paved :: marc weisblott

It takes a special kind of prostitute to be rewarded with 2,000 autobiographical words in the local weekend supplement of the National Post, but considering how the story is called My $150,000 body, it would take Nina Arsenault several decades of freelance writing alone to accrue such earnings. After providing fodder for gossip blogs earlier this year after practically charming the pants off enthusiastic tattooed stickman Tommy Lee, the proper pronoun to describe Ms. Arsenault’s gender was the subject of vigorous debate at Torontoist, but this article provided clarity for Post readers flipping between a profile of Jennifer Dale and list of the latest happenings at Holt Renfrew – reflecting her upwardly mobile ambitions. Nina claims to have previously resembled renaissance lunatic Crispin Glover, and was only inspired to follow through on gender reassignment after a quickie $100 cyst removal in South Africa provided insights into the wonders of plastic surgery. But after the obligatory nose job, lip lift, cheek implants, and hair removal, a round of facial feminization surgery in San Francisco was followed by a visit to “Dr. Sonny” in Guadalajara, Mexico for 450cc silicone implants, a rib cutting ceremony, and more: “It felt like someone was kicking me in the groin over and over.” Supplementary insight into how Arsenault paid for these surgeries can be found in her regular column for fab: The current installment features a lurid tale of an accountant, newly separated from his wife, who took Nina on a trip to Walt Disney World – where she recoiled at his scatalogical suggestions in the hotel room, and snuck away with $16,000 in cash. Meanwhile, the latest cover story of fab concerns another Torontonian waist-deep in the debauchery business, deported nightclub kingpin Peter Gatien, illustrating his plans for Circa. Due to dominate the club district starting next month, the venue will feature a “Bathhouse Bar” that boasts well-worn-in tiles and projections of people showering, a main room initially adorned with 15-foot white fibreglass hippos with strobe lights inside, and a sauna room decorated with fake lava rocks featuring a video projection of a man pouring water onto real sauna rocks. But unlike Nina Arsenault’s encounter with Tommy Lee – who flipped out when one of his flunkies informed him that he was lusting after someone whose female endowments were bought and paid for – it’d seem straight guys likely to hang out at Circa aren’t the type to recoil at discovering that the hot chick over there was born without a vagina.

The first Ontario Budget to be supported by a goofy cartoon featuring finance minister Dwight Duncan is “an exercise in paying more and getting less” says John Tory, it’s “another missed opportunity to make life better for working families” says Howard Hampton, and it was pronounced a letdown for those lobbying on behalf of long term care, publicly-funded physiotherapy and the municipal infrastructure whose taxes will continue to be diverted to those health and social services that argue they don’t get enough. Catholic school trustees feel their allocated funds are not enough, public educators think the situation looks peachy, and secondary school teachers give it a mixed review. Daycare expansion has met the axe, social assistance payments have risen a small notch, and the province has topped up funding for Toronto’s highbrow arts construction. (But forget about pleasing farmers, steelworkers, or post-secondary students.) The official party press release is headlined Experts Agree: The Liberal Budget is Good for All Ontario, and those responsible for medical research and innovation appreciate their injection of funds, reaffirming how there are plenty of projects being supported by the province beyond research into the sex lives of flying squirrels. But will this blitz change the fact that half of Ontario was ready to throw Dalton McGuinty out of office, according to a Leger Marketing survey, as if half the population can be bothered to pay attention to what happens at Queen’s Park? Well, the $1.2 billion flood of infrastructure funding for GTA public transit has dominated headlines – the promise of more harmonic service between each region will overshadow the TTC’s effort to spruce up its image with the Pizzazz campaign, promising subway appearances from a Lucille Ball lookalike or Mysterion the Mind Reader. Brampton is being granted the cash to start its rapid transit initiative, Mississauga is pleased to get their Hwy. 403 bus line, while Durham feels that Hwy. 407 was unrightfully ignored. But that subway to York University and beyond? Maybe not the surest thing, points out James Bow, especially since the promised $670 million will sit in a trust fund until the next election. The drawbacks of such a plan are dragged out in the pages of NOW, wondering why 90 times this year’s TTC budget shortfall should be splurged on six kilometres of subway track. The Globe and Mail speculated whether it was tied to former finance minister Greg Sorbara’s family-owned collection of unappealing apartment buildings that happen to be situated along the new route.

How much are Government of Ontario employees looking forward to their first weekday of not having to be open for business since January 2? Enough for two different ministries to issue press releases reinforcing labour practices and store closing laws more than three weeks beforehand. The Retail Business Holidays Act seems like an archaic concept in this Global Village, yet it still applies to both Good Friday and Easter Sunday, which represent one-quarter of the remaining days each year where store aisles are all but certain to resemble a bowling alley, with the exception of magazine stores under 2,400 square feet with a maximum of three employees, pharmacies under 7,500 square feet, flower shops and gas stations. A first offense fine of $500, or penalty of $50,000 or beyond, can also still be technically slapped on those who flout those laws that once applied in this province to at least one day of each week – with the exemption of designated tourist areas, which only came to include the Eaton Centre and environs once Sunday shopping became legal in 1992, after a decade of challenges that nonetheless failed to convince the courts that it was unconstitutional for the province to keep most shops locked on a day of rest. (This debate continues to be waged in Nova Scotia, where current poll numbers favour stores opening seven days a week.) Those employees corralled into working on Good Friday have the right to entitlements – although the long list of professions not covered by those laws make it seem like pretty much anyone who works hard for a living isn’t bound to reap the rewards of a government-enforced day off. Naturally, there are folks glad to be unleashed from their daily grind for religious reasons, although the complaint to the Ontario Human Rights Commission by Professor David Noble, who is “cautiously confident” that York University will discontinue their tradition of not holding classes on two Jewish holidays in autumn, should be an interesting battle to watch. The commission is hoping to mediate a solution to Noble’s demand that the practice get extended to all faiths, something that the York administration says would be too difficult, given how there are at least 100 such holidays each year.

The shadier side of the franchise industry is getting some glare this week, as the man behind the 3 For 1 Pizza & Wings chain, Reza Solhi, had what a judge called his “deliberately dishonest” dealings – practices compared in one ruling to piracy on the high seas – detailed on page A1 of the Toronto Star. This disgraced fast food mogul has been subject to a string of lawsuits from newcomers to Canada who threw large sums of money toward hopes of profitably satiating the appetite for getting three pies delivered to one’s door at once, undercutting the two-for-one pizza trend of the late-’80s. Those kind of freakonomics don’t extend to the courtroom, however, and Solhi is currently on the hook for nearly all of the $1.2 million he’s been ordered to pay back disgruntled franchisees – although, given how Ontario law is more sympathetic to franchisors, he’s hoping for his own payday from other cases. What’s made these tales of bullying, misrepresentations and fraud even more confusing is that 3 For 1 Pizza has all but ceased to exist – fewer customers presumably seduced by the idea of inhaling the vastest possible quantity of carbohydrates – and the infamous founder’s interest was funnelled into a new chain called Pizza One. But the promise of thin crust, pesto sauce and sun dried tomato toppings – along with a head office decorated with Persian carpets, leather furniture and dark oak trim – haven’t helped Pizza One get far off the ground, compared to the 90 stores once boasted by 3 For 1. A big newspaper article connecting the chain to the shattered hopes of immigrant entrepreneurs won’t help, although the 3 For 1 legacy now extends to a new concept called Anthony’s Kitchen – a more ambitious “food theme park” similar to the Richtree Market idea – in addition to seeking investors for wood-burning ovens at the obvious Pizza One spin-off, Anthony’s Pizza Uno. (The Star story mentions how, while Reza Solhi isn’t listed as the owner of these post-3 For 1 ventures, he admits to calling himself “Anthony”.) Based on current adverts in the publication Business Exchange, however, opportunities to funnel your life savings into a reliable fast food trademark in the big smoke are becoming fewer and farther between. The next big things would appear to be debit card terminals, inkjet cartridge refill stations, and high-margin vending machines where a handful of gourmet candy costs a buck.

Caught in a franchise fiasco [Toronto Star]

Local search engine iBegin.com has been switched on, the product of GTA-based developer Ahmed Farooq, who is determined to create the Craigslist-style answer to a phone book, starting with his hometown. The idea is based on trusting users to build a better infotrap than any existing outlet – for example, a review of other public transit searches reveals how a quest for info on Toronto “subway stations” in existing search services turns up no instant gratification. Following a couple months of closed beta testing, Farooq frowns on any hyperbolic ambitions, preferring to cast his efforts to the wind with hopes that submitted listings, reviews, photos and tags will bulk up the results, along with the ability to tweak what others have submitted. But it’s not like the scramble to find profitability in the local search field is over – a feature in The Globe and Mail outlined how Yellow Pages is scrambling to compete, their stock placed in brand name recognition and a sales force. Then again, the collective Wikipedia volunteer squad just marked their millionth English-language entry in just over five years, a milestone commemorated with a story in the Sunday Star. Considering how Craigslist keeps being cited as a factor in reduced profits in the newspaper industry, it’d appear the only path to success in the new new media game remains never really setting out to make a cent.

iBegin.com [local search engine]

Broken Social Scene, along with the community aesthetic surrounding the local rock ‘n’ roll collective, earn a 5,000-word treatment in The New York Times Magazine. The feature by Alissa Quart – the author of books on teenage marketing tactics and the dilemma of gifted children – leapt from mid-week subscriber e-mail delivery to the Stille Post message board, allowing the article to be heckled a few days before the Sunday brunch set flip past its pages. While it’s doubtful any NYT subscriptions were cancelled last October after critic Jon Pareles complained that Broken Social Scene, their self-titled record, “refuses to ride on Montreal’s momentum”, the attention merits comparison to Seattle circa November 1992, when a Sub Pop employee responded to a Times request for some indigenous hipster slang with their own contrived grunge glossary. And while this latest scenester overload was doubtlessly fact-checked to a fault, the hometown media pendulum has already swung back to dance clubs, due to the arrival of deported NYC nightlife kingpin Peter Gatien, even if accessing that martini-soaked society requires a disposable income, not to mention a wardrobe that wasn’t bought by the pound. Woven through the article are essential tips for any other town looking to cash in by projecting poverty: “He was clad, as usual, in baggy jeans, a moth-eaten black sweater and torn-up sneakers, a dime-store diamond on his pinkie,” is how BSS celebrity Kevin Drew gets described, followed by an explanation of how, until recently, he lived “in a splendidly filthy room that he calls ‘a nest of destruction,’ where Agnès B. suits and his original lyrics, scribbled on sheets of paper, lay in huge piles, tangled up with bottles of prescription drugs and a few sexually suggestive Polaroids, one of a girl lifting her wraparound skirt to reveal a thong”. The resident chanteuse, Leslie Feist, is “eating fried fish cakes she’d purchased at the local deli, discussing clothing swaps and how she was saving up for her next vacation”. While no one dares admit to making money, Broken Social Scene gloat of rejecting ad deals with Coca-Cola, Hummer and Hewlett-Packard, but only because of their objection to the specific products being sold. “When your lyrics are in a car commercial, they are stolen from you,” explains Mr. Drew. “But then again, we could be strapped and need orthodontia, and we could do a commercial.”

The profile of Elton John’s long-suffering spouse in Toronto Life, titled An Ideal Husband, must be cherished as a true artifact of this era – because someday, in the not too distant future, the less famous half of a gay male pairing can be portrayed with the same scorn and ridicule as one of Rod Stewart’s wives would be. For now, David Furnish remains just slightly beyond reproach, credited with salvaging his soulmate from what might’ve been a bloated, drug-addled and depressive descent into oblivion. But those qualities are also what singer-songwriter immortality is made of – and Elton spent the earlier part of this decade thinking he could swing both ways, releasing introspective albums in spite of living an increasingly ostentatious lifestyle, then left frustrated by the fact that his audience only wanted to hear the old hits. Whether or not Furnish can be blamed for this delusion is unclear, but his role as godfather to the children of Elizabeth Hurley and Victoria Beckham suggests this Scarborough boy has fulfilled his destiny as Britain’s greatest enabler of asinine celebrity antics. One of Furnish’s friends even took the liberty to invite Farrah Fawcett to David and Elton’s house in Nice, because who wouldn’t enjoy having Farrah stagger around their living room for a weekend? Based on this feature, the pre-Elton experiences of Furnish weren’t leading to much fulfillment – of course he’s now remembered by early-’80s classmates at Sir John A. Macdonald Collegiate in Agincourt for his penchant for sporting Ray-Bans, Polo shirts and Vidal Sassoon haircuts before anybody else, although the article by Ellen Himelfarb depicts a man who’d be trudging through the ranks of the advertising industry were it not for access to the disposable income required to buy fiberglass statues with a penis in place of a nose. Thankfully, feigning affection for an older woman is no longer required to secure such economic status.

An Ideal Husband [Toronto Life]

The blog aristocracy gets feature treatment in the latest issue of New York, where Clive Thompson weaves together tales of mostly NYC-based characters who’ve plugged away at establishing a parallel universe media world – where the only thing they have in common is hostility toward anyone else squatting on their topic space, even though getting linked from other sites is deemed the most effective measure of what any site is worth. The face on the front cover belongs to Peter Rojas, who bailed from his slave-wage job running Gizmodo – the first of the Gawker Media blogs created with money-making ambitions – to his co-owned knock-off Engadget, becoming a millionaire when company Weblogs Inc. was purchased by AOL. A newfangled version of the dot-com gold rush? Not if a newcomer can do a better job of filling a niche, although the article concludes that the era of blog success seen as something serendipitous – even when it was entirely calculated – has come to an end. Between all the hucksters huddling together to calculate ways of making a quick buck off personal publishing tools, and bigger media eager to harness online spontaneity toward making and breaking news, this should be the last package viewing weblogs as one homogenous phenomenon.

Blogs to Riches [New York]

Craig Newmark, the Craig behind Craigslist, earns an eight-page profile in the latest issue of New York. Craigslist Toronto has been around for nearly three years, gradually building its own loyal constituency, although still not popular enough to require reliance on the search function to browse through all its postings. The online community Newmark established over a decade ago in San Francisco, however, was calculated to have wiped away as much as $50 million a year in Bay Area newspaper classified revenue. Citizen journalism is Craig’s next frontier, with his investment in a forthcoming venture dedicated to checking and balancing the work of newsrooms, all part of the earnest systems engineer’s quest to create something beyond an outlet for cheap apartment listings and randy sexual invitations. While job postings in SF, NYC and D.C. require a nominal fee – and a charge for real estate adverts is being considered to weed out scammers – Craigslist Toronto remains a profit-free operation. The prospect of a more efficient competitor to Craigslist also looms, although eBay-owned competitor Kijiji hasn’t garnered much interest around these parts. But the cultural cachet of Newmark’s simplified mission can’t be beat when it comes to people pursuing spontaneous hook-ups inspired by current events – especially in the midst of mass hysteria. But unlike when Craig launched in Toronto in April 2003, a casual encounter listing placed by someone who determinedly boasts of being "SARS-free" probably wouldn’t be terribly successful today.

A Guy Named Craig [New York]

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.