Punk Rockers vs. Homeless Advocates

Wow, I'm not sure who to root for in this fight. I was reading just last week that the Bowery, historically a pretty shady neighbourhood in NYC, is gentrifying fast. Now there's this lovely little scuffle between punk rock mecca CBGB and the homeless services committee that owns the building.

There seems to be a lot of lousy accounting on both sides here and a general sense of flakiness but there really aren't any winners in this fight.

The most powerful design tool ever!

Most people will argue that the computer is arguably the most powerful design tool ever. Yes with programs like Photoshop and the ability to design things down to the millimetre electronically and make changes on the fly the computer has ushered in a new age of design. But I posit the humble restaurant napkin as our most powerful design tool. I was inspired when I read a post on Torontoist about Bruce Mau's Massive Change exhibit. Apparently the idea for the exhibit was concocted on a napkin and is shown above. Uber-architect Frank Gehry also designs buildings like the Disney Hall and the Guggenheim Bilbao on a paper napkin

And what's this scribbly looking thing? Well that's Alexander Graham Bell's preliminary sketches for the phone. . Imagine where we'd be if Graham Bell was sitting in a fancier restaurant that used cloth napkins? Or if his assistant Watson got a little tipsy and spilled something on the sketch? Or had his eye on a young philly across the room and decided to borrow Alex's napkin? [Boy Reporter's note: go to this website it's quite funny!] No phone, no telecommunications revolution! One wonders how many other of Graham Bell's many many inventions were done first on paper napkin? This is after all the man who Evan Solomon claims helped invent the modern world as we know it. I think the napkin wins this argument hands down.

Reading Minds...

I can officially add telling the future as one of my skills (also on the list: making a mean quiche, copy-editing and trivia skills. I'm also a good kisser). In today's paper Christopher Hume, Toronto Star architecture critic, also harps on the evils of suburbia and why that's coming to an end soon, but not soon enough.

Fighting Sprawl

Everyone seems to be talking about sprawl. Now magazine has written recently about what to do with all that open space outside the GTA (turn it into organic farmland growing a diversity of crops). The Star weighed in with this feature on small shops, new urbanism and why sprawl makes for boring cities (anybody who's been to the Dallas Ft. Worth area or any other second rate American city can testify to this). The Globe talked about an idea that's been floating around the Toronto blogosphere, a subway that covers everything in the city and not just the three lines we've got now.

Maybe it was that rather scary winter smog day we got a little while back (it looked pretty disgusting and probably wasn't that healthy) but I'm glad that the public is thinking about this. Sadly our best weapon for fighting sprawl, the TTC just got a little worse with a fare hike ($2.50 for an adult to ride the Rocket! "The Better Way" indeed). So what exactly should we do about sprawl? How can we change the hearts and minds of people who have been indoctrinated by car companies and popular culture to want cars in the driveway, a big fancy house in the burbs with a manicured lawn? How do we get the Joneses to stop wanting the now outdated and constructed fantasy of a "Leave it to Beaver" life?

Stay Tuned!

I've registered and hosted this site on www.boyreporter.ca. I'm also working on migrating this site over to Movable Type. I'm starting to find Blogger a little bit annoying and not as flexible as I would like. So stay tuned, changes are afoot.

The clearinghouse

I liked the Decemberists since my friend Hanson introduced them to me a couple of years back. Any band that can name drop Marcel Duchamp and write sea shanties and songs that make fun of Los Angeles is alright with me. I've been listening to a copy of their soon to be released album, Picaresque (mea culpa on internet piracy here). Well the new album is more of the same, which is a good thing. What the world needs now isn't love but tightly written, comical songs about maritime life.

I'm also going to take this opportunity to gush about wunderkind Jonathan Safran Foer. I gobbled up his debut novel Everything is Illuminated and I've been shoving that book into people's hands for the last three years now. It's a story about a young Ukrainian-American named Jonathan looking for his grandfather's destroyed shetl. He's coming out with a new novel, soon, but not soon enough. Here's an interview with Jonathan from the NYT magazine. Also, because I'm actually reading again I want to heartily recommend Ken Kalfus' novel the Commissariat of the Enlightenment, about the fictional meeting of Lenin, Stalin and a filmmaker witnessing the death of Leo Tolstoy.

Bye Radio3 website thanks for the memories

Although I promised that I wouldn't plug the Radio3 website so much, I can't help but do it this time. If you don't already know the Radio3 website is being shutdown because the higher-ups want to focus on the radio side of things.

Check out my friend Charlie Cho's piece "at the end of the day." Yep that's him on the couch. Also my old boss Sally McKay blows our minds with an alternative viewpoint on the nature of time. Yep, that's her holding the Stephen Hawking-like diagram.

Boy Reporter at MOMA

Hypothetical conversation between MOMA architect Yoshio Taniguchi and a member of the MOMA board:

Board Member: Uhm, Yoshio these drawings look great. We especially love the way you're using glass to dissect the staircase. It frames our gallery goers quite well. There is a problem though.

Yoshio Taniguchi: Problems?! What problems, I made sure I looked over everything. I even made sure you got light into that square box of a building. Natural light! In Mid-town Manhattan, do you know how hard that is?!

BM: But uhm....

YT: No buts, I've designed nine museums. I won't listen to your philistine arguments.

BM: Yoshio, you left something out.

YT: Left something out? Would you tell Frank Lloyd Wright to change something?! I don't think so.

BM: Uhm, really it's quite important!

YT: This should be good....

BM: You forgot the coat-check.

YT: @#$%%#$#

I'm sure that Mr. Taniguchi is a lovely individual.... and the new MOMA is a gorgeous building and the $20 fee is almost, uhm, justified. But for all that money, couldn't you have designed a bigger more efficient coat-check? I know it's busy in the winter with all those coats and scarves and mittens. And I know it's probably busy right now because everyone is ogling the lovely new building. but couldn't you have come up with a more efficient system? One that helps out those tourists that speak 80 languages trying to figure out where they can retrieve their backpacks and coats after entering a zen-like state staring at a Malevich painting? I only write this because I was waiting for close to an hour to check in my bag, when I could've been staring at Warhols and Dalis and Jeff Walls and Gurskys!

Boy Reporter at the Gates

I'm quite sure everyone is sick and tired of hearing about the Gates, so I promise that this will be my only and my last post about Christo's installation. I went to the Central Park last Saturday on a breezy winter day, and also the second to last day the installation was completely up.

The critical round-up about the Gates has been mixed. Timothy Comeau's Good Reads has done a good job rounding up critiques about the Gates including a very funny segment from the Daily Show. There's this Talk of the Town piece. And my old boss, Sally McKay's rousing commentary on the piece.

There's a strange tension in this work and indeed in many of Christo's work. The Gates is arguably a democratic piece. It was free (it didn't cost anything, but miraculously also free of ads), open to the public and in Central Park, a space that many New Yorkers use and frequent on a regular basis. But also strangely dictatorial, Sally commented on the massive police presence to protect the Gates. But the Gates is also Christo imposing his will and force of personality upon the environment. When he places giant umbrellas or a giant curtain out in the middle of nowhere, it's probably seen as artistic quaintness. But when you intervene in America's most famous park, you're going to piss a few people off.

I spoke to a few locals about the Gates and the conversation swung back and forth from, 'I loved it. I mean, all those people came and it looks great in the park' to 'It was ugly. They look like shower curtains, or an ad for Home Depot, give me back my park.'

It's conversations like this, which I heard all week that has me echoing Peter Schjeldahl's comment that the work rendered art critics helpless, "that “The Gates” is a populist affront to the authority of art critics, and [that he had to] accept being just another shuffling, jostling, helplessly chummy citizen." Here was a work in one of the most public of public spaces. Hundreds of thousands went to see the Gates, a work of relatively challenging contemporary art.

When was the last time that many people engaged with a work of contemporary art? It's heartening to see, but of course leads me to ask whether it takes a $21 million art project in one of the world's most famous parks to get people to actually look at, gasp in wonder or boo and hiss at a piece of art?