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

From the “I really wanted to post about this sooner” department: My bloggy friends Marc Weisblott (who does the words) and Brett Lamb

(who does the pictures, and some words too) are the masterminds behind

the new blog on all things  Toronto — or Accordion City, as I

like to call it — called Better Living Centre.

The BLC, as its founders like to call it, will focus on news and events

in and around the Toronto area. I’ll leave it to Brett to tell the story of why he and Marc created the blog.

As for the name, I believe it’s derived from the building at the Canadian National Exhibition with the same name, a 50’s modernist “machines for living”

edifice that used to feature home furnishings and appliances when I was

a kid (imagine Sears trying to put on a World’s Fair type of show

featuring their goods). I have no idea what’s inside it now.

There’s all kinds of good Accordion City-related stuff in Better Living Centre, and in light of mainstream journalism’s flight from blogging and general web availability (witness the recent moves at the Globe and the Post), there’s a void of Toronto-specific news reportage that can be filled with interesting bloggers.

It should be an interesting companion to another Toronto blog, GTABloggers (whose focus is more about Toronto bloggers socializing). I’m going to have to cross-post there sometime.

I thought that this blog entry by Colby Cosh on Accordion City was

worthy of note in case you hadn’t seen it. He wrote it after a recent

visit here:

I suppose the couple that put me up for

the weekend didn’t realize they were making such a wonderful black joke

by having a paperback copy of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation lying

on the coffee table when I arrived. I was thumbing through the book and

was reminded that, at the outset of Asimov’s space epic, the galactic

capital–a vast, crowded, barren planet frantically maintaining a

tenuous grip on empire–is called “Trantor”. Coincidence or prophecy? 

I kid. We provincials are fond of

complaining that Toronto regards itself as the “centre of the

universe“. But, honestly, what else can we reasonably expect? I’m not

certain any other city so closely resembles what the actual metropolitan centre of the universe

were to look like if such a thing existed. And I mean this in both bad

ways and good. Listen to the polyglot hum emerging from the television

and the street; consider the historical layering and the Herculean

churn of the city’s architectural scene, which runs the gamut from

ruins-in-progress to outrageous new confections;

ponder the way Toronto tries (oh so very hard) to assert a proprietary

interest in universal mass culture by obsessing over its movie shoots

and semi-notable part-time residents.

Gertrude Stein said of Oakland that “there’s no there there”; in

Toronto’s case the genius and the calamity may, equally, be that

there’s an everywhere there, trying to fit into a somewhat narrow

geographical space.

(The bold links are his; the non-bold links are my own additional “link-a-torial”.)