Shopping Carts in Ravines

I’m a city kid.

Toronto, Ontario, Canada has always been my home and home base, without even a consideration of a question.

Although I’ve had partial / dual homes in other towns and cities, I was born in this city and have always been solidly anchored to it.

All other cities that I’ve visited (except for Brisbane, Australia, though I can’t explain why) felt like simple places, products of architecture and street plans, while this place felt not only like it was alive, but like it was alive within me as much as I within it.

I may spend a lot of time contemplating and discussing topics like the impact of genetic manipulation on global politics and the effect of media oversaturation on contemporary freedom of choice, but everyone’s stereotypes aside, I am actually from the ghetto.

Of course, no one recognizes that side of me at all, and most of my friends are totally unable to relate to some of what I talk about, or laugh if I use some of the slang that seems natural to me. I’m not at all trying to front, but I do feel the same desire to represent as most ghetto kids do, to even wear that piece of me out on my t-shirt.

Living with a single parent in an apartment building and area plagued by violence and drugs at the time when crack cocaine was burning at its worst through urban centres, I did encounter these things firsthand as much as a child could really be able. (The weirdest thing I recall is the parents trying to abandon their 18 month old baby at our door with a loud knock and a mediocre vanishing act.)

I didn’t really notice how bad things were, as I knew no different, but I did acquire plenty of street survival skills.

Dizzee Rascal says, “Stay ghetto if you must, just remember to get out,” and I have managed to develop and apply my intelligence and abilities quite successfully, and I am now in a position to choose to make my home just about anywhere in the world that I might want… and for the first time, the question is actually coming up.

The building just right of centre in the photo above contained my first home, and then, seven floors above that, my second.

This is less than one city block east of the Jane St / Finch Ave intersection, an area renowned both locally and internationally for its drug gangs and gun violence.

This hydro-electric tower field contained my first garden, in amongst other ghetto apartment dwellers’ plot allotments. I’ve never had as large a garden since, despite moving to better homes in better neighbourhoods.

(You may recognize this from the site banner at the top of this blog’s pages.)

Now, I’m serious about Toronto seeming as alive as any of its components…

A big part of this sense of life is the city’s intensely multi-faceted nature, being a loose interaction of possibly the most diversely-representative array of communities on the planet, rather than a one-piece cultural unit that can be easily controlled from above.

The urban planning and municipal management of Toronto provides absolutely nothing but the most basic framework in which the thriving subcommunities, subcultures and subclasses live, and it is their lives and actions which truly create this city… making this forest as much a living thing as any of its trees, flowers, birds (mostly pigeons) or squirrels.

For the most part, even the independent commercial interests seem to have an appreciation for the organic and noncommercial and respectfully allow space for it, whether consciously or not. Only the elected and corporate suitdummies curl their toes in rage at this unapproved life and culture.

Thankfully, the corporate city can’t come anywhere close to controlling this life, much as it would like to sanitize, homogenize and package it for corporate purposes. One look at a Toronto tourism campaign shows their inability to even comprehend it.

I say thankfully, because blessed experiences like the one below are found in every area at any moment, created by the connection between an openly-left gift and a perfectly-suited recipient.

Other places, friends may try to lift your spirits when you seem down, but my city will do it for me on its own. Feeling low one day, I took a walk by myself down Spadina Ave and got the warmest and most personal hug a cement surface could possibly offer:

Christopher loves you too, Toronto.

And Toronto can be easy to love…

…but lately, I find it’s looking increasingly less familiar.

Areas I used to like, I no longer trust.

Places that never seemed like they could be anything but playgrounds now feel dangerous to be in. In a short span of time, the urban theme park that Toronto had seemed to be has vanished or grown terribly ugly.

For the first time in my life, despite the attachment of ghetto roots and enjoying plenty of middle-class comfort here…

…I find it possible to feel repelled by Toronto.

And it feels healthy every time I do.

Toronto seems most beautiful these days when I view it from a distance, and I find it harder to find the same perspective from within its midst.

Is it just me, is it just the summer heat and the annual surge of crime and pollution?

If it were truly simply a matter of having gone too long without a vacation, then why does this feeling now grow rather than lessen when I take time out of town?

Is it really the city changing - or possibly something even bigger?

I have been finding myself increasingly engaged in the city that I thought I already knew inside-and-out through blogTO, and so perhaps a big part of this really is in the details of where I focus my time, energy and attention. Perhaps I’m seeing my lifestyle as out of line and projecting it on my environment.

The waterfront walking tour, as a random example, sounds like a great way to get out and do something totally healthy and interesting… but increasingly, I find myself not feeling like I want to be out in much of the city, while certainly not feeling like being cooped up inside either.

A vegetarian co-op house that my friend lives in has rooms opening up and it sounded like it might be a very healthy move for me for this school year. Now I’m hearing of recent swarmings occurring around that exact area of Bloor St, spanning blocks in both directions and including Dufferin Grove Park, one of my favourite in the city. It takes more than that to really scare me, I already live off northern Jane St, but it sure does still count. (14 young offenders were arrested in connection to the swarmings.)

Last year at Trinity-Bellwoods park, panhandling meant this:

This year at Trinity-Bellwoods, panhandling apparently means a five-person fight ending with a fatal stabbing (although I do think the ‘panhandler’ label is being misapplied here, this is how it’s mostly been reported).

I don’t know what the actual statistics are for violent crime this year in Toronto, but what ultimately counts for me is whether I see them myself.

As I said, fewer and fewer areas feel safe and comfortable to me, and everywhere seems to be increasingly populated with people I can’t at all relate to and in many cases don’t trust. The parties are all great from one perspective, but these days few parties of any type in this city - from rap music nights in big clubs to hippies frolicking at drum circles in Trinity-Bellwoods - manage to happen without a noticeable invasion of scumbags and infusion of drunken sexism and violence.

(Funny how, before the drum circle permits, I never saw this issue arise yet squad cars would drive right into the park to shut us down… now that we’re official and regulated, the cops don’t appear even though aggressive thugs show up and the police could actually be doing something useful.)

I’m sure Toronto is the thug capital of Canada, but it also used to be so much else. Where have the adamant and organized anarchists gone, who used to stand up to this sort of street-level scum as much as to our overseeing oppressors, those who were previously so quick to show up at neonazis’ doorsteps with a torch-wielding mob when they began harassing and attacking people?

No one should expect NEFAC types to be the counter-balance to the most powerful and organized of the wannabloods and wishwewerecrips, but the random thugs who barely even have friends are just as much a violent threat given their lifestyle commitment to the principles of lacking principles, seeking out violence and destroying as much as possible… I feel like most of the good people have migrated to Splitsville (a lovely sea-side township in BC), but maybe that’s just what it feels like during the smog-fog season in Hogtown.

Of course, the street shitheads are only a small part of the ‘con’ category. NEFAC’s traditional enemies are a much larger part, and while I see plenty of small-town kids rocking System Of A Down hoodies, unless System has some Factory Farming song that I’ve never heard, you guys don’t get it ’cause you can’t possibly really understand what it’s like to be subjected to the intense corporate brainwashing shitstorm that airs 24 hours a day in a city like Toronto, from every digital device, on every frequency, over every surface and in every environment. A quick look around this site will give you an idea what I mean - at the cottage, I dream about the cottage. In the city, I dream in product advertisements.

The worst I’ve seen in rural areas is that, though the capitalist propaganda machine doesn’t pay you personal dream visits, most of the people around you buy into the neocon wars wholesale and will loudly proclaim their importance and even hold support parades without ever offering any actual explanation for how domestic conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan could possibly be considered to be in the reasonable domain of control of Canada or the United States without white supremacy and global control being underlying principles. That’s awful, but that’s just ignorance, that won’t make you crazy like breathing Toronto airwaves does, where people are so consistently hit with brainwashing messages that they unthinkingly dedicate their entire lives to the addiction of acquiring and consuming the products that actually lie at the root of these capital-driven conflicts.

I’ve also noticed in my time outside the city that, although certain days the air may be so clogged as to actually be unbreathable (medically speaking), our tap water seems relatively superior. In Toronto, I’d never drink unfiltered tap water except when faced with absolutely no other choice (especially with the rundown my inside source Anton gave me on our minimalistic lake-to-tap purification procedures), but outside Toronto a bottle of T.O. Tap tastes like spring water in comparison to the weird-smelling stuff coming out the faucets in other cities and towns. Our local bodies of water are, of course, another story. A Stephen King story, to be exact.

Let me take this to a broader level for a minute.

I’ve wondered for some time if I’d be able to judge - unlike the frog being proverbially boiled alive - if my urban environment and place in this society were making the transition from thriving and progressing while being dangerously exciting to being simply dangerous, depraved and regressive in terms of one’s health (on all levels).

At times, I’ve phrased this as whether I’ll be able to judge when it happens, but high-tech/neo-philosophical hopes for sustainability and the elimination of the roots of social ills (such as poverty) have encouraged - or tantalized - the side of me that places trust in distributed sensible and scientific progress, most especially with the increasing inclusion of synergy and holism in realms of thought and discussion (both deliberately and, I’m even more excited to see, unconsciously).

There is an appeal to the rural commune, the back-to-the-land hippie concept (some such attempts having managed to outlast the ’60s by a good deal, surviving to this day), however there is also a great emptiness that I find I feel when placed in such a closed context. Even in smaller cities around Ontario, I feel a strong emptiness, not inside myself but in the environment. Totally silent night time streets bewilder me, and draw my attention to the key difference between somewhere like Kitchener/Waterloo and Toronto… K/W seems to me to be a set of defined city limits with a collection of buildings and people within them. Toronto feels alive unto itself, to the extent that it is thriving out of control, that it can’t come even close to being shut down by anything from nightfall to blackouts.

I’m very much a product and element of that living urban creature, of one of the ultimate locations of the new, developed world in terms of being able to succeed in manifesting anything one can imagine - and having started with essentially nothing, I’ve already managed to do pretty well (on my own terms) without having even really started trying. When I’m in a rural environment it becomes that much more obvious to me that whether I’m trying or not, my mind has a high-bandwidth connection to the world around it and while I may choose to relax at times, I am functioning most properly when making efficient and dense use of my time. (If you thought calling my input “bandwidth” was weird, be glad I didn’t go with calling my time “my cycles.”)

Obviously, though, the Big City Dream needs to be ruled out as insane when it goes inherently hand-in-hand with destruction of the local and global ecosystem, homogenization of individuals beyond the point of being capable of free thought, and every other thing I see happening around me to varying degrees in my current-day urban environment.

The first question is whether these are happening to increasing or decreasing degrees.

The second question is whether those trends are headed towards the breaking point of reaching permanent problems or solutions.

The third question is the number of times I need to re-evaluate my concept of where that breaking point actually lies in order to decide whether to sacrifice the benefits and theoretical possibilities of the modern urban lifestyle in favour of preserving myself, my knowledge, my resources and my social networks (as happen to be relevant) to switch to a lifestyle that is driven primarily by sustainability, survival and maintenance of true cultural value and places all other concerns second.

Well, I can immediately answer the third question - re-evaluation ought to be a perpetual process up to and likely even beyond the point that the time to make a decision has presented itself and passed behind. That’s a rule of the scientific approach that I apply to everything as much as I’m capable of doing.

I can already answer the first one, too, and the answer is “both.” I’m witnessing the collapse of global systems, both natural and artificial, in nearly every area I care to check into. Simultaneously, I’m watching scientific understanding and technological application race forward towards a point that may not only solve the commonly-considered problems that have typically burdened humanity, but also bring us forward into a new era the likes of which is ineffable in many ways to us now. And, futurist nanobabble aside, there is some reason to think that Toronto can hold a place far superior to somewhere like Detroit in a post-industrial, tech-innovation-based meta-economy (existing as a layer above the now internationally-distributed manufacturers, committing us very permanently to globalization).

Which happens first? Will we see solar energy systems built from technology that places them at a price cheaper than coal, solving the world’s energy crisis and encouraging every Western nation to get the hell out of the Middle East and only go back under properly negotiated, mutually beneficial terms? Or will the dirty nukes hit the still-operating nuclear plants that humanity’s collective blindspot has somehow allowed to be constructed all over the place?

Well, that’s the final (second) question, in a sense… we’re in first place and we’ve nearly won the race, but it doesn’t change the fact that our horse is on fire and we too are about to be engulfed in the flames that have scorched the track and killed everything left in our (flaming equestrian) wake.

It’s up to each informed and free-thinking individual to make a decision for themselves. The decision before us is whether we commit to holding onto the reigns of this lifestyle regardless of how likely a disastrous outcome appears at any given time, placing faith in society/technology/knowledge or even the precedent of erroneous human pessimism, or whether we instead establish a personal danger limit at which we’ll jump the sinking ship no matter what assurances we may receive that rescue is just over the horizon.

And what would jumping ship even mean? Does it really count all that much where your house is in the face of global collapse? Perhaps it means things more like a Wobbliesque general labour strike, or the more recent call, promoted by Adbusters, of a general consumption strike (a little more topical in a culture with no real jobs and too much spending power).

Expanding both sides of the sinking-ship-awaiting-rescue metaphor reveals that the difference between the two greatly parallels the difference between faith in technology and attachment to our natural instinct for self-preservation. The decision may in fact be the same as the choice between our knowledge and our instinct, and while it may seem foolish to ever side with the widely-known-to-be-ignorant human being over the accumulated nature of wisdom… our airplanes _do_ actually work, most of the time, and no one operating on pure instinct would dare set foot in one of those actualizations of insanity.

Might we actually have reached the point in our species’ development where our libraries, schools and information networks can consistently provide us with more accurate and detailed accumulated information than our evolution has left us? Or will it only appear that way long enough for the law of the minimum to come into effect when we slip up and mismanage a single key element, putting us permanently in our place and out of the picture?

Far more than in the past, I’ve been feeling like I’ve got one foot in the nuclear-powered boat and one on old-fashioned dry land - something that might seem like a neutral position to many people, but is definitely a conscious decision for someone born in the ghetto and it’s not at all my default.

I do know where I stand on the question of committing unthinkingly to this society - whether the plane’s engines are still running or not - and that’s “I’m capable of reading the reports and interpreting the stats for myself, and will most definitely be using my own brain’s capacity for logic to decide if the rest of you are totally off your heads and I’d be better off switching from veganism to wild deer.”

I’m deeply concerned by things like the NAU/SPP and our southern neighbours’ elite’s rampant globalized nu-fascist behaviour, but those are pretty hard to simply run from anyway. It seems better to me to be involved in the information streams, spitting back into their “out” tubes.

That aspect of global/continental politics aside, these days Toronto is the issue that’s coming in my eyes and ears and tightening up my stomach. My spidey sense only tingles in spurts, and most of those are tied specifically to Toronto (Driftwood gangsters firing guns at random, serial arsonist, Queen W going downhill). I do also know, in a much more detached and vague way, that things are not necessarily peachy-keen in other urban centres. American cities are struggling with being in America (a chronic condition), many of Europe’s major centres face problems that are unheard of around here, and Australia’s got its own upside-down issues.

Leaving Canada is very low on the likely-list for me, at least for a good while, and leaving Toronto is very low on the list too given that I’m attached to it in some very solid ways in terms of my social networks, my pastimes and, most especially and importantly, my education. All the same, in contemplating whether Toronto is still somewhere that feels like a healthy home to me (I grew up by Jane & Finch with crack dealers in the stairwells of my building, so feel free to be confused about this sentence) my mind naturally wanders to wondering about the other Canadian cities that have touched me enough to feel they could host me beyond a brief visit.

Crime in Vancouver sounds like it’s pretty bad, but Vancouver’s never been my destination of choice in BC anyway because, well, crime in Vancouver sounds like it’s pretty bad. I’ve heard similar things about Victoria lately, but I just can’t picture that in my head. Maybe I should go find out or something, considering my looong term plans have been aiming for the island for some time now, something I’m still holding on paper but reconsidering as I reconsider the entire scope of this location and lifestyle issue.

Calgary is apparently facing a rise in serious crime right now and finding itself short on police officers. I always thought there were enough cowboys to make that up, but maybe Albertans aren’t slangin’ as many guns as everyone makes out. Whatever, moot point, Cowtown is not my type of town - they are not nice to the cows, despite the name, and an organized recycling program is still a complex issue for them - and Canada’s right-wing heaven throwing its overflowing budget resources into filling the streets with cops does not sound pleasant.

Oh, and before you take this as a snowglobed Torontonian viewing Alberta through nothing but Toronto Star headlines, I’ll tell you that I’ve spent plenty of time there, have family there, and effectively lived there for more than one block of time when younger. I got my first driver’s license out there, I watched an oil storage tank explosion scar the sky with a massive plume of black smoke for the rest of the day, I went to indie band and hardcore punk shows, I subscribed to a local street zine thing that flopped after the 3rd issue… I am genuinely familiar. Oh yeah, and the Stampede, I try to repress that though.

Now Winnipeg on the other hand… I’ll admit that writing it off is just pure old-fashioned arbitrary Canuck domestic bigotry (well, and Venetian Snares’ very convincing audio essay).

Montreal, I don’t have a clue how they’re doing. Funny what a little language barrier will do, I hardly even hear about them in the big newspapers that most definitely employ translators of every stripe and have offices in every city. I’m very unhappily missing the anti-SPP protests as I type this, and thus missed the brief trip I’d planned to Montreal. Don’t know when I’ll be going next, and I haven’t been in a while and saw very little of the city the times I did. It certainly does have an appeal for me, though. I admit my firsthand inexperience, but I perceive it to be more similar to Toronto than the rest of Canada’s cities, while having a stronger European influence than an American one. If that’s even a little true, that’s not a difficult deal to talk me into. I bet I’d even get back the fluency that was progressively drained out of me from the time I was removed from French immersion and dumped into the pathetic-rote-memorization-excuse-for-a-French-language-education of the English streams.

As I’ve said, for now, I’m not going anywhere and these are all questions and thoughts towards decisions that can only be made some while into the future… but previously when I left the city to visit another place, whether far away or within the province, I would position myself relative to the 416 rather than simply in that other place, relative to it and myself.

For the first time in my life I’m able to conceive of myself as being independent from Toronto, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to contemplate my position not just in relation to Yonge & Bloor, but to the intersection of the equator and the international date line, or simply to the sun and the moon.

It’s a funny thing now that I think of it, although I’ve been thinking about the “jumping ship” question for years now and debating urban vs natural-communal, the “which urban” question posing Toronto vs X has never really been present in my mind. It’s not wise to let your first breakup change your sexual orientation, and perhaps I should play the urban field before giving up on society entirely, eh?

Well, not that I haven’t already “given up on society” in the lifestyle-anarchist, Crimethinc sense as it is. But that doesn’t determine my course from here, that’s just cultural existentialism, recognizing that by my own declaration I’m free to interact with the world on my own terms, rather than strictly and entirely within the confines of the lose-a-dollar-gain-a-dollar property acquisition system.

And that might just be the final answer I’m missing here, as it makes moot the premise of the second question.

Why put myself in the position of being a victim in the confines of urban society, or victimized by feeling forced to live in a tree on days I’d rather ride an elevator?

Why feel like I ever need to choose between such false dichotomies as The Kingdom Of Western Capitalist Life vs nature’s whimpering and wheezing temples of reality?

I’ve long rejected the ego-trip notion that humanity is anything that can be considered separate from nature, and I now reject the idea of choosing between nature’s evolutionary development and our own cultural/psychological development, as one is derivative of the other. A synthesis of ideas and abilities gained from all sides - along with a healthy round of rejections - is the only logical way to move from here and actually be moving forward.

As for me personally, where I’m at can be permanently described as ‘in my shoes, on our Earth.’ For those who I want to stay in touch with, it’ll pretty much always be possible to locate/contact me and see what’s up… anyone else, well, I’ll write things down and maybe you’ll read about it afterwards.

—

Alright, so all of the above I wrote while at the cottage, where I spent the last bit of my nearly a month out of the city in various places around the province.

Now, having had a chance to return to the city and re-imerse myself in it, this time selectively, I’m feeling far more comfortable and at home again. I feel alright in the sketchy places, and actually feel more comfortable around street kids and people… despite having been pretty deep into street culture in the first place, my time out of town being able to hitchhike and feel safe and being able to trust everyone around me openly has helped me to approach people here with less prejudice.

I’ve been specifically choosing to be around people who I know I care about and who care about me, and all of us seem to be working harder on living healthier lifestyles in our own various ways, addressing our own various problems and vices.

I think the lesson I learned about Toronto is that it’s exactly what you make of it, Toronto has just about everything and you not only can but must select specifically what parts of it you want to observe and engage in, in terms of your social networks, environment and behaviour/lifestyle.

This determines almost entirely whether the place is a very bad one, or a very good one, and I think my perception of it as a very bad thing was directly related to how messed up my lifestyle had gotten and how awful some of the people I was interacting with were.

Labour Day has felt like New Years Eve for me this year…
I’m pretty sure that - once again - I’ve never felt better.
It’s taken a lot of wrestling to integrate everything I learned at Om, but I think I’ve nearly got it under control… and for one of the first times since leaving my teens, I feel happiest being this age and at this place in my life.

Update: this Star article on how rural areas actually have higher homicide rates.

July 27, 28 and 29 I was in the backwoods of Ontario’s Kawarthas region, near the small but friendly and more-progressive-than-you-might-expect town of Bancroft & its surrounding communities, for Northtek teknival 2007.

This is the 6th consecutive year of this festival (here’s my post on last year), which is a free, open, mandatory-DIY event held on crown land and comprised wholly and solely of the coming-together of whatever number of autonomous groups show up to take part in the temporary decentralized community.

Absolutely every aspect of the organization and occurrence is handled by whoever gets together and picks up the slack, including date planning (don’t get me started), location scouting and selection, and promotions / information dissemination.

That flyer up top was just one person’s artistic interpretation, and this one’s my own:

The only rules are: no vending allowed whatsoever (dually enforced by Canadian crown land law and anti-capitalist mob rule), leave no trace (same dual theoretical/practical enforcement situation), and don’t be “that guy,” i.e. don’t be obnoxious, unable to take care of yourself, or stepping on anyone’s toes… or find out what genuine response means in an essentially lawless scenario. (The answer: we kinda freestyle it, but power in numbers is always key.)

Introductory info on the festival is at Northtek.net and more detailed stuff is on the wiki at free23.net, however both of those are dynamic sites and if you’re reading this post too long after its post date, the content of the sites might have changed dramatically.

I could be said to have been some part of three of the soundsystems that set up, while also being little to no part of them at the same time. The one I was most involved with in the lead-up to the festival was the Slutek stage, a collaboration between Chicken Sluts (Toronto, ON) and Abitek (Abitibi, QC).

The Slutek, ahem, ‘teamwork’ banner

I contributed no gear or decor to the stage, nor did I in any way help set it up (I would’ve, but I was coming up on the bus and we only got there late Friday night when everything was already kicking).

Chicken Sluts banner, produced by a collective painting at the previous week’s Toronto drum circle

Lots of helping hands were pitched our way, however, and the stage came together pretty awesomely. Here’s the two main organizers, though:

  
Abitibi’s #FF and Toronto’s Wizard As Fuk, primary Slutek organizers

Of all the stages, Slutek had the most classical teknival soundsystem construction, although we’re sadly unable to put together speaker walls like this in Ontario.

Chicken Sluts vs Abitek ‘Slutek’ stage

I think of everything I heard, Ghost Television’s mosh pit-inducing set was my favourite. I did play a Sunday-morning set at the Slutek stage (starting off with an obnoxious happy hardcore smack across everyone’s 10 am… while wearing a Hanson shirt at that) but the stage I played the most at was the Operators of Overload stage, brought up by my friends from Waterloo, ON. In the lineup pictured below, I was right before the first set listed. I also played again later, and later again still.

Assembling Friday night’s O of O lineup as a doggy wanders by

My computer had been out of commission for two months leading up to the festival and I turned it on for the first time actually in the woods after getting the parts I needed the same day we came up… so I went all over the place and had lots of fun with the music collection I’d been locked off from in that time, playing from grime and dubstep to acid jazz, soulful house, Swedish hip hop and all sorts of other stuff.

Marta sleep-styling at her Decoration Station

Here’s Marta from Waterloo, who came up with the O of O crew. She set up a Decoration Station area for people to create pretty things to wear on their hair, clothes, etc. Once people were done with that, we converted the Station location to the Free Market that me and Mintjellie set up, where things could be donated or taken on a gifting-based (rather than trading-based) system.

Though the lack of a central message board (and the fact that no one had any clue what time it was at any point) prevented some planned workshops from coming together, those two spaces were successes, as was Icecream’s Northtek Cafe.

Relaxing and chatting over tea and soup at the Northtek Cafe

One other thing that I wanted to have people work on communally was creating a piece of art on the back of a confiscated Toronto advertisement, which was then going to be replaced backwards into an adframe when we got back to Toronto in order to display the art instead of an ad. We brought two up, one broke (they’re rather fragile plastic) and the other was needed to make this sign.

This bit of signage was painted on the back of a common Toronto “public service” advert-order…

…putting it to a much more constructive use.

I was satisfied with that use, though, and when we all got back to the city it wound up in front of an ad-bearing garbage can. (Expect to be hearing more about this sort of project.)

The most heart-warming stage had to have been the MiR/ghEttoblAst/subtransit collaboration under the Association of Autonomous Astronauts name. Though the stage was lower-power and more chill than the pounding O of O PA or the squawking Chicken Slut speakers, it was powered by solar-charged batteries and playing through home-built speakers and thus did the best job of capturing the DIY and sustainability aspirations that the festival tries to aim for and align itself with.

The Association of Autonomous Astronauts setup with solar panels and home-built speakers

Though that big metal subwoofer is MiR’s, most of the recent speaker construction work was being done by the Batman, who was working on some while in the forest and showing whomever happened to be interested in learning.

The Batman building speakers

This really is my idea of camping… way crazier, more memorable, more educational and ultimately more environmentally friendly than the way that the average person would handle camping.

Pretty far removed from Boy Scouts, though, and I’m not sure I’d trust these three to take my daughters on any Girl Guides overnights.

Knives and malt liquor on the forest floor

Actually, these girls were pretty cool, though I got the impression they were generally watched with a touch of suspicion as they were, and came off as, ‘teknewbs.’ They held up their end just fine, though, cleaning up their site well without having to be asked and putting in responsible work to ensure that they secured a way out early on as they didn’t have one (as opposed to the freeloaders who crammed into the bus we’d all paid $50 a head for after leaving litter on the ground).

Some folks called The Quanta from the Wasaga Beach area set up another stage for Saturday night, and the fifth and final stage on the list was the 10000 Creatures live band & independent film setup. I didn’t hop on any instruments, although they’re pretty open to people doing exactly that, but I did bring a number of movies for them to screen.

Despite having owned it for three years, I’d never actually watched my copy of Baraka, as it was given to me by a girlfriend who told me to wait to watch it with her and then permanently stopped speaking to me. I waited on it, knowing I needed the right time and environment/social setting to watch it in, and this provided the perfect opportunity. A very good film, to understate it.

I also brought Nothing Shocks Anyone Anymore, One Second Before The Big Bang (an experimental graphic design impression of the timeline of the universe from then to now, put together by this Belgian crew and mailed free of charge all the way to me so that I could show it at things like this - very cool of them!), and a Magic Eye VHS tape containing animated 3D stereograms. You can see some of the Magic Eye video being projected in the two clips below, but good luck getting the 3D thing to work through these!

Footage from the 10000 Creatures sound / film stage

I didn’t encounter any Californians this year, the majority of the approximately 200 people present were from the Toronto area, with some from Quebec and some from New York / New Jersey, and a few occasionals from further away, like Jacob from the UK and this guy MashyP from Australia (though they weren’t here just for this festival).

An Australian scrambles to make it from Toronto to Northtek

Photos: Njjunglist’s, evil9mm’s, rottenvegetable’s, TalixZen’s, #FF’s, Wakka’s

The City Of Toronto™ has this idea of how bridges are supposed to look. They’re supposed to be grey, minimalistic, empty and sterile. Not too sure why, the CN Tower isn’t even that way any more, but you know me, I’m not exactly one to rock the paradigm.

Anyhow, apparently things like graffiti, poverty and homelessness can all be grouped together as “dirt” and eradicated as a whole. All you have to do is have enough money to pay people to erase all the things in reality that you can’t come to terms with!

Enough wallets got together and agreed that bridges are grey and sterile, and put all their money into aggressively reconstructing reality to fit their worldview… not caring one lick whether that meant destroying not only the culture but the entire lives of those who fell outside the model.

On June 28th, the literally poor and unfortunate souls who had made their homes under the Bathurst bridge were evicted by the City™, and their last remaining bits of worldly possessions were bulldozed.

Along with trying to erase these people’s lives so as to not cause discomfort to the working masses passing by on their commuter trains, the City™ also felt that it was important, nay, probably vital that they cover all the cement columns’ graffiti with grey paint. Rich people like grey for some reason, I think it’s something to do with being too old.

Unfortunately for The City Of Toronto™, the city of Toronto has a powerful, thriving culture.

After two days of “work” painting the bridge’s underside a nice shade of blank, the City™ workers went home to sleep, and the city’s life came out to play.

All the stuff pictured here appeared in the span of one bridge party night. Paint cans were limited in number, but the blank slate encouraged people of all sorts to try their hand.

Even though the majority wasn’t necessarily the most mind-blowing, visually-appealing work I’d ever seen, I was brimming with joy just to see so many people trying to create at all.

Random scribblings appeared alongside stylistic tags and developed pieces.

The most elaborate piece was left unfinished, at least for the time being, as someone had run off with the necessary black paint:

However, my favourites of all weren’t the visually complex pieces, but the messages scrawled in red in different places…

You know, I’m starting to see a pattern established here…

Just like in the cases of the Perrier / GRL projection battle and the totally pirate tagging of Coca-Cola’s giant inflatable adver-bottle (installed on a rooftop at a major downtown Toronto intersection), here The City Of Toronto™ has decided to lock horns with the actual city of Toronto, and wound up with its pathetic little committee being absolutely hung out to dry.

This note was left for the city workers:

This just in: You lose, we win.

Care for a rematch? We could play at this ’til the end of time.
We invented the game and we still write all the rules.

Toronto-based street artist Posterchild has written out a rather long piece on the history and nature of graffiti as an explanation to a piece he did.

Under these laws, an owner couldn’t make his property open to any artist that wanted to paint it, even if he wanted to. He could have a mural painted, or sell it to advertisers, but absolutely no graffiti allowed! If a landowner insisted on making his wall a free wall, he would be charged as a criminal, but if he installed an ad, even an illegal ad, no one would care.

via Torontoist.

Here’s one for the history books: The Perrier battle.
No casualties, but definitely a new level in culture conflict.

Now that’s subvertisement… if it came down to an all-out media war, the corporations would definitely lose. They move and think slower than individuals, and by the time a memo about new technology bubbles up to top, something even better is already being tested underground.

Unfortunately, the meme war has already been underway for some time as a one-sided battle, and we’re only really catching up now. We have all the tools we need at our disposal to fight the mindfuck head-on, though, and it’s about time things really crack.

Digital street culture combined with politics opens a new door on the other side of the playing field. Well, it’s not super-new, it’s the Black Spot concept of using grassroots power to beat the system on its own terms.

Culture jamming already existed, but if the marketting teams are getting all hyped up about technology the rest of us better be ready to meet them on that level too. Of course, like I said, we’ve already been there and done that… sounds like some fat wallets just walked into a war they can’t win.

Except, of course, through the imposition of political controls carried out by an aggressive police force. But I’m sure they wouldn’t do that.

In Chicago, old/disused newspaper boxes have been redecorated & repurposed:

The idea has even been expanded to include food for homeless people.

More info on the Slo-Mo Home Depot Mission