WORD ON THE STREET

This past weekend, Collette and I attended one of our favorite events in Toronto, the Word on the Street book festival. This is a huge book fair held simultaneously in Toronto, Kitchener, Halifax and Vancouver. Here in TO, it's held in Queen's Park circle. That's where the provincial Parliament is located. So even when it's chilly, enough hot air wafts out of that building, that you can still wear shorts. Ahem

It actually turned out to be a pretty nice day, no rain, sun with some clouds, not too hot, a perfect day to wander around all the tents, perusing thousands of books. Collette did not bring her Nikon, that would just occupy space in her bag that books could go into. Such a practical girl. I did bring the Samsung palmcorder, as it fits in my pocket. There's a little video at the bottom of the post, just to give you a taste of what the festival was like.

There are lots of scheduled events at the fair, including readings (Margaret Atwood was there) and musical performances and awards being passed out in various genres, but frankly we go there for the books. Very often we can buy a year's worth of reading material in one day.

It may be a sign of the economy, but the really amazing deals of years past just weren't there. The Toronto Library used to bag up books by genre (westerns, thrillers, romance etc) and sell a bag of eight books for two bucks .. an outstanding deal. You find one paperback for that price you like, you are in great shape, if find another,you're laughing. But they no longer do that, not really sure why, probably too labour intensive or something. Heaven forbid we should wake up a librarian and make him/her work. Ahem

Collette goes primarily to look for books for her classroom and certainly, kids books are a huge part of the festival. This is a good thing. Encouraging kids to read is a bonus. So when they grow up and start driving, perhaps they will have enough reading skill to understand what "do not enter" or "speed limit" means. Ahem

But seriously, it was great to see the vast variety of books and other materials available to kids and their keepers. Collette not only scored some books for her classroom, she made connections with companies that produced a wide range of teaching materials. She was a bit disappointed that the number of exhibitors seemed to be down, and the ones that were there, weren't carrying the usual number of books.

Still, she managed to pick up some cool stuff that should aid her in her new position

It wasn't all work related for Collette. One of the cool things about a fair like this, is the opportunity to get up close and personal with publishers, artists, editors and authors. A lot of authors are there, flogging their books and Collette met such a woman, S.P. Hozy who stood by here tent saying "real life author here" After chatting, Collette ended up buying her novel, which looks interesting indeed.

Of course, yours truly was not really hunting down anything of any kind of educational value. If I wanted education, I would have gone to colleges without student pubs. But I scored some great swag. I have a long time interest in American pulp crime fiction and it doesn't get much tougher and grittier (with the exception of St Mickey Spillane) than Jim Thompson and James Ellroy

From tough guy fiction, I morphed into ludicrously fantastical females, or more precisely, Japanese anime picture books. Full colour books of just images are hard to find and stupidly expensive and I got a couple at what were pretty fair prices

I've recently reconnected with my past passion for comics. I bought a couple of graphic novels at the Fan Fest earlier this year and I picked up a few at Word, a couple that were not costume hero kind of tales and one that fits nicely into the contemporary superhero mode.

I am not, normally a big fan of manga. I find perusing the endless titles of the endless series that I don't see many that appeal to me. But a lot of American comics are the same, if I am going to invest in the time and money it requires to buy a series of books (I'm an old dude, I recall buying comic books for 8 cents a pop) it really needs to grab my attention.

But there are exceptions to every rule. I found a huge manga, really a graphic novel, by Akira Hiramoto. The title is Me and the Devil Blues and it is a fictionalized, mythical account of the life of bluesman Robert Johnson. Anyone who knows me, realizes that this book was in my hand in the blink of an eye. Robert Johnson. The Crossroads. The Delta. The dark, pulsing, mysterious music banged out on simple six string guitar. Hell yeah, I'm in

So another successful Word on the Street. A pleasant day wandering around, surrounded by thousands of books and magazines and people of like interests. We came home with sore feet and bags laden with our books and these gems should get us through the long cold winter that is beginning to bang upon the door.

Here's the video, just a short piece, to give you an idea of what the festival looked like. Music is Enya's Book of Dreams ..yes, book. Shut up. Watch the video.

Word on the Street from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

NUIT BLANCHE

Just when you thought there would be no more street festivals in Toronto this year ...

This is the third annual Nuit Blanche but the first one we attended. It is basically a visual arts festival, running from seven pm to seven am. Over 120 exhibits and installations all over the central core of the city. The city basically stays open all night, very rare in this town and many of the installations made use of public buildings and spaces.
With so many exhibits we had to find some reasonable way of establishing criteria. The night turned out to be surprisingly lovely, quite mild for October and ... a rarity this year .. dry. So we decided to stick to the outdoor venues; turned out to be a great idea, they estimated a million people were milling around downtown and the sidewalks were crowded enough, I can't imagine what a gallery would have been like.

The next criteria was to avoid installations that featured video ... I do video all day long and while I can appreciate it as an art form, I don't need to see it on my night off. We had a vague idea of what some of the exhibits were but mostly we were going in blind. We stared off at Dundas Square, right down at Yonge and Dundas, an area that has become nicely revitalized lately. Tons of people out, which became a theme of the evening. It was quite exhilarating to see so many people .. so many you couldn't get on the sidewalk .. out in the city at night. Even later, at three in the morning, there were literally thousands of people roaming around; even downtown that is extremely rare. It gave the night this great energy so that us old folks didn't feel tired at all ... much.

The installation in the square was called 15 Seconds. The artist built this wooden tower (doesn't that remind you of the guard towers in The Great Escape?) He was up there with this spot light and the idea was that he would randomly shine it down on individuals in the crowd, giving them their Andy Warhol 15 seconds of fame. An interesting idea I guess but unfortunately most of the people there did not seem to be aware of the script. Perhaps if people understood the concept better, there were would have been more interaction; they should have put the tower on Church Street ... then we may have seen some audience participation.

Right across from Dundas Street is the Eaton Centre and it was featuring an installation called Into the Blue, by a Japanese artist. It was this enormous cone shaped balloon hung up in the big space inside the mall.

From this angle it was interesting, the thing was just huge. But it became truly interesting when you got under it and shot upwards.


The thing took on a whole different dimension from the angle ... in the video (at the bottom of the post) you will see that it was turning and you got this real sense of motion, like a vortex, strong enough to induce some mild vertigo.

After the Eaton Centre we moved down the street towards Massey Hall. There was an interesting installation called Domaine de l'angle by a Montreal artistic collective. What they did was build a drop ceiling over the alley way that runs down beside Massey Hall.

The ceiling was made out of bright white tile and was well illuminated. So this alley, normally dark like most allies at night, was brightly lighted. They staged some "trash" around the alley, I suppose this stuff was all meant to represent something, I just found it a little odd.

At first this "installation" did nothing for me but as we hung out for a bit, seeing this normally dark, unused (but not dirty, this is Toronto after all) alley way transformed by the white ceiling and fluorescent lighting, the colours of the "trash" jumping out at you ... and just the fact that so many people were moving through it, the video will give you a good sense of the number. As I said, the sheer number of people moving through these art pieces was something I found very compelling. People interacting with art .. almost regardless of what that art is ... is pretty sexy and people using their city in any new kind of way definitely has an appeal to it.

From Massey Hall we made our way over to Nathan Phillip Square and Toronto City Hall. On our way we passed by some "unscheduled" art, including some incredible sidewalk chalk drawing.

We also came across this young woman who was doing the "living statue" thing but apparently her statue was a little frisky in the cool autumn air because she was not shy about moving.

Then it was over to City Hall to see an installation called Stereoscope, out of Germany. This one was pretty cool. The artists put lamps behind every window in both city hall windows .. all 960 of them ... and used them to display a variety of images in shadow and light, essentially transforming these two huge buildings into a giant canvas.

Here, Collette captured one of the images, a human silhouette that moved from one tower to the other, its shadow following it. Again, check out the video. From City Hall we moved west along Queen Street. It was great to see the street so busy; this time of year, around midnight, even a street like Queen W is normally sparsely populated. We made our way to St Patrick's Market Square and found that some very strange fruit was growing in the trees.

This was the Cocoon Garden, created by some local artists. Translucent plastic wrapped around chicken wire forms, illuminate from within by different colours.

Some of the cocoons had speakers inside them and they played snippets from commercials and jingles; some of the recordings were on a loop, others were activated when someone pushed the cocoon. That was one of the things I liked about this installation, many of the cocoons were at eye level and you could physically interact with them.

Obviously, if you have a public arts festival, the Ontario College of Art is going to be involved. We went there to take a look at just a couple of the many events which they featured.

Sketching Beauty was another interactive installation. Hundreds of people were given paper and pencils and made their own sketches, messages etc and everything was posted up all over the square.

Another installation at the OCA was A Dream of Pastures, a big shadow projection where people participated in the illusion that they were riding horses through a flickering woodscape.

Another big installation ... that wall is huge, about half a block long .. and one that invited participation. You can get a sense of the crowd here, and this is probably after 1 am.

From the OCA we made our way over to College Street .. which, means of course, a pit stop at John's Italian Cafe on Baldwin Street, a funky little stretch of restaurants right on the edge of Kensington Market. The weather was still surprisingly mild and John's was staying open all night so we took advantage of the patio and had a pint. Did you think we'd get through an entire street festival without beer .....

From Baldwin Street back up to College, close to Queen's Park to the Ontario Power Generation buildings. Here was an installation called Waterfall.

This huge installation was fashioned entirely from recycled plastic bottles. It doesn't really come across very well in the video and I don't honestly know if it made me think of a waterfall but it was impressive for its sheer size and the work that must have gone into it.

From Queen's Park we made our way up to Yonge and College to the College Park shopping/condo building. Here we found zombies ... well, Zombies in Condo Land to be exactly.



The idea here was having people off the street get dressed and made up as zombies and then participate in an ultra low budget movie. So it was really a movie shoot and as anyone who has ever watched a film being made ... about as exciting as watching hair grow (even my hair, which we all know is fabulous) Still, the idea of making a movie on the spot, with random actors is interesting and I wait to see the final product

After watching the zombies ... and girls getting naked in the pond beside College Park (which is another post altogether) ... it was time for a late night snack ... and more beer. Then the long bus rides home, arriving at our door step around 4 a.m. So a successful night indeed and we look forward to Nuit Blanche next year.

A quick note about the video: I went into my wayback files and pulled out a club track called Sandstorm. This tune is probably familiar to a lot of people. I used to use this to cut fast moving promo's to in the 80's and it is definitely a fun track to edit to.

Nuit Blanche Toronto from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

TORONTO BUSKERFEST PART ONE

Just a short post and a tease of things to come. This Thursday Collette and I attended the annual Buskerfest here in town. (Get the idea that Toronto is a city of street fests? Wait until the snow starts flying, then no life will be seen on these streets) It is staged around St. Lawrence Market, and features dozens of street performers from all over the world ... interesting how many of them are from Montreal, even if their country of orgin was someplace else. Toronto is still seen, I think, as a kind of dowdy matron whereas Montreal is a bit more New York City-like in its acceptance of artists.

So there were stilt walkers and jugglers and ribbon dancers .... oh my! Of course, there was a patio and there was beer but what event would I attend that did not include those essential elements?

But there was also the Pogo Dudes, three young skate boardy type guys who did some amazing tricks on these amped up pogo sticks. Extreme pogo-ing. Really, why does everything have to be extreme? I saw a documentary on a guy who did what he called "extreme running" which basically entailed him tearing through the bush at break neck speed, smashing through branches, bouncing off of rocks and looking like there was a crazed posse on his tail .... But back to Buskerfest . . .

Besides these amazing flying pogo dudes we found us a musical Squid; a drum core/piping outfit that we have seen in the past. Again, this is like extreme drum corps/celtic music; a high energy outfit with a sense of humour and some really amazing precision drumming.

As I said, this is just a kind of teaser post. Collette shot hundreds of pics with her Nikon and I shot close to two hours of raw footage with the XL1 ... so we both have some editing to do. In the meantime I did slam together this little video trailer, with just some of the highlights of the day.

Music is "Neh neh neh" by Vaya Con Dios

Toronto Buskerfest 08 Highlights from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.

OPAH! THE TASTE OF THE DANFORTH

Summer in Toronto is a seemingly endless stream of street festivals. This is a city of neighbourhoods and it seems that every four square blocks now has its own festival. The one that Collette and I always make a point of attending is Taste of the Danforth. Danforth Avenue is the heart of Toronto's Greek town so we are talking souvlaki, tazaki, ouzo and dancing .. so Opah!

This has been a crazy summer for weather in these parts. Any given day can go from warm and sunny, to hail, to funnel clouds, to pouring rain, to hot and humid. There have been tornadoes, there have been high winds and there have countless lightning strikes. The weather dudes on TV call this weather "unsettled" I call it: Build an ark and kiss your ass goodbye.

So that means when we got down to the Danforth it was pouring rain. Collette had brought her boyfriend (the D-80) and I had brought my Canon XL-1 ... a few grand worth of electronics that needed the tender protection of a covered patio .. the fact that there was souvlaki and beer is entirely coincidental.


The best thing about any street festival is that close off the street. The best thing about The Taste is that when you close off the Danforth it becomes magically lined with stalls selling souvlaki, spinach pies and baklava ... oh, it is a good thing there are many blocks to walk, you definitely need the exercise.




By the time we got off the patio the sun was coming out so we were able to wander around in comfort. This is a big festival. They close off something like eight blocks and you can have as many as half a million people milling around in there. The advantage of the weather was that it kept a lot of the crowds at home with the widescreen TVs and Kraft Dinner where they belong.

The nice thing about the Danforth, it is by no means exclusively Greek. There are some good Irish pubs there, a pretty snazzy Tex-Mex place and Allen's, home of the best burger in Toronto. But except for our escape from the rain, the whole point of this excursion was to wander down the center of the road, doing complex calculations that would put the maximum amount of food in our bellies in the shortest period of time.

We came across a dancing/singing troupe of young people from London Ontario ... which proves the brave if not foolhardy nature of the Greek people. I mean ... London .. on maps it says "Here there be people who got lost on their way to Toronto .."




They were pretty good, two girls doing the singing and the rest of them dancing, recreating a "tavernas" experience, which is when they would go out to taverns and sing and dance and flirt .. we call it clubbing .. often done with less clothing from what I can observe.




By the time these kids were finished their performance, the rain was back, reminding us that Toronto has somehow been transported to Rangoon .. and it's the rainy season. So that meant it was time to pack up the gear and go home.

Still, our bellies were full, our ears were filled with music and as the rain slashed down across Greek Town we knew we would be humming the Zorba theme and shouting opah! Only Collette reminded me that we really couldn't break any plates ...

Taste of the Danforth '08 from Victor Kellar on Vimeo.