[PHOTO] 8 Spruce Street, New York City

I should have known that 8 Spruce Street--a strikingly organic-looking 76-story skyscraper located just south of the Manhattan terminus of the Brooklyn Bridge--was designed by Frank Gehry, just by looking at it.

[URBAN NOTE] Four Torontoist links

Torontoist has been posting quite a few interesting articles of late. Four of particular note are linked to below.

Hamutal Dotan writes about how The Onion's A.V. Club cultural weekly has shut down after ten months.

The news formally went out internally via a staff memo today, which stated that TorStar made the decision “due to economic pressures resulting in declining ad revenues.” We asked Bob Hepburn, director of communications for TorStar, whether this boded ill for other TorStar publications in the short term; he told us that this decision is “specific to the Onion, but it’s well-known that advertising revenues for many publications and broadcast outlets across North America are declining.”

Though hopes were high for the A.V. Club, Toronto’s edition may have fallen prey to a particularly tight media market, says editor (and former Torontoist contributor) John Semley. “I had a lot of support from the publisher and they worked really hard,” he told us by phone today. “Especially in a city like Toronto that is one of the most competitive media environments in North America, the idea of starting up a new alt-weekly and thinking it will be immediately a success, because there is an insatiable appetite for this kind of thing…it’s just not true. It’s hard to do in a year… Everyone at the Onion and everyone at TorStar worked as hard as they could to make it work.”

Jamie Bradburn noted Toronto's new Sticky Plaques commemorating noteworthy events and locations around the city.

[T]here’s only so much information that can physically be placed on a plaque. Local history enthusiast Adam Bunch has come up with one solution: the “sticky plaque,” a sticker with a QR code which allows the curious to learn more about places where “something cool [or sad] and historical happened on this spot.”

The sticky plaques are the latest manifestation of the Toronto Dreams Project that Bunch has worked on since 2010. While researching material for postcards about Toronto’s past that he placed around the city, he realized just how many stories are lurking out there that deserve some sort of commemoration. Trying to figure out how to bring a guerilla-style approach to local history, and inspired by street artists and organizations like the Toronto Public Space Committee, Bunch thought about suggestions he received regarding printing QR codes on the postcards. He realized that large stickers could be printed cheaply and posted near existing traditional plaques to add to the information they include, or in spots where they currently don’t exist. The links go to pieces that Bunch has written or to other relevant sites that he finds informative (including Torontoist).

So far, about two dozen sticky plaques have been posted around the city, commemorating events ranging from fatal Christmas Eve streetcar crashes to William Faulkner’s drunken adventures in a biplane at the University of Toronto. Among his favourites is the story of the statue of King Edward VII in Queen’s Park, which originally stood in Delhi, India. After independence, the statue was removed from its prime location and left to rot with other colonial monuments until it was shipped to Toronto in the late 1960s.

Margaret Atwood, Carly Maga writes, is using one of Rob Ford's gaffes to earn money for charity.

Late yesterday afternoon, a one-of-a-kind T-shirt printed with an image of a charming Mayor Ford flipping the bird under the slogan “Welcome to Toronto,” signed by the legendary Canadian author Margaret Atwood, went up for auction on eBay. The proceeds will go to Fanado, a new online venture that Atwood founded.

Drawn in the style of a political cartoon, with emphasis on the mayor’s chin, the shirt references that time last year when he allegedly gave the middle finger to a woman and her young daughter, after the woman had scolded him for driving while talking on his cellphone.

The shirt was given to Atwood during a visit to Ryerson University’s Digital Media Zone, where she met with young entrepreneurs, offered feedback on their projects, and looked for possible fits between them and Fanado—an online portal for connecting fans with artists. Atwood, of course, has been a Rob rival ever since the Ford brothers dared to mess with Toronto libraries. Doug even once boasted that if he saw her on the street, he “wouldn’t have a clue” who she was.

Spying an opportunity, Atwood decided to sign the shirt and auction it off to help Fanado raise $85,000 on the crowd-funding site IndieGogo (the fundraising campaign continues until July 28). This isn’t Atwood’s first attempt at eBay success. Curtis White, a school teacher in Edmonton, Alberta, just closed an auction of a signed portrait of Atwood by his artist wife, Oksana Zhelisko, for $1,000 on behalf of Fanado. Atwood reached out to him again to post the Rob Ford T-shirt, available for bids until next Thursday.

James Gen Meers describes his documentary on graffiti and how Rob Ford's

If you are going to wipe out an art form, as Ford would literally like to do, you should understand it first. Some graffiti artists have tried to work with the City to promote an understanding of the difference between graffiti art and vandalism. The City has tried to create a program, StreetARToronto, to promote graffiti and street art, but it is not widely lauded by the artists or the general public.

In the process of making our film (which was recently selected to partner with the Hot Docs Film Festival’s Ignite crowd-funding initiative), we’ve seen widespread support for and interest in graffiti and street art. It has been very interesting opening our project up to the public and hearing the views of Torontonians about the subject—which are certainly more varied than the mayor’s.

A recent artists' takeover of Astral Media information pillars. Photo by Martin Reis.
In interviewing artists, the thing that comes up all the time is the role of corporate advertising versus public art, and the possibility that people don’t think about how they are affected by advertising in public spaces. People complain about graffiti and street art on public walls, but they don’t consider whether billboards and other forms of public advertising are desirable or even legal (in many instances, they are not). Toronto itself has instigated an ongoing conversation on this issue, particularly around illegal billboards in Toronto, heightened by the recent passage of a consolidated billboard bylaw and the creation of a new billboard tax—one that was challenged in court, though it has since been upheld. The graffiti writers and street artists we have been speaking with have repeatedly asked: “If outdoor advertising is legal, does that mean it is good?”

[LINK] "Conrad Black says stripping his Order of Canada would add ‘insult upon injury’"

Why do I still care about the ravings of a British citizen convicted of a felony? (The Canadian Press' Jim Bronskill writes a good article about Black's latest challenge, this one to his desperate push to relieve him of membership in the Order of Canada on account of his criminal conviction.)

Conrad Black says it would heap “insult upon injury” to strip him of membership in the Order of Canada over U.S. criminal convictions when no Canadian court would have found him guilty of the same charges.

[. . .]

The Order of Canada’s advisory council, chaired by Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, may recommend to the Governor General that an appointment be rescinded when a member has been convicted of a criminal offence, or if their conduct strays significantly from recognized standards of public behaviour.

Black went to the Federal Court this month after the advisory council rejected his request for a chance to make oral arguments in his defence, saying he could file only written representations.

A half-day court hearing is set for Aug. 24 in Toronto to determine whether Black can appear in person before the advisory council.

“I remain fully convinced of the legal and moral propriety of my actions,” Black says in the court affidavit sworn last week.

[. . .]

Black says he would present his position in an oral hearing of the advisory council “through witnesses as well as documentary evidence” about “the history of injustices” he experienced in the U.S. courts and related matters.

“In order to properly defend my honour and integrity, I seek the opportunity to present the very lengthy and complicated history of the past few years in person, looking the members of the Advisory Council in the eyes, answering any questions they may have and explaining to them why termination would be the unjust and inappropriate heaping of insult upon injury.”

In a response filed with the court, federal lawyers representing the advisory council say Black has no case.

“It is plain and obvious that the preliminary decision of the Advisory Council concerning whether or not to hold an oral hearing is not subject to judicial review,” they said.

[LINK] "Harper’s new friend in France"

Writing in MacLean's, Paul Wells highlights what might be the new normal in the official France-Canada relations, French non-support for Québec separatism. Almost since separatism took off as a political force in the 1960s, the idea that France would recognize an independent Québec was a linchpin of separatist strategies and French policy--at first officially, under De Gaulle, then more quietly under his successors.

[B]eginning with his 2007 election, Sarkozy began to change that. Sarkozy’s economic policies and his stance on major foreign-relations issues might change from day to day, but on Quebec he was consistent—and more hostile toward separatists than any of his predecessors.

Sarkozy’s best Canadian friend is the steadfastly federalist Power Corporation CEO Paul Desmarais. On a 2008 visit to Quebec City, Sarkozy became the first modern French president to come down openly against separatism. “I don’t see how proof of fraternal, familial love for Quebec has to feed proof of defiance toward Canada,” he said. “Frankly, if there’s someone who would tell me that the world today needs another division, then we don’t have the same view of the world.”

Enter the new guy. Hollande is a socialist and Harper really isn’t, and Conservatives in Ottawa worried that Hollande would differentiate himself from Sarkozy by retreating from his predecessor’s pro-federalist stance. But to their surprise, senior French and Canadian sources say the two leaders have managed to get off to a good start together.

Even on Quebec. On that election-night phone call, Hollande referred to “une amitié et un cousinage” with Canada and Quebec, which could translate as a reference to France’s Canadian friends and its cousins in Quebec. Note-takers and public-service parsers on the Canadian side noted the resemblance to Sarkozy’s preferred language: “amitié et fraternité,” friends and brothers.

Two weeks later they were at Barack Obama’s Camp David retreat in Maryland for a G8 summit. In their first face-to-face meeting, Hollande said two things about Quebec to Harper. First, that France sees its relations with Quebec and its relations with all of Canada to be parallel, harmonious and essentially synonymous. Second, that Hollande has no intention of disrupting that state of affairs.

Both French and Canadian sources interpret those comments as a continuation of Sarkozy’s line on the whole business, which was in turn viewed as an unusually pro-federalist departure from past practice. So Sarkozy left his Quebec brothers, or at least the Péquistes among them, out in the cold—and Hollande seems content to prolong that diplomatic isolation.

It goes without saying that French disinterest in Québec separatism will have a significant impact on the strategies of separatists. If, after a "Oui" majority in a hypothetical future referendum, separatists could no longer count on France automatically recognizing an independent Québec, their margins for international maneuver--hence domestic maneuver--will be hemmed accordingly.