Category: Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

Accordion City is a pretty great place to live, but the folks at City Hall and their committees are downright incompetent when it comes to extolling the city’s virtues. Case in point: the recent “Toronto Unlimited” ad campaign, launched last summer:

Widely regarded as a disaster except by the blinkered idiots who devised this campaign (consider that Tourism Toronto’s CEO loves to refer to the local citizenry as “humanware”: “Toronto’s humanware is blossoming”), the Toronto Unlimited campaign is a toxic sausage of unoriginality, amateurish graphic design, ad copy written either by gifted apes or sub-100-IQ humans and cluelessness as to the “feel” of the city, wrapped in a four million dollar casing.

After all the criticism the campaign received last year, the Toronto Unlimited campaign was watered down, with some of the most laughable elements completely removed. However, the culprits, Tourism Toronto, are still driving the bus, and it shows.

The current incarnation of the Tourism Toronto site still bears some of the terrible writing from the Toronto Unlimited campaign. Consider this gem, which you can find on the Toronto’s Story page:

You know the feeling you get when you come across an amazing menu and want to order every dish? That’s what it’s like to be here. Literally, we have an unparalleled variety of spice but we take fusion to a level far beyond cuisine. Find beautiful architecture of the city’s settlers alongside modern, sleek, gold-tinted skyscrapers. We’re modest but celebrate voraciously with over 1000 festivals every year. Our Mayor’s limousine is a hybrid electric Toyota Prius. How’s this for juxtaposition? – our street vendors even dish up vegetarian hot dogs!

Even first-graders at “show and tell” don’t express ideas in such a scatterbrained fashion. The committee who wrote this dreck should be put on a year’s worth of stoop-and-scoop duty at High Park for this crime against writing.

The Tourism Toronto site is terribly short on information. The “Where to Shop” page makes it look as if there are almost no places to shop in the entire city. Using the site’s search engine to find places to buy clothes in thew west end of Toronto yields one result: Roots.

Should you be lucky enough to find information on the site, it’s presented poorly. Consider the one result for my search for clothing stores in the west end: no address or “how to get there” information was provided — just a phone number. Ontario Place is listed as “Ontario Place Corporation”, which makes it sound like a provincial real estate company instead of a waterfront park with a concert amphitheatre, water playground, pedal boats and an IMAX theatre.

It has been suggested that Toronto should emulate Australia’s “Where the Bloody Hell Are You?” ad campaign, which is considerably truer to Australian character and much “ballsier” than the Toronto Unlimited concept (remember, “bloody” is a swear word in some variants of English). It’s memorable, it’s catchy, it’s a little bit risque, and it works.

I propose that we use the (possibly fake) old book cover shown below as the basis of the next Toronto campaign. Those of you on the left or who subscribe to Richard Florida’s “Creative Class” theory will enjoy it in an ironic way, those of you on the right will grumble and say “well, it’s true”, and believe you me, it will draw a crowd and everyone will remember it:

As Hackworth, who posted this image on a file-sharing board says, “Rock on, Toronto!”

Rannie “Photojunkie” Turingan’s opening for his show of Accordion City photographs, Toronto Squared happens tomorrow from 4:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Le Petit Dejeuner restaurant, 191 King Street East. If you want to see some stunning photography in a place where I hear the food’s quite good, check out this event. Wendy and I will be there.

Paul Graham

Paul Graham is a programmer (he made a lot of money writing the program that eventually became Yahoo! Store) who spends his time these days running Y Combinator, a company that gives seed money to tech start-ups and writing essays. Many of his essays are primarily of interest to computer programmers, but a few of them are general enough to catch the interest of a wider audience. His essay Why Nerds are Unpopular, which comes in both a full version on his website and an abridged version in Wired, is probably the one with the most general appeal.

One of the start-ups that Graham is backing is Infogami, a service that ” lets anyone put together good-looking easily-editable websites”. One of Infogami’s uses is to make blogging easy. Graham, who apparently believes in the maxim “eat your own dog food”, promised the Infogami folks that he’d start using it to blog the moment it was blog-capable.

“Boston” is Actually Two Cities

One of his recent blog postings, Paul Graham Eats Breakfast (Director’s Cut) (the title is both an inside joke about Paul Graham’s fanboys and a reference to “cheese sandwich” blog entries), covers his observations about cities, particularly the San Francisco/Bay Area urban clump and the Boston/Cambridge grouping, with some emphasis on his home base of Cambridge.

(I can’t explain why, but the discussion of cities and how they affect life has always been interesting to me. Had I not gone into computer science, I’d probably have gone into the field of “city design for living” or whatever they’re calling it these days.)

He writes:

One thing most visitors to Boston don’t get– and I didn’t consciously realize till I came back this last time– is that there are two towns here. There is a Boston of universities and high-tech companies, and there is a Boston of Archie Bunkers. No one calls them town and gown, but that’s the root of the difference.

Boston is one of only two places I am aware of where they make regular use of the terms “town” and “gown” to refer to the division between city and university populations. The other is Kingston, where we actually used “town”, “gown” and “crown” to refer to the division between Kingston, Crazy Go Nuts University and the nearby military academy, Royal Military College. In his blog entry, Paul Graham talks about how having a Boston accent clearly marked you as “town”, while having a more general American accent marked you as a resident of Cambridge, or “gown”. He remarks that there used to be a rich Boston accent; think Charles Emerson Winchester from M*A*S*H or Thurston Howell III from Gilligan’s Island. Even I have had personal experience with the whole class/accent thing: in the Philippines, you either have servants or you are one, and my “American” accent clearly puts me in the former group.

(Having the accent of a fluent English speaker pays off here too, but sometimes it pays to fake a “fresh off the boat” sound. This story will explain what I mean.)

The Metropolis is the Message

Another thing that Graham talks about in his blog entry is more applicable to Toronto in general. He concludes his entry with this paragraph:

I find every ambitious town sends you a message. New York tells you “you should make more money.” LA tells you “you should be better looking.” Rome tells you “you should dress better.” London tells you “you should be hipper.” The Bay Area tells you “you should live better.” And Cambridge tells you “you should read some of those books you’ve been meaning to.”

My question, which is especially relevant in light of my observations that the high-tech scene here is booming and considering the recent report from ICT Toronto is: What is Toronto’s message — or what should it be? (And by “Toronto”, I mean “Toronto and Region” — hey, let’s include the entire “Golden Horseshoe“.) I’ll talk about this further in the coming days, and you should too — tell me what you think in the comments!