Tag Archives: upcoming

The New Exurbanites: comments on this month’s Toronto Life

Alright, so here’s my two cents on Toronto Life’s current exodus to the suburbs story. A few notes before I begin:

I write for TL a fair bit (including a story in this very issue! About insomnia! Don’t sleep on it!), and I’m not going to trash the mag in favour of some mythical Toronto publication that gets it all right (more on this later). I’m also friends with Philip Preville, so aside from this—PHILIP, YOU LITTER? GROSS!—I’m not going to trash him either.

Others have already done a good job exploring the rather obvious point that the story has a packaging problem. I agree that it’s not about the suburbs, but small towns that are becoming exurbs whether they like it or not. So I’ll stay away from that, too. I’m going to focus on two things: economics and demographics.

Let’s start with the money bit. I don’t care if suburbanites/exurbanites don’t want to live here, but it’s ridiculous that we let them sneer at the overcrowdedness of the TTC and then turn around and take the money that we need to fix the TTC up to Uxbridge. What the story reinforced for me is that if people need Toronto to fund their gorgeous new Annex-mansions-in-Dundas, Toronto needs to stand up for itself. Most (all?) of the families interviewed have at least one partner who is relying on Toronto for a salary; meanwhile the city is suffering from years of provincial downloading and federal derision. Whether it’s via road tolls, or disincentives for companies with offices in the 416 to hire outside the city, or something else, it’s time for this financial engine to demand some cash money respect.

I also wondered about the effect of flush Torontonians buying up the nicest Victorians in Cobourg’s Rosedale on the current residents of the small towns in question. (Ok, I’ll say it: the focus on gorgeous real estate is sooooooo Toronto Life. It’s hilarious that the one family that lives in a typical nouveau salmon-brick suburban house is shown in their backyard.) Funding a 705 lifestyle with 416 money would seem to replicate awful Vancouver-y real estate markets. That kind of sucks for the original 705-ers. I can’t figure out if I think The New Exurbanites are contributing to sprawl. I suppose if they buy up the old houses, then people who work at lower-salaried jobs are left with new builds, but that’s pretty indirect. I’m still musing on this one.

Random thought unrelated to my points of focus: it’s my understanding that parenting is a fraught and paranoid practice everywhere, and I highly doubt, Philip, that you’re trusting your kids with random friendly small-towners. I was in Kingston this past weekend (itself a lovely town where a four-bedroom, 150-year-old, heartbreakingly gorgeous stone house was $539,000, sheesh) and shuddered when passing the penitentiary. Paul Bernardo’s worst crimes happened in St. Catharine’s, remember? Evil and goodness are not location specific.

On to demographics: There’s no mention of diversity at all, except for a weird comment about the Toronto-ditchers missing the food here. As far as I’m concerned, every single piece of journalism that claims to be about any meaningful shift in Toronto’s demographics has to tackle ethnicity head on. Otherwise, the half has never been told. And it’s fine for the commenters at Spacing to insult TL for white blindness, but let me take this opportunity to say that I don’t think any publication in this city consistently parses GTA diversity in any quality way. Good thing the Ethnic Aisle is planning a Suburbs vs. Downtown issue for September.

Months ago, a (white) friend told me that he and his (white) fiancée figure they’ll eventually move out of Toronto. They want the space and the quiet and all of that. A number of my white friends have talked to me about their desire to leave the city, for the usual reasons, from lower house prices to less road rage. During one of these convos, last spring, my reaction was visceral, i.e. rude: I blurted “well, enjoy life among all white people.” I apologized afterward, but I’m still bothered. I just can’t escape this nagging feeling that when people say they like the “simplicity” of the exurbs (or cottage country), it’s at least partially a code word for “homogeneity.” Everyone loves udon and dosas, but dealing with all that language-barrier stuff at your kid’s public school is so complicated. On Metro Morning, Philip said that his research shows that it isn’t just white people that are moving out of the city. The omission of that info from the actual article is a major flaw. If Toronto’s weaknesses are leading the entire region to self-segregate, that’s something to be obsessing over, not ignored.

Did I say anything new here? I dunno. When I was writing this, I kept humming LCD Soundsystem. Toronto’s having a hard time right now, and sure, it gets me down. But you know what? This is my hometown and I love it. I want to fix it, not flee.

Portfolio: Peter Mettler’s Eye in the Sky

mettlerhero

Here’s a piece I did for Green Living, an interview with director Peter Mettler, whose awesome tar sands film Petropolis is at the Toronto International Film Fest next week. To skirt private property laws, Mettler (Gambling, Gods and LSD; Manufacturing Landscapes) and his crew filmed the tar sands from 1000 metres in the air, using military grade camera equipment. The result is jaw-dropping.

A racist story from my childhood

churchilllogoheroSo, I’m currently working on a story for TL about the new Africentric Alternative School that’s opening in September. (FYI, the “Afri,” not “Afro” is their spelling. Obv the TDSB hasn’t heard of search engine optimization). I’m not going to waste details or opinions here—for that you’ll have to read the story in September—but I thought I’d share one memory that keeps resurfacing as I do my research.

One common reason that parents state for wanting to send their black children to a black-focused school is to have teachers that feel a “cultural connection” to their child. Even if a non-black teacher isn’t straight-up racist, these parents feel that teachers who share history, language, music, food, etc. with their students provide a more nurturing environment.

When I was in grade five, we had to write an essay about a vegetable. I chose eggplant, in part because I was excited to know that white people called it an eggplant (in my house, we called it bhaigan). I wrote about bhaigan choka, which is basically Trinidadian baba ganoush; it’s now one of my favourite foods, but at the time I thought it was FOBby and weird. I wrote that it was a gross, grey mush. Despite being a top-shelf nerd, I got a bad mark. My blue-eyed teacher looked straight at me and said disdainfully that she didn’t recognize an eggplant in the essay. She said “maybe that’s the way you eat it in YOUR household.”

I dunno if her father was an eggplant farmer or what, for her to get so worked up about it, but that incident really and truly made my nine-year-old self feel like a weirdo, an outsider, and a loser. What approach should I take, besides writing about my own life?  If you want to get multisyllabic here, it’s very self-effacing for any sort of marginalized child to be told by an adult to ignore their own experiences and hew to the majority. It’s the sort of thing that instigates internalized racism.

It’s 2009, so maybe teachers get more cultural sensitivity training than they did in the mid-80s. Overall, I’m not close to having a final opinion on the basic concept of identity-based schools. That said, I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a parent to want their child to have a sense of safety and belonging in the classroom. Sure, I’m wildly successful and well-adjusted, but the fact that I remember this little incident means that it counted.

Upcoming: Sonic Youth at Massey Hall

sonicyouthheroI am SICK with excitement to see Sonic Youth in a mere two weeks. It’s been a loooong time. The last show I saw was when they headlined Lollapalooza in 1995*, when like 75 per cent of the crowd up and left after Hole, which drove me insane (if it drives you insane, too, here’s a Web 1.0 flashback, an excerpt from Thurston Moore’s bitchy tour diary entry about “the singer from Hole.”) I also saw them at the Concert Hall (RIP, best concert venue ever) the year before: I bought a way oversized t-shirt and made out with some guy, the latter mostly cause I was pretending my life was the video for Dirty Boots.

Sure, they can get a little wanky, but in the best way ever. Admit it, you’re totally jealous that Sonic Youth have been noodling around with music and making art and clothes and doing whatever the hell they want for decades. They’re a testament to being weird and self-directed, rather than throwing in the towel and getting a job in communications or um, nevermind. The point is, if Sonic Youth is the musical establishment, the world is a good place. The show is at Massey Hall and it will be like the symphony for fans of experimental music and electric guitar. If I haven’t convinced you to shell out for tix, maybe Sasha Frere-Jones can in this New Yorker piece (which is apparently written in the future). Or maybe Chuck D. can, in this classic video. Fear of a female planet. Fear, baby.

*edit: proper date of SY Lollapalooza courtesy of fact-checking friend  mechamoney.