As I mentioned in an earlier entry, a number of prominent Toronto tech bloggers and I will be meeting with the people from ICT Toronto to provide suggestions on how they can do a better job reaching out to and support Toronto’s tech community. If you have any suggestions or ideas, please leave them in the comments!
Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)
Hamish Grant posted a link to my polemic about Critical Mass on the Tribe magazine message board, and five pages (thus far) of discussion has ensued, featuring a die-hard Critical Masser, a number of unbelievers and more than the recommended daily dosage of internet forum snarkiness. But as George C. Scott said when playing the title role in the movie Patton, “I love it. God help me, I do love it so. I love it more than my life!”
Jerrold from Accordion City-centric blog BlogTO sent this link to a video shot on Car-Free Day 2006, in which the bicycle advocacy message of the day gets flushed down the toilet by a cyclist who does just about every stupid thing you can do on a bike in traffic.
My advice to all cyclists in the city: the best way to advocate cycling as a valid form of transport in the city is to just cycle, obey traffic laws and don’t be a jackass. Contrary to the Critical Massholes, arrogantly taking over the street on a Friday at rush hour, when all people want to do is get home, will not help the cause of the bicycle. You won’t be welcomed as liberators, and you will not be showered with flowers and candy.
Before I Begin…
…let me first show you the Scorpion King, my bike, which I bought immediately after getting hired by Tucows back in 2003. She’s still running well:
My bike. Yup, that’s a keytar in the rear basket.
Now let me point you to a couple of articles by Accordion City’s favourite Crazy Biker Chick, Tanya:
- Things a non-cyclist might not understand: An open letter to motorists who dislike cyclists
- Stop Signs and Bicycles
…and now, the meat of the article.
Critical Mass
Today is the last Friday of the month, which means that in many cities all over the world, there will be a Critical Mass bike ride. I won’t take part in it — partly because I have a prior engagement, and partly because I refuse to take part in it anymore.
The simplest way for me to describe Critical Mass is to borrow a line from this page: “a monthly bicycle ride to celebrate cycling and to assert cyclists’ right to the road”. The closest to organization that the event comes is that there is an agreement for interested cyclists to meet at some specified location and go for a bike ride en masse. No leadership or central body coordinates its activities and the route taken is determined as the ride takes place. It’s up to the participants in each of the cities to make it what it is, oftentimes as it happens. It’s rather like the BarCamp/DemoCamp “unconferences”, which shouldn’t be surprising: both arose from the culture of San Francisco.
While I wouldn’t call myself “hardcore” — I’m neither a mountain biker nor a bike courier — I could honestly self-identify as an avid urban cyclist. Ever since coming back home to Accordion City from my (unexpectedly long, but rewarding) stint at Crazy Go Nuts University, I’ve biked to work whenever possible. This city is a pretty decent one for cycling by North American standards, and there’s a certain way that travelling the roads by bike puts you in touch with the “feel” of a city that travelling by motor or even on foot can. The benefits of exercise as well as not being beholden to the Saudis and other equally unpleasant terrorist-funding oil states (as my pal Cory likes to say, “an oil state is just a failed state that happens to have oil”) are bonuses. It is my love of cycling that led me to participate in Critical Mass.
Why I No Longer Participate
It is also my love of cycling that led me to stop participating. I understand that the character of Critical Mass varies from city to city, and in this city, it seems to have degenerated. It’s turned from a celebration of cycling into a bike-driven way for hipsters and the angry underemployed to act out their unresolved rebellion issues against their parents. I think that Critical Mass Toronto does more harm to cycling than good. That’s why I no longer participate in it, and that’s why I’m speaking out.
The battle cry of Critical Mass is “We’re not blocking traffic, we are traffic!“. I agree with that sentiment: bikes are vehicles with as much right to the road as cars. The problem is that Critical Mass participants here in Toronto seem to have forgotten that with rights comes responsibilities. The rally here tends to hold itself above the law, hogging as much of the road as possible, holding traffic by running red lights as a group and harassing drivers for committing the heinous crime of driving a car.
There’s a regular participant in Toronto’s Critical Mass, a bike courier type with curly brown hair and always in shades. He tends to bike ahead of the pack and seems to take great joy in either goading the police or threatening drivers. He often bikes up to cars to block their way and hurls verbal abuse at their drivers. At the last Critical Mass I attended, a guy in an SUV asked him how long they’d be blocking the intersection, to which he replied “Go fuck your mother.” In retrospect, I should’ve given in to my urge to clock him with my Kryptonite lock.
The problem is that in the sort of working anarchy that things like Critical Mass are, enthusiastic participants like him tend to define the spirit of the event, and the rest follow suit. The end result is that Critical Mass becomes less about celebrating bikes and more about acting out revenge fantasies against “The Man”.
In the meantime, the people in the cars who have been barricaded by the bike rally aren’t likely to be convinced that bikes have a ride to the road. What they see are ruffians who are flouting traffic laws and hurling abuse at them. For the most part, they’re people who are willing to share the road; they’re probably less willing to do so after encountering the two-wheeled barbarian horde.
In the last few Critical Mass rallies I attended, some bike cops escorted the ride with mixed results. Some of the crowd were a bit annoyed at the presence of the cops, and a couple of the cops shoved some of the cyclists about, follwoing it up with a “Go ahead. Hit back. I dare you.” It was two kinds of stupid coming together for a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of ass-hattery.
Some People Share My Sentiment
I don’t think I’m alone in these sentiments; consider the comments by otherwise sympathetic people in this blog entry. I find myself in the weird position of agreeing with a writer from the “Moynihan Institute” web site, who wrote this about Critical Mass in a pretty good article about bike commuting:
I understand the statement they claim they are trying to make but the truth is that they come across as a bunch of douche bag hipsters living off trust funds. No one has ever taken up the cause of the cyclist as a result of these fart knockers grid locking traffic.
And Finally…
That’s the problem with Critical Mass Toronto: does it want to be about celebrating and promoting bikes as a better alternative, or about punishing people for using their cars? And really, when you boil it down, isn’t it about punishing people for not sharing your lifestyle, which is the sort of thing for which one typically blames “the conservatives”?
As long as it’s about the latter, then they’re Critical Massholes. I’ll still bike, but not with them.
Related Reading
Back in 2002, I wrote about a similar event, “Reclaim the Streets”, in an entry titled Not-So-Smart Mobs, which got a link from BoingBoing.
Squeaky wheel, meet grease!
In response to my last article on ICT Toronto, in which I cast some serious doubt on the efficacy of the initiative to boost Accordion City’s profile as a high-tech hub, a meeting has been called. I was contacted by local techie consultant and DemoCamp regular Mark “Remarkk!” Kuznicki, who was contacted by ICT Toronto’s project manager, Alicia Bulwik. He told me that she’d proposed a meeting with prominent Accordion City tech bloggers to solicit our input on what’s really necessary to support a vibrant and world-leading tech industry cluster in Toronto. Among those invited:
- Yours Truly, plus
- Leila Boujnane
- David Crow
- Mark Evans
- Jay Goldman
- Malgosia Green
- Estelle Havva
- Rob Hyndman
- Matthew Ingram
- Rohan Jayasekera
- Mark Kuznicki
- Tom Purves
- Rick Segal
The meeting will take place on Thursday, October 5th, and we’ve all agreed that in the interest of transparency to the local tech community whom we claim to represent, we’ll blog our thoughts and the ideas that we’re going to take to the meeting. I look forward to this meeting and the chance to meet with the people from ICT Toronto — and if we’re very lucky, make the first steps towards realizing their stated goal.
Over the next few days, I’ll do just that. I also want your input — if you’ve got a stake in the local tech community, whether you’re a programmer, engineer, marketer, business development type, entrepreneur or even just someone who wants to contribute to a vital sphere within this city, please let me know what you think, either via email or in the comments!
In case you’re looking for articles I’ve written about ICT Toronto, here they are.
The Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibition of the darker side of Andy Warhol’s works, Supernova: Stars, Deaths and Disasters, 1962–1964, has proven to be so popular — over 55,000 visitors have come — that they’ve decided to keep their summer hours for the duration of the exhibit. Those summer hours are 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. from Wednesdays to Fridays, with Wednesday nights from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. having free general admission.
This Saturday, September 30th, you can see the exhibit for free under one condition: you’ve got to come dressed as Andy Warhol. That evening, the gallery will be open ultra-late; the Andy Warhol exhibit will be open until 2 a.m. and the rest of the gallery will be open until 7 a.m..
There’ll be another set of extended hours on the final night of the exhibit, Saturday, October 21st, when it will be open until midnight.
The Ginger Ninja and I enjoyed the show — in addition to seeing some of Warhol’s work from that time on display, they provide “audio wands” which let you hear audio commentaries matching Warhol’s pieces, with comments by guest curator David Cronenberg, film critic Amy Taubin, artist James Rosenquist and an “I was there, maaaaaaan” bit by none other than Dennis Hopper.
On Monday, I posted a link to a personal ad posted in the “Rants and Raves” section of the Accordion City edition of Craigslist, the free online classified advertising site. For the benefit of those who didn’t check out the ad, it’s titled
I LOVE TORONTO, DAMMMIT! and is a laundry list of things about our fair city that the author — known only as “Mary Fucking Sunshine” — loves. I agreed with most of the list, so I blogged it.
Yesterday, in the blog Torontoist — which bills itself as “a website about Toronto and everything in it” — an article covering “Mary’s” posting titled Concerning “I LOVE TORONTO, DAMMMIT!” was published. In the article, its author, one David Topping, appears to take great glee in refuting several of “Mary’s” points, calling Toronto a “giant dehumanizing city” in his closing paragraph.
Wondering where David’s Toronto malaise came from, I clicked on his byline, which led to a page containing his bio. The very first line told me all I need to know:
David Topping is not well-travelled; he almost never leaves the city he was born in.
“Wait a minute, Accordion Guy,” you might say. “You can’t take that bio at face value. We’re talking about hipster city bloggers, for whom irony and sarcasm is the default mode.”
That is a valid consideration, so I give you a quote from a series of articles that David posted (that I enjoyed), in which he photographed all the stations in the Accordion City subway system. He wrote:
I’ve lived in Toronto’s west end since I was born. I’ve moved twice: once, in grade nine, a block east of my old house, and, four years later, downtown to live in residence on the U of T campus. My Toronto — the part of the city that matters to me — has never extended further west than Kipling, further east than Yonge, or further north than St. Clair.
Therein lies the problem: his frame of reference against which he judges Toronto is, well, Toronto. Not even the whole city, but a subset that completely leaves out its eastern and northern halves.
Some Torontoist readers rightly called him on his familiarity-bred contempt of the city, to which he replied that when he visited New York City, people seemed friendlier. How many times have you been, David? Once? Twice? And did you venture anywhere say outside the Soho/Greenwich Village/East Village/Lower East Side box, or Park Slope?
As for this statement in the comments — “Or look at homelessness, for one; there’s a problem that seems way more persistent in Toronto than elsewhere,” — it’s only proof that he doesn’t get out much.
(Note that in the paragraph above, I linked only to articles about homelessness in the U.S.. If I really wanted to smack David about with facts about persistent homelessness, I’d pick Mexico, or even better, my home city of Manila…or lots of other cities off-continent. Ever been to a Third World country, David?)
David, it takes a bold man to wrote authoritatively on a topic of which he knows little or nothing. Have you considered a job at NOW magazine?
Geez, it’s been a dog’s age since I last saw my friend Meryle. You may remember her from the photos from my 36th birtday hot tub party.
(You know, I’ve never written about what happened at that party when the cops came in. It’s not truly a party until The Man gets involved. I need to write about that sometime.)
Back to Meryle: among other things, she’s a burlesque dancer and part of Toronto’s very interesting burlesque scene. I’ve had the good fortune to do some vaudeville accordion bits at these shows, but the real stars are people like Meryle and Mysterion the Mind Reader, who work hard at keeping the scene alive and entertaining.
(Come to think of it, I haven’t seen Mysterion in a dog’s age, either.)
Tomorrow, Wednesday September 27th, Meryle will be performing a burlesque number at the Cadillac Lounge (1296 Queen Street West) for the “A.J. Pack Superhero Fundraiser”. This event will raise money for the Lorraine Kimsa Theatre for Young People (formerly the Young People’s Theatre). It gives inner city youth a chance to attend classes at this theatre that they otherwise wouldn’t have.
(It’s also a refreshing alternative to the usual inner city youth programs, which often are hip-hop classes, basketball or some mix of the two. Not that they in and of themselves are bad, but they shouldn’t be the only options presented to inner city kids.)
This should be a good show. The burlesque dancers and their vaudeville supporting acts take what they do seriously. Although their work is often contemporary, they’ve done their homework and are aware of the history of burlesque and vaudeville, and they know what makes a good live show. You’ll be entertained, and your money will go to a great cause.
Also on the bill are musician/songwriter/accordion player Kevin Quain (who’s got a great Tom Waits-esque sound), comedian Nick Flanagan and Mysterion, who’ll do some of his mentalist and magic tricks.
Cover is $25.00. The doors open at 8 p.m. and the show starts very soon afterwards. If you want to catch Meryle, get there early!