[PHOTO] Downtown Toronto as seen from Bathurst and Dundas

As anyone who glanced at my Flickr and Instagram feeds in the past day or so can tell, I've been posting lots of photos from the Toronto Fringe Festival. The whole thing is a fun experience, and it's nice to document it with images as well as with words.

The above is one of my favourite shots to date. Walking from the Robert Gill Theatre at the University of Toronto on College Street where I had my first show southwest to the Factory Theatre on Bathurst below King, I passed through the broad low intersection of Bathurst with Dundas. Looking east, Toronto's skyline lay exposed before me.

[URBAN NOTE] "Vintage Toronto Ads: The 1999 Toronto Fringe Festival"

Torontoist's Jamie Bradburn writes, with examples of ads, about the Toronto Fringe Festival in 1999.

Three months before the 1999 Toronto Fringe Festival opened, new artistic director Chuck McEwen received an unpleasant surprise: a call from the owner of the building where the festival’s offices were located indicating the summer event had to find a new home. “That was an unexpected and high-pressure situation,” McEwen told the Star. “We had such a small amount of time to actually find a space and then move. And it’s difficult finding office space in the Annex area that fits our current budget. So it was tense.”

Quarters were found at Bloor and Spadina, and the festival rolled on. Over 11 days, 93 shows were presented. The best known, The Drowsy Chaperone, was promoted as coming from “the co-creators of Honest Ed! The Bargain Musical.” Having evolved from a stag party, the show earned kudos during its run at the George Ignatieff Theatre. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry,” noted Now reviewer Glenn Sumi. “Well, OK, you won’t cry. But you won’t want to leave either.” The Star’s Robert Crew accurately predicted that, with a little reworking, “the potential is enormous and it will be back.” The show eventually won five Tonys for its Broadway run in 2006-2007.

There is much more at Torontoist.

[MUSIC] Ace of Base, "The Sign"

I'm a bit sad today. Not an hour ago, I found out that my venerable RCA CD/tape player no longer plays CDs.



I've had it for two decades. It was with me in Charlottetown; it eventually came with me to Toronto. Maybe it can be fixed, maybe it cannot, maybe it is just not worth the effort. It was, admittedly, a device I used less and less over the years, as I transitioned to playing music off my computer. The last time I used it was a couple of months ago, when I played the superb 2003 maxi-single of Yoko Ono's "Walking on Thin Ice".

What was I wanting to play today? Ace of Base's 1993 debut album, something I found yesterday discarded on the side of Bathurst Street along with their followup and two French-language novels I wanted to read.



Specifically, I wanted to hear "The Sign".

"Ace of Base - The Sign (Official)" (Watch on YouTube)

I'm perfectly willing to agree with the casual evaluation of Ace of Base's music, that it was a sort of lowest-common-denominator Europop that was briefly fashionable international in the early to mid 1990s and the commercial counterpoint to other more challenging and innovative movements. This is entirely true.

Is this all that there is to the music of Ace of Base, though? I could note, if you're interested in the sociological implications, that Ace of Base's hits arguably inaugurated the current era of Swedish domination of the international pop charts. (Well, that and Roxette in the late 1980s.) Ace of Base counts.

More to the point, Ace of Base counts to me. Along with the aforementioned Roxette, Ace of Base was the first pop music group with albums I owned, actively seeking them out and buying them with my money. I was attracted to the music for good reasons: it was popular, it was cheerful, it was catchy, it came from the world outside. The music of Ace of Base did, and does, make me happy. Surely it's unfair to condemn anything that can do that.