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Toronto (a.k.a. Accordion City)

The Colbinator on Accordion City

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”.)

One reply on “The Colbinator on Accordion City”

Hey Joey,

Here is the link I was mentioning last night: http://maddox.xmission.com/ …funny that you mention Asimov in this entry…Maddox’s last “rant” was about ‘I, Robot’. Some of his stuff is marginally funny, while most of it is hysterical…you’ll have to do some digging for the gold. Carrie

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