[PHOTO] The old Metro Theatre

The old Metro Theatre, the last porn theatre in Toronto, is set to reach the next stage in its evolution. I blogged in August 2012 about how there was some interest in remaking it into an arthouse movie theatre, but that fell through. A June 2014 report suggested that the place was set to be made into a gym. As observed in May by the Toronto Star's Katrina Clarke, the Metro Theatre will become a rock-climbing gym.

Where there were once sweaty naked bodies, there will soon be sweaty, not-quite-naked bodies.

The longstanding mystery surrounding the future of Toronto’s last porn theatre was solved on Wednesday when the owner of a rock climbing business announced he’s moving into the Little Korea space.

“We’re taking something that was a little bit seedy and scummy and making it available for families, kids, friends to go and hang out,” said Matt Languay, owner of the soon-to-be-built Basecamp Climbing Gym.

The Metro Theatre was built in 1938 and became a skin flick theatre in the 1970s. Its former owner, Karim Hirji, whose wealthy family bought the Bloor St. W. business back in 1979, had been trying to sell it for more than a decade.

“I’ve passed by The Metro hundreds of times and just sort of seen it as this empty, vacant space,” Languay said. “It’s kind of a spot that people walked by instead of looking at.”

[URBAN NOTE] "Toronto Is Exactly the City Canada Deserves (to Bring Us Together in Mutual Loathing)"

Vice's Ishmael N. Daro writes, with no small amount of humour, about the reasons why the hatred of Toronto unites the rest of Canada so well. Must-read.

We are taught from an early age that those who live "out East" are selfish swindlers intent on fucking over the rest of the country, and many people are still mad about policies that privileged Central Canadian elites over the Western provinces going as far back as John A. Macdonald's first government.

This hostility is by no means confined to the flat provinces, though. Virtually every region has reason to resent Toronto, for sins both real and imagined, but it usually comes down to the fact that so much of the country's wealth, power, and influence is based there. Hatred for the city is so universal it even spawned a documentary in 2007 titled Let's All Hate Toronto.

Having lived in Toronto for the past two years, I can confirm that exactly none of that hatred is misplaced.

Last week, Globe and Mail sports columnist Cathal Kelly helpfully reminded many Canadians why the country's largest city is so loathed outside its borders. In a lazy column about the FIFA Women's World Cup, Kelly lamented that the competition was kicking off in Edmonton's Commonwealth Stadium and not in Toronto. After gratuitously insulting Edmonton by calling it ugly and bush-league, and claiming the stadium holding the World Cup opener "says 'high school'" because it has a track around the field, he even suggested "the real victim here is Toronto."

Kelly, who has many bad opinions, managed to provide in one piece of writing a perfect encapsulation of what makes Toronto so obnoxious to the rest of the country. The column both reinforced Torontonians' arrogant self-image of being the centre of the country, if not the larger universe, while also making the city seem like a bunch of thin-skinned whiners.

[BLOG] Some Wednesday links

• blogTO notes the bizarre Evan Solomon scandal at CBC.


• The Dragon's Gaze reports on the nascent planetary system of HD 169142, which includes a Nemesis-class exoplanet distant from its star.


• The Dragon's Tales links to a paper suggesting that the very young Titan had a much denser atmosphere.


• Far Outliers notes that as late as the 1830s, New Mexico was arguably a Comanche dependency as much as it was a Mexican territory.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money notes how political strategists who call on the Democratic Party to reach out to southern whites are missing much.


• Marginal Revolution notes that India's cities, unlike China's, are not that significantly more productive than rural areas.


• The Planetary Society Blog notes the apparent appearance of a groove on the latest Pluto pictures.


• The Power and the Money's Noel Maurer explains the Mexican midterm elections.


• Spacing links to a fascinating review of the politics and construction of museums in China.


• Window on Eurasia is skeptical about the viability of Russian imperial nationalism and suggests that Russia's past expansions, if they are to be durable, rely on ethnic cleansing.


• Zero Geography looks at the wages of digital workers worldwide and finds noteworthy patterns.

[URBAN NOTE] "These Are the 13 Cities Where Millennials Can't Afford a Home"

Continuing this blog's intermittant theme fo unaffordable urban real estate, Bloomberg's Victoria Stilwell and Wei Lu document how home buying is out of reach for young adults in many American urban centres.

The biggest disparities are on the West Coast. Take the three Californian hubs of San Francisco, San Jose (the heart of Silicon Valley), and Los Angeles (where a developer is trying to sell one of the biggest homes in U.S. history for a record $500 million). The typical young adult in those cities doesn't even make half of what's needed to afford a home.

That makes places such as New York, where millennials have an earnings gap of just $6,550, seem relatively affordable. But remember that New York's metropolitan statistical region includes places that are outside of the high-priced housing market in and around Manhattan, where $374,350 (the median home value for the metro area) wouldn't even buy you a kitchen.

Almost 80 percent of New York's millennials reside in three counties: New York County, Queens County and Kings County, where Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn respectively are located. Using the average median home value for those three boroughs ($749,596) and the 2015 estimated earnings for millennials living there ($49,193), the affordability gap comes out to a whopping $52,262.

Furthermore, Bloomberg's calculations assume that millennials have already saved up the 20 percent they'd need for a down payment, which is a problem in itself. Families where the head of household was under 35 years old had a median net worth of $10,400 in 2013, according to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances.

[URBAN NOTE] "The Canadian stop on the London Underground"

Spacing Torontos' Adam Bunch has a lovely photo essay looking at the neighbourhood around London's Canada Water Station.

The subway station is pretty new: it opened in 1999. But this exact spot has been a transportation hub for centuries. For about 300 years, it was home to the Surrey Docks: some of the busiest docks in London. As the British Empire boomed, ships from all over the world came here to unload their cargo. The first docks were built on this spot in the 1600s, long before the British ruled Canada and founded the city of Toronto. It all started with whalers — at what they called Greenland Dock. Then, there was timber from Scandinavia and the Baltics — so they built Russia Dock and Norway Dock and Finland Quay and Swedish Quay.

But by the end of the 1800s, trade with Canada was booming too. We were sending a huge number of goods across the Atlantic into the heart of London — including, for a while, enormous old white pines from the Rouge Valley. They were needed as masts for British ships. So, in the 1870s, they built Canada Dock. There was a Quebec Pond, too.

[LINK] "Hudson’s Bay, Dollarama thrive as Canada’s retail landscape shifts"

Global News' Jamie Sturgeon notes that in the Canadian retail sector, low-end and high-end retailers like the stores listed in the title of thriving. The remainder are being hollowed out.

The country’s largest bargain store reported Wednesday morning sales results that again trumped all expectations held by experts, as more customers walked through Dollarama’s doors, and the amount of money they spent jumped. The story was similar for Hudson’s Bay Co., which also reported a jump in department store sales.

The pair’s performance contrasts sharply with others, like Sears Canada and clothing store operator Reitmans, both of whom already reported their latest quarterly numbers. They weren’t pretty.

Sears continues to lose huge sums of money as it closes down locations. Reitmans isn’t selling apparel to middle-income working women like it once did, either. The disparate fortunes highlight a “transition” happening in Canadians’ shopping habits, according to Maureen Atkinson, a senior partner at retail consultancy J.C. Williams Group.

[. . .]

The variety of stores Canadians shop at is beginning to visibly reflect the widening inequality that’s been playing out in this country and other advanced economies for more than a decade, some experts say; the high- and low-ends of the retail market place are flourishing while the middle chips away. It’s just now becoming clearer to casual observers.

“You’ve noticed it,” Nelson, a sales associate at HBC in north east Toronto, said. “We’re trying to go more upscale.” The middle-age Hudson’s Bay employee said he left Sears two years ago when his appliance department was downsized.

[LINK] "Is Solomon scandal the latest sign of a CBC celebrity culture?"

Reacting to the aftermath of the bizarre Evan Solomon scandal at the CBC, The Globe and Mail's Konrad Yakabuski wonders what sort of culture the CBC has built up around its stars.

“I did not view the art business as a conflict with my political journalism at the CBC and never intentionally used my position at the CBC to promote the business,” said the ex-anchor, who had been regularly touted as a leading contender to replace Peter Mansbridge on The National.

Yet, it was precisely Mr. Solomon’s “position at the CBC” that enabled him to meet and socialize with the likes of Mr. Balsillie and Mr. Carney in the first place. And he was well aware of the business potential in those relationships. “He has access to the highest power network in the world,” Mr. Solomon said of Mr. Carney in an e-mail to his art dealer.

Like so many other journalists in the tiny Ottawa bubble, Mr. Solomon seems to have confused what is ultimately a transactional relationship with friendship. But only a naive or egotistical reporter could think “people of great power” want to be their friend for their intellect or sense of humour.

How could Mr. Solomon not recognize the ethical red flags those relationships raised? And wouldn’t the CBC be the first to take down a politician in a similar conflict?

[LINK] "The rise of the HDP - elections and democracy in Turkey"

At Open Democracy, Harriet Fildes argues that Turkey's People's Democratic Party, which made breakthroughs in the Turkish elections, is critically important for Turkish democracy, both for including Kurds and new social movements.

The increased salience of the People’s Democracy Party (the HDP) in Turkish domestic politics will be a wild card in the June elections. Previously a highly marginalized party predominantly aimed at ensuring and protecting Kurdish rights, in recent years (and particularly since Gezi Park), the HDP has begun to appeal to a much broader spectrum of Turkish society, and has finally entered into the normative battle taking place over Turkey’s public sphere as one of the main runners in what is now a four party race.

Controversially in this year’s elections, the HDP will run as a party in their first attempt to break Turkey’s punitive electoral threshold in 13 years, which currently stands at 10 percent - the highest in Europe. In order to achieve this formidable task they will need to pull support from both the ruling party (the AKP) and from the main opposition party (the CHP). This was previously assumed to be impossible due to the enduring animosity bordering on xenophobia between nationalists (particularly Kemalists) and Kurds. But now it seems to be a viable goal. The widened appeal of the HDP can be attributed in no small part to a successful re-branding campaign. More commonly known by their nom de guerre; the BDP (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi), they have decided to run under the western front of the HDP, perhaps due to the association amongst some sections of society between the BDP and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (the PKK). Whichever way you look at it, this is a departure from the party’s ethnic-based political history. It also signals a swing in geographical focus, away from the party’s traditional roots (and electorate) in the Kurdish dominated south-east of the country (these votes are largely secure) toward the west - aiming to collect leftist or liberal voters disenchanted with the nationalism and conservatism of the main political parties. The success of Demirtaş in the presidential elections, during which he received nearly 10 percent of the national vote, shows the increasing ability of the HDP to do precisely this.

This transformation of state-society and society-society relations could be seen as a by-product of the Gezi Park protests, arising from the increased understanding of the structural violence felt by Kurdish communities amongst broad segments of society. Not only did citizens, most of whom had never attended a protest before, experience firsthand the physical violence extended by the state to peaceful protesters, they also gained an understanding of the more ubiquitous discursive violence disseminated by the state’s disciplinary apparatus; the neo-liberal media, whose failure to objectively report on the protests shed some light on issues suffered by Kurds for decades. As Figen Yüksekdağ, the Co-Chair of the HDP, asserted; “All components of the HDP are Gezi protestors, they are the subjects of Gezi.”

[LINK] "In West Hollywood, gay couples from China fulfill a dream: marriage"

At the Los Angeles Times, Hailey Branson-Potts and Julie Makinen note how seven Chinese same-sex couples won a contest in China that saw them win trips to get married in California.

(I wonder how long it will be before same-sex marriage breaks through in China.)

For seven Chinese gay couples, a trip to California offered something that wasn't legal at home: marriage certificates.

The couples were among hundreds who entered a high-profile online contest offering an all-expenses-paid American dream wedding.

On Tuesday, they wed at the West Hollywood Library — the same place where, two summers ago, gay couples married en masse after same-sex marriage became legal in California.

[. . .]

The “We Do” contest, as it was called, was sponsored by the e-commerce behemoth Alibaba and its shopping site Taobao, as well as China's largest gay dating app, Blued. The couples got marriage licenses at the Beverly Hills Courthouse this week. Though their marriages will not be recognized in China, they are legal in the U.S.

[URBAN NOTE] Rosie Prata on Power Ball XVII, "The Road of Excess"

Last Tuesday, the Power Ball XVII fundraising party was held at waterfront Toronto art complex The Power Plant. I had heard of it, but did not go. Why would I? How would I even have a chance of attending?



In a devastating essay at Canadian Art Rosie Prata examines, with no small amount of scholarship and wit and incredulity, this event. She describes Power Ball XVII as a place hardly devoted at all to the art that it is supposed to sponsor, it being an event much more dedicated to an indulgent decadence blind to its own flaws that evokes pre-1789 Parisian soirées.

In the opening scene of Ben Lerner’s 2014 novel 10:04, the main character celebrates the signing of a lucrative book deal by dining on bluefin and baby octopus that have been “massaged gently but relentlessly with unrefined salt until their biological functions cease.” Stunned as to why he’s been given such a generous sum, and empathically disturbed by the absurd decadence of gorging on creatures so intelligent that they decorate their own dwellings, he mentally calculates that the six figures he’s been given amount to “about twenty-five years of a Mexican migrant’s labor, seven of Alex’s in her current job. Or my rent, if I had rent control, for eleven years. Or thirty-six hundred flights of bluefin, assuming the species held.”

I entered the performance space of Jennifer Rubell’s So Sorry, the main event at this year’s Power Ball—the Power Plant’s annual gala fundraiser and hot-ticket art-society event—wearing the sample-sale designer dress I’ve worn to the last four upscale events I’ve gone to. I thought of Lerner’s protagonist, not least because of the resplendent cephalopod chandelier hanging in the centre of the room. This year’s theme was “Appetite for Excess,” and a Bacchanalian feast was underway at various food stations. Everything was literally stacked: enormous loaves of rustic sourdough, an oozing pile of golden honeycomb next to wheels of sharp cheese, an altar of roasted asparagus spears, a sticky choux-pastry Tower of Babel construction, hip-height drawers of herbed new potatoes and spits of caramelized ham hock installed into alcoves in the wall.

Near the centre of the room, a crowd gathered around a long white table with fist-size holes cut into it. A peek through the holes revealed a busy kitchen assembly line set up with prep stations and an expediter directing the show. I was eerily reminded of Santiago Sierra’s Workers Paid to Remain Inside Cardboard Boxes (1996–98), but saw faces smiling as workers interacted with guests. A never-ending procession of protruding hands offered delicious morsels of finger food: cured meats, fried chicken, sausage rolls, leafy radishes and bocconcini balls draped with slivers of oily fish and a smattering of allium blossoms. I helped myself to at least three of the latter. It was a luxuriant display of overindulgence, reminiscent of Marina Abramović’s controversial art direction at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s 2011 gala, and party guests blissfully lapped it up.

Read it all.