I moved to Toronto from Vancouver a couple of weeks ago, and one of the things I miss most about home is the daily commute that took me over the Cambie Street Bridge and into the downtown core each morning. I’d hop on my trusty ten-speed (minus one brake cable, but who’s counting?) and rocket down the hill, past the all-too-familiar yellow and red safety vests of the Canada Line construction workers, and onto the wide bike-friendly path speckled with self-propelled individuals on their way to work. On rainy days my view from the bridge was limited to the slippery pavement in front of me, but on the rare and much celebrated occasion of a clear, sunny Vancouver morning, the city would rise up before me in all its tall, glassy glory.

To my left, the expansive curve of English Bay’s shores would wind beneath the Burrard Street Bridge, where tiny rainbow-coloured ferries shuttled market workers to Granville Island. To my right, the waters of False Creek would reach into the city, before ending abruptly at the foot of the Expo ‘86 architectural orb known as Science World. And in front of me, clusters of residential towers would form a shining wall across the horizon, some so distant that only the sharp glare of their reflections would register, others so close that I could see through their windows smartly dressed couples making breakfast and preparing for the day. It was easy to see how Vancouver earned the Coupland-coined moniker “City of Glass.”

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Last night, I watched Barack Obama’s acceptance speech, streamed over the Internet to my room in Toronto by Al-Jazeera. I was thinking of my younger sister, who lay in a delivery room in America at that moment.

She gave birth to her first baby girl at 9:51 p.m. last night, nine minutes before Obama took the podium at Mile High Stadium. I was thinking about how this man will have a disturbing amount of influence on my newborn niece’s life. That 8-pound-6-ounce baby girl doesn’t have the power to mitigate carbon emissions, find alternative sources of fuel, or repair a broken financial system. Opening her eyes for the first time, she has no idea what she’s being born into. She’s relying on Obama and his promise of genuine leadership to create a situation in which she can live a decent life. It’s the current policymakers, more so than her hardworking parents, that are going to decide how bad climate change gets and where our energy comes from and which wars, if any, we are embroiled in. Of course, the US is ostensibly a democracy, so it is impossible and unfair to put the burden on Obama’s leadership alone: it requires all US citizens to support him, influence him, challenge him, and go beyond him. (more…)

A couple of weeks ago, and with bittersweet irony, on the day I found out that one of my favourite aunties had passed, this photo (above)

“If you must put me in a box, make sure it’s a big box. With lots of windows. And a door to walk through.” —Dan Bern

A couple of weeks ago, and with bittersweet irony, on the day I found out that one of my favourite aunties had passed, this photo (above)—cyber-bounced around my family—made my own impending aunthood a reality. So in the spirit of looking at how far we’ve come, baby, and within the real-meets-conceptual space that this genderless creature exists, I’m wondering: when, how, and why do we ascribe gender?

It seems appropriate that this photo would find a semi-permanent home on the Internet, given that it’s likely had more web-fame than most unborn babies have (can I get a fact check?). And though said fetal celebrity has been mostly confined to my family, that’s not always as simple as it sounds. (To get a glimpse of her great-grandfetus, my eighty-five-year-old grandmother, for example, had to track down her computer teacher to unlock the shared computer room* on her kibbutz, but I digress.) Once we all successfully sorted out how to get a hold of this black and white blob—the question on the tip of our tongues was, without hesitation, Is it a boy or a girl? (more…)

It was in spring that I heard about the inaugural All Points West Music & Arts Festival. I was examining Radiohead’s website in hopes their tour would bring them close to my locale (then Winnipeg), within a couple of thousand kilometres even. I looked to August’s North American schedule and was puzzled to see not one but two dates booked at something called All Points West. Two consecutive concerts in one place—that must be something special, I thought, before looking up the festival. Little did I know that I would make it to New York—via Toronto—for those very shows. But while they may have been the festival’s biggest attraction, All Points West (APW), August 8-10, was more than a double dose of Radiohead. (more…)

Would your country ever steal a colour from another country?

Granted, from a twenty-first century perspective, the question doesn’t make perfect sense. One pictures a team of graphic designers pitted against another team, in some skyscraper in Shanghai or Mumbai or New York, concocting trademark colours for branding purposes. (Canada’s pretty much got the red-and-white scheme cornered, but did Mexico and Italy ever have a design conflict over the red-white-green of their flags?)

However, colour used to be more of a physical commodity than it is today. The raw materials used to produce colourants were costly: costly to produce, costly to transport, and costly to the environment. And, like any precious substance, they were subject to conflict, contention, and theft. Red was one of the most precious colours during colonial times, so an intense rivalry grew up between England and Spain over the mysterious red substance called cochineal. (more…)

Why did Igor Kenk keep more than 2,800 bikes in storage?

That was the question posed by last Saturday’s front-page National Post article. Buried within the article was a possible answer: preparation for the apocalypse. “Det.-Const. Dennis says ‘Mr. Kenk told him ‘the apocalypse is coming.’ In the future when we have run out of oil, we will all need bikes to get around, the logic goes, and Mr. Kenk will have a few in storage to offer us.” (more…)

In Turn completes its coverage of Morocco’s Master Musicians of Jajouka with a review of their Toronto performance. Photos by Joel Trenaman. (Read the interview/show preview.)

The nine men of Jajouka arrived at the Phoenix Concert Theatre for a July 15 performance—their first in Toronto in fifteen years — to almost otherworldly expectations.

A tradition passed down over thousands of years. The originators of the world music genre. Spiritual expression rooted in transcendental mysticism. These are some of the heady descriptions that have followed the Master Musicians of Jajouka around the globe for decades.

A week before the show, featured performer and hereditary standard-bearer Bachir Attar told my fellow blogger that, “This music can build, for the human being, mercy in the heart.” So, for a night, I put the details of the history and debates over rightful group representation out of my head, and focused on the visceral experience of a cultural legacy. (more…)

Last Saturday, Toronto was enveloped in muggy greyness. I was riding my bicycle along Bloor Street West, after being doused in unspectacular rain in High Park, and the street was less appealing than usual. Two women were yelling at each other outside a store with sad appliances in the window, the kind of appliances that break when you get them home; the police were cordoning some building off; and the whole street—which occasionally vibrates with a kind of transglobal charm—was entirely charmless.

“Amazing knowledge!” a man called from the sidewalk as I rode past. I laughed, and kept on down the block to the Salvation Army, where all the summer dresses were polyester testaments to humanity’s ability to create dreadful fashion; the kind of fashion that evokes a physical response, a shiver or a cringe. Stepping back out into the humidity, I followed my curiosity, and walked my bike up the block.

“What kind of amazing knowledge?” I asked the man.

“No, a maze of knowledge. Entry five cents.” There was a table on the sidewalk with a smiling woman and a yellow piggy bank. They were positioned in front of a door with black curtains. I rummaged through my pocket for a nickel and the man waived me along. “It’s free for people with purple shoes today.” (more…)

Hercules gets the initial credit for discovering purpura. He was strolling along the seashore with a svelte nymph, Tyros, and his dog was trotting along ahead in the sand. When they caught up with the dog, its muzzle was smeared with a brilliant, deep red-purple colour—a colour neither of them had ever seen before. Tyros begged Hercules to make her a garment with that hue (in fact, she told him she wouldn’t be with him unless he produced it), so he began collecting shells from the beach.

Shells? Yes, the famous Tyrian purple dye was made from snail shells: from the murex mollusk (shown above), a type of sea snail. It would take 250,000 murex shellfish to obtain one ounce of Tyrian purple, so the dye was highly valued. Purpura (its latin name) became the colour of royalty. It was produced in the city of Tyre, by the Phoenicians (whose name came from the Greek word phoinos, meaning “blood red”). They had been producing dyes in Tyre, and beyond, since 1000 BC.

“The Tyrian colour is most appreciated when it is the colour of clotted blood,” Pliny wrote, “dark by reflected and brilliant by transmitted light.”

By 400 AD, the murex mollusk was on the brink of extinction—a colour vanished from the world, perhaps.

Can a colour really go extinct? (more…)

“Legend has it if they ever stop playing the world will come to an end…”

These words appear on a flyer for the upcoming Master Musicians of Jajouka concert in Toronto (July 15 at the Phoenix); the flyer shows the Master Musicians in white robes, with their leader, Bachir Attar, front and center. Is he smirking? Pouting? Keeping a mysterious secret?

Legend certainly surrounds this group of Moroccan musicians, layers upon layers of it. To fully understand the legends, one would have to excavate beneath the recent bohemian myths surrounding them—beneath the mystique of the Interzone-Tangier scene in the 1950s, and the iconic writers and musicians like Brion Gysin, Paul Bowles, Brian Jones, and William S. Burroughs, who brought the power of Jajouka music to Western ears. The deeper mystique is that of the music itself: it has been taught in early childhood and passed down from father to son, through the Attar family, for centuries. Master Musicians would travel with the sultans of Morocco as official royal musicians; in more recent times, the clan performed as royal musicians for the Moroccan king. Trance-like, hypnotic, this Sufi music is reputed to possess power. [Listen to the track "Memories Of My Father", written by Bachir.]

Listening to this music, I wonder: what is “powerful” music, really? Or: what can music do? Most of us would agree that it can lift the spirit. Some would say that music has the power to transport a person; others credit music with giving strength, or even with healing.

Through a stroke of luck, and the wonders of globalized communication, I was able to interview Bachir Attar via a shaky Skype-to-cell connection two nights ago. It was 1:30 a.m. in the village of Jajouka, Morocco, but he was awake and passionate, ready to discuss the power of his music, his musical heritage, and its possible disappearance.

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SIX MILE BEND, FLORIDA—The crop duster whined overhead, banking hard and swooping for another pass over the field. My impulse was to duck and cover, but it would have been a useless gesture. This was cane country: flat fields, straight canals, uncurving roads, all smothered with an eerie leaden haze. The only human being I’d seen in the area had been sporting a shabby plastic suit.

Cane country stretches for miles and miles, spreading across the Florida peninsula to the south of Lake Okeechobee from east to west, pierced by settlements with sugar factories: Clewiston, Belle Glade, South Bay. Occasionally, the green is broken by a rectangular parcel of a phosphate mine―a lunar landscape of bleached rock forms and strangely-colored pools, where rock dust hangs in the air. Closer to the eastern and western fringes, there are also occasional rectangular parcels of “Signature Collections”―million-dollar homes that boast elaborate fortress-like walls. The luxury homes are pressed up against the rock mines and cane fields in a bizarre patchwork of human intervention, which has blanketed the whole peninsula. You can walk down a road and have a coral pink fortress on your left side; a rock mine or cane field on your right.

This accidental quilt was pieced together only very recently. Much of this cane country was “reclaimed” from the Everglades by the sugar growers and the US Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s, who built the system of levees and canals that allowed the cane to be planted. Before that, the ecosystem was part of a “river of grass”—a unique bioregion that allowed water to flow between Lake Okeechobee south to the Florida Bay. The Everglades have since been reduced in size by more than half, and the national park that still exists is but a remnant of the actual swamp. (more…)

I had heard it would be harrowing. I had read that it might be offensive. But the last thing I was expecting of My Name is Rachel Corrie, a one-woman show about the young American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer, was to see Rachel Corrie’s real life mother deliver a talk-back at the end. For those who don’t know Corrie’s story, a brief history:

Rachel Corrie was a young American activist from Olympia, Washington, who travelled to the Gaza Strip in early 2003 to support Palestinians there in non-violent demonstrations. Two months later she was run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of a Palestinian home in Rafah. The bulldozer operator either clearly saw her before he ran her over, or didn’t see her at all (depending on who you ask, of course). (more…)