The Varsity Magazine: Cities

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

C ties

EST. 1880

VOL. V ISSUE 3

19 MARCH 2012

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The Varsity Magazine

Letter from the editor People who live in cities think that people who don’t live in cities have city envy. They actually don’t. To some, the suburbs are sublime. Small towns are where it’s at. Cars are king, and Rob Ford is amazing.

Cities aren’t always what we want them to be. But whether you ride a fixed-gear bike or a car that runs on fried chicken grease, we all have some common ground when it comes to thinking about the place we live in, and the way we interact with it.

That’s what the final instalment of The Varsity Magazine is all about, and we’ve talked to some pretty cool people in the process. Assunta Alegiani joined Toronto artist Mike Parsons in his studio to get his thoughts on the metropolis through his iconic black-and-white artwork. Jade Colbert sat down with Commonwealth-winning author Rana Dasgupta to chat about Delhi as a model for the 21st-century city.

On the local end, we caught up with Degrassi actress Judy Jiao, the city’s expert in Solid Waste Management, Vincent Sferrazza, the famous Wanda (of Wanda’s Pie in the Sky fame), and Spacing magazine editor Shawn Micallef. And while our city tends to get a bad rap, these people all think Toronto is pretty great — maybe you should too.

We’ve also imparted some of our own wisdom and, inevitably, a dash of tomfoolery. Ankit Bhardwaj recounts the mishaps he’s had in his global quest to find places to pee in the street — and you’ll also learn of the evil sandwich-stealing squirrels of Washington, DC. Chongwong Shakur imparts the five best things she’s found on city sidewalks for free (hint: her list includes a penis-shaped water bottle).

On the more serious side, Angela Brock describes what it was like growing up on the nowgentrified King Street East, while Matthew D.H. Gray visits the Albertan boomtown of Fort McMurray, land of oil and high rent. Murad Hemmadi traces the effects of guerrilla marketing from his hometown of Bombay to the sidewalks of Yonge–Dundas square.

There’s a lot to say about cities, and we haven’t said it all. And while our perspectives are diverse, we’re certainly missing voices from the suburbs, from the small towns, or from the places that we as city snobs don’t even realize exist. (I’m writing this from my smartphone on my fixed-gear bike in Parkdale, with a cappuccino in hand.) (Not actually, at all.)

Happy reading, Erene Stergiopoulos Magazine Editor (2011–2012)

ABOUT THE COVER

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The Varsity Magazine team signs off on the final mag of the year. Bernarda Gospic/THe VarsiTy

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THE VARSITY MAGAZINE VOL. V No. 3

CONTACT 21 Sussex Avenue, Suite 306 Toronto, ON, M5S 1J6 Phone: 416-946-7600 thevarsity.ca

SENIOR COPY EDITOR Maayan Adar copy@thevarsity.ca DESIGN EDITORS Matthew D.H. Gray Mushfiq Ul Huq design@thevarsity.ca PHOTO EDITOR Bernarda Gospic photo@thevarsity.ca ONLINE EDITOR Sam Bowman online@thevarsity.ca

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Tom Cardoso editor@thevarsity.ca

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Jenny Kim illustration@thevarsity.ca

MAGAZINE EDITOR Erene Stergiopoulos magazine@thevarsity.ca

VIDEO EDITOR Wyatt Clough video@thevarsity.ca

ASSISTANT MAGAZINE EDITOR Murad Hemmadi ASSOCIATE MAGAZINE EDITOR Simon Frank ASSOCIATE COPY EDITOR Jasmine Pauk ASSOCIATE DESIGN EDITORS Suzy Nevins & Dan Seljak ASSOCIATE PHOTO EDITOR Vacant ASSOCIATE ONLINE EDITORS Mimoza Haque & Patrick Love COVER Mushfiq Ul Huq

DESIGNERS Yasi Eftekhari Simon Frank Matthew D.H. Gray Jenny Kim Suzy Nevins Anne Rucchetto Dan Seljak Mushfiq Ul Huq Nathan Watson Michelle Yuan COPY EDITORS Tina Hui Laura Mitchell Joshua Oliver Jasmine Pauk FACT CHECKERS Tina Hui Laura Mitchell Joshua Oliver Jasmine Pauk

We have to confess, this magazine’s cover idea isn’t entirely original — but then again, these days, what is?

Back in 1989, a peculiar anthology film was released in the US. The film, New York Stories, was split into three segments, each with its own director (hence the “anthology film” moniker). All three were cinematic heavyweights at the time: Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Woody Allen, who had taken home an Academy Award for his screenplay for Hannah and Her Sisters two years previous. Though not an especially memorable film — Scorsese and Allen’s pieces were positively received by critics, and Coppola’s was torn to pieces — New York Stories has become iconic for its poster, depicting a simplified illustration of a classic New York City brownstone, with the World Trade Center towering above.

Using the poster as inspiration, The Varsity’s design team got to work on transplanting the idea and giving it a Toronto spin. Though several buildings were given up as options (City Hall? Robarts? the Manulife Centre?), the Gooderham Building at the intersection of Wellington and Front ultimately won out. One of the few classic “flatirons” in North America, the Gooderham Building has been an iconic landmark for Toronto for over 120 years — that’s just twelve years after The Varsity was founded!

PHOTO & ILLUSTRATION William Ahn Michael Bedford Rémi Carreiro Wyatt Clough Bernarda Gospic Matthew D.H. Gray Jenny Kim Ariel Lewis Jessica Muraca Suzy Nevins Dan Seljak Steve Tan Stephanie Travassos Mushfiq Ul Huq

CONTRIBUTORS Tom Adamson, Assunta Alegiani, Brandon Bastaldo, Ankit Bhardwaj, Angela Brock, Ethan Chiel, Jade Colbert, Simon Frank, Catherine Friedman, Matthew D.H. Gray, Murad Hemmadi, Patrick Love, Laura Mitchell, Joshua Oliver, Stephan Petar, Alex Ross, Dan Seljak, Chongwong Shakur, Jamie Shilton, Erene Stergiopoulos, Steve Tan, Michael “Angel” Vu AD INQUIRIES 416-946-7604 ads@thevarsity.ca BUSINESS MANAGER Arlene Lu business@thevarsity.ca ADVERTISING EXECUTIVES Jamie C. Liu Kalam Poon Ivana Strajin

SPECIAL THANKS Steve Tan, Gooderham Building, Tiago Oliveira, Kettle Chips, Nathan Watson, Suzy Nevins, Ahmed Aljumaa, Rémi Carreiro, Justin Timberlake, Rob Ford for never getting back to us.

MARCH 19, 2012

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Where have you been?

We asked for your postcards, and you delivered.

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1. “My friend wrote this while listening to a speech by the Director-General of UNESCO in Paris.”

2. “You can often get a sense for life in a new city by wandering through grocery stores. This card takes the journey back to Bangkok shelves a few decades ago.”

3. “Capuchin catacombs, Palermo.”

4. “My Mexican pal Eddie sent this to me; it’s the most beautiful postcard I’ve ever received.”

5. “I picked this up at the MOMA in New York City. I got distracted by pretzels and hotties on the street so I forgot to mail it.”

6. + 12. “I spotted these while roaming the streets of Barcelona looking for a café and sangria.”

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THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

7. “Frogs: no idea. I think I picked this card up in Portland, Oregon.”

8. “This is a photo of Thailand’s king and his wife in the 1960s.”

9. “The energy, passion, and patriotism was out of this world — I have never felt so proud to be Canadian as I did in Vancouver.”

10. “I visited California and bought this because it represents how much I hate highways.”

11. “I picked up this deadstock postcard at a photoshop/café in New York. A cool concept, but unfortunately the scent of photo chemicals doesn’t mesh well with coffee.”

Cleaning up Toronto’s expert in Solid Waste Management Services gives us the scoop on city garbage

by SIMON FRANK, photo by MICHAEL BEDFORD

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t’s easy to crack jokes about the “dirty business” of Solid Waste Management Services, but once you meet Vincent Sferrazza, the city’s general manager of the department, and you’ll learn it’s no trifling matter.

Full of vigour and enthusiasm, Sferrazza sketches out the city’s plans for improving recycling and reducing waste. Having previously worked for the City of Hamilton and Ontario’s provincial government, Sferrazza has been in City Hall since 2008.

The Varsity: What goes into each day of work for you? What does your daily schedule look like?

Vincent Sferrazza: Honestly, I can say each day is different… It can [involve] me meeting with my senior management team, meeting with politicians. It [can also involve] specific projects, issues affecting solid waste management, whether it be an operational issue like collection or disposal, or on our policies, on our strategy to get to 70 per cent diversion and how we’re doing…

TV: I saw that you have a Masters in Public Administration, but what path did you follow to get here? Did you ever set out for a position like this?

VS: When I was at university, I did in fact enjoy politics, and I did take an interest in municipal politics and municipal government. There was an opportunity to do that with my graduate program at Western, where the MPA program is dedicated to municipal government... I never had, at that time, really, a sense that I would end up in waste management. An opportunity presented itself where I worked on a specific file. This was my first job that I worked on in the City of Hamilton: I was given a file that pertained to waste management, and I found it interesting.

TV: The past few years have brought changes to Solid Waste Management Services, through more recycling

and the growth of the green bin. What does the future hold?

VS: Wow, okay! The future holds more challenges. In the last 20 years or so, what we’ve done is, as we like to say, we’ve captured the low-hanging fruit. By that we mean we’ve been recycling the newspapers, the pop cans, the aluminum. Recently we started collecting electronics at the curbside… Another thing is a concept called extended producer responsibility. Essentially it’s where the producer of a product, ultimately, is financially and operationally responsible for their product, as we say, from cradle to grave.

TV: In 2009, there was the city workers’ strike. The lack of garbage collection was a visible part of that.

What sort of contingency plan do you have for the next time a strike might occur?

VS: Back then, what we did was we set up temporary depots or temporary waste sites across the city. People would have to bring their garbage to sites. We had some lessons learned though, in terms of where the sites may be located, how they would be operated… So yes I’m preparing, [but] I can’t reveal that information at this time because it may never happen, and we certainly hope that there won’t be another labour disruption.

TV: What do you enjoy most about working for the City of Toronto?

VS: Great people, lots of support. For instance, education: there’s a lot of support for staff to continue their education. I come into work and I drive through the city and see the positive impacts of our programs, whether it be garbage being properly collected, the aesthetics of the city, how clean it is. All that you see on a regular basis. We have some great successes, but we’re constantly looking for ways of improving, and that’s great. And that’s on every level of staff. I find that the people that work in solid waste management, they stay.

Lightning round Styrofoam or plastic?

In the city of Toronto, you can recycle both!

Greatest innovation for solid waste management?

Since I’ve been here, the implementation of our 70 per cent Waste Diversion Plan.

If you’re weren’t general manager of solid waste…

Management for a sports team or management in music.

Bicycle or streetcar?

Bicycle.

Favourite city?

Toronto.

Toronto’s top 5 abandoned spaces

by STEPHAN PETAR, photo by BERNARDA GOSPIC

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bandoned buildings are beautiful but — let’s face it — kind of scary. In Toronto, you’ll find abandoned places at ground level, high in the sky, and right below your feet. Recently, Maple Leaf Gardens re-opened after being abandoned since the late ‘90s, while the old Bank of Commerce on Yonge will be restored and incorporated into a new condominium complex in the coming years after sitting gated up for decades.

The Crystal Ballroom on top of the King Edward Hotel The Crystal Ballroom opened in 1921 on the top floor of the luxurious King Edward Hotel and was closed in the 1970s. The Ballroom was named after its three large, sparkling chandeliers and was famous for its floor-to-ceiling windows.

Today, even though the ballroom has been neglected, it still has that charm that made it the place to be in the 1920s. The ballroom eventually became a place where fly fishermen could practise their cast-offs.

The Old Bank of Toronto at 205 Yonge Street Built in 1905 by Toronto architect E.

J. Lennox, the bank is an example of neo-classical architecture and is most notable for its Corinthian columns and large domed roof. It’s unknown when the Bank of Toronto vacated the building, but it wasn’t abandoned until 2003 when its then-occupants, the Toronto Historical Board, relocated. Today, the building is owned by an Irish businessman who hangs an Irish flag from the building but leaves it vacant. The building’s interior features a partial glass ceiling, unique light fixtures, and walls that look as though they are covered in vines, all of which go unseen today.

The Old Loblaws Warehouse at Lakeshore and Bathurst With a bowling alley and a stage where employees could put on shows, the old Loblaws Warehouse was not your average workplace.

Built in 1927, the Warehouse was a wonder with its electric tram railway, oversized ovens, and 22,000 feet of refrigerating piping. The warehouse closed in the ‘70s, and the Daily Bread Food Bank called it home until 2000. Today it is neglected as seen in the discolouration of the façade and the broken win-

dows that Toronto’s urban wildlife use to sneak in. It’s a sad sight for a building that was once an art-deco masterpiece.

The Prison Chapel at Liberty Village The Prison Chapel was built by the inmates of the Ontario Central Prison, which operated on the grounds of Liberty Village from 1877 to 1915.

The chapel was intended as a place of worship for the prisoners but instead was where they got drunk off

communion wine, which is ironic considering most inmates were there for alcohol-related crimes.

Once the prison closed, it became a training ground for the Canadian Army during WWI and today is one of the few historical buildings in the area that has yet to be restored and redeveloped.

Lower Bay Station The tiles in the middle of Bay Station display a colour inconsistency because those green-coloured

bricks were used to close off the lower platform. Lower Bay was a 1966 TTC experiment that failed; the lower platform connected the Yonge and Bloor–Danforth lines.

On rare occasions you can actually go into the station, which is so old that the yellow line says “Mind The Gap” on it (a previous incarnation of today’s plain yellow line). Today the station is mostly used by TTC employees or for film shoots when it gets transformed to look like a NYC subway station.

MARCH 19, 2012

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Mike Parsons’ guide to “Sound of the City” 5 3

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by ASSUNTA ALEGIANI

1. Sax Player

2. End of Trumpet

3. Face of the City

4. Poodle

5. Billboards

You might know Toronto artist Mike Parsons, AKA, Hey Apathy! from his street artwork on Queen West. Whether his distinct black-and-white drawings are on pavement, canvas, or paper, they generally revolve around the city. His 2008 drawing entitled “Sound of the City” is Parsons’ most intricate piece to date. We asked Mike Parsons himself to bring some order to the chaos.

That’s the very first thing I drew, a saxophone player.

There’s the music coming out because I picked the theme to be music in the city. It also gives you a real sense of how much work goes into a piece like that.

This is where the music is blasting into all the apartments, as if [the dragon] played too early in the morning and knocked all these people out… I was thinking about all the places people use music in the city to make their lives better… When I was drawing this apartment with all the people flying out, I had the idea of a next-door neighbour playing the horn too loud, and that’s when I got the idea to do the whole trumpet city.

In the centre I gave the city a face. It’s got two eyeballs and a little dragon horn and it’s playing a giant trumpet. I just had that shape before I even knew it was a trumpet. The player is kind of a dragon, so this really powerful creature, but he’s also the one who brings the music.

That has to do with both sides of the city. It can be a terrible as well as an exciting place. Even the whole theme of using black and white is sort of that idea: contrast, yin and yang, good and bad. Everything is in balance.

When I made this, it took over one month. Each day I went into one area, and any strange idea that popped into my head, I added, keeping with the theme of the city, music, and chaos. So when I saw a lot of people walking their funny dogs, that’s probably how [the face of a poodle] ended up in there.

I always have the billboards, which tend to be blank because there’s never anything of interest being advertised.

Five cities in fiction

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Stonepalm

Berlin

Washington, DC

Los Angeles

(Overside, Evan Dahm) There are a bunch of cities in Overside, the world where webcomic artist Evan Dahm’s lovingly crafted tales are set, but none are as audaciously literal as Stonepalm. The city sits in the shadow of a set of stone fingers, and it is populated by orangey-brown creatures called Hornèd, whose names all stem from grammatical terms. What more could you want from a city?

—Ethan Chiel

(Berlin, Jason Lutes) There’s a lot to see in Berlin, Jason Lutes’s fictional chronicle of the waning days of the Weimar Republic in the eponymous city. Complicated events and equally complicated characters cover the pages, creating a somewhat idealized, but nonetheless captivating, story of a city on the verge of a precipice.

—EC

(Idiocracy, Mike Judge) Mike Judge’s 2006 film Idiocracy presents a dystopian version of Washington, DC, where human intelligence has devolved to levels both ridiculously low and eerily familiar. The degenerating city features a metropolis-sized Costco with an internal subway system, a dustbowl fruitlessly irrigated with sports drink, a landfill mountain range, fast-food vending machines, and a self-serve hospital.

—Tom Adamson

(Blade Runner, Ridley Scott) One of the details that makes the world of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner so rich is Cityspeak, the language spoken by the working class of Los Angeles in 2019. The language was constructed for the film by actor Edward James Olmos, and includes elements of Chinese, Spanish, and Hungarian, among other languages.

—Jamie Shilton

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Interzone (Naked Lunch, William Burroughs) Interzone, the setting for much of William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, is based on the international zone of Tangiers in the 1950s. Tangiers was probably an intense, chaotic, and amazing place then, but Burroughs takes things just a few steps further.

Interzone is a hallucination of junkies, secret agents, crazed doctors, and giant black aquatic centipedes with addictive, vomit-inducing flesh.

—Simon Frank

Let them eat pie Wanda Beaver of Wanda’s Pie in the Sky says quality and location is everything

by PATRICK LOVE, photos by WYATT CLOUGH

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hen Wanda Beaver decided to open a pie shop, she insisted on two components in the hunt for the perfect spot for her “Pie in the Sky”: the facilities to produce enough pies for wholesale and a retail space to allow her to set up a sit-down café. She found the perfect home in Kensington Market at the corner of Augusta Street and Oxford Avenue.

“You have everybody in the market; there’s students, there’s residents, there’s a lot of businesses. The hospital nearby has 3,000 employees. There’s a lot of retirement homes and condos, lots of tourists,” she says. “[Kensington Market] is not just somewhere you go to shop … It’s a place you go for the experience.”

Finding a niche To celebrate Pi Day (March 14 or 3/14), Wanda and her team produce a batch of square pies. This may sound strange at first; the number π is probably best known for its application in solving the area of a circle using the formula πr².

Wanda’s take on the formula? The standard “Pi R Squared” became “Our Pies Are Squared.”

While those who formally observe Pi Day might represent a small slice of clientele, one thing is certain: Wanda is Toronto’s pie specialist, catering to every whim of Toronto’s pie enthusiast community.

When it comes to marketing, Wanda is totally old-school.

She’s far more concerned with the quality of the product than anything else, and she counts on word of mouth and a little media coverage to take care of the rest. Last year, her Pi Day pies got her coverage from Global Television and the Toronto Star.

Gentrification The development of Kensington is a beast unto itself; while higher-end lofts have snuck into the mix, the Market’s residents and business owners have been success-

ful in keeping out corporate interests, such as overpriced chain cafés. For Wanda, it’s a matter of keeping the ongoing change in the community in check, with a focus on the Market’s pedestrian heritage.

“Our Business Improvement Association is working towards more street [closures] on Sundays,” she explains.

“Some of it is for a festival kind of thing, with bands and circus acts, but we don’t want things to get out of hand either, because the residents wouldn’t want that. So it’s a balancing act. Certainly we want more people to come to the market.”

Too many cafés?

While selling pie is how Wanda’s eponymous shop made its name, there’s a lot more going on in “the Sky.” To the left of the pie display is a table with Wanda’s official cookbook; on the other side sit a number of tastylooking vegetarian savouries, including quiches, lasagna, and sandwiches. As with her pies, Wanda takes great pride in the quality of her coffee. Her café features local artisan-roasted coffee that’s fully organic and made from fair trade beans. It’s this café–storefront presence that Wanda wants.

A recent article in The Grid claimed that in the past four years, over 100 new cafés have opened their doors in downtown Toronto. The rise of the so-called “barista café” raises the question: how many is too many? Despite the rise of this café culture cannibalism, Wanda is optimistic.

“I can’t think of a café that’s closed its doors if the quality’s been there,” she says. “The emphasis, I think, is more on independent coffee shops with fair trade that sell organic products and use small-batch roasters.

“If you’ve got a good quality product, you can survive.”

Wanda’s Pie in the Sky is located at 287 Augusta Ave. and is open daily from 8 to 8.

The killer squirrels of Washington, DC

by JEANETTE CHIPETTE Washington, DC has the highest concentration of squirrels in the United States. Folks even call it the “Squirrel Capital” of the world. Averaging three pounds, these furry rats are to DC what the killer rabbit was to the Knights of the Holy Grail.

I spent a summer there when I was 15 and was used to Canadian squirrels, the sort that said “please” and “thank you” when collecting their nuts. So I thought nothing of it when, one day, while enjoying a scrumptious bacon and avocado sandwich on a park bench, an American squirrel joined me.

As I ate, I became more and more aware of this squirrel’s presence. His glowing, red gaze

was unnerving. From the corner of my eye, I could see him rubbing his paws and scratching his hind legs against the surface of the bench. Nervously, I moved to another spot, where I hoped to finish the rest of my sandwich in peace.

I hadn’t been sitting for two minutes when a shrill chirp pierced the air. Before I knew it, a flurry of fur flashed across my face, snatching my sandwich from my hands.

All I remember are his cold, cruel eyes, and that feeling of despair as I realized that my bacon and avocado sandwich was gone for good. The killer squirrels of DC had gotten to me; there was no going back.

MARCH 19, 2012

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A psychogeography of the city A walk through Toronto with Stroll author and Spacing magazine editor Shawn Micallef text and photo by DAN SELJAK

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’ve heard it’s frowned upon to begin an article with a cliché, but in the case of Shawn Micallef, an exception must be made — the man has literally written the book on walking around Toronto.

Two years ago, Micallef published Stroll, a collection of essays on what one learns and observes by travelling through Toronto neighbourhoods at walking speed. Today, he’s a journalism fellow at Massey College, and a senior editor and owner of Spacing magazine.

From the Massey College quad on the first real spring-like day of March, Micallef sips his coffee and recounts the beginnings of his career as a writer.

He half-jokingly refers to himself as a flâneur — the French term describes a character who explores and observes cities. In his intro to Stroll, Micallef calls the flâneur a “perfect idler” and a “passionate observer,” referring to the definition originally coined by 19thcentury poet Charles Baudelaire. Essentially, the moniker is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the most basic distilled version of what Micallef does: he walks around cities (mostly Toronto) and then writes about what he sees and learns in the process.

After moving to Toronto from Windsor, Micallef became interested in the parts of Toronto that were outside of the typical out-of-towner’s reach — the places outside of the main stretch of Yonge, the CN tower, and the Eaton’s Centre.

“I found there were dark places on my mental map of the city, so I just started wandering from where I lived at the time, Yonge and St. Clair, kind of just drifting through the city.”

On his travels, Micaleff met others who were into the same thing, so he began writing about his strolls for Toronto websites. Eventually, the observations made on his walks became a recurring column in Eye Weekly, which had two iterations — one called “Stroll” and the other called “Psychogeography.”

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“Cities can be very utilitarian — we’re busy, trying to get to our work, or to our lover, or to wherever it is, so we’re not really paying attention to spaces. Writing about cities forces people to stop a bit and think about the places they go through and spend so much of their life in. And maybe if we think about and appreciate that, life is better — but then again, that might be a stretch.”

He also notes that the fresh perspective of an outside observer can make an often seen or visited place new.

“Sometimes it isn’t until you read something about the place you live from someone else that you notice the things around you.

There are a lot of things we overlook. I overlook things and it takes someone else to point out things they’re totally into, and then suddenly that’s part of your life.”

While he was working at Eye Weekly, Micallef also joined a small magazine devoted to urban living in Toronto called Spacing. He came aboard after the first issue, and since he knew several people who had started the publication, he was able to, along with five others, become an owner when the magazine was incorporated.

His work for these publications became fodder for what would eventually become Stroll.

“Each chapter started as either a little piece in Eye, or a piece in Spacing, or articles from a few other places, like The Star, and then I was able to expand on them.”

Noting the finished product ended up being more than three hundred pages, Micallef laughs, “When it was done, I was like, I don’t remember writing this.”

After publishing Stroll in 2010, Micallef continued with Spacing and Eye Weekly (until Eye shuttered in the spring of 2011), and became

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

a Massey journalism fellow in June 2011. Offered to four mid-career journalists or writers, with an additional two international journalism fellows, the Massey Journalism Fellowship gives writers a chance to take a sabbatical and to study freely for one academic year at U of T. “It’s nice because there never is any time to pause and think when you’re out there doing stuff, jumping from one thing to another. It was really wonderful, that first week, to remember what academic

of the city doesn’t exist. There was a series of historic moments in the past, not a city in the past in some sort of monolithic way. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t save old stuff; we should save it, old good stuff, that is, but we should be a little more sanguine about change. If there is any common defining thing about a city is that they are always changing … which makes them extremely exciting.”

This attitude, along with his own research, has given Micallef perhaps a more optimistic view on the future of Toronto than we’ve seen in the recent combative language from City Hall on issues like LRT and the Harbourfront.

“It’s a little hard to talk about right now really. We’re in a funk, but there is no other time in history I’d rather live in Toronto than now. It is the most exciting time for Toronto … because of all the new elements coming in: new Canadians, new buildings, new infrastructure.

I compare Toronto to these mythic places like Paris or Berlin in the ‘20s, New York in the ‘50s… The momentum of the city is way more powerful than whatever political leaders are in City Hall. The city is going to be fine, if that’s what one is worried about.”

Micallef sums up his thoughts on the future of Toronto succinctly. “Physically, the city will be certainly recognizable, but it will be thicker, taller, and — I think — more fun.”

“This idea we have of a speed feels like.

It’s a much single historic view of more humane the city doesn’t exist. sane speed.”

Micallef There were a series of smiles wryly, “My analogy of it is when historic moments in the the Millenium past, not a city in the Falcon comes out of warp or past in some sort of whatever it is, and the blur of the monolithic way.” stars all slow down.

So to kind of slow down and be humane for a while was nice. Of course, now it’s speeding up again and the anxiety is coming back.”

Micallef sees studying cities as almost something that enables their progression and growth. “When you study the past and present of a city, this worry that people have about change, and this anxiety about change can be mitigated a bit.

“This idea we have of a single historic view

The only game in town

How ZED.TO, a new Toronto-based alternate reality game, hopes to reinvent the genre

by ALEX ROSS, illustration by JESSICA MURACA

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t’s Tuesday morning and you’re waiting beside a phone booth. An email from an unknown person has instructed you to wait for a special call that will give you further instructions. Someone gets into the phone booth to make a call of their own. You’re anxious. If the line is busy, you might miss out.

Eventually, the person steps out and gestures for you to go ahead and enter, completely ignorant to your real intentions. Finally, the phone rings. You pick it up and hear a voice read out a series of code words. You scramble to scribble them down on a small piece of paper. After the call is finished you rush home and share the code words with others. They’re members of an Internet forum and they’re participating in the same experience of solving the obscure and difficult puzzle.

Such is the popular image of alternate reality games, or ARGs, cemented by the success of games like The Beast, which was used to promote the movie A.I., and I Love Bees, which was used by Microsoft to promote Halo 2.

However, David Fono, lead designer for the upcoming Toronto-based ARG, ZED.TO, wants to get away from that term, especially since ARGs are no longer just fun promotional tools.

“They tend to be more about stories… The puzzle aspect has become a lot less of an essential component over the years,” he says.

“When you say ‘game,’ people think about challenges, about winning and losing, about objectives. ZED.TO doesn’t really have those; it has interactivity, but it’s not about winning or overcoming things.

“It’s about story and making choices within

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that story.”

In that way, ZED.TO sounds a bit like the game Myst, a popular PC game adventure series from the ‘90s where players could only experience the story by solving different sets of challenging puzzles. However, for Fono, ARGs — or as he prefers to think of them, “live interactive performative narratives” — offer many more possibilities for storytelling than a traditional game does.

“A well-done ARG with money behind it [will] have all the same kinds of roles that you would see in something like a major film,” he explains. “What defines an ARG is its use of so many different things, so it’s kind of unlimited in terms of what’s involved. An ARG designer is a generalist, a person who does a whole bunch of different things. I’m a developer by trade, so I do a lot of that myself. ” Fono and his team hope to bring that ambition to ZED.TO, which revolves around the story of a Toronto-based company, ByoLogyc, which inadvertently ushers in the apocalypse. In addition to the current online campaign (where you can even see a “promotional video” from fictional ByoLogyc CEO Chet Gertram), the game will include some major live theatre events.

“There’s going to be a show at the Fringe Festival, we’re going to have an installation at Nuit Blanche, and then we have a finale show running between mid-October and early November,” Fono explains. “And all of these are not going to be traditional theatre shows; they’re going to be highly interactive. We’re taking the ARG philosophy and putting it into a theatre show.”

Top five TO movies

by BRANDON BASTALDO illustrations by DAN SELJAK

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Videodrome (1983) Before David Cronenberg made any promises to the East, he was better known as the Canadian director with an affinity for blood and guts and an unapologetic love for his home city. His Toronto city symphony Videodrome shows a classic Cronenbergian descent into insanity, framed by TTC cars and visits to Spadina storefronts circa 1980.

Resident Evil: Half Baked (1998) Apocalypse (2004) After cringing at the unresolved plot of the first Resident Evil film, I was very surprised to see the making of Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Still, Apocalypse gets points for parading Central Tech, the Gardiner Expressway, and essentially every nook and cranny of Toronto as the zombie-ridden Raccoon City. With its climactic fight sequence at City Hall, Apocalypse is Torontonian in all its efforts.

The goofy stoner bro comedy Half Baked is remembered by many as a good introduction to scriptwriter Sir Smoke-a-lot’s (Dave Chappelle) comedic flare. Still, any Torontonian, stoned or sober, couldn’t miss the iconic Sam the Record Man sign or the Yonge street Pizza Pizza shop that serves as the backdrop for a police horse’s death by junk food.

Goin’ Down the Road (1970)

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010)

Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road is an oldie but a goodie — and the best thing about this Canadian landscape film is that it proudly grounds itself in our city. With a distinct Toronto flair, Goin’ Down also goes to show that Yonge Street had a hell of a lot more strip clubs in the ‘70s.

One of the best things about the screen adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that, like its source material, it doesn’t use Toronto to represent bigger or bolder cities than our own. The beauty of the film lies in its visits to the likes of Lee’s Palace and Casa Loma, all of which confirm its status as an endearingly Torontonian movie.

MARCH 19, 2012

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The anatomy of an oil boom Thousands have flocked to Fort McMurray to work in the oil sands, but will they put down roots? text and photos by MATTHEW D.H. GRAY

T

ommy Jardine, 61, is about to arrive in a new city for a new job.

Tommy is from Miramichi, New Brunswick, where he lives with his wife on the homestead his grandfather built in 1920 after emigrating from Boston.

For 30 years, Tommy worked in an iron ore mine in northern New Brunswick until it closed in 2000.

To support himself and his wife, he has spent his summers working in construction and his winters plowing snow. Today, he will land in Fort McMurray, Alberta. He’s boarded a bus at the airport, along with a dozen other men, which will take him to an oil sands worker’s camp where he will live and work for the next four weeks. He doesn’t yet know what his job will entail.

“When the mills and mines closed, a lot of families sold their homes and left town,” Tommy explains through his thick northern New Brunswick accent. “A bunch of the younger guys have gone to work in the Alberta oil patch. We keep losing industry, and they’re gonna have to leave. People are hurting.”

Miramichi was hard-hit by the recent recession, but the local economy had been in decline since the 1970s.

The search for employment has driven Miramichi-dwellers elsewhere,

10

and many of them are choosing Fort McMurray. A 2011 survey found that more than a quarter of travellers leaving from the nearby Bathurst airport were headed there. The total income earned by migrant workers from New Brunswick alone in the oil sands boom is estimated to be between $230 and $350 million.

“When the boom word comes up, there’s an opposite cycle that says ‘bust,’” says Melissa Blake, the mayor of Wood Buffalo, the regional municipality into which Fort McMurray was amalgamated in 1995. Sitting in her newly renovated office on the seventh floor of the municipal government building overlooking downtown Fort McMurray, she explains, “The difference that I see between a boomtown and sustainable growth is that we’ve been experiencing this growth since about 1996, and it doesn’t look to end in the future.”

The municipality’s population growth projections are based on this assumption of sustained long-term growth, a forecast of increases in oil sands output. By 2030, the population is projected to more than double to 225,000, over 85 per cent of which will reside in Fort McMurray.

The cost of housing in Fort McMurray is astronomically high. Almost every parcel of available land has

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been developed, and the outskirts of the city are densely packed by cheaply built pre-fabricated homes, lowrise apartments, and motels. Cars are the preferred mode of transport in Fort McMurray, and it shows. Public transit, recently expanded, sees little use. Most of the city’s population lives several kilometres from downtown in communities branching off from the arterial Highway 63.

At all hours of the day, the highway, which runs through downtown Fort McMurray, is abuzz with dirtcaked buses and trucks carrying workers and equipment to and from the oil sands. Driving along the highway, you can see the signs of industry, with sales offices for manufacturers of heavy equipment lining either side.

Further north, before reaching the main extraction and processing sites, the smell of gasoline and sulphur permeate the air. Depending on wind patterns, the smell can blow into the city, some 30 kilometres to the south.

The scale of industrial change is difficult to assess until the highway splits in two, when the boreal forest gives way to the barren, windswept landscape of the tailings ponds. The skyline is illuminated by a four kilometre-wide Suncor processing facility with a gas flare tower topped by a

Housing costs in Fort McMurray, AB... (population 65,565)

$1,406 Bachelor (monthly rent)

$1,694 One BR (monthly rent)

$2,049 Two BR (monthly rent)

$729,092 Single family (to buy)

$387,244 Multiple family (to buy)

$436,993 Mobile home + land (to buy)

...compared to Moncton, NB (population 69,074)

$479 Bachelor (monthly rent)

$591 One BR (monthly rent)

$715

$201,200 Single family (to buy)

$157,700 Multiple family (to buy)

Two BR (monthly rent) Sources: CMHC, Fort McMurray Real Estate Board, Royal LePage

Shortages in the Albertan labour market have driven wages up — the average household income in Fort McMurray rose to $177,634 last year.

Photos, from top to bottom t Flames from a Suncor gas flare tower illuminate the skyline and workers’ camps. t Melissa Blake, mayor of the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo, home to 104,338 people, works in her office in downtown Fort McMurray. t Pre-fabricated houses like these in Gregoire, a neighbourhood in Fort McMurray, regularly sell for over $500,000.

huge flame that burns off excess gas from the production process. The vapour plumes from the site are visible for miles.

Around the base of this installation, and others in the area, are the lodgings of over 30,000 workers. Like Tommy Jardine, they will work rotating shifts around the clock to ensure the uninterrupted extraction and production of bitumen.

A standard 158-litre barrel of crude oil takes two metric tons of extracted and processed bituminous sand.

As of late last year, the total output of the Athabasca oil sands was over 1,700,000 barrels of oil per day, and is projected to triple by 2030.

This explosion in production will doubtlessly bring new waves of migrant labour to Fort McMurray. In the next eight years, over 13,000 new workers will be needed in the oil sands alone. Shortages in the Albertan labour market have driven wages up — the average household income in Fort McMurray rose to $177,634 last year.

The high wages have attracted thousands of temporary labourers.

A sharp drop in the price of oil, like the one experienced in the 2008 recession, would lead to the cancellation or postponement of many capi-

tal projects. Many migrant workers would find themselves out of work, forcing them to return home.

One of the biggest challenges Fort McMurray faces is the integration of these transient workers into the community. Still, Mayor Blake doesn’t agree with observers who say the city’s population is largely transient.

“A lot of people would be rumoured to come with a two-year plan, make some money, and then vacate,” says Blake. “But they become so enamoured by the community and the lifestyles they’ve been afforded here.”

Fort McMurray’s community has had substantial support from the oil companies operating in the region, she argues. “You’re going to find [oil] industry names across a number of different community projects, but that’s not where [their involvement] ends. They’re also great contributors to the non-profit sector.”

When asked whether he’d stay in Fort McMurray, Tommy is not so certain he would.

“If there was an economy back home, I’d be there. I grew up in Miramichi. My grandkids grew up there. It’s home.”

MARCH 19, 2012

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The Degrassi kids are alright We sat down with former Degrassi actor and Mississauga native Judy Jiao to talk all things Toronto

by STEPHAN PETAR photo by STEPHANIE TRAVASSOS Degrassi is a cornerstone of any Canadian educational curriculum. Whether you watched it or not, the 33-year-old franchise (it started in 1979, seriously!) has become a cultural phenomenon.

The latest chapter in the franchise, Degrassi: The Next Generation, began in 2001 and is in its 11th season on MuchMusic.

The show, which is shot in Toronto, features actors from all over Canada. One of those actors is Judy Jiao, who played Leia Chang from seasons 8 to 10. Introduced as a transfer student from a ballet school, Leia immediately became friends with Mia (Nina Dobrev). Their relationship came to an end thanks to Mia’s party-animal ways, but in the meantime, Leia had a romance with Danny (Dalmar Abuzied).

Judy herself was born in Winnipeg but grew up close by in Mississauga. Today, Judy attends Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts but still holds Toronto dear to her heart.

The Varsity: What type of high school did you go to? Did it focus more on arts or on sports? Was it similar to Degrassi?

Judy Jiao: My school couldn’t be any more different than Degrassi. My high school was a mid-sized public high school in a very wealthy area of Mississauga with a huge focus on athletics.

In comparison, Degrassi had a lot of diversity. It was diverse in terms of being multicultural as well as having students from different socioeconomic backgrounds and upbringings. It was very representative of Canadian multiculturalism. Also, Degrassi was very dramatic and dealt with very heavy issues — something my high school didn’t.

TV: Degrassi is shot in Toronto like so many other shows. Why do you think people enjoy and get so excited to see Toronto on TV? JJ: I like to watch Life With Derek, and in that show they make Canadian references to places, schools, and other things. I think people like it because they feel a strong tie to where they have been brought up and it is always amazing to have it featured in popular culture. I still enjoy American shows but, [they don’t] have the same hold that shows shot in Canada have on you.

TV: Do you have a favourite building in Toronto?

JJ: Hart House. It is so historical, beautiful, and very rustic-looking. I don’t know how to describe it, but it shows an older and beautiful Toronto. I love the ROM too, even though I don’t really like modern architecture that much. I find it sometimes doesn’t make sense. There is a very awkward juxtaposition between old and the new, but I still love the ROM — I like the rotunda. It’s beautiful.

TV: Modern architecture can really go either way.

JJ: I agree. Modern architecture just wants to be talk-worthy and such.

TV: I feel as though Toronto is moving towards a more heritage and restoration movement as opposed to modernization.

JJ: That’s excellent. I love old buildings. It’s always sad when they tear down old buildings because there’s so much history and culture attached to them.

TV: How about your favourite Toronto neighbourhood?

JJ: Queen West. It has great shopping, and they have a really nice mix of modern chains and little boutiques. I feel like those Toronto neighbourhoods are distinct with certain ethnicities and cultures, but it’s experienced by everyone in the city.

TV: Do you have an earliest memory of Toronto?

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JJ: Going to Chinatown. My mom worked at U of T and occasionally, when I went with my mom to her office, we would end up going to Chinatown to do grocery shopping and to have lunch. I was about four or five, and I have such fond memories of that time.

TV: And how about your favourite restaurant?

JJ: Joey at the Toronto Eaton Centre.

I love the elegance, and it feels really classy.

TV: Nowadays, where is your favourite place to hang out or to have a relaxing day in the city?

JJ: Kensington Market or St. Lawrence Market with friends. I just love marketplaces, they’re fun and a great place to spend a weekend afternoon when it’s nice outside.

TV: Let’s talk about your experience on Degrassi. Why do you think Toronto teens in particular love the show?

JJ: It is very representative of Toronto; it shows how Toronto embraces multiculturalism. It’s something Degrassi does amazingly. Canada is unique. If you look at Canada and America culturally, they are very similar but very different in terms of multiculturalism. The concept has a

Canada is unique. If you look at Canada and America culturally, they are very similar but very different in terms of multiculturalism. The concept has a different connotation in the States than in Canada. Here we embrace it, and Degrassi shows that. different connotation in the States than in Canada. Here we embrace it, and Degrassi shows that.

TV: Out of the episodes you worked on, do you have any favourites?

JJ: My first two episodes, just because it was my first experience being on set and meeting everyone. It was a mix of excitement and terror.

My first block of episodes was this big party scene. They made this gorgeous set; it was a bachelor padesque set. It was just a really fun atmosphere and fun working with everyone.

TV: If you could have played any

other character, who would you have liked to play and why?

JJ: Holly J, played by Charlotte Arnold. It’s remarkable to see her character development. She started as a mean girl who was superficial, but there were always undertones to her character, deeper issues to Holly J. It was interesting watching Charlotte and the writers tap into her character as she evolved, and watching her character’s transformation. I can understand her character’s pressure to succeed, that drive and ambition. I think we are similar because we are motivated individuals, and Holly J’s

dream was to go to Yale or another Ivy League school — and I understand that as well. I really liked her character a lot.

TV: You must’ve been very busy with the show. What was it like balancing Degrassi and school?

JJ: I was really focused on school.

There was an overlap between Degrassi and school, and it was difficult to balance the two. Degrassi was great because it was an ensemble cast, so I could balance school and normal life. We’d film for a week or two and then take a break. It was difficult, but I always had my priorities well-established. It’s about balancing and managing your time and making it work.

TV: When your character “graduates” from Degrassi High, do you plan to continue acting in Toronto or do you see yourself starting something different?

JJ: I love acting, but realistically, it is very competitive and cut-throat. I might audition part-time, but I want to make sure I have a degree. I may want to work on the business side of the industry, maybe corporate strategy or on the production side.

Lightning round In character!

TV: What’s the one thing a person could do to commit social suicide at Degrassi?

JJ: Mess with Holly J. TV: Do you have Bieber Fever?

JJ: Yes. TV: Assuming you were to return to the show for a reunion, who would you be most excited to see and who would you be least excited to see?

JJ: I would be excited to see Mia [played by Nina Dobrev] to see what direction she took and not excited to see Chantay [played by Jajube Madiela].

TV: If you could have a romantic storyline with one character, who would it be?

JJ: Sav [played by Raymond Ablack]. I need a nice guy, a guiding force to show me the ropes.

TV: What about if you got to have one with a celebrity?

JJ: Jake Gyllenhaal or Ryan Gosling.

Stephan Petar blogs for whyilovetoronto. Follow him at whyilovetoronto.tumblr.com.

A short history of food in cities

by JOSHUA OLIVER illustrations by JENNY KIM and MUSHFIQ UL HUQ

Cities have always depended on food. The development of the first major urban areas, which occurred in the near East about 10,000 years ago, coincided with the development of grain farming.

Fast-forward to the industrial revolution and its less wellknow cousin, the agricultural revolution. Advances in farming methods produced greater yields and less demand for manual labour on farms. These surplus farm labourers found new industrial jobs in growing cities. Urban growth was facilitated both by the increased food production and by new technologies, such as railways, which could bring enough food into cities to feed their increasing populations.

Further advances in agricultural and transport technology — think cars, trucks, and refrigeration — now allow us to feed huge groups of people in geographically improbable location with food from around the world.

And so we’ve arrived at the modern food system, a system that many people now are increasingly worried about.

Here’s some food for thought:

FOOD PRODUCTION

MONEY MATTERS

33 per cent of global greenhouse gas production comes from the production and transport of food.

Agriculture accounts for 75 per cent of the world’s fresh water use Farming and ranching use 40 per cent of the earth’s land mass.

Food travels an average of 1500 miles to reach your plate.

Fifty years ago, 45–60 per cent of the money consumers spent on food went to farmers In the US today, it’s 3.5 per cent.

A wheat farmer gets as much money from the sale of a loaf of bread commercially as the manufacturer of the packaging.

Five corporations control 80 per cent of global trade in food.

ORGANIC FOOD HOW MUCH WE EAT

1 per cent of America’s agricultural land is organic.

Sales of organic products make up 4 per cent of the American food market.

From 1990–2009, sales of organic products increased by 25-fold.

In London, England (with a population of about 7.8 million), 30 million meals are consumed every day.

This means that Toronto (with a population of roughly 2.6 million) should consume about 10 million meals a day.

By 2050 twice as many people are expected to be living in cities.

Half of the food in the US is thrown away.

MARCH 19, 2012

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Oh, the places you’ll go

B

O la Th fro al

Lonely Planet travel writer and photojournalist STEVE TAN takes us through the best cities he’s visited. He’s been to a few.

Rome, Italy

Jakarta, Indonesia

Salzburg, Austria

Kolkata, India

I made a wish at Trevi Fountain for my return to Rome to be ensured and realized the bottom of it was glistening with gold, silver, and bronze. Being the most famous Baroque fountain in the world, this fountain receives €5,000 per day. The money collected is used to feed Rome’s needy.

Huge malls such as Grand Indonesia are scattered across the city, and you can find street food everywhere. Prices range depending on how much food you take or how hungry you are. It’s sold by hawkers peddling their goods, such as mixed rice, satay, cakes, or tempeh, on bicycles or carts, notably around the Kemang Raya area.

There are Mozart impersonators everywhere. And they want money. They also do many things Mozart wasn’t famous for — breakdancing, rapping, acrobatics, balloon twisting, fire eating, magic, you name it. On the bright side, you will see some Mozarts playing piano or violin on the streets.

Called the “city of furious creative energy,” Kolkata is known among its people as the birthplace of modern Indian literary and artistic thought. I had a chance to visit the National Library of India and learned about Bengali literature and was lucky enough to sample some machher jhol, a local dish of rice and fish curry. That was the most productive flight transit time ever spent.

Gweynedd, Wales

Bruges, Belgium

Gweynedd has Europe’s longest town name in Welsh: Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

58 letters in length, it translates into English as St. Mary’s Church in The Hollow of The White Hazel near to the Rapid Whirlpool of Llantysilio of the Red Cave. Seeing this made my day.

Bruges boasts some of the worlds’ finest chocolates and chocolatiers — and they all come in different packaging, flavours, decorations… and human body parts.

If those tiny truffles, marzipan, or tarts can’t satisfy your palate, you can try eating their two top-sellers: penis and breast-shape chocolates. I decided to buy a pair of DD-sized chocolate breasts for my relatives in London.

LISBON PORTUGAL The Galerias Romanas in Lisbon is an underground Roman gallery, said to be a portico crypt from the reign of Augustus, and is located at Lisbon’s downtown area. It’s open only once every September. Since much of the area is flooded, it takes up to a month to prepare this monument for public access. Waiting time can be up to 3.5 hours, and access is via a hole in the ground located in the middle of the street.

CHIANG MAI THAILAND

Talk to any locals outside Chiang Mai and they will ask if you’ve been here. This city is a keystone of any journey to Thailand. I played with tiger cubs, kissed king cobras (non-venomous ones), had snake wines, watched elephants playing football, and had a monkey attack me.

I did what I had to do. I’ve lived here!

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BORDEAUX

FRANCE

On June 21, the entire city turns into a nightclub to celebrate Fête de a Musique, an all-night music celebration of the summer solstice. housands flock around the city to display their musical talent, rom street performance at its iconic Place de la Bourse, to dancing long its ancient Rue Fernand Philippart.

San Francisco, USA

Xi’an, China

In San Francisco, I chatted with the friendliest homeless guy I’d ever met.

We talked for nearly an hour on Christmas Eve before I treated him to Burger King and Starbucks at 12 am. The homeless people of San Fran aren’t just the friendliest — they also have the most creative signs I’ve ever seen. “I slept with Lindsay Lohan last week — please help.”

Xi’an is a stop you cannot miss. It’s old and mysterious. Here, the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, was buried amongst thousands of terracotta warriors. He started building a grandiose mausoleum at age 13, and its secrets and legends were lost with him over the years. Seeing the terracotta army and Mountain Li where the tomb is gave me an eerie sensation of how the world was once upon a time.

Nairobi, Kenya

Phuket Islands, Thailand

Oxford, England

Tokyo, Japan

Most people stay for a night or two in transit, coming in and out as soon as they can. Southeastern Africa is, to me, the best place to do parachuting. If you dare, go up 20,000 feet and jump down at 200 km/h while enjoying the view across the African savannah!

Soft drinks served in a plastic bag, toilet paper used as a napkins on restaurant tables, gasoline in whisky bottles, and beach chairs made of plastic blue pipes — Thailand’s largest and most popular island has all it takes to amaze me. Phuket is famous for its surfing, so don’t forget your speedos!

As you walk around the colleges of Oxford University, be sure to look up once in a while. All over Oxford’s buildings are gargoyles (technically “grotesques” as these don’t spout water): some in the shape of faces, some animals, and some entire people. The keenest of eyes will spot the funnier ones — the one picking his nose, the one relieving itself…

When I visited Tokyo, I got tired while wandering the streets and did a back squat outside a building while opening a white-powdered mochi bits caramel candy. Long story short, they thought I was begging for money and doing heroin. As the police dragged me away to the police station, I realized I was squatting behind the Bank of Japan.

FUSSEN

GERMANY

Neuschwanstein Castle lies just 5km away from the Austrian border, and is located on a very high rugged hill. Standing from there looking below at all the trees and mountains made me feel like I was a king living in Lord of The Rings’ Minas Tirith or at Hogwarts.

Check out the rest of Steve Tan’s favourite cities in our new online series, “Around the world in 80 cities.”

AMSTERDAM THE NETHERLANDS

var.st/aroundworld

There were over 5,000 prostitutes in Amsterdam five years ago. Today, there are only 1,100. They come from all parts of the world, as young as 18 and as old as 83. They pay taxes, have their own hospital and church (which you can only enter through a hotel), and a strong union that managed to shut down four blue windows operated by male gigolos.

MARCH 19, 2012

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An ode to King Street East, before (and after) the condos What overnight gentrification did to a neighbourhood

W

hen much of the zoning around King East switched from industrial to commercial a few years ago, it kicked off the developments and revitalization the area is famous for today. Growing up there was like a Trudeauian wet dream.

Elementary school classes were populated by a whole assortment of skin tones and socio-economic statuses, just like the diversity-themed mosaic at the school’s entrance doors.

I grew up on King East. The residential alcove where I lived — steps away from the downtown core — incited a good deal of jealousy in peers whose curfews wouldn’t allow for their commutes and so had to stomach their parents’ Paul Simon albums on the drive back home to suburbia.

But the neighbourhood hasn’t

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always been the site of fashionable condos, urbane furniture stores, and organic pet boutiques. The Distillery District was an abandoned eyesore you glimpsed beyond the waste filtration plant on your way toward Cherry Beach. There were distinct drop-offs into shady territory, which were just a few TTC stops from a pregentrified Regent Park, the disrepair on Sherbourne south of Bloor, or the hostels of Moss Park — where two new condos have just broken ground. This is the area Michael Moore epitomized as a representative Canadian ghetto in Bowling for Columbine. Unbeknownst to Mr. Moore, this area was also the blueprint for a successful integration of community and private housing.

Today, the cultural nucleus that was once exclusive to King West is

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crawling eastward. The Distillery District is now touted as a historic site and developers are jumping on opportunities to expand the district. The once decrepit plot is now a cosmopolitan oasis, with its array of galleries, studios, and live theatre attracting culture-seekers.

It’s home to Toronto’s first commercial brewery and a few independent bakeries, cafes, and restaurants producing fare that could make any bologna-eating schmuck feel like a gourmand.

Some, however, are less optimistic about this district, which seems to have materialized overnight. There’s something about Toronto’s new and beloved hotspot that leaves an artificial aftertaste in their mouths. After all, the site was created not out of altruistic responsibility for arts

by ANGELA BROCK, photos by SUZY NEVINS and culture but for the sake of commerce and condo-building.

The Distillery and the few trendy niches cropping up around it do seem to come out of nowhere. It’s a kind of Potemkin village catering to yuppies and tourists on rented Segways. A block north, a new Porsche dealership has opened up, though one wonders if the clientele would be comfortable parking outside it. A block south, tags spray-painted on a basketball court are hidden under a fresh coat of paint.

We have to ask how much this really does for the community that actually lives here. Does it just whitewash the heterogeneity and everything else the neighbourhood was once known for?

The landmark Canary Restaurant at Front and Cherry was forced to

close its doors when the plot was sold to developers.

Some are resisting the change. On the corner of King and Sherbourne someone has spray-painted “fuck gentrification” on the stoop of a real estate firm. With the revitalization of Regent Park we saw the displacement of many low-income families whose previous homes were given to those willing to pay market rent. The Real Jerk restaurant will be packing up soon, joining other less-known mom-andpop shops who’ve faced extinction by gentrification.

The way of life for most here hasn’t been threatened in the same ways yet. My own has only been improved by the recent changes, and let’s face it, I’ll continue to sip on overpriced coffee while it lasts.

Psychoanalyzing the city Writer and Commonwealth Prize winner Rana Dasgupta explains his fascination with Delhi and reads the future of the world’s cities

by JADE COLBERT, photo by ARIEL LEWIS

“I

’ve lived in Delhi for 11 years, and I find that when people who come through say, ‘What’s it like to live here?’ I have never been able to give an answer to that question that measures up to the intensity of the way I feel about living in the city.”

In October the acclaimed fiction writer Rana Dasgupta, best known for his 2009 novel Solo, which won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, gave a talk at the University of Toronto on the book he is currently working on, a nonfiction piece on Delhi. It’s the city where he’s written for over a decade, where he lives with his wife and daughter, and a city that, without this book, he says, would continue to confound him.

“I feel that the city I’m living in hasn’t actually been discovered yet. It’s all around me and 16 million other people. We inhabit it every day and we are bombarded by stimuli, but we haven’t actually imagined it.”

While the book is a work of non-fiction, Dasgupta says it will use the techniques of fiction to tell the stories of the extreme, outlandish, and compelling personalities that Delhi seems to produce.

That is not to say that the Delhi he is writing is “hidden” or “exotic.” He’s not looking to sensationalize.

“It is the unknown in a more philosophical understanding of the city, which is to say, ‘How do we invent a city out of these things that we already know?’ We know that there are very rich people and very poor people, but how do we make this into a city in a literary sense?”

The project in part arises out of Dasgupta’s desire to codify the city, to make it known to himself and his fellow Delhiites in the way that the highly codified cities — like Paris and New York — are known to us, even if we have never been there. We know them through stories, through literature and film, television and song, and these stories form a code through which we read the city — even when we do visit there.

That’s not so for Delhi, Dasgupta says.

“I feel that we’re reading Delhi raw. It’s just raw stimulus that we’re not able to code. That’s partly why it feels so overwhelming and tiring.”

His current non-fiction undertaking is what Dasgupta calls a “project of imagination.”

“I think it’s important because we — we being the people who live in that country — don’t know who we are, really. We don’t know

the first thing about who we share the country with, what those people must think about, how different issues connect together.”

Connect: the word comes up often in his talk. With his Delhi book he is trying to do what “serious” (his word) writers of Indian fiction are now trying to do with the novel.

The post-colonial project no longer motivates.

The new question: “How do we connect everything in this economic and political reality?”

When I meet with Dasgupta after his lecture,

I put to him the question of why not fiction if what he is trying to do is the same as his novelist peers. He replies that he wants this book to be more direct than his last book — direct both in its purpose and its style. The raw material he is working with includes 18 months of interviews. The result he is aiming for sounds like reportage — “This is the person I met and this is what he said and this is how he lived” — all filtered through Dasgupta’s unfolding relationship with the city.

He also doesn’t want to give his readers the alibi of fiction: “This guy may be entertaining,” he explains, referring to one of the people whose stories he tells. “And maybe you would have enjoyed reading about him in a fictional format, but that’s not why I’m telling you about him. I’m telling you about him because he’s in your world and he wishes to make claims on your world, and somehow your picture of your world has to accommodate him.”

The specifics of how Dasgupta will codify Delhi will have to be examined once the book is complete. In the process of writing, he has come to see Delhi as an emblem of the 21 st century. He makes a compelling case for that position and its implications, which he has begun to share.

India, much like Russia, came to capitalism late, though they are two of the four BRIC economies (along with Brazil and China) outpacing the former industrialized heavyweights and expected to overtake the G7 by 2027.

“So the book is interested partly in the new persona of the emerging economy.” The other part? “A meditation on the 21st century.”

If Delhi is unlike the highly codified New York, it did initially remind Dasgupta of a former version of the Empire City, that of the 1920s with its robber barons and sudden, illegitimate wealth, the Vanderbilts and the Rockefellers who built New York as a way to legitimize the capital they had accumulated.

You build the Met so that you can be seen in your box in the “golden horseshoe,” whether you like opera or not.

Success in Gilded Age New York was also understood to be in competition with the cities of Europe: buy Europe’s art treasures and bring over the best European orchestras and soloists. The status of the robber baron was tied to the status of his city.

“I thought that’s a natural future for this place: Asia is taking over from the West, and we’re going to have these kinds of amazing buildings and all this kind of stuff. None of this has happened. So the question is: Has it not happened because Delhi remains completely immature and still hasn’t caught up, and it’s that whole thing of the West being the vanguard and everyone else doing the same thing but a bit later? Or is it that this is a hypermodern state already, it’s a fully mature 21 st-century city, in which case, what does that mean?

CONTINUED ON P21

Throwback to King East in the ‘90s

MARCH 19, 2012

17

Smoke & mirrors How companies use guerilla marketing to get in your head

by MURAD HEMMADI photos by RÉMI CARREIRO 18

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

Yo, can I have a cigarette?

It’s a familiar refrain in Bombay social circles. I don’t — can’t — smoke, so I make my apologies and the questioner moves on in search of someone else with a cigarette to spare.

It was the summer of 2011, and I was back home in Bombay.

That summer, if you asked certain people for a cigarette, their answer would immediately be “yes.” It was something I noticed at a succession of social gatherings in the city during my trip home: young people giving out cigarettes at a rate that would have bankrupted the ordinary student, even in India where a pack costs about a dollar and not 10 bucks like it does in Toronto.

There’s a reason those people were able to be so free with their smokes. They’d been hired by a company, Enbisaze Solutions, to distribute — or “sample,” in their terminology — Marlboro cigarettes to young people at social events.

“It was a three-month campaign, where I had to sample cigarettes to legal-age smokers — that’s the ages of 18 and above,” explains Vanessa, who was hired as a “Marlboro Red Connector.”

“At any parties or any chilling-out scenes where a group of more than six people were present, I had to sample.”

It wasn’t as simple as just handing out cigarettes to friends, though. “You had to take pictures — that was very important — to show the number of people you had sampled to,” says Vanessa. “Every time you sampled, you needed to take pictures and give [the company] an estimate as to how many people you had sampled to and how many packs of Marlboro you used to sample to those people.”

Advertising is certainly not a new concept. The ancient Egyptians featured their wares on papyrus posters, and billboards have existed since at least the late 17th century.

Rewind to New York in the 1890s, and you’d see a kind of guerilla marketing similar to what I saw last summer in Bombay. If you were walking along the street in those days, you’d be accosted by a man in the street, engaging you in lively discus-

sion about the wonders of the commercial establishment behind you. Swayed by his argument, you’d find yourself stepping inside to peruse the wares for sale.

It’s one of the earliest examples of the “promoter.” Product placement and guerrilla marketing all seem like fairly modern concepts — far removed from the ‘60s Mad Men era of big advertising. But store-owners in late-19th century New York understood the same basic concept that drives product promotion today: the personal touch sells. The man who talked you into entering that shop was hired by its proprietor to do just that.

He wasn’t the only person in the city being used to drive up business. The owners of the stale-beer dives that filled the tenements of New York’s urban poor would permit tramps to temporarily inhabit their establishments on cold nights. The shivering “sitters” attracted the sympathy of passers-by, who could be counted upon to buy the tramps some of the dive-bar’s particular brand of alcohol. The tramps were “hired” on cycles, and owners made them move out of the beer bars at intervals to ensure fresh faces for the walking public to pity.

Just like the beer bar owners of New York City, the Marlboro Connectors made sure they “sampled” to as wide a spectrum of people as possible.

“I would see to it that I wasn’t oversampling, because you need to keep a count on how much you’re sampling,” notes Vanessa. “You can’t oversample, and you can’t sample to the same person a million times.”

Still, there was certainly no shortage of cigarettes.

“They would give me two cartons a month, and whenever my stock was over, I had to go ask for more,” says Vanessa.

But the Connectors did have to meet certain minimum goals. “In a month we had to reach a certain target, which was 100 cigarettes, and in December, it was 150.

“If you met your target for the month, you would get the entire salary,” explains Vanessa. “If you sampled to [fewer] people, they would cut it accordingly, according to the number of people you’d missed out on.”

The promoters themselves had to meet certain criteria.

“You have to be a smoker,” explains Gaurav, an old acquaintance whose free hand with the cigarettes first brought this promotional scheme to my attention. “The clause is that once you start working you cannot be seen in public smoking any other brand except for Marlboros — that’s a serious violation.”

But within those boundaries, the Connectors were given the freedom to choose exactly how and when they would work.

“We were allowed to take cigarettes as and when we wanted, when we partied,” says Gaurav. “Whenever we went to parties, when we went to clubs — basically anywhere with more than 10 people.”

Places where large groups of people congregate are ideal targets for guerrilla marketing. Yonge–Dundas Square in Toronto

is one such place. Rain, snow, or shine, Toronto’s answer to the Big Apple’s Times Square is always buzzing. Another constant of the square is that there’s always someone trying to give you something for free.

A week’s worth of trips to Dundas Square can save you a lot of money on toiletries and snacks. I’ve picked up a straight razor, lemons, ice cream, and tennis balls among other things, just by sauntering by on my way to and from the Eaton Centre.

The people who haunt Dundas Square to give you free stuff aren’t doing it out of the goodness of their hearts. They’re doing it because of that other great principle of marketing: give people things for free, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll like what they get enough to pay for it the next time.

That’s particularly true for young people, those aged 18–34, the target audience of most advertising efforts. The campaign I witnessed in Bombay was no different. The Connectors were selected as much for their age as for their smoking status.

“They look for young smokers, not exactly 18 but 19, 20, 21, up to 24 — basically below 25 years old,” notes Gaurav.

Despite not being a smoker, I fit the target demographic and still ended up being a part of the “campaign.” My face appeared in a number of the pictures taken by the Connectors in an effort to show the company that they were doing their jobs. “We

Give people things for free, and maybe, just maybe, they’ll like what they get enough to pay for it the next time. had to take pictures with their faces, because that’s how [the company] knew whether they were legal-age smokers or not,” explains Vanessa.

But here’s the funny part: most people don’t think advertising works, at least not on them. Sure, they see the TV ads and they take the free swag, but they assume the product choices they make have nothing to do with marketing or promotion.

The marketers behind Red Bull certainly don’t agree. If there’s one company that’s associated with marketing in the modern age, it’s the Austrian energy drink manufacturer, whose logo adorns everything from Formula One cars to soccer jerseys and extreme sports events. Celebrities and athletes including rapper Eminem and NFL player Reggie Bush have endorsed the brand.

But Red Bull’s most effective strategy is probably the personal touch: Red Bull cars and Red Bull girls.

CONTINUED ON P21

MARCH 19, 2012

19

What makes a city move?

A history of Toronto by its most influential movements

by MICHAEL “ANGEL” VU and CHONGWONG SHAKUR

T

he recipe is simple: friends meet over food, satisfying their biological urges while talking, ambitions and insecurities are thrown into the mix, and by some magic, the inertia that often dampens human imagination is overcome.

The place can be any place, as long as it is one — cyberspace will not do. You need physical proximity for the ideas to flow.

Toronto has its share of legendary nooks and crannies, where quintessentially Canadian narratives have emerged.

1 1908: The Group of Seven 36½ King St. East The room above the Brown Betty Restaurant Suppertime

Great Careers don’t just happen

“Toronto has arts, but no Art,” says a man in a little room of yesteryear, above the Brown Betty Restaurant on King Street.

Others listen on over their steak-and-pancake portions. Art and patriotism spew out between mouthfuls as they encourage each other to speak against the artistic constraints of European naturalism. In attendance are J.E.H. MacDonald, Arthur Lismer, and Tom Thomson, who met as commercial artists working at the design firm Grip Ltd. They share a vision: Canadian artists should organize and find their own direction to express the unique territory of this young country. From here they begin taking weekend trips to Algonquin, Algoma, along the Georgian Bay, developing a style that will mark their future fame as founders of the Group of Seven.

20

2 1952: The Toronto School of Communications 100 Queens Park Basement coffee shop in the Royal Ontario Museum Most weekdays, 4 pm A group of friends gathers most weekdays at the coffee shop in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum. Among the regulars are the anthropologist and filmmaker Ted Carpenter, the artist and curator Harley Parker, the political economists Harold Innis and Tom Easterbrook, and the then little-known English professor Marshall McLuhan.

They converse freely and throw around theories about radio and television. They suspect that these disruptive new media technologies are having an effect on society as well as the psychology of individuals.

This decade-long interdisciplinary exchange of ideas culminates in the publication of The Gutenberg Galaxy by McLuhan in 1962, which popularizes what comes to be known as the Toronto School of Communications. In The Gutenberg Galaxy, McLuhan follows the work of Innis in positing that not only radio and television but all forms of media — especially print media — influence how we view the world through our senses.

3 1963: Centre for Technology and Culture 39A Queens Park Coach House, St. Michael’s College Mondays, 7 pm The coffee shop group receives an official home with the establishment of the Centre for Technology and Culture.

Students flock there every Monday night as McLuhan hosts a seminar in “open mic” format, where ideas bounce around an increasingly star-studded crowd: the likes of John Lennon, Pierre Trudeau, Woody Allen, and Buckminster Fuller. McLuhan offers up koan-like “probe” statements (“The medium is the message!”) designed to provoke discussion and expose the role of electronic media in everyday existence.

Overdue international recognition is given to Toronto’s intellectual community, long populated by luminaries such

as Northrop Frye, McLuhan’s long-standing rival. After his popularity wanes in the 1970s, McLuhan’s work is rediscovered with the advent of the Internet, a development which he had anticipated decades in advance.

4 1965: Hippie-filled Yorkville 134 Yorkville Ave. The Riverboat Coffeehouse Nighttime In the 1960s, Canadian musicians hailing from places like Orillia and Regina — m any of whom would later achieve international fame — were incubating in cheap-to-rent row houses in Yorkville. Bohemian types formed a lively artistic community, and folk-singers were hosted at the numerous coffeehouses (one popular spot being The Riverboat) and art galleries that lined Yorkville Avenue.

If you knew what you were looking for, you could catch a pre-fame Joni Mitchell busking in the street, Gordon Lightfoot playing to customers at Fran’s, or perhaps even The Mynah Birds, featuring both Neil Young and Rick James. These future singer-songwriters would also gather to the south on Yonge Street, where blues and rock bands — such as the future members of The Band — were playing in taverns like Le Coq D’Or and The Zanzibar.

In 1965, the musicians in Yorkville did not have a sense of being a “movement” in Canadian music. They were simply perfecting their craft together, making ends meet, and nursing their grand ambitions.

By the 1970s, the low rents which had attracted coffee shop owners to Yorkville in the first place began to rise as developers bought up housing on Yorkville Avenue. As the Yorkville scene disintegrated, musicians sought better opportunities in America. It is during this period that Canadian folk and rock music broke into the American market for the first time, beginning with The Guess Who (with “These Eyes” in 1969) and Gordon Lightfoot (“If You Could Read My Mind” in 1970), followed by Neil Young (as part of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) and Joni Mitchell (culminating with her critically acclaimed album Blue in 1971).

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Look for more Toronto movements online at var.st/mindsmeet

1

“DASGUPTA� CONTINUED FROM P17 There is no Delhi Opera House, nor does Dasgupta believe there will be one in the near future. “I think the Delhi elite are not going to build an opera house in Delhi, partly because they’re not very interested in opera, but they can go to the Met themselves anytime they want. ‘It’s already been built. We don’t have to do it again. Our kids go to Harvard.’ There is this sense that the infrastructure of their lives already exists.�

Equally, “If Americans were to build New York now, they wouldn’t do it. We are in a different cycle in the global economy, which is of much faster returns on investment.�

Who today starts digging with a mind to the building having a 200year or a 300-year return on investment? “One of the reasons I feel Delhi exposes the 21st century better than Europe or America is that in a place like Europe, you’re drawing on those older temporalities a lot.�

After his talk, as we are finishing our coffees, Dasgupta admits that had he been living in Bangalore, he might be writing a book about Bangalore — though he does believe that Delhi is especially suited to a discussion of our age. “The image I have in my head is it’s a kind of place where the surface of the earth has broken open, and

one can see the precise churn of the 21st century.�

As we get up to leave and put on our scarves and jackets, we begin to chat about how he has enjoyed interviewing his subjects. He compares the role of an interviewer to that of an analyst. As much of our discussion has been given over to financial and economic matters, I make the wrong connection. “Like a financial analyst?� I ask. “No,� he laughs, “like a psychoanalyst.�

That may be the most apt description of his current project: to psychoanalyze his city, and through it, his time.

Finicky about grammar? Copy edit for The Varsity. copy@thevarsity.ca

“SMOKE & MIRRORS� CONTINUED FROM P19 They’re everywhere: hatchbacks with giant Red Bull cans on the back, whizzing through cities from Vancouver to Hong Kong. Out of them pour attractive young women carrying (smaller) cans of the energy drink.

The combination of extreme sports, fast cars, and sex appeal makes perfect sense considering who Red Bull is trying to target: young men.

And on the whole, it works. We’re so used to getting free stuff from guerrilla marketers, it’s faded into the background. Most of us wouldn’t think twice about taking a Red Bull can from a beautiful girl. It helps that the labour force that promotion campaigns tap are young and social, just like the campaign’s intended targets.

The illusion people retain that advertising “doesn’t work� on them seems to apply mainly to “big� advertising — billboards, TV commercials,

and so on. Does it make a difference that the targets of guerrilla marketing can’t help but know that they’re being promoted to?

What struck me particularly about the Marlboro campaign I saw in Bombay was that everyone around me seemed completely aware of the fact that the cigarettes they were getting were part of a promotional campaign. “Most of my friends knew, 90 per cent of my friends knew,� admits Gaurav.

By and large, the guerrilla promotion of a particular brand of cigarettes didn’t seem to evoke any kind of response from the young people the campaign targeted. As for Gaurav’s friends, “they didn’t exactly react much; I didn’t get any hard core reactions. They were mostly okay with it.�

Maybe it’s the “free� angle. After all, my reaction to someone handing me a free energy drink is vastly differ-

ent from the way I act when someone trying to talk to me about, say, the importance of educating girls in the developing world. Maybe we’ve just become so accustomed to being targeted by companies that we don’t see any harm in being given something to affect our purchasing choices.

As Vanessa points out, free stuff — in this case, smokes — isn’t exactly going to be greeted by howls of protest. “[My friends] were happy about the fact, because anyway, they’re getting cigarettes to smoke.�

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21

Why do Toronto sports teams suck?

A meditation on the longest losing streak in North America

by LAURA MITCHELL

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THE VARSITY MAGAZINE DOCKET/AD#: 11-HRB-047-BW-SP-E-1

NEWSPAPERS:

f you cannot be good at what you do, then you should try to be pleasant while you’re screwing it up.” According to Cathal Kelly of the Toronto Star, this is the sole rule for Toronto’s sports teams.

Toronto has a self-defeating mentality when it comes to sports; we seem to be convinced that we are the underdogs. We believe that we are the downtrodden, the long shots, the-little-city-that-couldn’t.

Is it our lack of confidence in our teams that causes the losing streak?

Or is it the losing streak that inspires our lack of confidence?

For many of us, disenchantment with the Leafs started in childhood.

Each season we continue to delude ourselves that this will be “the year” — and each season since 1966–67, we’ve been wrong. The lack of skill with which the Leafs continually fail is particularly embarrassing because we’re Canadian. And one of the fundamental stereotypes about those of us who are up here in the Great White North is that not only are we supposed to be nuts about hockey, we’re supposed to be good at it too. To add insult to injury, if the Maple Leafs don’t make the playoffs this season (they won’t) and the Florida Panthers steal their spot, we will officially be the team with longest drought of playoff appearances in the league.

So much for hockey. Steven Spielberg would have us believe that raptors are among the scariest creatures to ever have walked the Earth, but much in the way that you felt let down and injured when you found out that a velociraptor was about as big as a full-grown cocker spaniel, you’ve been duped and disappointed by the Toronto Raptors: duped into believing that they’ll succeed and disappointed when they don’t.

Teams who have an approaching game with the Raptors must feel a lot like teams who played my old high school’s football team did: they would have to seriously screw up in order to lose.

And the Blue Jays? They’re not terrible, but they’re not that good, either. And frankly, I don’t know that many people who care either way.

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that our sports teams are less than glorious; other people have taken note of our poor performance. For example, in June 2011, ESPN: The Magazine awarded us the title of “Worst Sports City in North America” based on the performance of all of our professional teams. With that kind of press, it’s not surprising that our teams and our morale aren’t so hot.

Check us out online at thevarsity.ca

A hitchhiker’s guide to peeing in the street

by ANKIT BHARDWAJ, photo by DAN SELJAK

P

ublic urination is a rite of passage in any city. The tribulations, and eventual catharsis, speak a lot to the place you’re in: its culture, its infrastructure, and its cleanliness. Though the reason and location of one’s public peeing may differ on every occasion, they are normally coupled with a hilarity that is characteristic of the activity.

These are some of my experiences.

Tokyo, 2010 Finding a place to relieve yourself on New Year’s Eve in Tokyo is quite the undertaking. Bars are packed and the streets are brimming with police trying to maintain order. We somehow found our way onto an abandoned rooftop and proceeded to break our seals. Yet our streams of ecstasy were met with shouts of anger and confusion. Under the seemingly nondescript pile of cardboard where we were emptying our tanks was one of Tokyo’s many homeless men. The relaxing waterfall-esque soundscape of our coordinated streams struck a sharp contrast to his bellows of fury. There is little you can do when you’re drunk with your pants down and a man starts chasing you, so we apologized profusely, bowed (it’s Japan after all), and ran.

Toronto, 2011 It was that time of year when everyone was running around campus doing things that can only be described as stupid. Ah yes, Frosh Week. It was an average enough night, but it became a night forever committed to my memory when my friend said he had to urinate near Trinity. I can’t explain it — it might have been the Frosh mentality, divine intervention, or just similar minds — but a smirk took hold of all our faces. We had to (before the sun came up) pee on all the colleges. It was a night when we drank not to get drunk, but to pee.

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THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

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BACHELOR OF SCIENCE (CONSTRUCTION PROJECT MANAGEMENT) Third Year Bridge Option Begins May, 2012 Build your career faster at SAIT Polytechnic in Calgary. With applicable training or work experience, you can enter this four-year degree program in its third year and graduate in only two. Apply today.

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FROM HERE, GO ANYWHERE. BACHELOR’S DEGREES GRADUATE CERTIFICATES PATHWAYS TO FURTHER EDUCATION

A pile of puke with a half-digested chocolate bar wrapper in it, Wednesday afternoon.

SENECACOLLEGE.CA MARCH 19, 2012

25

School of Law

Start your LLB in September 2012 Join the 216 Canadians studying law at the University of Leicester The School of Law is now accepting applications for its 2-year and 3-year LLB. s No prior degree required for 3-year LLB s Students with any University degree can apply for the accelerated 2-year LLB s No LSAT/LNAT A representative of the School of Law will be giving a presentation on the following dates: s Saturday 24th March, University of Toronto, Bahen Centre, 40 St. George Street, Room 1180, 2pm s Monday 26th March, University of Toronto, Bahen Centre, 40 St. George Street, Room 1180, 7pm Details of how to apply can be found at www.le.ac.uk/law/canada There are special scholarships for ÂŁ3,000 available to applicants from Canada.

Leicester is located in the picturesque Midlands, with easy access to London and is one of the most innovative and successful Universities in England. The UK system includes lectures and small group tutorials (example 8 per class). All first year students are guaranteed housing.

Contact: Beth Astington, School of Law, University of Leicester, University Road, Leicester, UK, LE1 7RH T: 011 44 116 252 5187 E: law@le.ac.uk Ref: Canada

26

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

What’s your favourite Toronto hangout spot? compiled and photographed by MICHAEL BEDFORD

Liz

Niloo

Kubota

2nd year, English and political science “Distillery District on a sunny summer day.”

4th year, psychology and health & disease “Chocolates and Cream on Harbourfront.”

3rd year, political science “Bathurst and Bloor.”

Andrew

Adeel

Melissa

Graduate student, OISE “Kensington.”

1st year, life science “Queen Street.”

1st year, history “Yorkville.”

Chris

Thi-Ut

Andrew

4th year, biological anthropology “The Toronto Islands.”

2nd year, physiology “Science Centre.”

2nd year, forestry “High Park and Bloor West Village.”

MARCH 19, 2012

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Around the world 1

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53 57

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19. American Science & Engineering, Inc. 20. Stuck 21. Indianapolis nickname 23. Bach’s “Mass Minor” 24. Sludge 27. Correo 28. Unescorted 30. Cimino picture (with “The”) 33. Gulp

Write for The Varsity! recruitment@thevarsity.ca

Former Japan capital Massachusetts town Neck piercing River in Flanders SeaWorld star Donkey, in Düsseldorf Home of the Little Mermaid

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ACROSS

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9

by Catherine Friedman

THIS SUMMER

CHOOSE YORK TO FAST TRACK YOUR DEGREE More than 1,000 courses available at York’s two campuses.

Take advantage of the summer term with a Letter of Permission from your home university.

Reduce your tuition by as much as $800 if you qualify for an Ontario Tuition Grant.

34. Mets and others 35. Welsh breed 38. Pretentious type 41.

Lauder 43. Costa 46. Column style 51. Exam for an atty.-to-be 52. Cornhusker city 53. Airline investigators, Abbr.

55. glance 56. ’92 World’s Fair city 59. Spanish gal 61. University in New Dehli 62. Rigid types, so it’s said 66. “The Mother of Soap Operas,” Phillips 67. Intense fear 68. Sci-fi princess 69. Normandy city 70. Missteps 71. Like llamas

DOWN 1. US capital in 1790 2. Currently 3. China, for example 4. Son of Zeus 5. One of the oldest cities in the world 6. Lil Wayne’s Carter III 7. Crone 8. Warning 9. Cannon’s Stella 10. Trim 11. Group together 12. Herman or Reese 13. Poet Wylie 18. Paleo- opposite 22. Break 23. Magazine no.

25. Acme 26. Sushi choice 29. pogo 31. Iterate 32. Timecard abbr.

36. Kind of dialysis 37. Fed. Tax 39. Link letters 40. Dissent 42. German article 44. Sicilian city 45. crossroads 46. Out of this world 47. ‘98 Masters champ 48. Gorge 49. “ animal with my car!”

50. Aspirin and naproxen 54. Barrie’s arena, abbr.

57. Some TVs 58. British noble 63. Wee prov.

64. Grammy category 65.

Diego

2012 Varsity Board of Directors Elections April 9, 10, 11, 2012 Interested in providing direction for one of Canada’s oldest student newspaper?

Nominations due: March 28, 2012 Positions Available: One (1) Director elected by and from members at University of Toronto at Mississauga One (1) Director elected by and from members at University of Toronto at Scarborough

Four (4) Directors elected by and from members from the Faculty of Arts and Science of the St. George campus Three (3) Directors elected by and from members from the Professional Faculties

Eligibility: Any F/T undergraduate student at the University of Toronto Visit var.st/agm2012 to print off your nomination form today.

chooseyork.ca

28

THE VARSITY MAGAZINE

See where the Board of Directors has taken The Varsity this year at the Annual General Meeting on Tuesday April 10, 2012.

Weekly Horoscopes

by Destiny Starr

Aries

March 21 – April 19 Interference in the court of celestial heaven will cause you to lose control of your inner magnetism. Focus to maintain control but stay clear of household pets.

Taurus

April 20 – May 20 Amethyst is your most amenable spirit stone at the moment. Seize the opportunity and unleash your earth child.

Gemini

May 21 – June 20 Anoint yourself with luscious oils to prevent the ill omens brought by the rain clouds of spring.

Cancer

June 21 – July 22 Your energy will lull due to a decrease in solar activity. Chew khat to revitalize yourself.

Leo

July 23 – August 22 In a time of great instability and difficulty, seek an oak tree as a center in your life. But the morning dew may find you far from home…

Virgo

August 23 – September 22 Do not resist: a fruit and bread based–food related substance will capture your fancy, and it is best to dive in.

Libra

September 23 – October 22 Only you can liberate yourself from the mental control of pants. Feel the breeze. Run free.

Scorpio

October 23 – November 21 In a dream, a large crustacean will guide you along the ice beaches of Europa. Take this knowledge into your daily life, and scuttle towards contentment.

Sagittarius

November 22 – December 21 A stone pyramid arranged in the order of the cosmos calls to you, a muffled chant repeating your name.

Orient your life to the South Sea islands.

Capricorn

December 22 – January 19 Changes run through your life.

Increase the circumference of your bosom for enlightenment.

Aquarius

January 20 – February 18 Your dolphin friends splash in the water with an urgent message for you. Evolve, my friend, evolve.

Pisces

February 19 – March 20 You were born from a rock, and greatness is your destiny. Join a holy man on a quest for the esoteric scriptures.