Res erection

It’s like a four-day update of SCTV’s Gerry Todd Show this weekend, as Resfest 2005 brings its visual rummage to the Royal Cinema (608 College St.). Saturday night’s keynote presentation comes from puppet-obsessed California photographer Charlie White, and the feature-length premieres concern Brazilian football and sneaker culture. A substantial amount of this nine-year-old 35-city travelling festival is dedicated to restoring the exotic qualities of the long-maligned rock video – even CBS News Chief White House Correspondent John Roberts must recall MuchMusic’s relatively avant-garde roots – as the pendulum has swung over to advertising as the harbinger of innovative imagery, employing directors like Scandanavian collective Traktor, whose reel hits the Royal’s screen on Friday night. The faded days of alt-music creating a buffer between art and commerce will get feted at Resfest’s Saturday night Beck retrospective. Sunday evening’s CanCon program is filled with aspiring short-form sell-outs.

Resfest Canada 2005

Rochester in red

The return of the Rochester-Toronto ferry, halted 80 days into its existence last year before a June 30 resurrection, has been plagued by further red ink, despite an increase in passenger numbers. The average summer ride had 400 aboard, although higher gas prices and low ridership led to cancelled voyages in September. Public watchpoodles say not releasing data beyond August means the taxpayer-supported Rochester Ferry Co. – which salvaged the car-friendly catamaran after its original private ownership bailed – has something to hide, even as the $4.2 million loss is pegged on startup costs and a lean marketing budget. The only notable local mention of revived ferry rides to Rochester came from Joe Warmington in The Toronto Sun, reporting on tabloid journalist John Kennedy getting his jaw broken in an unprovoked attack outside a hotel. A blog called Rottenchester didn’t mind the vessel ride: "The boat is gorgeous, it seems to glide effortlessly across Lake Ontario at 50 MPH, and the staff is friendly and capable. As an experience, the ferry is first-rate, and I was glad that I tried it." But the cost of the journey, exchange rate and  awkward departure hours give a car trip his upper hand. Rottenchester also cites the contrast in port styles: Rochester’s terminal is a palatial building with its own art exhibition; Toronto’s departure point remains a rinky-dink waiting room with a couple vending machines.

Building a Mystery

A book called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists has become a formidable hardcover hit, as author Neil Strauss storms the media circuit to share what he learned after meeting Toronto native Erik von Markovik, better known as "Mystery". The now-defunct Saturday Night leapt on this magician-turned-seduction master’s emerging profile last year with a cover story, even as Mystery claimed he’d soon distance himself from the notoriety associated with concepts like the "neg" – a method of securing a woman’s affections through diminishing her self-esteem. Well, it appears The Mystery Method is alive and well online, marketing $1750 weekend-long seminars across America, plus a pricey DVD encyclopedia and handbook, entirely dedicated to phone number procurement techniques for aspiring Alpha males. And, given The Game’s best-seller status, Mystery isn’t going to yield to competitors in the field of pickup artistry. Naturally, a Google search on Strauss’ book turns up several other firms vying for benevolent business – meaning it’s probably not such a secret society anymore. Below, a glimpse at the prominent companies riding the coattails of the wealthiest stud to come out of Martingrove Collegiate.

IFOA #8: Nick McDonell

"Nick McDonell was born in 1984 in New York City," reads the sum total of his back flap biography, because what else would he have found time for since? It’s that Orwellian birth date that stands out for now, weathering the fact that people between ages 21 and 33 won’t tolerate any work of art created by someone demonstrably younger than them. McDonell wrote what he knew for his smash 2002 debut Twelve: Drug-addled prep school life on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. Given how his dad, Terry McDonell, is a celebrated editor amongst the literati – figuring in many a Hunter S. Thompson tale – Nick rode the fast track with plugs from family pals like George Plimpton and Joan Didion, a web amusingly untangled for a profile in New York magazine. The Third Brother is where McDonell begins the steep process of trying to appeal to neither teenagers nor septuagenarians, with a two-pronged story about researching stoned travelers in Bangkok, then a fatal family house fire coinciding with the fall of the World Trade Center – if not for 9/11’s visceral backdrop, seems this would be just another semi-memoir from someone with little else to brag about beyond the year they were born. Nick McDonell is part of an all-young dude reading, Saturday afternoon at the International Festival of Authors, and you’re not.

The Third Brother [Grove Press]

Ajax unlimited

The Town of Ajax, a part of Durham region with a population nearing 100,000 along its bucolic waterfront, is desperately seeking the definitive graphic design to represent itself. Ajax currently has seven different logos, explained The News Advertiser, and $25,000 was initially budgeted for a Visual Identity Initiative. The decision to employ a consultant led to the usual uproar about tax dollars, and the backlash resulted in a promise to re-examine the expenditure, suggesting the task could be completed for less than half that amount following the November 1 proposal deadline. What the Town of Ajax website identifies as the town’s preferred logo, implausibly unveiled in September, 1997, looks like it belongs on a dusty jar of prune preserves sold exclusively at lower-end dollar stores. Nostalgia buffs can reminisce with a blog that collected scouring criticism of last summer’s Toronto Unlimited logo launch, and a rebuttal blog that defended the despised design.

Gehry transformed

Frank Gehry’s architectural debacle in Paris, France is being resurrected, explains today’s New York Times, outlining how the 19-month life span of the American Center – a $42 million neo-Classical-style and Cubist creation that opened in June 1994 – had its original purpose of bringing U.S. culture and English lessons botched by bad planning, which foreshadowed this golden age of Bill O’Reilly-led boycotts and Freedom Fries. The building’s irregular geometry has much in common with Toronto-born Gehry’s best-known works, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain and the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, but the American Center lacked the funding to live up to its original purpose. The French government, however, were happy to chip in over $60 million to adapt the building into a new home for the venerable Cinémathèque Française, with extensive renovations that Gehry did not participate in, even though it remains geographically distant from the Left Bank, where most Godard and Truffaut snobs reside. A David Cronenberg retrospective will be among the initial neo-Cinémathèque attractions. Frank Gehry’s contribution to his hometown, the transformed Art Gallery of Ontario – home to Cinémathèque Ontario’s screen – with its more animated streetscape, is 30+ months away from opening.

A New Life for a Has-Been, A Gehry Building [New York Times]

Queen West Best

Pete Best checks into the The Drake Hotel (1150 Queen St. W.) tomorrrow night, securing the former Parkdale fleabag’s transformation from the sort of squalor The Beatles would’ve inhabited during their Hamburg, Germany days, to the type of place that charges $30 to watch an early-’60s British cover band anchored by the original Beatles drummer. Pete is also pushing a documentary DVD that starts with his mother pawning all her jewelry to bet on a 33-to-1 horse called "Never Say Die" and, with the winnings, buying the house that provided Lennon and McCartney with a rumpus room. The avuncular Best’s appearance compensates for Cynthia Lennon’s slated IFOA appearance last weekend being called off. But an auction of original lyrics of John and Yoko’s lyrics to "Give Peace a Chance" was announced Monday by shaggy lookalikes at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel, a re-enactment of the celebrity "bed-in", even though the song was written during their honeymoon pitstop in Toronto, at the King Edward. Were such an event to be staged now, presumably John and Yoko would be choosing the resurrected Gladstone over The Drake.

PeteBest.com

MegaBin filter

Spacing Wire notes time is running out on the New Garbage & Recycling Bin Survey conducted by the City of Toronto, who are polling citizens on whether they found the 7′ high x 5′ wide x 2′ deep receptacles practical and easy to use, and if increased revenue for the city from commercial advertising space is worth permanently installing these monstrosities for. The three-month pilot project has been ruthlessly monitored by the Toronto Public Space committee at their Attack of the Monster Garbage Cans! page. Spacing is on the receiving end of today’s press release from Eucan – who aren’t as swift at lobbying online – which spells out the environmental benefits of the 96 watt MegaBin. Thing is, the gaudy old garbage cans these new contraptions are replacing don’t use any power whatsoever, hence a net increase in energy consumption, although Eucan are using 250 watt bus shelter advertisements as a comparison point. Spacing also fielded a dispatch from Scarborough Centre city councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, who’s suggesting an extra thousand solar-powered mini-MegaBins be added to the order of 1,500 regular ones – even though De Baremaker was previously involved in rejecting the smaller ad-free versions as the citywide standard. Where is the receptacle that can crunch all these numbers?

The spin on monster garbage bins [Spacing Wire]

MetaTown

Questions posed on Ask MetaFilter represent the few remaining mysteries a Google search can’t readily reveal, just as often turning up a scholarly response within minutes on the most obscure topic. However, yesterday’s lively thread – "Which neighbourhood in Toronto is best for two young people just starting out?" – is a more subjective matter. Suggestions to avoid: Liberty Village ("cheap but a little isolated"), north of Dupont (as in "for god’s sake don’t live north of …") and, repeated from a previous Ask MeFi conversation about moving here, The Annex ("I would go near the Annex, but not in the Annex"). Local bon vivant Joe Clark interjects to halt what he calls "parochial advice" reflecting a city of neighbourhoods where residents ferociously defend their turf, while also pointing out how access to a streetcar line is especially overrated. Oh, and there’s a local MeFite meetup being planned, where those loyal to the site can continue the arguments in person.

Which neighbourhood in Toronto … ? [Ask MetaFilter]

IFOA #7: Lauren Weisberger

The likes of Jonathan Safran Foer can’t help but be indebted to diabolical blog gossip’s role in stoking their celebrity, no matter how much it clashes with their sullen approach to prose, but Lauren Weisberger is readily resented for hitting bookstore paydirt with little more than a drawn-out version of an online diary – her thinly veiled account of underpaid fetching for Vogue editor Anna Wintour in The Devil Wears Prada. The follow-up, Everyone Worth Knowing, is a non-starter relative to the million-dollar advance Weisberger received – with yet another seven-figure story waiting to be written. It’s tough to not fixate upon these figures in light of the new book’s plot: A starry-eyed 27-year-old quits banking to work at a PR agency, and then proceeds to complain about the vapidity of it all, like having to contend with "that ugly little lesbian troll blogger". (A presumed swipe at the ex-Gawker editrix Elizabeth Spiers, whose own book deal was announced a few days later.) Not only has this dynamic gotten tiresome, it’s depressing to imagine any local chick lit connoisseurs or aspiring princess diarists think the GTA is less civilized for lacking a comparable snark circuit – but then, someone must’ve calculated that flyover country rubes crave tales of boldface chasing. Lauren Weisberger is part of a Saturday afternoon all-female reading at the International Festival of Authors – even seated at the grown-up table.

Everyone Worth Knowing [Simon & Schuster]