Torontopia in the Age of Ford

Carl Wilson's terrific encapsulation of Toronto's beleaguered civic moment. Source.

"The term Torontopia was coined in jest in 2002 by some recent college graduates who were playing Fototag, a game in which one person runs through a public space, say the tunnel network of malls and bargain-luggage shops and food courts downtown, chasing a bunch of other players with a camera – anyone successfully photographed then becomes It. During it, one of them (exactly who is now forgotten) told the young artist and musician Steve Kado that he was thinking of starting a magazine called Torontopia, which would feature enthusiastic tributes to all the shitty, inadequate things about Toronto – its inherent dullness.

Kado laughed and swiped the term to apply to the bands and other art projects he saw on the scene around him, which he considered kind of parasitical means of living on the wormy flesh of the traditional, bloated, self-doubting, bank-and-WASP-dominated, widely hated institutional weight of Toronto – then aptly misrepresented by Mayor “What Is the World Health Organization?” Mel Lastman. As Kado later told music journalist Michael Barclay, it was a punk, DIY, “our band could be your life” kind of rhetorical gesture, the kind of defiant but un-self-serious pride every  hardcore punk community exercises when it proclaims in a fanzine that the Pittsburgh or Orange County scene is the best.

In 2004, Kado and Blocks put out a compilation record called TORONTO IS THE BEST! full of groups shouting over Casio keyboards and iPod loops (not exclusively, but notably). There was a full-day launch show in a bike shop during which a comic pretended to be a high-school athletics coach, yelling at the audience to do calisthenics between bands. A lot of the songs were really great ones, but the conspicuous chintziness of many of the means of production ensured they radiated from a place of humility, maybe even humiliation. (The 2006 Bad Bands Revolution compilation took this another leap.)

One of my favourite representations of that aesthetic was in local comedian and performance artist Jon McCurley’s 2009 play Double Double Land Land, in which Toronto was represented as a mediocre, mutated and impoverished place that was located right next to the wealthy and prosperous Tuba City, which is of course also Toronto – and, at a second level of meta-theatricality, the play ended when what the audience believed was a real wedding party in the building next door crashed the performance in tuxedos and party dresses and smashed champagne glasses all over the set. The creeping realization that the interruption was staged made me laugh longer than anything else in the past decade. The moral? We are our own worst enemies and, really, that’s the best thing we’ve got going for us.

A Future Toronto, Mathew Borrett, Source.

This double-double-edged aspect of Torontopia is the part that got forgotten. And the reason, I think, is that right in the midst of its inception and popularization, a confusing, counter-intuitive thing took place: In 2003, David Miller was elected mayor. No one anticipated a sympathetic-minded, arts-loving mayor (who would do things like take part in a debate at Trampoline Hall right in the middle of his campaign) vanquishing what was then a deeply corrupt City Hall (remember that scandal involving computers and stuff? it seems almost prehistoric, or at least pre-Facebook).

Its coincidence with the Torontopian moment certainly helped spread the gospel, but it also distorted its course – our tongue-in-cheek cultural movement got all mixed up with the Jane Jacobs-quoting, organizing-and-lobbying stuff of standard progressive urban activism. All of that stuff is of course worthy and important and needs to be fought for in every city all the time. But it is different than the more perverse imp that is Torontopianism.

That change of context made Blocks Recording Club’s slogan “Don’t try, do!” sound more like “Just do it,” when what it really meant was not to allow the near-certainty of “failure” to be a deterrent – do and fail, fail hard and big. It was about supplanting “productivity” with something more like processitivity, and participation for participation’s sake. It was anti-bystander, anti-consumer, anti-spectatorship. It was not built to win elections.

Elections, of course, are gloriously un-utopian. This is their great virtue, but the continuous letdown that is democracy requires the subversively impractical counter-weight of utopian thinking if it is to be borne. Your utopia can never be lost to the pendulum swings of civic moods and political cycles and garbage strikes. It can only be neglected to death, especially in those infrequent and unlikely occasions when real life on the ground threatens to get really good and you actually start to believe that Toronto’s deep attachment to the half-assed is a thing of the past.

On that level the Ford era is indeed our rebuke. But it’s also a welcome reminder that we’re still here, in the familiarly crappy heart of our half-assedness, which means that we are home, in the place that still relies upon us, its voluntary or involuntary children, to imagine it into being, a job no one else can or would want to do. Let them put some idiotic NFL stadium on the waterfront and more, more, more hideous condo buildings. As the poet Theodore Roethke wrote, “In a dark time, the eye begins to see.” And in these dark, idiotic times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing, about the idiotic times – probably into half-broken game consoles we scrounge at pawnshops.

Appropriately enough Double Double Land is now not just an imaginary but a real location, a busy performance space hidden down an alleyway in Kensington Market, and everywhere in the city there are these obscure utopian efforts that will probably never set the world on fire but can be settings where we huddle together, fan the flames and enjoy our symptoms. May a million bloom, and wilt, and bloom. There, as Darren O’Donnell put it in his next-level-Torontopian 2005 one-man show A Suicide Site Guide to the City, “We will not refer to our revolutionary plans – but we will look at each other deep in the eyes and we will know who we are. And we will exchange email addresses. And we will build the future.”"

How Should a Person Be, Teenager Hamlet and Don’t Go to School: MFA, Oct. 14, 2010

Granted, it is a bit much to be cataloging articles that include the mention of one's own projects. But it was bound to happen: my theoretical concerns have a lot to do with what's happening in a space beyond these reassuringly (to me) static, impersonal texts. Carl Wilson's most excellent article on being "life-sampled." Of critical interest: relationships as units of exchange.

Source.

"There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going. More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else."

Tonight, in a couple of hours, three of my closest friends are holding a launch party for the results of their three respective long-term projects, a novel and a movie and an album.

They all examine the relationship of life to art, using the people and places right around them as their subjects and sources. (It’s less obvious with the album, but we tend to forget that almost always when a band plays, we’re listening to a set of dynamic relationships in space; the “community band” element of Tomboyfriend emphasizes that.) They also served as each others’ characters and aides-de-camp.

The launch party takes place in a bar basically across the street from the apartment where I lived in the years they worked on their projects. And that seems apt. I was a participant too: I played a plump, pasty-skinned, city-slickened swamp ghost in the play-within-the-movie, the “ex-husband” around the peripheries of the action of the novel, and the music critic doing what he can do for friends-within-a-band. But mostly I was in another room, at middle distance, framed by a window, finishing my own project, my own book about art and life, which likewise involved them, though mostly less visibly. I almost wish I hadn’t finished it so long ago so I could be launching it tonight too. Instead, I marked the occasion by moving out of that apartment.

There are many tests and lessons involved in being a close part but not a collaborator in other people’s projects. Some have to do with ego, with the way the bubble can envelop you in warm inclusion but then pop you out into chilly dispossession. It’s good for the metabolism to get used to the coming-and-going.

More importantly it’s really educational to be sampled – that is, to be reproduced, in snippets, to be recontextualized and rewritten, to meet a blurry third-gen doppleganger who sounds more like someone else. Most of us aren’t 1970s funk musicians so we’re probably more accustomed to being on the other side. We may be accustomed to being linked or quoted in social media, but being sampled is a more intense sense of self-displacement. To adapt to your life being sampled may be a 21st-century necessity.

That it’s a little harder than you expect gives you sympathy for some of those older artists who take the copyright issue so much more personally than the scope of the financial issues involved. There’s the nightmare vision of being disassembled and reassembled atom by atom in a Star Trek transporter, but put back together in an utterly wrong order. (See also Cronenberg’s The Fly.) Or the subtler nightmare of being reassembled perfectly and yet no longer being “right.” Yet it is also deeply meditative, allowing oneself to be copied, mistranslated: When you think, “Wait, that’s no longer myself,” the next natural step is to wonder whether it was yourself to begin with and whether there is such an animal as yourself or whether you would recognize it if you met it.

So sweetly intoxicating to dare to think not, especially when a crowd of people are daring it with you (out of bravado, perhaps, too proud to be the one to say no, but it doesn’t really matter why, only that you did). It’s becoming the done thing, perhaps, in commercial and fame-economy culture to look at reality as a liquid commodity, worth more in exchange than in savings. But when what you’re buying with it is a dispersal rather than a magnification of self, it seems different enough to matter, which may be as far away from a dominant paradigm as one is usually able to get.