[PHOTO] Watching the World Cup in the Galleria

[PHOTO] Charlottetown City Hall, decked out for PEI 2014

The main difference between this picture of Charlottetown City Hall and the picture I took during my 2013 trip is that this photo sees City Hall adorned with Canadiana-themed bunting. Presumably this is part of the PEI 2014 event celebrating the 150th anniversary of Canadian confederation.

[URBAN NOTE] "East end Toronto a developer's dream: Hume"

Christopher Hume's recent Toronto Star article talking about the gentrification of eastern Toronto is worth reading.

The east is red — as in red hot. Suddenly it seems everyone in Toronto wants to be on the other side of Yonge St., an area avoided for generations.

The latest sign of the east end’s new-found desirability is a large mixed-use scheme proposed by Streetcar Developments, a firm with a long history in the district. The triple-towered project would occupy space south of Queen and Broadview.

Even more transformative is what’s unfolding in the West Don Lands. Under the administration of Waterfront Toronto, the 32-hectare site is fast becoming one of the city’s most intriguing new neighbourhoods. Organized around Corktown Common, a park that sits on a giant mound of earth created to control flooding on the Don River, the district was an industrial wasteland. The cement plant at King and River has been replaced now by elegant condos and social housing whose architecture is as laudable as its intentions.

The massive Athletes’ Village constructed for the 2015 Pan-Am Games will be turned into a student residence for nearby George Brown College once the jocks have departed. With narrow streets and extra-wide sidewalks, accessible park and transit, the Don Lands will be the first neighbourhood in Toronto to incorporate the best of 21st-century urbanism.

Though much remains incomplete, it’s a safe bet the new community will be a busy and vibrant place that attracts families as well as the usual hordes of young and upwardly mobile.

[LINK] "The Amazing Art on These Communist-Era Houses Was a Rebellion Back Then"

Wired's Margaret Rhodes describes how colourful houses in late-Communist Hungary were a sign of rebellion.

There’s a children’s book from 1977 called The Big Orange Splot. In it, all the houses on one block look the same. Until one day, when a pelican drops a bucket of orange paint on one roof. Instead of painting over it, and returning to the status quo, Mr. Plumbean decorates the roof—and then the facade, and then the yard—with wild, rainbow patterns. His neighbors think he’s lost his mind. But one by one they see the beauty in individual expression, however weird and wacky it may look at first.

The popular book sounds like an allegory about communism, and conformist lifestyles. And as it turns out, something similar happened in the Hungarian countryside in the 1960s, during the height of communism. The result—those decorated houses—are the subject of Hungarian Cubes, by Katharina Roters.

From 1965 to 1988, János Kádár ran things in Hungary. Unlike the leaders of the other Eastern Bloc countries, Kádár practiced a sort of relaxed strain of communism: the Hungarian People’s Republic had a free market, and was tolerant (more than Stalin, at least) of individual voices and public dissent. These policies ultimately became known as “Goulash Communism.” It’s fitting, then, that during the Goulash Communism era, a peculiar architectural trend took off: People started painting the facades of their houses with abstract shapes, in wild shades of color.

It might be more accurate to say a decorating, or public art movement, began to take off, because the architecture style in question began in the 1920s, long before Kádár’s time. It followed the principles of Communist urban planning: city blocks filled with square, economical row houses. They were designed for efficiency, meaning every house was the same, and every house was boring.

That didn’t last forever. In Hungarian Cubes, Roters documents those countryside row houses during Kádár’s reign, after residents started freewheeling with colors and shapes to make it so no two houses looked like. Roters noticed the painted “Magyar Kocka”, or Hungarian Cube, houses in 2003 after moving from Germany to a small Hungarian town. Some of the homes have trompe l’oeil paintings around the window, like facsimiles of shutters or trimming. Others look like abstracted images of sun rays, or harvested crops.

[LINK] "In Thimphu"

At the London Review of Books blog, Gavin Francis looks at a bookstore in Thimphu, the capital of the still somewhat isolationist Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan. Despite everything, books--and the world they represent--still come in.

At the Junction bookshop in Thimphu the manager is reading Sartre’s Age of Reason. ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of Nausea for months,’ she says, ‘but the Indian distributors won’t send it up.’ On a stand in the centre of the shop there are glossy photo books: cute, scruffy waifs; austere Himalayan panoramas; a coffee-table celebration of carved wooden phalluses (the Bhutanese strain of Buddhism employs phallic symbolism with zeal). These are the books laid out for souvenir shoppers. On the shelves, there’s a section dedicated to Ancient Greek drama, another to 19th-century Russian novelists (all in English translation). There’s a volume of Elizabeth Bishop, and some Freud. She has sold her last copy of Infinite Jest but still has a copy of The Pale King.

I take a copy of Barthes’s Mythologies over to the counter. On the floor is a stray dog, one of the custard-coloured mongrels that roll in Thimphu’s dirt by day and howl to one another at night. The manager strokes the dog’s patchy fur. ‘His name is Motay,’ her companion tells me. ‘It means “the fat one”. People here feed him because he barks only at the police.’

On the main square outside there are monks and nuns wearing burgundy robes; some have prayer wheels, others have cell phones. Most of the local men are wearing the gho, a robe with a knee-length skirt a little like a kilt, and the women the ankle-length kira. Bhutan wants its traditional dress to be more than a gimmick for the tourists: at many of the city’s institutions there are signs insisting ‘Formal Dress Only’.

I sit down with the Barthes and open to ‘The Lost Continent’, an essay that scolds the West for stereotyping and exoticising the East. ‘This same Orient which has today become the centre of the world,’ Barthes writes, ‘we see… all flattened, made smooth and gaudily coloured like an old-fashioned postcard.’

[LINK] "Naomi Lewis's 'my big Jewish nose' essay sparks controversy"

CBC describes the controversy surrounding an extended personal essay by Calgary woman Naomi Lewis, published in the Calgary Herald, describing her complex personal relationship with her nose.

In A Bridge Too Far: The story of my big Jewish nose, 38-year-old Lewis writes about her experience getting a nose job at age 14. She also shares the experiences and complicated relationships between others in her life and their noses.

She interviewed her mother, aunt, father and two cosmetic surgeons in the hope of presenting different perspectives on why some Jewish women feel compelled to get nose jobs.

"It's something that I've thought about quite a bit since it happened and I regretted it," Lewis told CBC Radio's Calgary Eyeopener.

"The more that I thought about it, the more it seemed related to a sort of internalized racism, a kind of after-effect of intergenerational trauma. I have a lot of Holocaust survivors in my family and I think that the cultural phenomena whereby Jewish women have more nose jobs than anyone else, historically, I think is related to that kind of persecution and a kind of internalized self-loathing."

In response to the essay, Calgary Rabbi Shaul Osadchey wrote an op-ed piece blasting it as a "defamatory, borderline anti-Semitic, and anti-multiculturalism article."

Osadchey said the article perpetuates offensive stereotypes that "lead to prejudice and discrimination on an individual level, which in term ultimately leads towards the gas chamber and the path of genocide."

My reaction, as a non-Jewish reader, was that this was a sensitive essay examining one woman's complex relationship with pervasive stereotypes and her own body. You?

[URBAN NOTE] "For the love of Kensington"

I'm fond of Jason McBride's Toronto Life article from last month, containing interviews with four different Torontonians (and photos!) from Kensington Market on the subject of how that storied neighbourhood has evolved and is continuing to evolve. It's fun.

In the spring of 2012, with my best friend in hospital recovering from cancer surgery and my wife pregnant with our first child, I decided to join the ­Consciousness Explorers Club in Kensington Market. Founded by Jeff ­Warren, a journalist and meditation teacher, the club is dedicated to what he calls “playful spiritual exploration.” One aspect of this was an occasional sweaty dance party at Handlebar on Augusta, but the club also held weekly gatherings and more formal meditation classes in the living room of ­Warren’s Wales Avenue Victorian. A couple of dozen people routinely showed up, a ragtag group of doctors, writers, students, scientists and one youngish mother who sometimes hit the Hot Box pot café around the corner to get a buzz on before class. The novelist Barbara Gowdy, the playwright David Young and the filmmaker Ron Mann were among the regulars. In a room decorated with a large tapestry depicting a tiger, the floor a colourful sea of cushions, Warren led the group in a 40-minute guided meditation. After a tea break, he’d initiate a conversation around a theme—one week might be about notions of community, another week, the consciousness of animals. He called these conversations, which could be both enlightening and tedious, “collective wonderment.”

I had never meditated before in my life, and it took me several weeks to find a comfortable posture (three cushions helped). There was a lot of “sharing,” too, which I reflexively balked at but which became kind of liberating after I finally realized that there was nowhere to hide. And, to my surprise, that I didn’t want to hide. The discussions often got intimate—one guy talked a lot about his anxieties and drug addiction. At one point, I teared up as I meditated on an image of my unborn baby taking a bath. In its most sublime moments, it felt like seeing a shrink—if both you and the shrink were high on ecstasy. In other words, it was all quintessentially ­Kensington.

[BLOG] Some Tuesday links

• 3 Quarks Daily considers the ethics of suicide.


• Slate's Atlas Obscura blog shares photos of Second World War relics in Alaska's Aleutian islands.


• The Big Picture shares images of Australia's doll hospital.


• blogTO lists five things Toronto could learn from New York City.


• The Dragon's Tales notes China's growing presence in Latin America and observes that apes and hmans share the same kind of empathy.


• Joe. My. God. notes the coming out of an Irish beauty queen.


• Marginal Revolution expects inequality to start growing in New Zealand.


• Discover's Out There looks forward to the new age of exploration of Pluto and the rest of the Kuiper belt.


• The Planetary Society Blog shares beautiful photo mosaics of Neptune from Voyager 2.


• The Search examines in an interview the use of a hundred million photo dataset from Flickr for research.


• Torontoist notes a mayoral debate on Toronto heritage preservation.


• Towleroad observes that a pro-GLBT advertisement won't air on Lithuanian television because of restrictive legislation.


• Window on Eurasia suggests Ukrainian refugees are being resettled in the North Caucasus to bolster Slav numbers and predicts the quiet decline of the Russian Orthodox Church in Ukraine.