Tag: Toronto

Categories
Street Photography

Bodily Autonomy

Two naked women walk down the middle of a busy street.
Walking Down Church Street, Toronto

As often happens, noisy news from the US drowns out what’s happening in my own back yard. With the May 2nd leak to Politico of Justice Alito’s draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, talk about abortion rights has formed a tsunami of toxic discourse that has washed over the border and threatens to sweep away Canada’s quieter conversational habits.

Then June arrives with Pride and I’m reminded that conversation in one sphere doesn’t happen in isolation, but leaks into other spheres. To the extent that abortion laws concern themselves with matters of bodily autonomy, their language and reasoning ends up contributing to conversations about sexuality, gender and identity, too. To what extent does the state have an interest in the bodies of its citizens? And how far can it go in asserting its interest? These are questions that we can ask in nearly every sphere of public engagement.

Taking a long view of history, we can be forgiven for thinking there is a general trend that favours bodily autonomy. We have shifted away from the view that treats the body as property. Feudalism and indentured servitude give way to natural rights theory. Humans have a transcendent quality that eludes bondage, or so goes the narrative. We abolish slavery. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in women which means that women are not subject to masculine authority. We acknowledge that the same rights inhere in people who express their sexuality differently. And so it goes.

Until it doesn’t.

I find it odd that the pro-life crowd lean to the libertarian end of the political spectrum. A rational person who enjoys coherence in their public conversation might expect a libertarian to favour bodily autonomy. I guess we shouldn’t expect coherence from people who call themselves pro-life while renewing their NRA memberships. As a famous American poet once said: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself. (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” It seems an incidental fact that the poet in question was also gay.

If we are to be consistent, we should also reinstate laws that criminalize suicide since those laws were premised on the view (from feudal times) that suicide is an offence against the state because the body exists by right of the state. We abolished such laws because they were cruel. That was the same motivation for the abolition of abortion laws. But these days people seem inured to cruelty. For the sake of consistency, maybe we should abolished compassion altogether and be done with it.

Categories
Street Photography

People Not Doing Things

A man offers a pamphlet to a passer-by who ignores him completely.
Pamphleting in Dundas Square, Toronto

There is a kind of street photograph that I try to avoid at all costs. It’s the “catch whatever’s walking down the sidewalk” photograph. People being people. People going to work. People going home from work. People waiting for the light to change. People walking at night. People walking in the morning. People walking in dull light. People walking in bright light.

Yawn.

I prefer to capture people engaged in interactions either with other people or with their environment. People kissing people. People yelling at people. People avoiding puddles. People protesting things that make them angry. People spray painting messages on walls.

In the first case, I could photograph a cardboard cutout on the sidewalk and you wouldn’t be able to say for certain whether it was a flesh-and-blood person or a poster from the print shop. In the second case, my photograph would capture a dramatic encounter impossible to replicate no matter how many times I revisited the scene.

However, every rule has its exceptions, as does the rule about photographing people only when they’re engaged in interactions. In today’s photograph, a man offers a pamphlet to a passing woman who emphatically ignores him. This documents a deliberate refusal to engage.

In a way, this encounter typifies all contemporary public discourse. Never have so many people had so much to say. And, thanks to universal literacy and social media, never have so many people had the means to disseminate their messages. At the same time, never have so many people found themselves the unwilling audience for so many messages. Never have so many people felt so overwhelmed by the sheer noise of others exercising their constitutionally protected freedoms.

Increasingly, this dynamic produces an exchange in which one person does their utmost to promote a message while another person, the intended recipient, does their utmost to ignore that message. As Janis Joplin never said: “Freedom’s just another word for making a nuisance of yourself.”

Categories
City Life

Black & White Photos Promote a Feeling of Nostalgia

A man talking on a cell phone walks on wet pavement past the graffiti-covered entrance to the Hotel Waverly.
Hotel Waverly, Spadina just north of College, Toronto

The Hotel Waverly doesn’t exist anymore. Even when it did exist, the word “Hotel” was a generous gesture. It was more like a flophouse. I had thought I’d write a short story someday about a family of tourists on holiday from another country, Germany for instance. Not knowing any better, their travel agent books a suite for the family at the Hotel Waverly. They arrive from the airport to some shock. Hilarity ensues as they share with the locals the German words for such phrases as “crack whore” and “meth-head.” They return to their home in Bonn with bedbugs and STD’s for souvenirs. Alas, I was too slow and a condo developer had demolished the building before I could get around to banging out my story.

Like so much real estate in Toronto, if I blink, it vanishes. While I’m out and about, I make a point of capturing older buildings so that I have personal documentation of what things looked like at that precise instant. It’s astonishing how quickly visual memory fades. Without the help of my photographs, I would soon forget the old buildings, the ones people like to say had character when what they really mean is that they were gross, dirty, and decrepit.

It feels somehow natural to offer these photos as black and white conversions. Black and white signals we are glimpsing a world that no longer exists. Black and white encourages a certain feeling of generosity toward the subject matter, too. However disdainful we snooty middle class types may have felt for the Hotel Waverly in its day, we can forgive its sins now that we look back from a safe distance. Such character!

After a few more years have passed, and we find ourselves growing weary of the endless rows of glass and concrete towers, we note a surge in feelings of nostalgia. The Hotel Waverly was not just a place with character. We realize now that it was somehow integral to the city’s life and personality. Its demolition is a lot like what happens when a senior loses brain mass. Memory grows unstable, and then follows the gradual slide into municipal senescence.

Categories
Street Photography

Pushing back against Susan Sontag: Cozy in Plato’s Cave

Man in tie and overcoat walks past the west entrance of Toronto's Fairmont Royal York Hotel.
York St., West entrance of Fairmont Royal York Hotel

The first essay in Susan Sontag’s book, On Photography, is titled “In Plato’s Cave.” I love Sontag’s writing. It does what all good writing should do: it provokes me. It doesn’t try to be my friend; it tries to make me think.

The trope of Plato’s cave—firelit shadows dancing on a wall—suggests the basic mechanisms of photography itself. Instead of firelight, photographers rely on sunlight or flashes; instead of shadows, they capture light reflected from their subjects; and instead of a wall, they cast that light on film or image sensors. Sontag invokes the trope the way clergy tell a parable: it has a didactic purpose. Like the dancing shadows, the reflected light we have captured on our image sensors is a dull likeness of a fuller reality that lies just beyond our apprehension.

But there’s something about Sontag’s tone that troubles me. She expresses her views in extreme terms:

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.

I’m troubled by her use of the word all. She lays this down as an absolute law of universal application. She leaves no room for variations in personal experience.

At the end of the essay, she offers another grand pronouncement of universal application:

Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies; it is the most irresistible form of mental pollution.

First published in the New York Review of Books nearly 50 years ago, her words have taken on new life in the post Instagram age when people will produce 1.72 trillion photographs in 2022. How prescient! say her admirers. Well. Yes and no.

While I do agree that we are a society of image-junkies, our addiction goes beyond image-making. We are addicted to stimulation: binge-watching Netflix shows, road rage in GTA, Twitter hate-fests, Tik-Tok porn, live-streaming Ukraine gun battles. An image avalanche may well be the least part of our addiction.

What Sontag’s observations may miss 50 years after the fact is that, among the countless motivations for making images, many contemporary image-makers may use the process as a defence against over-stimulation. Like so many others, I answer Sontag’s invitation to turn around in Plato’s cave and stare at the world as it really is, only to find a world so saturated with stimuli that I find myself inundated.

My reality is a media-saturated reality. The only way I can cope with its overwhelm is to turn its tools on itself. I don’t make photographs to colonize the world, or to commodify it, or to fetishize it. I make photographs as a way to throw up a buffer between myself and a fuller reality. I tighten the frame and get rid of the colour to make the buffer more effective. Without that buffer, I would go crazy. I need Plato’s cave. I need the protection it gives me from a version of the real that isn’t interested in my well-being.

Categories
Street Portrait

How does The Amazing Spiderman go to the Bathroom?

Spiderman struggles to line up the eye holes of his mask

Does Spiderman have a fly? (I’m sorry. I couldn’t help myself.)

But seriously, if Spiderman struggles to find his eye holes, don’t you think he’d struggle even more to find his pee hole? I guess it depends on how desperate he is.

And what happens when Spiderman hits middle age? In the entire 60 year lifespan of the franchise, I don’t think Peter Parker has ever been more than 19 years old, complete with acne and cracking voice. But realistically, I don’t think the spider bite changed the fact that Peter Parker has a prostate gland which, like all prostate glands, enlarges as he ages and correspondingly reduces his storage capacity. By now, he probably needs to whizz every hour or so. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that his initials are PP.

Assuming Mr. PP does have a pee hole and has no trouble finding it, there’s still the problem of how to handle his equipment without getting sticky webbing all over it. Or maybe that’s not webbing.

Now you know why I never got that second interview for a job at Marvel Comics.

Categories
Street Photography

Plywood Canyon

Woman passes plywood-covered shop windows on Bloor Street. A diagonal shadow terminates at her feet.
Woman Passes Plywood-Covered Shop Windows, Bloor Street, Toronto

I can’t speak to the way things played out in other cities during the pandemic. All I have for a reference is what I observed in Toronto. Based solely on appearances, Toronto looks like any number of large American cities. That’s why, in films, it often serves as a body double for cities like New York and Chicago. Of course Toronto isn’t an American city. While the features that distinguish it are often subtle, those features are real all the same.

Early in the pandemic, when everybody went into lockdown, most retail enterprises had to shut down. Unless they could hold themselves out as an essential service, they had to shutter their doors and send their workers home. As soon as this happened, most of those stores covered their doors and windows with sheets of plywood. By this gesture, these stores said, in effect, that they expected an end-of-civilization scenario complete with marauding gangs and looting and molotov cocktails.

I can’t say for certain, but I get the feeling the plywood order came from head offices in large American cities where end-of-civilization scenarios are more probable. Especially in those cities where (lack of) urban planning has encouraged (white) flight to the suburbs, downtown cores are less stable in times of crisis. But Toronto is not one of those cities. Say what you will about all the condominiums sprouting like mushrooms, these projects guarantee that the city’s core enjoys a vibrant street life which in turn promotes a greater sense of social cohesion.

In addition, there is a certain alchemy in Toronto that’s harder to nail down. Call it local culture if you like. The fact is: people in Toronto are extraordinarily compliant. Relative to other large cities, rates of violent crime here are extraordinarily low. (The 2021 Safe Cities Index ranks Toronto as the 2nd safest city in the world). Vaccination rates in the city have been high (almost 90% for 2 doses). And most people have accepted public health protocols like masking and social distancing.

Despite the evidence, as soon as Doug Ford issued his first state-of-emergency order in March of 2020, retailers with windows fronting on major thoroughfares covered those windows with plywood. As I discovered on my pandemic photo walks, the only people out on the streets at that time were the homeless and marauding gangs of photographers. I feel badly for all the trees they wasted.

Categories
Street Photography

Black & White Directs the Sight: a Post-processing Mnemonic

A street preacher with white hair and beard speaks to a gathering of youth on a street corner. Sunlight glints off a cross he wears and it looks as if his chest is on fire.
Light reflects from cross worn by street preacher at Yonge & Dundas intersection, Toronto

I’m standing on the southwest corner of Yonge & Dundas with my eye on a street preacher. He’s older, with a shock of white hair and a Santa Claus beard that makes him look like a prophet the way people look prophetic in Cecil B. DeMille movies. He’s gathered around himself a group of young people who look on as he shares the good news. He sways a little and I shoot a burst as he’s swinging through the full range of his sway. Well that was interesting, I think, and I go on my way.

It isn’t until I get home in front of my computer screen that I realize one of my images captured a glint of sunlight reflected from the cross dangling against the prophet’s chest. If I believed in any of the man’s hoo-ha, I might take the glint of sunlight as a sign. It’s an alignment of sorts, like the alignment of Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Only in this case it’s the alignment of sun, flat surface of the cross, and my image sensor. Either way, it must mean something, no?

Then comes the all-important question: colour or black and white? In this instance, the answer is determined by the fact that the whole point of the image is the fiery cross. My choice will depend on which format shows up the glint to best advantage. Does colour or black and white do a better job of directing the eye to the centre of the preacher’s chest?

There are no absolute rules, of course. Every fresh photograph presents a fresh context for a decision. In this instance, colour is a distraction. It draws our attention away from the only thing that really matters in the context of this image. All of this highly subjective, of course. On another day, with my stomach rumbling after a dinner of spaghetti, I might have decided the image makes more sense as a riot of colour, signifying something else, like the vibrancy of urban living. But as it is, I had lasagna for dinner and I made my choice.

Categories
City Life

Kill All The Colours

View from above staring down onto King Street West and Toronto's Financial District. A translucent image of the photographer's foot appears reflected in the window.
Looking down on King Street West, Toronto, during the Pandemic

In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimated the inhabitants of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”. Subject to a quarantine for nearly a year, the characters grow anxious and fearful. Inevitably, the suspension of life’s ordinary activities coupled with the relentless threat of death wears on them. It corrodes the affective dimension of their lives, making everything appear dull.

I know from personal experience that severe depression can change a person’s capacity to see colour. All the colours seem muted. Where, in ordinary times, bright colours spark feelings of joy, in times of extreme stress, those same colours can look as if they’ve been greywashed.

In the first months of the pandemic, when most people weren’t sure what was going on and stayed in lockdown, the pandemic threatened to produce a secondary health crisis by ratcheting up anxiety disorders, promoting feelings of depression, and encouraging people to cope through self-medication.

Recognizing my own tendency to view the world through Camus-coloured glasses (life is absurd and pointless so let’s lounge all day in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking ourselves into a carefully modulated stupor), I chose instead to put the pandemic in a neatly wrapped package. I would manage the shit out of this thing. After all, what a shameful thing it would be to have an epitaph that reads: “Here lies someone who was such a loser he allowed a respiratory pathogen to destroy his liver.”

I did a lot of little things to promote a sense of mental well-being (e.g. making the bed each morning, dressing up even if I wasn’t going out). On the photographic front, I refused to desaturate my photographs. I ignored Camus’s observation and, even if it didn’t feel that way, I pretended the world was bright and shiny.

Only now am I allowing myself the luxury of black and white conversions. I’m far enough away from the early sense of uncertainty that I can now revisit my photographs from that time with a sense of detachment. Featured today is a photograph I made early in May, 2020 from the TD Tower overlooking Toronto’s Financial District. A solitary streetcar rumbles past. There are no pedestrians. No cars. The streets are pretty much empty. The scene really does deserve to have all its colours killed.

Categories
Street Photography

A Month of Nothing but Black and White Photographs

I went through a street photography phase where I made nothing but black and white photos. There is a massive bias on photo-sharing sites towards black and white photographs. If I post a black and white photograph on Instagram with a #bnw hashtag, I get far more traffic than when I post colour photos. Black and white is “real” street. Colour is for wannabes and Joel Meyerowitz.

I expect the bias goes back to the days before colour film existed. Early masters of street photography like Henri Cartier-Bresson had only black and white film to work with and look at what they produced! Clearly, colour film isn’t a necessary condition of great photos. The convention continued long after colour film became widely available, at first because it was more expensive and fussier to develop, and later because … Well, just because. That’s what it means to be a convention.

Here we are in the age of digital sensors where there’s no cost difference based on the colour values we assign to a given pixel. One would think that in such an environment the bias against colour photography would evaporate. But no. It’s as prevalent as ever. Now cameras come with black and white settings so you can pretend you’re shooting with black and white film. Or, you can convert your colour images to black and white in post, either through apps on your phone or through fancy software packages like Photoshop or Lightroom or through plugins like Nik Effects or Luminar.

The only thing we can say for certain about the decision to shoot black and white is that it is no longer a technical or financial decision. Photographers have shifted the decision into other spheres, like aesthetics and politics. And so, for the month of June, I will present black and white images with commentary about why, sometimes, it might be preferable to do things the old way. Not always. But sometimes.

Categories
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.

Categories
Street Photography

Buddies In Bad Times

A father and small child walk on the sidewalk while holding hands. In the child's free hand is a happy face balloon. On the building in the background is a large sign that says: Buddies In Bad Times Theatre.
Buddies in Bad Times Theatre, Yonge Street and Alexander, Toronto

If you didn’t know about Buddies In Bad Times before, you certainly did after the building on the corner of Yonge & Alexander came down. Toronto’s premiere queer theatre took advantage of clear sight lines to tack a massive poster to the side of its building. Unfortunately, like everything else in Toronto, construction on a new condo began a few months later and the sign vanished behind scaffolding.

But there were a few good months when I could stand on the west side of Yonge Street and shoot east, watching people pass on the opposite sidewalk while the BIBT sign offered commentary. Oftentimes, on busy city streets, scenes play out in ways that are no less theatrical than staged productions. So I was pleased when a father and child entered from stage right. The child held a happy face balloon which seemed to contradict the “buddies in bad times” message.

I love it when I end up with a photograph that suggests an internal contradiction. Don’t ask me what this means. I have no idea. It makes me happy just to produce an image that raises a few questions for the viewer.

Construction worker surveys site of future condominium at the corner of Alexander & Yonge Street, Toronto
Categories
Street Photography

Crossing Rosedale’s Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge

Night shot standing on Toronto's Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge. A blurred person runs towards a group of people loitering at the far end of the bridge. In the background rise the apartment buildings of St. James Town.
Crossing the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge, Toronto

A place only becomes a place as it accumulates memories. Recently, the city blocked off both ends of the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge and began work replacing it. The former bridge, the bridge I’d grown to love, had wooden slats reinforced here and there with sheet metal where the wood had begun to rot. It was almost impossible to set up a tripod and take a long exposure because the minute anybody else stepped onto the bridge, it began to shake. And in a mild breeze, the whole structure wobbled. My wife refused to step onto the bridge because she was afraid it would come crashing down into the ravine below. But I enjoyed pausing in the middle of it and imagining I was on a ship in rough weather.

Unless you look closely, you might miss the fact that the bridge is pasted over with memories. Some of those memories are public, some personal. Most obvious is the plaque at the north end advising that the writer, Morley Callaghan, used to walk his dog, Nikki, every day across the bridge. In fact, the bridge is often call the Morley Callaghan Footbridge although I’m not sure if that’s its official name. More recently, the bridge appeared in an episode of the Hulu production of The Handmaid’s Tale. I know, because I was walking underneath the bridge at the time and accidentally fucked up one of their takes. And just a few weeks ago, a psychopath gunned down an an innocent exchange student outside the Glen Road entrance to the Sherbourne subway station at the south end of the bridge. I didn’t say all the memories had to be happy memories.

Once the city has finished its project, dismantling the old bridge and replacing it with the new, will this still be the Glen Road Pedestrian Bridge? I suppose this question is a variation on the Ship of Theseus paradox: if you replace each plank of the ship until none of the original planks remains, can you say that it’s the same ship? In the case of this bridge, if you reconstruct it and give it the same name as the original bridge, does it still support all those memories? Or does it hasten their disappearance? Like shadows running away in the night.

Categories
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.

Categories
Street Photography

Good Will Hunting

A woman in a winter coat walks along the sidewalk past a giant poster of a woman dressed in fur.
Advertising Poster on Bloor Street West, Toronto

I have a small wooden display case for Hohner mouth organs. It’s old and scuffed and my wife wishes I’d throw it out. But I can’t bring myself to get rid of it because it belonged to my great grandfather. Frederick (Fred) Barker, who died long before I was born, kept a small general store in a small community in a backwater of New Brunswick. This display case comes from that store.

I don’t imagine his store was much of a going concern, but it was enough to sustain him and his wife Mary and their four sons. Back at the turn of the (20th) century, Fred sold the sorts of goods that people living in the town of Sheffield might need. He didn’t advertise. I’m not sure it would have occurred to him that he could advertise his business. Even if he had advertised, I doubt it would have made any difference.

Fred relied almost exclusively on good will to attract his custom. He fostered that good will by being an active member of the community. He attended the local church (in fact, two of his sons grew up to become clergy). And when people entered his shop, he spoke to them by name. He expressed an interest in their lives, and in turn they expressed an interest in his life. Good will.

Nowadays, it’s almost inconceivable that somebody could rely exclusively on good will to sustain a business. It may have something to do with increasing urbanization. Maybe the way capital swallows up small businesses and integrates them into large organizations. Maybe it has something to do with changing cultural expectations. Or maybe it’s a combination of all of those things along with other reasons I can scarcely imagine.

Today it’s a matter of scale. When Fred ran his general store, it was a modest concern that fit hand-in-glove with the community it served. Now, retail concerns have grown so large, the customers appears as ants by comparison. It’s no longer the case that the customer is always right. Instead, the customer is always small.

Categories
Street Photography

Too Old To Fail

Shadowy outlines of the words "Hudson Bay Company" remain on the wall of the former Bloor/Yonge retail location after the sign has been dismantled. People pass on the sidewalk underneath.
Hudson Bay Company, Bloor Street East, Toronto

Ever since the financial crisis of 2008, we’ve grown accustomed to the phrase “too big to fail” as a justification for using government funds to prop up large corporations. The rationale is that certain companies are so large that if they collapse, the consequences will ripple throughout the national or even global economy and take everything down with them. For example, if a bank defaults on its obligations to its depositors, they will then default on their obligations, too, and so on. Never mind that the people who lobby for government money by crying “too big to fail” are the same people who, at any other time, would declare themselves neoliberal small-government libertarians. But that’s a rant for another day.

It strikes me that the phrase “too old to fail” has some traction too, though maybe for different reasons. I feel no sentimental attachment to the Royal Bank of Canada, but I feel very differently about the Hudson Bay Company. As a boy, I read about how Henry Hudson and his son were set adrift in the spring of 1611 by a mutinous crew who were tired of masking wintering in the newly discovered Hudson’s Bay. They floated off, never to be seen again. I read, too, about the adventures of Radisson and Groseilliers and imagined myself paddling alongside them as they explored uncharted territories.

In 1670, a group of wealthy courtiers obtained a Royal Charter formally establishing the Hudson Bay Company. And in 1869 the HBC sold the region known as Rupert’s Land to the recently formed government of Canada (rejecting an American offer).

However, recent transactions have sucked most of the romance out of The Bay and remind us that it’s now just another company, as subject to the logic of free-flowing capital as any other. For example, in 1978, it acquired Zellers. Zellers for fuck’s sake! But that wasn’t the last shit discount retail store it acquired. It bought Towers in 1990 and Kmart in 1998. Holy crap! In 1979, billionaire Kenneth Thompson acquired a 75% stake in the company and, like an unsexy version of Richard Gere’s character in Pretty Woman, proceeded to break it apart.

But the nail in the coffin of HBC romance came in 2008 when an American private equity firm bought the company for $1.1 billion. In 2020, they took the company private and that, as they say, is that. Earlier this year, they announced that they were closing the local retail outlet at Bloor and Yonge. The place where I buy all my underwear! Gone with the snap of a finger. Earlier this month, a crew came and pulled the sign off the side of the building and turned one of Toronto’s shittiest stretches of sidewalk into an even shittier stretch of sidewalk.

But I should have known better. As I boy, I could be forgiven for getting swept away by a romantic telling of the Hudson Bay story. But what took me so long to revisit the story with the critical eye of an adult? What took me so long to recognize that this is just another example of capital, whether in 1670 or 2020, deployed to make a handful of people obscenely wealthy at the expense of whole nations of people and the natural resources that sustain them?

A stain on a wall is easy enough scour away. But other stains endure.