Chapter 18 Words for Sale
1476 Words
If you're looking for something good to read, you don't always have to hit the nearest bookstore. Try Canzine (brokenpencil.com), the annual festival of all things independent and photocopied. A lesser known, but equally inspired, gathering is the Cut 'n' Paste Fair (comeaumichael@h*********m), the apotheosis of the do-it-yourself aesthetic. For old newspapers, magazines, postcards, and other ephemera, you can't beat the Old Paper Show and Sale (416-410-1310), held spring and fall at the Harbourfront Antique Market. Indie publishers hock their wares twice a year at the Small Press Book Fair (torontosmallpressbookfair.org) and, in 2003, the first-ever Toronto Comic Arts Fair (torontocomics.com) was penciled into artists' schedules. And lastly, there is Word on the Street (thewordonthestreet.ca), the city's biggest literary event. Held on the last Sunday of every September, WOTS commandeers seven blocks of Queen West, between Spadina and University, where readings are staged, author signings are scheduled, and publishers and bookstores show off and sell all manner of books.
WILDE TIMES
Robert Ross was the grandson of Robert Baldwin, an early advocate of responsible government in these parts. Born in 1869, he spent the first three years of his life in the area near Dufferin and St. Clair before the family moved to England. As a 17-year-old at Oxford, he met and seduced a man nearly twice his age: Oscar Wilde. The affair was over within months, but their friendship lasted a lifetime. Ross stuck by his infamous friend through obscenity trials and exile, and was named literary executor after Wilde's death in 1900. Ross died in 1918 and asked that his ashes be interred with Wilde's, but his high society family refused and it took over 30 years before Ross's last wish could be fulfilled.
Fingers on the Zeitgeist
Looking through the local media, it sometimes seems our art has never got past the Group of Seven. Nothing could be further from the truth. Here are a few who've made their mark.
• His work is lovely and utterly useless: cardboard replicas of everyday appliances, made from the box they came in; marble carvings of Styrofoam containers. James Carl walks the line between art and consumption. He also curates The Balcony, an ongoing series of easily reproduced images that hang from his apartment balcony at 183A Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market. Participants have included General Idea's AA Bronson and 2001 Governor General's Award winner Tom Dean.
Glen Crumback's drawings are often compared to those of Winnipeg star Marcel Dzama. One of the major differences is that Crumback's work contains original drawings and found images. The result is immediately surreal and oddly touching.
• Diverse as they come, Germaine Koh makes ordinary objects extraordinary. Her diary excerpts have been published as classified ads and she once devised a machine that translated computer keystrokes into smoke puffs of Morse code. She also hosts weewerk, a series of twice-a-month art salons in her small apartment.
• Tayna Read is the creator of Mr. Nobody, a catlike cartoon whose simple, beatific existence is inevitably at odds with modern technology. Mr. Nobody has been mass-produced on T-shirts and meticulously hand-drawn on single sheets of paper. He has been featured in old- style animated cartoons and recreated as a giant robot - called Nobot, naturally.
• A senior artist by any standards, Jamaican-born Winsom is best known for her fabric art she studied traditional textile symbology across Africa and for her paintings and installations on spiritual themes, Inspired by the ancient religions of the Ashanti, Carib, and Arawak peoples, her installations often incorporate altars or gateways between this plane and the spirit realm. (One such outdoor work was promptly struck by lightning.) Her work has been shown at the AGO, across Canada, and internationally, and she has a great gallery at winsomwinsom.com.
CAFFEINE DREAMS
Authors seeking inspiration should take note: the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop at 519 Parliament Street brews up some powerful stimulants to the creative imagination. Author Michael Ondaatje, who lives a couple of blocks away, is often seen there in the morning, ordering a big stainless steel mug to take away. In fact, Jet Fuel is on the list of people and institutions thanked at the end of his most recent novel Anil's Ghost (2000)... ahead of everybody else, including the publishers.
Kika Thorne's videos have been described as "low-tech documents of the underclass. Basically, this means her work veers between the personal and the political. Her guerrilla style was perhaps best showcased in Mattress City. The eight-minute video, shot with frequent collaborator Adrian Blackwell, covers a 1998 megacity protest in which a group of activists staged a public bed-in at Nathan Phillips Square.
• If there's a
more intelligent humorist in Canada than Mike Constable, we have yet to meet them. The bearded and berettopped activist spent about a quarter-century curating political art at Partisan Gallery. A cartoonist for magazines from the Canadian Tribune to Saturday Night to The National Post, he's also created just about every satirical giant puppet you've ever seen at a political demonstration in this town. Constable's sly, piercing wit belies dogged dogmatism; some of his wicked animations are posted at web.net/~animated.
• No one else in the city perhaps no one in the world - has elevated knitting to such a high level of artistic ingenuity and off-the-wall creativity as Janet Morton. Javacheff Christo made a reputation wrapping buildings and islands in plastic, but Morton thinks nothing of knitting a house cozy - sort of like a tea cozy, but much, much bigger. Some of her quirkier projects have included neck warmers for giraffes and sweaters for plastic snakes. She also spent a week in a*****e window, where passersby could watch her knitting the news of the day into a gigantic scarf-like document.
• Anyone who's spent any time at all downtown knows Barbara Klunder, who's made her joyfully spiky and swirly style of illustration the virtual trademark of Toronto. She created the signature look of the BamBoo Club, right down to the matches, and NOW Magazine's Deirdre Hanna has called her "Toronto's patron saint of the good-cause T-shirt." Her multimedia gallery work is invariably filled with verbal as well as visual puns; she's even created a typeface, and the Rolling Stones came to her to design the merchandise for their Voodoo Lounge tour.
LIKE A BAT OUT OF HELL
Do the undead like to toboggan? Probably not, if we base anything on Bram Stoker's experience. In February 1884, the Dracula author was in town as stage manager for Henry Irving's travelling theatre troupe. Invited to Riverdale ravine with the Toronto Toboggan Club, Stoker would fly downhill and repeatedly fall off the sled. He kept trying, but the toboggan was just too bloody fast.
CAFFEINE DREAMS
Authors seeking inspiration should take note: the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop at 519 Parliament Street brews up some powerful stimulants to the creative imagination. Author Michael Ondaatje, who lives a couple of blocks away, is often seen there in the morning, ordering a big stainless steel mug to take away. In fact, Jet Fuel is on the list of people and institutions thanked at the end of his most recent novel Anil's Ghost (2000)... ahead of everybody else, including the publishers.
Readings
• No one else in the city perhaps no one in the world - has elevated knitting to such a high level of artistic ingenuity and off-the-wall creativity as Janet Morton. Javacheff Christo made a reputation wrapping buildings and islands in plastic, but Morton thinks nothing of knitting a house cozy - sort of like a tea cozy, but much, much bigger. Some of her quirkier projects have included neck warmers for giraffes and sweaters for plastic snakes. She also spent a week in a*****e window, where passersby could watch her knitting the news of the day into a gigantic scarf-like document.
• Anyone who's spent any time at all downtown knows Barbara Klunder, who's made her joyfully spiky and swirly style of illustration the virtual trademark of Toronto. She created the signature look of the BamBoo Club, right down to the matches, and NOW Magazine's Deirdre Hanna has called her "Toronto's patron saint of the good-cause T-shirt." Her multimedia gallery work is invariably filled with verbal as well as visual puns; she's even created a typeface, and the Rolling Stones came to her to design the merchandise for their Voodoo Lounge tour.
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TORONTO: THE UNKNOWN CITY
Art Bar Poetry Series
Victory Café, 581 Markham St., 416-516-5787, artbar.org
Cryptic Chatter
Renaissance Café, 1938 Danforth Ave., 416-698-6188
I.V. Lounge Reading Series
I.V. Lounge, 326 Dundas St. W., 416-593-5105
Lexiconjury
The Pilot Tavern, 22 Cumberland St., 416-923-5716
The Scream in High Park is an annual July reading in the great outdoors. the scream.co
Syntactic Sunday
Free Times Café, 320 College St., 416-967-1078
U of T Bookstore Reading Series 214 College St., 416-978-7900 ext.9
- Writer
