Lunch?

You all know the photo - "Lunch Atop a Skyscraper," the one by Charles Ebbets of 11 construction workers sitting on a girder, high above Manhattan, having lunch.

Well, New York sculptor Sergio Furnari has rendered them in 3D, and they caught the eye of Les Abro, president and CEO of billboard company Abcon Media. And now a version on Furnari's sculpture is in my neighbourhood.



At first, I thought this was sort of cool. But as I thought and read about the installation, I realized it wasn't done so much in the name of art as for advertising.

As you can see, the lunching construction workers are no longer seated, but standing - standing so they'll be visible behind billboards.

There is some advertising that functions as art, but not in this case. It turns out that Les Abro has been trying to get these sculptures on top of an uptown Toronto building since 2007. His initial target was Yonge and Eglinton, where they would have supported three billboards:



The Yonge and Eglinton area has plenty of tall buildings so this would have fit in - or at least, fit in better than it does in the Yonge and Lawrence area where it is now. But the city councillor for Yonge/Eg nixed the plan.

Abro managed to get a variance in the zoning bylaw from our councillor, and in June, the sculptures went up in the relatively low-rise neighbourhood, at the corner of Yonge and Deloraine:



In fact, Spacing Toronto published an interesting article detailing the whole story.

I want to like these sculptures. I really do.







But they really don't fit in the Yonge/Lawrence neighbourhood, and the 17 figures are mostly hidden by the billboards. I disagree with Edward Brown, writing on the Torontoist website, that the Furnari sculptures represent "art tinged by artful marketing."

It's art obscured by advertising - and advertising that debases public spaces.

New identification?

On Saturday, I spoke to the ROM Walkers, the volunteers who lead walking tours around Toronto and environs, based at the Royal Ontario Museum.
They're such a knowledgeable group, I'm not sure I told them much they didn't already know.
While I often learn things when I give these talks, I came away with a huge prize on Saturday.
When I was talking about what fun it is to wander around the Queen's Park legislature building and spot all the anonymous faces in the carved foliage, I showed the above picture.
Regina Virgo, the ROM Walkers' leader, immediately said, "Laura Secord!"
And I think she's right! I hadn't considered that before, but I could see it almost immediately. Look at this common portrait of Secord, one of our heroes of the War of 1812, and tell me you don't see the resemblance:


Thanks, Regina!

Serenity

I haven't posted for a few days. I'm tired of taking pictures of the hole in the ground at the end of the street. I'll return to that when there's something more to show.
I'm also having some trouble with post-holiday re-entry to real life. So I thought I'd post this picture I took last summer of Kali, my friend Denyse's cat, meditating before one of the several shrines Denyse has in her apartment in Montreal. She looked so ... meditative and serene and placid...

...until she decided to jump up and check out the Buddha and the bamboo more closely.

Our Lady of York (aka Deeds Speak), cont'd

Leslie Gash from Toronto Housing kindly sent me this picture (courtesy of Bird Construction), showing the two sculptures from the old 60 Richmond Street East building safely in storage.
The pieces—of the County of York coat of arms, with its motto "Deeds Speak," and a woman holding a building and a scroll and standing atop the coat of arms (I've named her "Our Lady of York")—were created by Jacobine Jones, a prominent Canadian sculptor of the mid-20th century. Jones was the sculptor behind several other bits of architectural decoration in Toronto—notably some of those on Kerr Hall on the Ryerson campus, and the four figures in high relief on the Canadiana Building, across Queen's Park Crescent West from Queen's Park.

There goes the neighbourhood (part 3)

When I got home from work on Tuesday evening, I was surprised to see that even this little bit of the House on the Corner was still standing. I don't know why they couldn't finish the job on Tuesday.
When I arrived home on Wednesday, the lot was empty. I wasn't surprised.
But even the backhoe was gone. The flatbed had come, loaded up the backhoe and drove off ... no doubt to the next demolition site. And they seem to have taken their portable loo with them.


CORRECTION: The portable loo is still there. It just didn't show up in the picture.

There goes the neighbourhood (part 2)

On Saturday, the backhoe landed with much noise, arriving as it did on a flatbed. There was a great cacaphonous chorus of backing-up beeping announcing its arrival—which was actually a help, I suppose, as it was the signal for me to get my camera.

Here you can kind of see that the front door has been removed, possibly sold to an architectural salvage firm. This view adds to the eeriness, though, because the interior stairs, bannister and railing make it so clear that someone lived here relatively recently.
On Monday morning, the garage was levelled and the upper right part of the house had been demolished.
I fully expected to find only an empty lot when I arrived home from work on Tuesday, but there's still a bit left—probably because piles of brick and whatnot had to be carted off before any more could be torn down. So if I get up early on Wednesday, I'll have another picture of the last bits of this house.

There goes the neighbourhood (part 1)

This corner house (before the fence) was the grand entrance to our stretch of Woburn Avenue in North Toronto. It was listed for sale in the Fall of 2006 thusly: "100 WOBURN AVE, TORONTO, Ontario - $1,300,000 — Large Gracious Traditional 2&3/4 Storey Centre Hall 5 Bdrm Brick Family Home. Double Garage With 2nd Floor. Extra Large Lot. 1 Blk To Subway. Opposite Parks. Walk To Wanless & Bedford Pk Schools, & Yonge St Shops…"
It sold about a year ago and its demolition has begun in earnest.

I took these pictures in the August and November of 2007 ( although I intended to start sooner, before the fence went up), to document the decontextualized destruction of a sense of neighbourhood. This grand old house is going to be replaced by three — count 'em: three — townhouses, which you can read about here, here and here.
You'll note that while the asking price for the original house was
$1.3-million, the listed prices for the three that will replace it total about $4-million.
Sometime in November, the tree was taken down, and in the last week or 10 days, the front door disappeared.
Today, some heavy equipment was moved onto the site. Pictures to follow.
So continues the stucco-ification and shoe-horning of North Toronto residential neighbourhoods.
To be continued.

Hoppy New Year!

No, no, no. It's not the Chinese Year of the Frog. (According to the Chinese zodiac, it's the Year of the Rat.)
Amphibian Ark has declared it the Year of the Frog, to call attention to the "amphibian extinction crisis which represents the greatest species conservation challenge in the history of humanity."
(The journalist in me feels I must tell you that Amphibian Ark is a joint effort of the World Association of Zoos and Aquariums (WAZA), the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group (CBSG) of the IUCN/SSC (World Conservation Union/Species Survival Commission) and the IUCN/SSC Amphibian Specialist Group (ASG).)

So have a hoppy new year—and remember, it's a leap year so there will be a leapfrog day.

Also remember: Time's fun when you're having flies.

Happy New Year's Eve!

It's probably best to keep wishes for the new year separate from those for new year's eve since they are two quite distinct, although related, events.


So, Happy New Year's Eve!
To all: Don't drink and drive.


To mathematicians: Don't drink and derive.
To critics: Don't drink and deride.
To surgeons: Don't drink and debride. (Yes, I know it's not pronounced that way.)
To politicians: Don't drink da bribe.
To reporters: Don't drink and describe.
To oppressors: Don't drink and deprive.
To protesters: Don't drink and decry.
To refusers: Don't drink and decline.
To judges: Don't drink and decide.

You get the idea.

House guests

My sister is visiting. She is not in this picture.
The dog—Landon, the Sheltie—is visiting too. That's him in the picture. Euripides, my Siamese, is enjoying his company. As much as a cat can enjoy the company of a dog, but Rippy seems glad of having a male pal.

Murray Christmas!

A musician hanging out in our Christmas tree.
More later — Santa came and we're checking out what's under the tree.
In the meantime, Murray Christmas (an old family joke) to you all!

Believe

Again, I did NOT PhotoShop the red nose into this picture. I shot this outside Tucson, Ariz. I saw two of these signs - the other was on the other side of the highway.
I shit you not.
If you don't believe me, Rudolph will bypass your house completely and you won't even get a lump of coal!

Buy the book

Are online sales down this year, or below expectations? If not, then why am I getting e-mail after e-mail, imploring me to buy more and more? And for myself?
On the 16th, I received the following from Amazon.ca:
"As someone who has shopped at Amazon.ca, you might like to know it's not too late to treat yourself to a little something to enjoy as you're recovering from the holidays.
"Maybe you got everything on your holiday list taken care of early, and it's time to relax with that mystery you've wanted to read or a few new DVDs."
But it's not just Amazon. I received a similar pitch from Dover, the publisher, yesterday!
The biggest gift-giving holiday of the year is about to happen and I'm supposed to buy *myself* stuff now? And to help me recover from the holidays that haven't happened yet? Or to reward myself for finishing my shopping and decorating and baking early? Are they nuts? As if anyone is going to have time to read a book between now and Christmas! Unless they're a recluse, shut-in, orphan, on welfare or on life support - and in all of those cases I'm sure a book or DVD is farthest from their minds.


P.S. The picture above is from San Francisco. I made a note of the building, but it's not to hand and I am just too swamped getting the house ready for my sister's* arrival to look it up. If you're really interested in knowing the building, e-mail me and I'll look it up for you... after Boxing Day.
*Not Marge, the sister whose Christmas present I read before mailing it to her. The visiting sister is Roxe, from Ottawa.

Rear window

The "picture" I posted of our snow the other day was pretty lame. This might make up for it.
I was working in my home office on Monday. It looks out on the back of the house and although I was concentrating on what I was writing, I became aware, in my peripheral vision, of a flying white lump of something. It was an across-the-lane neighbour shovelling her snow.
Well, it wasn't the neighbour — it was the snow she was shovelling.
When she was clearing the walkway between her house and the next-door one, she'd just heave each shovelful over the fence, and sometimes she'd achieve remarkable height.
This isn't the best example of that, but it's the best I could capture shooting through the window.
Today it rained and the temperature went above 0C. We still have lots of snow on the ground, but less than before.

Evidence...

... that a gargoyle has been doing his job.

If you've never been here...

... this (right) is what Toronto looks like. Today anyway.
Of course, it's also what most of southern and eastern Ontario look like today. I've lost track of the accumulation that Environment Canada has estimated for most of us. 25 cm? 40 cm?
If you enjoyed this post, you might also like sketches in a similar vein (only much more amusing) by Sparky Donatello.

WHITE CHRISTMAS TRVIA: I just discovered this week that Environment Canada actually has a definition of "White Christmas." If there's not at least 2 cm of snow on the ground by 7am on Christmas day, it ain't white. Saith the guvamint weather agency.

Christmasy but creepy?

This fellow and five of his brothers appear on the now-closed Village Theatre in Chicago. This whole figure—especially his tangle of musical instruments—has always struck me as Christmasy. I think he reminds me (without the instruments) of Marley after he's removed the bandage that keeps his jaws shut.
But he's sort of creepy too, which detracts a bit from his Christmasy aspects.

Canadian Women Artists History Initiative

We interrupt seasonal pictures for some relatively new news: the Canadian Women Artists History Initiative, based in the Art History Department at Concordia University in Montreal, appears to have officially started.

It is a collaborative effort to bring resources and researchers together to build and build upon scholarship on women artists in Canada. Its focus is on the period before 1967, and includes Canadian women artists born before 1925 (1965 for those in architecture) and working across a broad range of media.

I learned about the plans for this effort when I interviewed Dr. Janice Anderson (PhD), curator of visual resources in Concordia's Faculty of Fine Arts, in June, but I just happened upon the group's Web site yesterday. I interviewed Janice in connection with the biography I'm writing of Toronto sculptor Merle Foster (1897-1986). The picture above is a figure from a fountain she sculpted.

Blue Christmas

The City of Toronto decks out many of its neighbourhoods and squares with large light displays every year. The city also offers bus tours — one of the east end and one of the west end — to view the "cavalcade of lights." It's a hop-on/hop-off arrangement, to encourage riders to hop and shop.
This blue tree is in Dundas Square and part of the light display near the Eaton Centre.

Me, I'm not so crazy about the background of Dundas Square, so I (admittedly crudely) PhotoShopped most of it out.
As messy and noisy and commercial as the background of Dundas Square is here, if I'd shot the blue tree from the other side, the tree would be overwhelmed by a ginormous advertising tower on the opposite corner. I'll try to get a shot from that angle some time this weekend, braving the fierce winter storm that is swirling about us even as I speak.

Time for something seasonal

Doesn't this guy look like the Ghost of Christmas Present in the Alastair Sim version of A Christmas Carol? Only less jolly?
(His current gig is watching over Geary Street from the façade of the American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco.)