[URBAN NOTE] Four Torontoist links

[rfmcdonald]

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?”