Coyote Ugly Saloon — the New York City bar that inspired the movie, which in turn inspired a number of franchise bars bearing the same name — is about to open a branch in Accordion City’s “Clubland” area.
The National Post reports that Don Rodbard, president of the King-Spadina Residents Association has these particular concerns about Coyote Ugly that suggest that he’s as clueless about life in the big city as the pro-nightclub people suggest:
“Of course we have concerns, Coyote Ugly, yeah,” Mr. Rodbard said. “They don’t have a good image. The impression the world has is that this place is where you go to get drunk and pick up chicks if you’re a guy and pick up guys if you’re a chick.”
How does this differ from any other singles bar? Or many house parties, school dances, debutante cotillions and even church socials?
One thing I will not miss about working at Tucows is the Dufferin 29 bus in the morning — inconsistently scheduled, often overcrowded, and this morning (like many others), poorly planned. About a hundred of us were crammed onto the sidewalk waiting for a bus that wasn’t “short turned”. The Dufferin bus is the biggest reason I tend to bike to work. It’s the KFC Famous Bowls of public transit: a failure pile in a sadness bowl [warning: some swearing].
There are days that I wonder how the TTC has any fans at all.
Believe it or not, these buildings aren’t just in the same neighbourhood, they’re right beside each other. I took both photos on the same day, perhaps 15 seconds apart. Good landscaping and decent signage make a big difference.
(I really hate the sign on High Park Manor, from the all-wrong-for-the-building choice of typefaces, to the fluorescent-backlit sign that makes the place look like a convenience store rather than an apartment across the street from the city’s largest park.)
A couple of weeks back, the Ginger Ninja and I went to Cluck, Grunt and Low to see if Toronto finally got a barbecue place worth mentioning. I felt that the food could use a little work: the sauce — which comes courtesy of the highly-regarded Thuet — is quite good, but the pork ribs I had that night were a little thin and dry; I’ve had juicier and meatier at Montana’s Cookhouse (which is surprisingly good, considering that it’s a chain). Wendy, who’s used to some of the better barbecue place in the Boston area, said that it wasn’t authentic enough to bill itself as “barbecue”. I think the true test will be to bring my coworkers from Tucows’Starkville, Mississippi office there. We’ve had a couple of serious discussions of what real barbecue is, and I think it would be interesting to see what they think.
I think part of Cluck, Grunt and Low’s problem is that the food isn’t barbecued or smoked on the premises. The place isn’t large enough — I remember when it was Shakespeare’s Cafe, a student coffeehouse — and there just isn’t enough of the smell that a real barbecue pit and smokehouse has. The barbecuing and smoking apparently takes place offsite and the food is trucked in, where it’s warmed. Those of you who old enough to remember the CN Tower restaurant in the late 70’s and early 80’s may recall hearing that the kitchens were in the basement and the food had to be taken up in the elevator, which was one of the reasons why the Tower’s Revolving Restaurant was also known locally as the “Revolting Restaurant”.
I might give Cluck, Grunt and Low another shot if I start hearing better reviews from friends or the Chowhound crowd, but in the meantime, I think I’m going to get my barbecue during my trips to the States.
While hanging out on Queen Street West back in the summer of 1985, I saw a T-shirt with the image below and bought it immediately. I wore it all summer that year:
Click the image to see the source.
Yesterday’s entry, “Thank You, Mask Man!”, got me thinking about that time and what was then my favourite t-shirt. A little Googling led to me to this entry in the blog We Saw a Chicken, whose author had scanned the image from the magazine Strange Things are Happening.
I’m going to invert the image and make it the desktop background on my computers.
Way, way back — I’m talking about twenty years ago — my friend Yann and I decided to go catch one of Reg Hartt’sSex and Violence Cartoon Festival shows. For those of you who aren’t from around Accordion City, Reg is one of the city’s better-known eccentrics — he’s a film and cartoon buff who likes to show his collection of rare films. If you walk around some of the city’s hipper streets, you’re likely to see a poster for one of his screenings.
Yann and I had decided that after years of seeing these posters plastered all over town, we should actually attend one of these events. Reg now hosts his film screenings at his house, but back in the late eighties, he held his movie nights at the Cabana Room, which was the upstairs bar of the Spadina Hotel, which was located at the corner of King and Spadina. Today, that corner is both a nightclub and dining destination as well as home to a number of fancy offices and condos, and the Spadina Hotel has since closed and turned into a backpacker’s hostel. The corner is a yuppie haven now, but back then, it was considerably more seedy.
That upstairs bar was the sort of place you’d expect to see Charles Bukowski challenging Mickey Rourke, Harry Dean Stanton and Tom Waits to a shooter-drinking contest. It was delightfully divey, and populated with an assortment of interesting characters, from hard-drinkin’ old men to the not-quite-legal-to-drink (the legal age here being 19) spiky-haired punk and alternative rock crowd who’d spilled over from Queen Street, which was then a little edgier than it is today. The place looked like it hadn’t changed since the early 1960s. My favourite creature comforts there were the air conditioning — possibly the best in town, next to the bone-chiller at Sneaky Dee’s, then located in The Annex — and the Jiffy-Pop cooker on the bar, which was a hot plate rigged with Jiffy-Pop branding and a mechanical arm that shook the Jiffy-Pop package side-to-side as it cooked.
The Sex and Violence Cartoon Festival featured all sorts of old cartoons dating from the 1940s through the 1970s that you could no longer show in most places for their racy (and sometimes racist) content. One of Yann’s and my favourites was Thank You Mask Man, a cartoon based on a routine by Lenny Bruce, in which Lenny himself does the voices. It’s about what happens when the Lone Ranger decides to accept the thanks of the townspeople he saves, with hilarious — and very profane (especially considering the time) — results.
Thanks to this entry on MetaFilter, I know that someone put Thank You Mask Man on YouTube. Watching it makes me feel like I’m drunk and 19 again. Watch and enjoy, but be forewarned that this is a Lenny Bruce routine:
Enter Not My Dog and you get the sense of something cool going down. The exposed brick walls, a 1957 Nordheimer honky-tonk piano and a guitar tucked away in the corner, all add to a comfortable, DIY enclosure. A walk further out to the secluded back patio provides more of the same coziness.
The virtues of Not My Dog are considerable. The most immediately obvious is its unceremonious sense of being in a friend’s apartment. There’s a small bar near the back and a smattering of tables and chairs to accommodate a few dozen trendy Parkdale denizens.
“Parkdale,” begins the Toronto Life article on the area, “now trimmed with sweet cafés, bars and vintage boutiques—cleans up good.” Here’s what they have to say about Not My Dog in their review of places in Parkdale:
About the size of a room at the Y, this tiny, glamorously unglamorous hole in the wall is long on pogey chic. Locals, decked out in Value Village’s finest, swill organic brew and couture cocktails (wasabi martinis and cucumber saketinis) to indie folk rock strains. A 1957 Nordheimer honky-tonk piano invites Johnny Cash tributes; local band Makita Hack performs weekly. TIP: Look for the occasional Tuesday-night movie screening on the back patio.
For those of you not familiar with Canadian slang and who were uncertain about the phrase “pogey chic”: pogey means welfare. Depending on where your head’s at, you can read that to mean either “scruffy” or “authentic, duuuuude“, take your pick.
Be sure to check out the rest of the article to see their reviews of other spots in Parkdale, including one of my favourite breakfast spots, Easy.
A scene from the movie Coyote Ugly.
