letting go of things”, and it really was refreshing.

Among other things, I think it jarred something loose in my brain, something that had been blocking my writing on this on-again, off-again audio play podcast. It’s been percolating for months now, if not longer, and I think I’d grown very attached to a certain arrangement of the characters, a certain approach to the story and the world… and I think I’d set it up to be too big a deal, way more work than it had to be. As usual, I was trying to run before I’d even got the hang of the crawling thing.

The main viewpoint character, for example, was originally an amalgam of several cool, funny people I know. But I wanted to get her right, to make her believable / cool / funny / worthy / whatever. I couldn’t get into her head, into her life. I couldn’t get her or any of the other characters to sing.

So I tossed out all my notes for the characters, along with Aborted Episode One Draft, Version Eight. The characters and their roles have shifted several times along the way, but this was the biggest shift yet.

The premise still holds: it pretends to be a real podcast about life in Toronto, but it’s a fictionalized, slightly fantastic Toronto. And podcasts tend to be personal things, so I’m making it a lot more personal. I’ll host the thing (in character), and there’ll be more room for music and commentary on local issues.

I realize part of me was worried about seeming egotistical, since I’m already filling so many roles (writer, lead, engineer, composer, producer, director?)... but deargod, why? This isn’t a big show on stage or radio. If I think of it instead as just a fun little project, a way of learning all those different roles, a seed that can grow into something bigger, involving more people, everything snaps into place. I get to play with new voices, new aspects of characters. I don’t have to worry so much about it being “good enough” to drag other people into helping.

It’s fun again.

Tuesday 9 January 2007

And in with 2007

It’s January, and this year, that means a new office for Spinglobe. We’ve spent a lot of the past month building a new space at the Merchants of Green Coffee building (you can see it from the Don Valley Parkway; it’s midway between Dundas and Queen), with the help of our new neighbours: putting in studs and drywall, mudding and painting, and generally turning a raw space at the back of an old warehouse building into a new home for our crew of oddballs.

Above: the old Spadina office (left) and the new office on Matilda. Toni, the more gregarious of the building’s two cats, comes to pay Sean a visit.

We’re still moving in, but we love it already. For one thing, we can actually walk around the place without tripping over one another. We have a meeting room, and space for all kinds of plants, and some wonderful neighbours in the building, including two cats and two cockatoos.

Lots more to tell. I have a few book reviews to do, for one thing, and possibly some television as well.

Tuesday 4 July 2006

Along the streets

Took a couple cool walks through the west end, down the hill north of Davenport that marks the ancient Lake Iroquois shoreline, past the old Wychwood streetcar barns and the Tollkeeper’s Cottage, a couple of souvenirs of Toronto’s transportation history. The former site is slated for conversion to artists’ studios, greenhouses and parkland, the latter for restoration as a national heritage site.

And there were other neat things along the way - parks and neighbourhoods and friendly cats, and other stuff that may provide inspiration for the radio scripts I’ve been working on.

Down on Bloor Street, we passed by the trio of construction sites at Varsity Stadium, the Royal Conservatory and the ROM, and wandered down Philosopher’s Walk past the Conservatory and the U of T music building, there to check out the second lamppost bass installed by Richard Bishop (who ran across my post about his earlier installation, the Kensington Bass, and was kind enough to alert me to the arrival of its new sibling). A bit tough to play, but fun! I’ll have to come by with my contact microphone and an amp or recorder sometime.

Speaking of the urban landscape, city council is now seeking proposals to provide street furniture citywide. One side effect of this is that the Eucan “monster bin” project (see left) is dead. Good thing too - but we’d better keep an eye on the proceedings and let councillors know we want ads kept under control.

There’s also one really maddening bit: those three-sided “ad pillars” that AstralMedia have installed in parks are exempt from all this. They’re just off the sidewalk, and therefore within the jurisdiction of Parks and Rec, not Urban Planning.

More about this via Spacing Wire. Also, a Star article by Christopher Hume.

Also, on Friday, Newmindspace (instigators of Bubble Battles, subway and streetcar parties, and other revelry) are having a big mobile party they’re calling Flight Of Fancy, somewhere close to downtown. Route to be annouced via email. I’m gonna be there, hopefully playing some music!

Saturday 6 May 2006

another musical day

On the way to meet up with my SO and a friend in Kensington, I lost my way and ran across the great Bob Snider, who was busking on Baldwin St. I snagged a copy of his CD, and he asked if there was any kind of song I wanted to hear.

On the subway I’d been revamping my plans for a series of podcast radio plays set in a mysterious, Kensington-like neighbourhood. “Anything about the neighbourhood, or the city?” I said.

“I got one,” he said, and launched into “The Street Takes You In”, a haunting, cautionary song about, well, the street. And then he sang one he’d recently completed, which I understand is called “Plum” — an altogether happier tune. (“Let’s invent a game for two where I play me and you play you / and the object is to figure out what all the rules are for. / Pin the tail on the monkey in the middle / Top Banana, second fiddle. / Loser is the one caught keeping score.”) Both wonderful. :D

Also, I got my copy of the latest Spacing magazine in the mail… looks awesome (and it’s part of the reason I was thinking about the radio plays).

So many things to think about lately. I want to take piano lessons and set up a decent little home studio, and there’s all those other musical projects I want to tackle too. So impatient.

Oh, and Christopher Eccleston may be the next Number Six. O.o (I can see it now. Number Two, secretly a disgruntled Doctor Who fan, demanding “Why did you resign?”)

Tuesday 25 April 2006

RIP

Dan Gibson, nature sound recordist. He actually died over a month ago, but I hadn’t heard until now. When I was a kid, we had the very first Solitudes LP, back before his son talked him into adding music (a smart commercial move, I’ll grant you, but no thanks - I’d rather have just the sounds).

Jane Jacobs, author and champion of neighbourhoods and cities as vital entities. Her book The Death and Life Of Great American Cities spurred me to study urban planning (I discovered it, in turn, through Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn). (via Spacing Wire)

Friday 13 January 2006

get a grip, Glenn

Back on election day, 2003, I was delighted when Glenn De Baeremaeker won a seat on Toronto city council. An environmentalist who campaigned to save the Rouge Valley and the Oak Ridges Moraine, representing the heart of Scarborough — wonderful! Bit of a grandstander, but hey, that’s not always a bad thing.

It wasn’t quite so wondrous when I learned he’d voted against youth events being held at Scarborough City Centre after some kids had a bit of a scuffle there. But whatever. He was still on the right side most of the time. Right?

And then he became champion of the godawful ‘megabins’ - essentially six foot high billboards with a garbage and recycling bin squeezed awkwardly between them. Was he just so wowed by the fact that it had a slot for bottles and cans that he overlooked how annoying and poorly designed they are? Was there money involved, or what the heck?

Well, if we’re to believe the Spacing Wire kids, this latest news is one more nail in the coffin as far as I’m concerned. The man really really needs to be turfed this fall. I’d heard him referred to as the “class clown” before, but good flippin’ god. O.o

But I dunno. Maybe we do need a clown or two. Where would we be without Rob Ford to make fun of?

I also picked up a copy of the new book uTOpia: Towards a New Toronto, and the new Fembots CD, The City... and I can’t help but notice a certain similarity between their cover art (here and here), though they’re done using totally different techniques. I’m enjoying them both.

Saturday 1 October 2005

Library

Yesterday I popped by the Royal Ontario Museum to visit the library and photocopy a few articles for an out-of-town friend. I’d never been to their library, so it was a neat adventure. Little did I know that in the month since I was last there, they’d moved the main entrance around the side of the building to the group entrance (soon to be the “back” of the building, once the renovations are complete).

Inside, I signed in and since there was no direct route to the library, what with the renovations, I had to wait a bit for someone to escort me through the labyrinthine back corridors to the library, where a very nice lady (who looked startling like an Indian version of my mother) fetched the required books.

One of them was a seventy-year-old German bibliography and list of hominid fossils, with a terrifyingly brittle cover bearing the title Fossilium catalogus. I: Animalia — Editus a W. Quenstedt. I couldn’t find the proper pages at first, and it turned out that the pages hadn’t been cut apart. “You must be the first person to read this book,” the librarian remarked as she went to fetch the Page Cutting Knife.

Once I’d copied the articles, it was back to the outside world, which seemed to be an even longer way, including going up a flight of stairs and then down in an elevator. Very mysterious. Must remember this all for future writings.

Tuesday 30 August 2005

Info avalanche

I’m discovering far too many cool blogs to keep up with. RSS doesn’t help - it just seems to make it all even more overwhelming. When will I ever have time to read all this stuff?

WorldChanging is an environmental blog with a futurist stripe.

We’re up against some heavy, heavy challenges, and it’s understandable that some people feel paralyzed by despair (heaven knows I get that way sometimes) or want to turn back the clock to some idealized vision of the past. But those aren’t terribly useful. If we’re going to make it through all this while saving something of this planet, it’s going to take effort on every front. WorldChanging’s got reports on ecosystems and innovations from around the world, and occasionally a personal piece or two, like A Love Note To New Orleans.

(I’ll have to jot down more of my thoughts on the environment some time.)

The Spacing Wire is from the people who bring us the excellent Spacing magazine - thoughts on public space, urban living and Toronto.

The Toronto Psychogeography Society blog is along similar lines (and shares some contributors, such as Matt Blackett). It’s more about the experience of the city; the Spacing Wire is more about issues.

CBC Unplugged has news and podcasts from the locked-out employees of the CBC, nationwide. I haven’t had a functioning TV or radio in quite a while, but when I did, I listened to the CBC almost exclusively. Now employees in several cities are turning to the web as an outlet.

The first English-language community radio station in Canada was formed by idealistic, disgruntled volunteers from Radio Waterloo, the University of Waterloo’s cable station, after RW was closed down by the student federation and reluctantly re-opened with a quarter of its original budget. I’m not expecting massive revolution at the CBC - it’s not going away - but still… this could get interesting.