Prince off the Path

The occasional occupant of 61 The Bridle Path hasn’t really been sighted around these parts during 2005 – compared to the preceding years, when Conrad Black might’ve been right to fear a knock on his pied-à-terre hideout door from a diminutive black man named Prince, crusading on behalf of the Jehovah’s Witnesses.  Family members of Prince’s wife, Manuela Testolini – who was raised on the less glamourous side of Don Mills – apparently keep the estate warm in their absence, though. Prince has been most recently preoccupied in Marrakesh, shooting a video directed by Salma Hayek, which gets unleashed today online along with a simultaneous 11 p.m. video premiere via seven different Viacom-related outlets – five different VH1 channels, plus online and mobile platforms. This saturation coincides with the news of Prince signing a distribution deal with Universal, his fourth different major record company pact in the past decade, after three previous arrangements failed to supply him with the elusive adult contemporary crossover hit. But without the indentured corporate survitude he protested through the ’90s, Prince has been limited to an oldies arena act – so, could a slinky Latin ballad charm the snake of chart success? Maybe elsewhere on the planet – hence a single titled "Te Amo Corazon" – but it’ll take more than one day of media overkill to generate interest in new material from a sanitized Prince, no matter how hard he’s trying to distance himself from the kind of deviant who’d compose an entire concept album simply to incorporate a word like "sexsomnia".

Brooding with Brûlé

Tyler Brûlé, the globetrotting swollen-headed son of a CFL player who dropped out of Ryerson journalism school to start a magazine named Wallpaper* instead, uses the salmon pink pages of the Financial Times to bemoan the state of Toronto – under the headline The capital of bland. However, his reportage is limited to the journey from airport to hotel: "On Monday evening I was questioned by what looked like a pork chop squeezed into body-armour and blue latex gloves about the purpose of my visit," writes Brûlé. "For some reason the Canadian government has decided that the best way to leave a lasting first impression is to make its front-line welcoming committee look like a slightly lumpy brigade of commandos." Despairing the condo construction hovering above the Gardiner, he’s further infuriated by slapdash Christmas lights along University Ave. Then, more condo hoarding in Yorkville leads Brûlé – who now runs advertising and branding agency Winkreative – to collapse on his Four Seasons Hotel bed in a fit of indignation, as column deadline surely loomed: "The last property boom left the skyline littered with eyesores, generated more traffic snarls and arguably made the city a less attractive place," Brûlé concludes. "This latest round of development offers little hope of improvement." For a different – if similarly absurdist – perspective on local lures, a recent story via the Chicago Tribune touted the desolate underground PATH as ideal for tourists to avoid winter’s gusty gloom while carousing downtown.

Games without gravity

Whenever the International Parabolic Sports League fires up its first season of gravity-free competition featuring eight teams, Toronto won’t be denied a franchise – even though the playing field will be initially confined to an airport in Las Vegas. Down the line, the Zero Gravity Corporation plans to bring its modified Boeing 727-200 G-Force One aircraft to the individual markets craving to watch local heroes play a game called Paraball, even though they fail to explain where spectators are going to sit. Currently, a weightless flight involving a total of 15 parabolas – lasting about 30 seconds each – can be obtained for $3,750 per person. Weightless dodge ball and tag have been played on the aircraft, and Zero Gravity claims to have been approached about zero-g gymnastics and a zero-g fashion show.  The newfangled sport will be covered in a show called Space Champions, produced by local company IPX Entertainment – not coincidentally a Zero Gravity sales agency – as part of an online television network allegedly launching in March. Slashdot commenters are dutifully dubious of the entire enterprise: Beyond the cracks about how this is the first sport where a plane crash would take out both teams, the officials and staff, one wonders how actual athletes who can’t transition from grass to astroturf would be capable of moving from earth to simulated space. But at least the filthy rich now have access to a recreational outlet that requires fewer coordination skills than fox hunting or croquet.

Space Sports Closer to Reality [SPACE.com]

Star burst

During the next couple weeks, after an earthquake rumbles through this town, unemployed actor Matt LeBlanc perishes in a flaming motorcycle accident, and religious leaders start rejecting the divinity of Jesus Christ, there will be a local psychic to say they told you so – in a list of predictions for 2005. Not that they won’t sell you a personal reading amidst 2006’s publicity grab. The website of Psychic Nikki provided dozens of speculative scenarios for a disastrous year – if the earthquake didn’t get Toronto she figured an explosion at the CN Tower would – of which "a misunderstanding and fight between Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie" may have been the most precisely prophetic, considering her merely passing reference to natural hurricanes. Betsy Balega was focused on larger phenomena like the state of the clergy, and can claims to have accurately predicted the soaring cost of oil, plus the marketing of Celebrex, splits of Brad & Jen and Nick & Jessica, and acquittal of Robert Blake. Anthony Carr, the self-proclaimed "world’s most documented psychic", was responsible for the LeBlanc prediction, and also envisioned Arnold Schwarzenegger being confronted with gay rumours, Ben Affleck ballooning to 300 lbs. and Simpsons creator Matt Groening being convicted of murdering his homosexual lover, Kevin Spacey. Seems fortune tellers have an added burden these days to be accurate with their pronouncements. Words smeared on tabloid pages become fishwrap by mid-January – but when you’re wrong on the internet, then you’re wrong forever.

Warrior with mussels

He wants to dunk that Henry Moore statue into Lake Ontario and have it encrusted with zebra mussels over a six month period next spring and summer, but shaggy-headed Scottish artist Simon Starling is currently getting encrusted with adjectives concerning his current work, awarded this week with the notorious £25K Turner Prize. Shedboatshed consists of an old wooden boathouse which was transformed into a boat, its leftover planks paddled down the Rhine, and then rebuilt into a dank boathouse again. The Guardian’s Culture Vulture blog rounds up U.K. media reactions, which are mostly favourable – surely the kiss of death for any conceptual artist. But according to one gallery wag, Guy Dammann, it’s not conceptual art if the artist is so obsessed with production and consumption, merely "an example of perfect product placement". Casting an iron replica of the utterly defenseless Warrior With Shield into the murky water is another effort to explore the path that an object originally took to reach its destination. The Power Plant gallery, which will bear the stench of Starling’s mussels in September, focuses through March 6 on a retrospective of Japanese artist On Kawara’s 40-year obsession with chronicling the minute details of his own existence, including over a hundred telegrams bearing the message "I am still alive". (More tenacious than seeking a cathartic quick fix via PostSecret.)

Transit bash

Not much cause for celebrating at the TTC this season: That relative sliver of a subway system is dwarfed by the sprawling megacity more and more each day. The first stages of construction of the St. Clair streetcar right-of-way will remain a frosty eyesore as the opposing faction lobby for funds to continue a protracted legal battle. A proposed $5 license plate registration surcharge to enhance transit awaits passage of the new City of Toronto Act next year – if a fare hike doesn’t happen first. Nonetheless, the urban pranksters of newmindspace are gathering at Kipling station by 11:11 p.m. tonight (Dec. for an eastbound party, picking up celebrants on the west end of each platform all the way to Kennedy. Last week’s unveiling of plans to spruce up the decor of three bleak subway stations adjacent to cultural attractions stimulated mostly enthusiastic chatter right here – and JB’s Warehouse and Curio Emporium blog was the most responsive to the call for suggestions of what other platforms were begging for a new look. (Still no insights for what to do with Castle Frank station, though.) Elsewhere, an excellent Flickr set is being gradually assembled by cartographer Craig White, who is tenaciously snapping the art and architecture of each subway stop, with the ambition of finally assigning proper credit to those responsible for all the architecture and artwork. And, in the process, highlighting the inconsistent sign styles, not to mention the inconsistent cleanliness.

TTC Stations [Flickr set]

Lennon’s tomb

A quarter-century since the murder of John Lennon may well be the last exit from the media’s centre stage for the Boomer industry his death was exploited to create. Reminiscing at year 30 and beyond is only going to be an uncomfortable reminder of one’s own mortality, after all. (Besides, there’s really no turning back once Paul McCartney has shilled on behalf of retirement funds.) Those who were kids 25 years ago recall being bewildered at how mass mourning almost immediately mutated into mass marketing – yet were nonetheless swept up by the nostalgic thrall. Youngsters currently enraptured by the Beatles myth are perfectly content with a story that ends before a white-suited and shaggy-bearded John strode into Varsity Stadium on September 13, 1969 to nervously hurtle through rockabilly anthems while Yoko writhed inside a bag. The cracks in the Lennon legacy have become accepted with time, it seems – like how his own temperament was anything but peaceful, contributing to creative exhaustion by age 30.  And how all that cynicism isn’t heresy because, after all, would the man himself disagree? All the broadcast retrospectives don’t hold a candle to hearing the raw emotion as heard on CHUM-FM through the late-night hours of December 8, 1980, of which 40 minutes are preserved at Rock Radio Scrapbook.

J.D.’s misfortune

Fading to black is a decade of speculation that Mississauga-born John "J.D." Roberts would be the new full-time anchor desk occupant at The CBS Evening News. The drafting of NBC Today show hostess Katie Couric for the job – at a rate of $20 million for each of the next seven years – now seems to be all but confirmed. Following last year’s blogger-led haranguing of Dan Rather, successor talk tilted in the direction of Roberts. While demurring at any insistence he was actively lobbying for the job, J.D.’s name nonetheless started turning up with greater frequency in publicist-fed nightlife reports, even after he reconciled with his wife. Letting a woman named Katie put on a stoic clownface for the CBS camera at 6:30 p.m. is apparently cause for some concern in some media circles. The New York Observer quotes one nameless network executive in regard to Couric and her new generational counterparts who’ve replaced Peter Jennings at ABC: “I’m not sure I see them helping the nation through 9/11.” Which certainly won’t be a problem once all the nation’s network news viewers die of natural causes instead. Back to the White House press room for Roberts, then, careful to not drop VJ colloquialisms such as "sloppy seconds".

Toothless ferry

Better cancel those plans for a winter boatride to Rochester – the beleaguered fast ferry, originally established as a year-round enterprise, won’t start its next season until March 31. The city’s outgoing mayor, William Johnson, is determined not to have his legacy sunk, despite flawed financial assumptions and a schedule that discourages Toronto travelers from making a day trip to Rochester. The new plan may involve something similar to what’s done with the high-speed ferry between Bar Harbor, Maine and Yarmouth, NS, which is shipped to the Port of Spain in Trinidad and Tobago for half the year. Hanging in the balance is a request for the local government to back a $10 million loan, adding to the $40 million the venture has already burned, including the $32 million to buy the craft itself from a failed private consortium. Meanwhile, three other American towns are hoping to launch ferry operations to Canada over the next year, with prospective routes connecting Cleveland to Port Stanley, Grand River to Port Burwell, and Erie, PA to Port Dover: "Part of the theory behind these ventures is that they will give local tourism a big boost," writes the Akron Beacon Journal. "But if Rochester is any indication, that may be overly optimistic." And even more optimistic if plans are to run those shuttles during colder months. High winds last Saturday resulted in northbound Rochester riders being herded on a bus instead, not because the ferry couldn’t stand the weather, but because a choppy trip would result in the seasick passengers giving the boat bad PR.

Sears trowel

Not that anyone feels sentimental toward the Sears store that hastily filled the biggest shell at Yonge and Dundas after the failed transformation of Eaton’s (logo pictured), but it’s certain to have a new tenant if the department store is swallowed by its American parent – possibly leading to some kind of merger with Hudsons Bay Co. Quebec discounter La Maison Simons was being pegged as a prospective new tenant according to a report in Canadian Business; a speck of online chatter speculates on refined American retailer Nordstrom as a replacement; and the new Apple Store now recruiting for the Eaton Centre is bound to generate more traffic than Kenmore appliances and Arnold Palmer sportswear could. Regardless, the disappearance of the classic department model continues to inspire wistful sentiment, even among those who long ago gave up on trying to navigate the places – must be that sense of comfort commanded by the anchor stores that would reassuringly cradle the rest of the mall in their arms, combined with the warmth of downtown window displays. But patriotic fondness for The Bay’s 335-year legacy of point blankets doesn’t mean much when the registers don’t ring. With the opening of a Winners in a misshapen space at 110 Bloor St. W. covered as a genuine cultural event, it’d seem the old-school monolithic retailers have given up on trying to court new consumers – especially compared to 1998, when Eaton’s pierced their own tongue with a department called "Diversity", as if the marketing of youthful indifference could salvage a sinking corporate ship.