Celebrity Spotting in Accordion City

A couple of the Queen West regulars have told me that Johnny Depp is in town for the Film Festival and has been hanging out at Shanghai Cowgirl. Be careful, Johnny: their sweet potato fries and wasabi mayonnaise may be tasty-licious, but a few plates of those and Sir Mix-A-Lot may be writing raps about you.

Val Kilmer’s presence is also being felt in town, albeit in a different way:

Photo by Cory Doctorow.

Cory Doctorow took the photo above during his last visit to town. He, Possum and I had just come from watching The Village (“A ninety-minute Twilight Zone

episode”, he called it) and were walking along Grange Avenue towards

Spadina when we saw “Val Kilmer” with a peace sign on a side door to one of the Chinese markets.

“You think it’s for his career as a whole, or just a specific role?” I asked. “I liked him best as ‘Nick Rivers’ in Top Secret.”

A couple of weeks later, during her visit to Toronto, Wendy spotted this graffito as we were walking on Phoebe towards Soho (just north of The Black Bull):

Photo by Yours Truly.

The peace sign beside “Val Kilmer” suggests that the tagger probably saw The Doors and had some kind of epiphany. I haven’t seen the movie — was it really that good?