Category: City Life

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City Life

Fading Street Art: The Times They Are A Changin

Old graffiti painted on paper that is peeling off a rotten sheet of plywood.
The Times They Are A Changin, Dupont/Christie, Toronto

This concludes a month of images curated on the theme of “things which were but are no more.” My final image captures a rotten sheet of plywood that covers the window of a decrepit building, former home of a hair salon near the southeast corner of Toronto’s Christie/Dupont intersection. Someone spray painted bubble letters on the plywood and then someone else (or maybe the same person) added words inside one of the letters: “The Times They Are A Changin.”

It’s the title of Bob Dylan’s song released in 1964 on his album of the same name, a call to hippies to resist the oppressive forces of the day, McCarthyism, Jim Crow, the police action in Vietnam. On this sheet of plywood, someone has invoked those times to resist the oppressive forces of today. But the times aren’t really a changin, are they? The fact that people say this over and over again demonstrates how little the times are a changin. To bastardize lyrics by Dylan’s son, Jakob, the only thing that’s changed is that things are exactly the way they used to be.

Things have taken a turn to the pernicious. In 1964, Bob Dylan didn’t have to name the forces of evil at work in his world. He sang his song and everyone in the audience knew exactly what he was singing about. But things have gotten confused since then. As someone who feels politically aligned with the hippies of Bob Dylan’s world, I look at my current world and name certain things: the oil and gas industries, consumption beyond the planet’s limits, accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few at the expense of the many. I want to sing “the times are a changin” but the world doesn’t agree with me.

Other’s challenge my perception of reality. They tell me the forces I name as forces of oppression aren’t even real. Climate change isn’t real. Collectively, we’ve never been better off than we are right now. Soon I begin to doubt myself. In another time, I might have called this gaslighting. But today’s forces of oppression take it one further and tell me their gaslighting is really gaslighting at all; it’s just a description of the way things are. In fact I’m gaslighting them.

For the sake of clarity: I’m not gaslighting these people even though they say I am. The purpose of gaslighting is to destabilize a person’s basic beliefs about the state of the world by injecting profound uncertainty into their thoughts. These people—the denialists, the conspiracists, the ideologues—haven’t enough uncertainty amongst them to fill a thimble.

Which takes me to my final observation: maybe Bob Dylan’s call for change is misdirected. The times are never a changin, or if they are, it has little to do with human agency. The only change we can ever effect is the change we inject into our personal thinking. And the only way that happens is if we cultivate mental habits like curiosity, and if we revel in the pleasure of uncertainty. The problem today with the people we disagree with is not that we disagree with them, but that we have all turned to stone.

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City Life

Fuck Marie Kondo

A ragged comfy chair sits outdoors on gravel with a light dusting of snow. In the background is a wall covered in graffiti.
Chair under the Glen Road Bridge, Toronto

You know what gives me joy? Living in the midst of crap scattered everywhere. That’s what gives me joy.

I revel in creative chaos. There is a delicious pleasure in disorganization. It’s impossible to accomplish anything of substance without the nourishment of a messy desk.

Didn’t life begin in chaos? An ocean swirling with amino acids? The random collision of molecules energized by solar flares and lightning strikes? Life from chaos. The generative impulse.

The declutter movement aims for the opposite of creativity. Spare spaces. Clean lines. Organized closets. To me, these words suggest sterility. They suggest the rooms where imagination goes to die.

I see the eyebrows rise. After all, to speak harshly about the patron saint of orderly shoe racks verges on heresy. What am I? Some kind of consumerist who wants to swim in an accumulation of stuff?

Quite the opposite, I would argue. What kind of a sick mind would tell us we should only keep the things that bring us joy? Isn’t that the very essence of consumerism? To find joy in stuff?

In fact, environmentalists tell us that the declutter movement brings to light the very worst of our consumerist habits. When we get rid of our stuff, we transfer almost all of it to landfill sites. It would be better to repair it. Or repurpose it. Or find other people who can use it. But most declutterers never do these things. They just want to get rid of their stuff. And as quickly as possible.

For my part, I will treat my accumulated stuff as if it were a primordial soup. A place to birth creative ideas. Poems. Stories. Art projects.

Fuck Marie Kondo.

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City Life

Green Umbrella

An upended green umbrella lies on the damp path beside Rosedale Valley Road while in the distance, obscured by fog, a bridge spans the valley.
Foggy morning in Rosedale Valley, Toronto

When I was a child, I was afraid of umbrellas because, viewed in a certain way, with their eight ribbed supports, they reminded me of spiders. Why would I want to hold a spider over my head? What if the umbrella collapsed and all the spider legs folded over my face? I imagined myself in the clutches of a malicious umbrella, waving my hands over my head, unable to see, running into the street and mowed down by a passing garbage truck. Long before the movie, Alien, there was my imagination breathing life into all the terrors of the modern world.

I once believed that my passage into adulthood would relieve me of my childhood terrors. My imagination would settle itself: a thing is just a thing, and not invested with terrors beyond itself. In a sense, that’s true. I’ve never once been attacked by a malicious umbrella and so my childhood fears have subsided.

However, my adult life is not without fears all its own. And like my childhood fears, my adult fears arise from an overactive imagination. I see a broken and discarded umbrella splayed on the ground while a garbage truck trundles past, and I imagine all the umbrellas that have ever lived since the invention of the umbrella. Billions upon billions of them heaped in a pile of dead umbrellas. Umbrella mountain.

I imagine the flimsy frames of unreclaimed metal, the plastic latches, the nylon fabric fading in the sunlight. In time, the elements work away at the monstrous pile of waste, dissolving bits of the metal, breaking the nylon fabric into microplastics, all of it washing toxic into the water table and borne from there into the hydrologic cycle. In a way, this is a horror far worse than anything springing from my childhood imagination. This is more like FrankenUmbrella: a billion billion arachnid creatures flip over onto their spindly legs and scuttle down from their high mountain on a long march against their creators.

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City Life

Stone Angel

Stone angel in Toronto's Mount Pleasant Cemetery stands with right hand raised, fingers broken, with condominium balconies in the background.
Angel in Mount Pleasant Cemetery, Toronto

It’s dead on a Friday afternoon in the city. After the May long weekend, all the Gen-Xers head up north to open the cottages they’ve inherited from parents now laid out in Mount Pleasant Cemetery. The Millennial kids don’t go with; they can’t imagine a worse way to spend a weekend than stuck on a gravel cul de sac, no dock in the lake, water too cold for swimming, and the air swarming with black flies. It’s better being stuck bored in town where at least they can make a run to Tokyo Smoke.

After a couple joints, they remember the angel standing guard over granddad’s grave. They call a couple buddies from school, the ones who haven’t turned domestic yet, and invite them over to do some wingsuit base jumping from their 50th floor balcony. A thousand years ago, we could only imagine what it must be like to wheel around the heavens, cherubim and seraphim sailing to glory on a wing. Now look at us.

Most of the friends say they’re busy, but at least one of the friends has the guts to offer the excuse all the others are thinking: you’re a lunatic. And maybe that’s true. But the divide between lunacy and holiness is paper thin. They used to say that someone whose behaviour was a bit off was “touched” as if to suggest that they’d been touched by the holy spirit. Because authorities weren’t confident they could tell which side of the divide a person stood on, they conflated the two sides and called the person a holy fool.

Years ago, when it was still fun to go to the cottage, they’d stand on the dock, toes curled around the rough edges of the pressure treated wood, arms pulled back in preparation for the leap. Always, there was a pause. Time hanging still in the summer air. They could feel the splash of the cold water even before it struck the skin. They could sense the approach of the dark nothing that would enfold them as they sank below the surface.

That leap was a perfect moment, poised in flight, held between sky and water, memory and oblivion. Only a couple friends come over, and then, only to watch. Everyone else is busy adulting. Everyone else has already sunk like a stone and the water grows dark overhead.

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City Life

Ghosts in the Landscape

Long pinhole exposure of a Go Train whizzing over the Don River on its evening run.
Evening commute up the Don Valley north of Pottery Road

I set up my tripod and frame a shot of railway tracks across the Don River. I use a 50 mm lens, then swap it out for a pinhole attachment that is roughly the equivalent of a 50 mm lens. I say roughly equivalent because pinhole lenses aren’t quite as precise as modern lenses. Technically, they aren’t even lenses. They’re apertures. To bastardize Leonard Cohen, they’re how the light gets in. But the light gets in unfocused so the images are blurred. And since so little light gets in (which is why I have to use a regular lens to set up the shot), the shutter has to stay open longer. How long is a matter of guesswork. In this case, I leave the shutter open for 135 seconds, which means that the train passing through my frame comes and goes all in one exposure. It leaves its traces in the blurred lines of the lights rushing past.

A commuter train like this carries how many people? 1000? 2000? There they are, rushing home after a long day at work, rumbling up the Don Valley to points north of the city. If I made this shot with a regular lens, you might be able to see faces gazing out of the train’s windows. Even then, because it’s dark and because the train is moving fast, the faces would appear blurred, almost ghostly. But with the pinhole lens, we can’t see the faces; the best we can do is infer their presence from the blurred lines where we would expect to see faces.

Whether or not we see ghosts in our frame depends very much on the shutter speed we use. Something analogous can be said when we gaze down a city street. A cursory glance is like a modern lens: we freeze the scene in an instant and have no sense of time passing. But a long hard look that engages the imagination and invokes deep time functions more like a pinhole lens and reveals how the street is inhabited by ghosts.

I offer the major intersection closest to my home as an example of how that works: Sherbourne and Bloor in Toronto. Today, the intersection is a hotbed of construction as condominium towers go up one after another. It’s hard to see the ghosts for all the concrete. But the writer, Hugh Hood, tells how, when he was a boy, Hooper’s Pharmacy stood on the southwest corner where we now have a Tim Horton’s. He remembers how a man spoke in a friendly way to the pharmacist, then walked onto the Sherbourne Street bridge and jumped to his death.

Long before that, from 1839 until the 1860s, a military blockhouse stood in the middle of the present-day intersection. It could accommodate 44 soldiers and was put there in response to the rebellion led by William Lyon Mackenzie. Looking even further back in time, before the first white settlers, we can imagine how Indigenous people used Rosedale Valley for transport, passing immediately beneath the site of the future blockhouse. And looking further still, we can see how melt waters from receding glaciers cut the deep ravine that would later become Rosedale Valley.

What we see depends entirely on how long we leave the shutter open.

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City Life

The Human Scale

A tiny construction worker stands in front of a large upright slab of concrete as the last of a building is being demolished.

There’s a story—I can’t remember where I heard it and I have no idea if it’s true—about loggers in the late 1800’s cutting down trees in an old growth forest, maybe in California or the interior of British Columbia. They fastened guy wires to the top of an enormous tree, at least a couple hundred feet high with a trunk of such girth that it took a dozen loggers holding hands to circumvent its girthness, and they used block and tackle rigging to pull down the tree.

Once the tree was laid out on the ground, the loggers took up their enormous saws and set to work cutting it up, starting at the trunk. It took all morning to make a single cut, but when they were done, they had freed the tree from its upended root ball. Time for lunch. The loggers gathered in the shade of the root ball, made themselves a little fire for their tea, pulled out their sandwiches or whatever it is that late 19th century loggers ate for lunch, stretched out their legs, settled in for a short snooze. Ah!

The problem with pulling down a tree is that half the roots are still in the ground, bent at a 90º angle, but not broken. Those roots are under enormous pressure, but held in place by the weight of the tree. When the loggers cut the tree at the trunk, there wasn’t much left to hold the roots in place. Without warning, the roots snapped back to their original position, flipping the root ball flush with the ground and effectively swallowing all the loggers underneath it. Lunch. An entire logging crew vanished beneath an enormous redwood root ball.

When I heard this story, I think the teller intended it as an environmental parable, a case of tree revenge. The moral of the story was that, ultimately, we must pay for the ravages we inflict on the natural world. Something like that. But I was a kid at the time and didn’t care for parables with environmental messages. I evaluated all stories by their gross factor. By that measure, this was a good story. Almost as good as a dead baby joke.

Logging crew, Camp 3, Waite Mill and Timber Company, ca 1920
Logging crew, Camp 3, Waite Mill and Timber Company, ca 1920

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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City Life

Psychic Readings: What Does Your Future Hold?

Man walking along sidewalk gazes back at sign advertising psychic readings.
What Does Your Future Hold? Sign on Yonge Street south of Bloor, Toronto

NASA has released a photograph of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* which spins at the centre of our galaxy. With a mass of only 4.3 million suns, it is relatively small for a supermassive black hole, especially when you consider that the black hole at the centre of the galaxy M87 has a mass of 6 billion suns. Strictly speaking, the photograph doesn’t show us the black hole since a black hole captures all information and releases nothing back to observers outside it; more properly, it’s a photograph of illuminated gas surrounding the black hole.

Whenever I read news stories like this, it sends my mind reeling, partly speculation, partly existential musing. Thankfully, neither of these tendencies need be limited by the fact that I know absolutely nothing about theoretical physics. In fact, my general ignorance probably makes the speculation more fun and free-wheeling.

What I do know is that the technical term for a black hole is singularity. Extreme gravity pulls matter to a single point in spacetime. Because we’re talking about spacetime and not just space, the extreme gravity also affects the flow of time. Observed from outside, as something approaches the singularity’s event horizon, time appears to slow. Beyond the event horizon (the boundary beyond which no information returns to outside observers), it’s impossible to say how time flows within the singularity. This is where speculation comes into play. Maybe time stops. Maybe time flows backwards. Maybe time flows randomly. Maybe we get time soup.

Another speculation that occurs to me: maybe we already know what happens inside a black hole because, in effect, that’s what our universe is. Like a black hole, the universe has a limit beyond which no information can escape. It’s limits appear to us dark and empty, not because there’s nothing there, but because whatever is there is unknowable. And if our universe is like a black hole, then maybe the flow of time in our universe is likewise fluid.

In his book, A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking wonders why time appears to move in only one direction. There doesn’t appear to be a reason why time can’t move backwards. An incidental consequence of Hawking’s observation is that the physical laws of our universe offer no reason why psychics shouldn’t be able to do what they claim they can do. This suggests a different kind of singularity: a convergence between theoretical physics and theoretical psychics.

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City Life

Disposable People

Torn missing person poster on a utility pole
Torn missing person poster on a utility pole

It’s 10 years since we moved from Toronto’s suburbs to the downtown core and while, for the most part, we are glad for the change in lifestyle, one thing I find disturbing is the endless succession of posters pleading for help to find missing people. Most of the stories are tragic. One of the first posters I saw when we settled downtown turned out to be a victim of serial killer Bruce McArthur. The appearance of Covid-19 has brought no abatement in this epidemic of missing people.

I don’t like to confess such a thing, but I note a shift in my personal attitude to these posters. I’ve grown inured to their presence. It reminds me of the fire and police sirens that blare at all hours of the night. After years of exposure to them, I’ve grown used to the sound and often don’t even notice anymore.

But I think the issue runs deeper than that. It’s not simply a matter of growing so accustomed to something that we cease to notice it anymore; it’s also a function of a broader cultural trend. People have becomes units of labour, fungible cogs in the neoliberal machine. Marx and Engels had documented 170 years ago how a nascent industrialization was changing the relationship of capital and labour. Their problem was that they suffered from a failure of imagination. Today, their jaws would hit the floor if they learned about cryptocurrency and the gig economy. And it would astonish them to witness the manipulations we apply to persuade people that today’s forms of work belong to reasonable social arrangements.

People do express outrage. For example, Twitter exploded when somebody leaked a supreme court opinion on abortion that cites with approval a CDC report that addresses the “domestic supply of infants.” It suggests that maternity wards are production lines in a factory. But the outrage dissipates because the most active Twitter accounts are managed by gig peons. Nobody pays them enough to sustain their outrage.

Like our bottled of water, like our masks and hair clips, like our myriad plastic widgets, our people are disposable.

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City Life

Life’s Too Short to Worry about Shifting Usages

Adulterated Shop Sign on Queen Street West, Toronto
Adulterated Shop Sign on Queen Street West, Toronto

My post yesterday featured a blank-eyed Roman bust and dwelt upon the old cliché: the eyes are the windows to the soul. I wanted to know where the saying comes from and, after a cursory search online, I landed on a web site called phrases.org.uk. I have no idea if it’s a credible site and it doesn’t really matter. For my purposes, what does matter is that it offers an interesting illustration about the malleable nature of word usages.

The web site suggests that an early source for the idea that the eyes reflect a person’s soul is the Roman writer, Cicero, who was a contemporary of Julius Caesar. As you might expect, Cicero’s native language was Latin. But when the web site tells us this, it substitutes an asterisk for the letter “a” and gives us L*tin instead. Presumably the web site does this so that search engines don’t flag it as somehow derogatory towards a group of people. Not the group of people who lived 2,000 years ago and spoke the Latin language. Another group of people still alive today.

I think it’s reasonable to say that the word “Latin” accurately describes a dead language which people formerly spoke on what is now the Italian peninsula. “Latin” is not a word English people made up and imposed on another people; it is a word its native speakers applied to describe their own language long before English emerged as a distinctive language. However, as context changes, we find other meanings grafted onto the word “Latin” and we feel compelled to make adjustments to our usage.

Shifts in meaning happen all the time but most go unnoticed except by lexicographers. The shifts that attract our attention are the ones that do harm. The “N” word, for example, with its Latin etymology tying it to the Roman word for “black”, is now impossible to utter without racist associations. People twist themselves into knots over its appearance in literature and pop culture. Think Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

In the spirit of doing unto others as I would have others do unto me, I’m inclined to give Mark Twain a pass. He had no way to anticipate how the prevailing culture would overtake the “N” word. It’s important, too, to note that his usage appeared in a context that aimed to present a Black man as a flesh and blood character who warranted the reader’s empathy. I would hope for the same consideration in my own writing. I have no way to anticipate how context may overtake my own usages and end up casting a shadow across my benign intentions.

The concern nowadays is that humans no longer assess our usages. Bots on social media sites identify offending words and suddenly we find ourselves shadowbanned or our accounts temporarily suspended. Despite all the techno-optimism wafting through the air these days, there is no such thing as an algorithmic solution to the problem of context. The bots run roughshod over everything, so we protect ourselves in advance by inserting asterisks, dashes and numbers. What the f*ck? Oh my g-d! Quentin is such a sh1th3ad.

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City Life

To the Museum or Bust!

A marble bust sits in a museum gallery while a young woman passes in the background.

Further to yesterday’s museum post, I note that museum exhibits serve as an obvious reminder about the fleeting nature of life. We who are gaze at those who were but are no more. Dinosaur fossils. Mummified remains. Roman busts.

Whenever I visit the local museum, the Royal Ontario Museum, I pay a visit to the gallery of classical busts. I like to pretend I’m schmoozing with people from the past. Afternoon drinks with old (really old) friends. Selfies to post on the ancient Roman social media site, VoltusLiber. Unfortunately, after a few drinks, their eyes start to glaze over.

Sculptors have always had difficulty with the eyes. They look blank and eerie. In fact, Roman sculptors working in marble had no trouble at all with eyes because they painted them in. They had no scruples about painting their work to make it as lifelike as possible. But in the intervening years, the elements have worn away the paint. It was the sculptors who came later—Renaissance and Neo-Classical artists—who complained about the eyes because it never occurred to them that classical artists had painted their marble. Even where they did suspect that their predecessors were more relaxed, conventions had become so entrenched that later artists couldn’t persuade their patrons to try new things. And so blank and eerie eyes gaze back at us across the centuries.

To my way of thinking, blank and eerie eyes may be more realistic than carefully painted irises and pupils. They say eyes are the window of the soul. It’s impossible to say who the first “they” is, but people have been saying this since at least the days of Cicero who, ironically, is the subject of many blank-eyed sculptures. The problem is that no matter how precisely we represent a person’s eyes, the sense of an essential personality conveyed by that representation is illusory. Maybe our belief about eyes has something to do with empathy. Humans are keyed to feel something when they look into another’s eyes.

However, personal experience (and rational thought) contradict this belief. People with visual impairments give the lie to the “window to the soul” conceit. When I gaze into a person’s injured or unseeing eyes, their eyes tell me nothing about them as a whole person. Conversely, the fact that they cannot gaze into my eyes in no way hinders them from perceiving me as a whole person. Whatever mysterious alchemy constitutes the self does not depend on eyes. Similarly, the belief that we can learn something about ancient cultures by gazing into representations of ancient eyes is silly. In fact, ancient sculptors may have done us a service by leaving us with blank and eerie eyes; they force us to seek out more credible sources for our convictions about what our predecessors were like.

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City Life

Old Bones

Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum
Shadows of a dinosaur skeleton at the Royal Ontario Museum

There’s nothing quite like bones from the Late Cretaceous period to remind you that you’re going to be dead for a lot longer that you’re going to be alive. Compared to the millions of years you have ahead of you as a corpse, the handful of years you have as a living breathing creature pass in the blink of an eye. My wife and I didn’t set out with that in mind when we booked our tickets to a special dinosaur exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum, but it didn’t escape our thoughts as we observed how shadows of the ancient bones played across the floor and danced with our own footsteps.

I am a rational soul and tend not to tie myself up in anxious knots over the prospect of my own death. Age may have something to do with my willingness to entertain thoughts of death. Experience, too. A brush with death does tend to clarify one’s thinking. Then there are my vaguely Buddhist habits: for a time, I was a regular in a community that engaged in traditional Tibetan meditative practice (until surprise, surprise the leader died). Holding one’s own death in mind turns out to be a paradoxically liberating thing to do.

The deliberate contemplation of death is not unique to Tibetan Buddhist practice. I’m reminded of the Capuchin Crypt beneath the Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini where tiny chapels have been formed from the bones of 3,700 monks. The purpose of the chapels is to remind worshipers that their time on earth is fleeting. A plaque declares: “What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be…” As an aside, I can’t help but hear these words in the voice of Yoda.

Playing on the walls of the museum exhibit were animated videos featuring 3D dinosaurs. It seems that digital animation is paleontology’s answer to breathing life into Ezekial’s dry bones. The dinosaurs may be long dead but, like gods, we can bring them back to life. We watched to the end of a video then read the credits scrolling down the wall. Noting the name of the production company, we wondered why it sounded familiar, then realized that our son had just that week gotten a job working for the production company. It creates a lot of children’s programming, including a show about dinosaurs. It hired our son to do a job that didn’t exist even 10 years ago.

Children hold an ambivalent place in conversations about mortality. On the one hand, they are a source of hope insofar as they offer us an extension, both imaginatively and genetically, into the future. On the other hand, their youth reminds us of the very thing that is slipping away from us. Sometimes, they go out of their way to remind us that we are becoming superfluous. Never is our obsolescence so apparent as when they roll their eyes while explaining to us for the umpteenth time how the smart TV works. Now I understand how my parents felt and I hope they forgive me the impatience I showed while trying to set up their VCR.

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City Life

Red Dress Project

A red dress hangs from tree in Philosopher's Walk, Taddle Creek, University of Toronto Campus
Red dress hangs from tree in Philosopher’s Walk, Taddle Creek, University of Toronto Campus

Five years ago, in 2017, the University of Toronto’s Women & Gender Studies program invited artist, Jaime Black, to bring her REDress installation to the U. of T. campus. She hung red dresses from trees along the path of Philosopher’s Walk (Taddle Creek) where they were exposed to the early spring weather. The purpose of the installation was to draw attention the staggering loss of life associated with missing and murdered Indigenous woman.

As with everything in the city, the installation had its moment in the sun, and then it was gone. So much clamours for our notice, and we have such short attention spans, and our memories fade as fast as we can turn the channel. Then, of course, there’s Covid. Covid has sucked our attention from everything else until we’re sick of it. All we want is to be left alone.

Like the bodies themselves, the dresses vanish. As do their memories. Historically, Indigenous women have sat at the bottom of every social hierarchy, and that has invited others—mostly notably white men—to treat them as disposable. I can’t say that a shift to a late capitalist consumerist society offers us the finest model to REDress this wrong. When we have grown used to talking about a gig economy where people are no longer reduced even to units of labour, but to subslivers of time/labour, and when the only line advertising blurs is the line between exploitation and indoctrination, and when we smile at quaint notions of distributive justice and say they properly belong in a museum, it may not be so unreasonable to suggest that any progress for MMIW isn’t going to happen without dismantling the existing system.

I get tired of the same conversations that goes nowhere. And I get tired of the same political promises that produce no concrete action. I can’t begin to imagine what it must be like for those who have lost someone they love.

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City Life

The Breitling Bombshell

Blonde bombshell sits on a bomb while a cleaning lady looks on.
Blonde bombshell sits on a bomb while a cleaning lady looks on.

It isn’t always the case that we should mourn the disappearance of things. Some things that disappear were best gone in the first place. Sometimes things best gone have stayed in plain view for so long that we’ve come to view them as part of the landscape, as fixed in place as a mountain. It’s strange, then, when they disappear and we don’t even notice they’re missing.

One of those things is the Breitling Bombshell. To adapt a phrase from T. S. Eliot, I might describe the Breitling Bombshell as an objective correlative, the physical manifestation of a broader—and perhaps mostly unconscious—cultural trend. She has an emotional heft to her that means so much more than just a girl in a skimpy red dress straddling a bomb. For the boys in the service, she was hope and freedom, and she presaged the sexual hope and freedom of the 60’s that arrived courtesy of second wave feminism and the birth control pill.

One evening late in 2015, I stand by the window of Breitling’s store on Bloor Street long after closing. A cleaning lady appears with her duster, a little stooped as she works her way around the perky blonde. Seventy years ago, Breitling provided the fly boys with precision timepieces so they could coordinate their flying missions, and it adopted, as part of its branding, the fly boy practice of painting pinups on the noses and the sides of their machines. Now, most of those fly boys are gone. And so is the world and way of life they thought they were defending. This is a new world now, one in which timepieces no longer serve a practical function when an iPhone tied to an atomic clock is more accurate; instead, their chief function is to declare the wealth of the wearer. Meanwhile, the vendors rely on wage labour that creeps out after dark like the Morlocks in H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.

After making this photo, I get home and post it along with my usual commentary. Call it cultural criticism if you like. A few months later, they’ve removed the bombshell. A cursory search on YouTube suggests they’ve taken down all their classic nose-art nostalgic commercial spots featuring fly boys with wrist watches. Maybe you remember them; they doubled as breast augmentation ads. I find it highly unlikely that anybody at Breitling saw, much less heeded, my post. But I do think there’s something in the air, something Breitling understood and acted on.

Lately, on social media, a certain subgroup of white men has been going on about how it is being discriminated against by others who want their fair share too. They say the white male gaze is being threatened. I hate to be the bearer of bad news: but when major corporations have, for years now, been treating the white male gaze as over, it’s time to accept it as a certainty.

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City Life

When a Tree Falls in the Forest

Black and white photograph of two large trees whose roots have been exposed by significant erosion.
Two Trees in Yellow Creek Ravine, Toronto

I feel fortunate to live in a city whose chief geographical feature is a network of ravines courtesy of melt water from the last ice age. The ravines interrupt Toronto’s urban geography with trails and green space. There is a significant canopy that improves air quality and moderates temperature and, most importantly during the pandemic, offers forested areas where people can retreat and decompress.

Throughout the pandemic, I have seen posts about the benefits of a walk in the woods to emotional and mental health. For example, during our first pandemic summer, the UK’s Woodland Trust posted a piece titled “Why walking in woods is good for you.” A year later, Medium.com offered an article about the Japanese practice of forest bathing. But before contemporary declarations about the benefits of walking in the woods, we had William Wordsworth, an inveterate walker who was forever rhapsodizing about the joys of communing with nature, as we see in this snippet from “Sweet Was the Walk”:

Musing, the lone spot with my soul agrees,
Quiet and dark; for through the thick wove trees
Scarce peeps the curious star till solemn gleams
The clouded moon, and calls me forth to stray
Thro’ tall, green, silent woods and ruins grey.

For a number of years now, I have been taking regular walks through a nearby ravine where Yellow Creek flows from the northwest and drains into the Don River. The ravine passes under the St. Clair Avenue bridge through what is poetically called the Vale of Avoca which served as the opening scene for Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: a car careens off the bridge and into the river below.

Over time, I have noticed a shift in my emotional state. This is not merely a place I pass through on my regular walks. It doesn’t serve a merely utilitarian purpose as an alternative to the treadmill in my local gym. Instead, I find myself developing a relationship to the place, with feelings of attachment and fondness. In particular, I have discovered that I have developed feelings of attachment for a number of the trees here.

Walking north where the trail begins a long rise out of the Vale of Avoca, there were two trees which I used to visit each time I passed. I liked to go down to the shallow water and pick my way over the rocks that formed a stepping-stone path. There, I would set up my tripod and photograph the trees or simply stand and pay my respects. They were two mature maples, intertwined roots exposed where erosion had swept away most of the supporting soil. They leaned away from each other, like a pair of dancers, precarious but somehow holding their position.

Inevitably, one of the trees toppled. It happened last April. I came upon the fallen tree during a snow storm. A week later, city crews had come with their chain saws and chopped it up.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I mourned the tree, but I was struck by a feeling of sadness for its loss. I had taken from it a sense of constancy, and then it was gone. The destabilizing effect of the pandemic has been a challenge and, as much as possible, I want the external circumstances of my world to remain untouched. The tree betrayed me. How could it fall like that?

The remaining tree stands alone now. I visit it often, but I can tell by the exposed roots that its turn is coming soon.

Winter scene of a snow-covered tree trunk lying across a stream.
Snow on Fallen Tree, Yellow Creek, Toronto
Categories
City Life

Empty Parking Lot in Downtown Toronto

A plastic bag blows across a dusty gravel parking lot while in the background is a graffiti mural on a wall.
Plastic bag blows past mural southeast of the Church/Dundas intersection, Toronto

Maybe you remember the scene from the 1999 film, American Beauty, the scene where the boy next door, Ricky Fitts (Wes Bentley), videos a plastic bag as a breeze buffets it no place in particular. Ricky Fitts is utterly transported by the beauty of the moment and in the background we hear Thomas Newman’s haunting “Any Other Name.”

Ricky intuits that the beauty of the moment is somehow related to the fact that it is fleeting. I have been reading the novellas and short stories of Thomas Mann where he poses questions about the relationship between beauty and decay. In a cruder form, Milan Kundera wonders if, in the absence of shit, beauty is nothing more than kitsch. The film, American Beauty, holds to a similar line; the passing moments we stitch together to make a life would come to nothing without the certainty of death.

A few years ago I found myself standing in an empty parking lot on the southeast corner of Dundas and Church Streets in Toronto staring at a scene chock full of ephemera and wondered if I hadn’t stumbled onto the set of an American Beauty sequel. A breeze kicked up the dirt and, with it, a plastic bag. The bag never got very far before the breeze changed and blew it in the opposite direction.

On the wall behind, a mural, itself a piece of ephemera. Etched on the wall, the outline of a building that had once stood where there was now a parking lot. Even the wall turned out to be a piece of ephemera. Shortly after I made this shot, a demolition company enclosed the lot with temporary fencing and tore everything to the ground. After that, a construction company took over, excavating and putting in footings to support a condominium tower.

Now, everything is gone and I can scarcely remember what stood there before.