Toronto Tourism Done Right

BlogTO pointed out today that the Canadian Tourism Commission has an amazing series of videos about Toronto on YouTube. In fact, they have a YouTube channel of amazing videos about places all over the country, but me being me, I'll focus on the Toronto stuff for now.

Clocking in at no more than about two minutes, these videos look fantastic, but aren't cheesy. They just naturally let the awesomeness shine through about everything from West Queen West to the Distillery, Casa Loma to the Islands, from the AGO to the Brickworks to Woody's in Boystown...and even more. If you don't live here, you really need to check them out. If you do live here, check them out anyway and I'll bet they might get you to feel maybe a teensy bit proud of this place.

Here's an example below, featuring an area I walk through very often: Yorkville, but you'd do best to go through the comprehensive playlist (and don't forget it's two pages).

For NaPodPoMo: No Mood Swing

Evidently, it's not enough I have this monthly podcast and another weekly podcast - I have to come up with a daily one. But it's just for National Podcast Post Month (NaPodPoMo), which I dodged last year, but this year won't. A podcast episode every day in November, and in my case, each will be under 10 minutes. Yikes.

But don't worry - I'm not foisting it on you, unsuspecting Description listener. The podcast, No Mood Swing, will be on another feed...with this one exception: my mission statement for the project, where I give an idea of what I'm going to do on this thing. If you want to subscribe, awesome! If not, no problem, and thanks for putting up with this one thing in your feed. That's the one thing about being less than 10 minutes: compared to what I usually do here, it goes by like (snapping fingers) THAT!

Download the mission statement
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Description 74 - GOing

I venture into suburbia in a big green and white clanging flattened metal hexagon, and live to tell the tale. Featuring music from The Most Serene Republic, a surprise cameo by a constable, looking up a word I didn't know and a bird in a nice suit.

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(Yes, you can download it. I'm migrating all episodes to other hosts, working backward. Thanks for your patience on that.)

Associated links
Go Transit Official Site
GO Transit @Wikipedia (and follow the link in the article for "conurbation".)
The GO Concourse @ Union Station
That Paul Janz song (Again, because much of the video was shot in Union Station. Sorry.)
Mississauga.com
The Most Serene Republic
And here comes the IODA Promonet stuff...
The Most Serene Republic
"Heavens To Purgatory" (mp3)
from "...And The Ever Expanding Universe"
(Arts & Crafts)

Buy at Napster Buy at Rhapsody
More On This Album

Canoeing the Credit River
Lakeshore Lions Arena

The Most Serene Republic are forging on with their tour (at the Mod Club here tonight as I write this) although recently they had a lot of their gear stolen in Vancouver. That's a hard blow for any Canadian band, so check out their official site in the links for details on what was stolen, so you can watch for it if you're in that area.

A GO Train was the location for the tv series Train 48, which aired on Global from 2003 to 2005. A version of an Australian soap, it centred around a group of commuters heading home each night from Toronto to Burlington (technically, that would have to be Aldershot, right?). The train was the only location for the show, and the episodes were taped the same day they aired (having great improv actors helped), so things could be topical and cheap - and the cheap part was how Global was able to do an original drama series at all back then. That's grist for another episode, I guess, if I could find a way to keep it from being depressing. :-)

I cut quite a lot of the soundseeing tour of the concourse hall. Sure, I could go on about the Second Cup and the juice place and the Cinnabon and the Dairy Queen, but...meh. As you might have noticed by my boundless energy in this episode, the place is nothing more than functional.

When I first lived in Toronto way back when, there was a bar where the newer food court is now - called Choo-Choo's, I think (whatever it's called, it has moved nearer to the stairs to the Great Hall of Union Station). It was actually where I made my first mixed drink order. Due to my fairly uneventful teenage years, I had very little context for concocting a beverage in my head. I knew I loved Coke, and thought I'd like Kahlua because it wasn't fruity, so I walked up to the barkeep at the age of 19 and asked for a Kahlua and Coke. He asked me to repeat that, and I did. He stood there perplexed for a moment, then went to fill my order. He poured a shot of Kahlua and a highball glass of Coke, then gave me the glasses.

"Um, no, I'd like them together," I said.

He raised his eyebrows. "Together?"

I nodded, he shrugged, then poured the shot into the Coke. He watched as I drank this mix perfectly content, because it was exactly what I wanted. I would go on to perplex less seasoned bartenders than him for the following two years, before university life would mature me to the level of gin and tonics.

Hang in while our host is down

You might have noticed this in the last little while, but our lovely hosts at publicbroadcasting.ca have been down and are not connecting. Really sorry about this, and we'll get things together as soon as possible.

Updates on Updates and Nuit Blanche Again

As usually happens when I do a post without a show, a new episode is coming next week. One of the things I've been doing instead of an episode lately has been FINALLY transitioning a part of my first website to blog form. Incompletely Conspicuous, my almost-10-year-old (holy crap!) website about the band The Pursuit of Happiness, has always had a news section called Updates, and I figured it was time to drag it kicking and screaming (if it felt like exerting effort) into the 21st century by turning it into a blog, so I could...er...update more easily and include more doodads and interactivity. So if you like TPOH and want to know about some of the interesting things its people do because the band isn't really around anymore, take a look and feel free to subscribe.

Now, it's also time for good ol' Nuit Blanche, what I've called "NXNE for modern art" during the now-four years I've been doing podcasts about it. The subject of Description 25, 45 and 61, the all-night city-wide art exhibition - starting tomorrow night - will most likely be the subject of Description 76 (yes, two podcasts away...not guaranteeing that). My focus this time is probably going to be the happenings around the Art Gallery of Ontario, because it will be open FOR FREE from 6:55pm to 3am for various snazzy things. Since the AGO re-opened with its full Frank Gehry makeover, I've wanted to do a soundseeing tour there, but hadn't yet made it there during the couple hours on Wednesday night when I could afford admission. So here's my chance. Yay!

But what I'm going to do is more about the AGO than Nuit Blanche (sort of like Description 61 was as much about the Crystal at the ROM than Nuit Blanche), so this does not in any way get you off the hook if you're anywhere near town to experience the event. There are at least 130 projects of all kinds to explore and sometimes participate in, reportedly closer together in the downtown core than last year (which was my beef then), helping out even more with car-free zones and open-all-night TTC with a $9 pass to take as many trips as you want. There's also the Nuit Blanche app for my iPod Touch and your various smartphones to help you out when you're pounding the pavement in the dark not knowing which way is up (correction: whoops, it's not for the Touch - I have to stick with the mobile version of the official site). For info on all that stuff I just mentioned, go to the official Nuit Blanche site, and also check out suggestions and tips from our friends at Torontoist.

Granted, some years are better than other years, but even at its worst, Nuit Blanche is as accessible as contemporary art gets, and frankly, it's as accessible and happy and warm-fuzzy as Toronto usually gets. So celebrate art, the city, and each other.

Description 73 - The Dual Citizens

In the temporary Canadian embassy of Ashtabula, Ohio, I talk with my birth mother about why she went to Canada, why she stays, and how it's even more our home than I'd ever known.

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Associated links
The beginning of the story is at the end of Description 68 and throughout Description 69
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee @Amazon.ca
The Bank of America Center @Wikipedia
1972 U.S. Presidential Election @Wikipedia
The Port Angeles-Victoria Ferry
Oak Bay Tourism
Straight.com
"The Last Streetfighter: the History of the Georgia Straight"
Canada and the Vietnam War @Wikipedia
"What Is An Affinity Group?"
Tourism New Brunswick
CBC.ca article on election for AFN national chief
Walnut Beach Cafe Photo Gallery

By the end of the year, you will be hearing more about Aboriginal people in Canada (having already recorded some stuff) and more about New Brunswick (because I'm going there for Canadian Thanksgiving). Maybe I should say "perhaps on either side of the end of the year," just to keep it safe.

In case you were wondering, this experience has been a big one for my parents. They always said they would support me if I ever wanted to search out my birth mother or father, and when my birth mother's family found me, they were as happy as anyone. Knowing that they were familiar with some of them (there are even more odd connections than I've mentioned) and then learning with me how great these people are, it made what could've been a fairly daunting thing even happier for them, and therefore even happier for me. We had our own driving, eating and talking while I was there too. (Btw, it should come as no surprise I gained five pounds over that week.)

There's not much more to be said here, except that I had a much better time than I made it sound with my morning semi-cold voice. The week with my birth mother's family was remarkable, but exhausting. Strangely, one thing it wasn't was awkward (although I seem that way in our talk - it's no more awkward than I usually am). My birth mother and I had been communicating freely and deeply through phone and email almost every day since June, so a lot of ground had been covered. I hadn't communicated as much with the rest of the family, and even with my birth mother, there's nothing like being in the same physical space. But the whole thing, while a whirlwind, all felt perfectly natural - like we were all supposed to be there.

And we were.

Description 72 - Between Mud and Sky

Volunteering for a theatre company, I explore Dufferin Grove Park, where the play's the thing in more ways than one. Featuring a naked kid, a pongophone, ice cream truck music and Stephen Harper getting beaten with a stick.

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Associated links
Friends of Dufferin Grove Park
You may know Todd Tyrtle from such podcasts as The QN Podcast and Talking Stick
Blog post: The Tyrtles Have Landed
Clay and Paper Theatre
Trailer for Between Sea and Sky with ASL
Ryerson University Centre for Learning Technologies
Citizen Z @NFB.ca (not with description, which kind of sucks)
Dufferin Rink
The Brick Oven @Project for Public Spaces
Barbara Klunder
"Dufferin Grove Park" poem by RM Vaughan
Okay, technically, the wading pool is not a Splash pad...
For the Birds by Margaret Atwood
What is Cob?
The QN perspective on the Punch and Judy show with Stephen Harper

In case you think Dufferin Grove Park is some sort of hothouse of gentrification in some well-to-do, lily-white neighbourhood, you would be wrong. That area has had a history of poverty and crime and all kinds of people from everywhere doing their best to get by, so making the park what it's become was an uphill battle and continues to take strength. The fact you wouldn't immediately know that from being there speaks volumes.

If you could only click through one link in that list (and that's not true, so go to all of them), it would be the one for Friends of Dufferin Grove Park, because not only does it have all the information about everything going on in the park (rink! oven! cob! campfires! farmers' market! arts! history!), but it sort of evokes the vibe of the park - there are forums and public discussion sections everywhere. The transparency of process in how things work is really impressive.

It should not come as a surprise, then, that the editor of the site is Jutta Mason (from Germany - yet another immigrant), who was a major part of the "friends" creating what Dufferin Grove Park is now. She won the Jane Jacobs Prize in 2001, and continues to help hold together the spirit of freedom and community the park embodies every day, inspiring work beyond that block through the Centre For Local Research Into Public Space (CELOS). Mind you, she only helps to hold it together, because this sort of thing doesn't work the way they've done it through the control of a person or two - it has taken a deep but not-foolish trust in one's fellow neighbours.

I think many of the greatest thinkers concerning social media can relate to that. So if you have any interest in any kind of community, you'd do well to study that one site as deeply as you can, and take notes.

Coming Around Again

A new episode is coming next week, but a couple old episodes somehow seem to fit with some current events.

In Description 46, I talked about working "location support," and did a soundseeing tour of one of my long days guarding a location film set. The film in question was The Time Traveler's Wife, which is finally getting its release this weekend. In the previews, I've already spotted a scene (in front of a tv store in the '70's) in The Junction neighbourhood where I had a couple shifts, and even the gazebo/bandstand in Kew Gardens, where I started the tour of the last episode. Other settings where I stood/paced/sat for 12 hours at a time included a very wood-lined mansion (the Christie Mansion, where I finished Description 45) and an old hospital ward (actually an abandoned part of the Centre for Mountain Health Services, aka Hamilton Psychiatric Hospital). But if you check out the movie and notice scenes inside a house where you can see snow in a yard outside, that's where I was for Description 46, with leftover "snow" cushioning my butt on the concrete steps and keeping me warm in the autumn dusk. It's more than likely you won't notice a thing beyond the romance of the story, which is testament to the talent of the hard-working Art Department and those people whose job I would not wish on my worst enemy: the Location Managers. I don't know if I'm going, but if I do, I'm sticking around to see their names (especially A.J., Warner and Don) way down in the credits, and applaud.

And for something completely different...perhaps you've noticed the "debate" in the U.S. about proposals for reform of the healthcare system. I've been a bit more vocal about this on Twitter and Facebook, but suffice it to say it's been fantastically stupid and most of its stupidity has been fueled by very distinct economic interests. One element of the stupidity has been fearful and silly attacks of the healthcare systems in Great Britain and here in good ol' Canada (NDP leader Jack Layton said his piece about the matter in Huffington Post a couple weeks ago). I remember in the miniseries "Prairie Giant," the protests Tommy Douglas had to deal with a few decades ago from doctors spooked about his proposed introduction of healthcare reform in Saskatchewan (which eventually led to the systems we have today). Douglas must have thought the doctors' strike was pretty scary at the time - it's not quite like the more literal "strike threats" President Obama is dealing with now.

Anyway, a couple years ago, without such clouds of comparison over me, I did an episode illustrating a typical experience of mine with the healthcare system in Ontario (healthcare being under provincial jurisdiction) with a soundseeing tour of my trip to St. Michael's Hospital to get my first mammogram. So you can follow along in Description 52, but don't expect any death panels. ;-)

Dubber Takes the Subway, Spoons Makes the Archive

(As usual, the part of this post you'll actually find really useful is near the end.)

Anyone who's in the Canadian podcast fishbowl or has listened to Description 18 might know my big tipping point in becoming a podcaster was listening to and guesting on a podcast called Dubber and Spoons Take the Bus, in which two media profs in Birmingham England would have an often-funny conversation on their bus ride home from work. On vacation in 2005, I rode on the bus with them for an episode on Canada Day, we hung out afterward with their respective wives and Dubber's son and all were lovely to me; then when I got home, I sent them an audio message saying how lovely they'd been and other general things, inspiring Dubber to say I should do a podcast, which eventually resulted in me doing this one.

In the years since, they podfaded - Spoons (James) moved to Australia with his wife to another prof-type job and furthered his career as an excellent photographer, and Dubber (Andrew, and originally from New Zealand) became one of the preeminent authorities on using various tools on the internet to create, promote, share and make money from music.

Dubber's expertise on that and radio brought him here to Toronto to speak at a big academic conference about radio at, of all places, my alma mater of York University. A couple nights ago, he came downtown and I was happy to reunite with him in actual physical space, having drinks with some great guys who had been to the latest edition of DemoCamp nearby that night. When things broke up, Dubber had the idea he was going to drop the equivalent of a week's rent to take a cab all the way back up to York, but I told him that was insane when he could get more than halfway there on our own public transit (actually, he could get the whole way up, but those buses to York from Downsview Station have always been kind of a drag). So I gave him a token (which he found really small and really odd) and introduced him to the wonders of the TTC. He survived to present the next morning, and will now go on to share his wisdom in consultancies with bands in Hamilton and Montreal. For more on his multitude of works which you'll find useful (most of them, anyways...), take a look through the links at andrewdubber.com.

But say you're a podcast listener who's noticed that many of your favourite podcasts have been less frequent in the summer as folks step back or recharge or do whatever it is they do. Looking for something to listen to in their place for a while? Consider the fact, then, that James has gathered most of all the old episodes of Dubber and Spoons Take the Bus (there were just under 50, and Dubber didn't really keep anything), and has put them on a new blog, thebuscast.com. Get a taste of it with these promos I helped them do back then, and decide for yourself if they'd be good summer replacement material.

Description 71 - Back to the Beach(es)

Taking Queen Street to its eastern end, I extend one previous journey and correct another. Featuring music by Luke Doucet, a dog that sounds yippier than it looks, a walk around a picket line and not a single soul bared. :-)

"DL Burnside?" Where did that come from? It was NQ Arbuckle! Damn!

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Associated links
beachestoronto.com
The Beaches @Wikipedia
The Beach Business Improvement Association
An even better tour of The Beach by Doors Open tour guide Gene Domagala
Beyond Landscaping
Ivan Forrest Gardens
That Luke Doucet song in full @the Mod Club
You know about Rick Danko, right?
Official sites for Luke Doucet, NQ Arbuckle and Justin Rutledge
Six Shooter Records
Garden Gate Restaurant (aka "The Goof" because sometimes the "d" was missing)
Fox Theatre
Torontoist stories tagged "city workers' strike"
The kicking at Christie Pits
History of the Neville Park Loop
Harris Water Treatment Plant @Wikipedia
Harris Water Treatment Plant History
QTVR Harris Treatment Plant tour
I ended up on Balmy Beach (Flickr photo by Diego_3336)

Woodbine Avenue is also kind of a signpost for me because it's where my friend Julie (now in Western PA) once lived long ago when I was first living in Toronto. I'd go out there to see her, thinking I was going to the far edge of the city. Obviously I was wrong.

Hey! Speaking of being wrong...

When I should have said NQ Arbuckle (and he was my favourite part of that show at Lee's! Argh!), I must've been thinking of RL Burnside, the legendary Delta Blues guy who passed away a few years ago. That was weird. My subconscious has better taste in music than I do.

If you or your subconscious has great taste in music and you're in town when this episode is posted, you'd do well to go where I walked, because for the next few days you will be smack dab in the middle of the annual Beaches International Jazz Festival. More than 50 jazz and jazzish bands clogging up Queen Street East and Kew Gardens with coolness, so go if you can..and take your garbage with you when you leave, because the strike is still on and it's nice to help out those residents who work so hard to keep their neighbourhood lovely without kicking people.