On my way home late-late Monday night (part of which was spent viewing La Rabbia di Pasolini, a reconstruction of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1962 essay film),  I was surprised to board the Dundas W. streetcar and find the driver sitting behind a plexiglass partition. The driver was gruff, bearded, burly guy — the sight of this bear-sized man squeezed inside a protective box on an otherwise empty streetcar seemed both comic and like another instance of Toronto’s over reaction to safety concerns. (It also made me feel like a potential threat.) Had I missed something while I was away? Via iPhone I status-posted to Facebook something reflecting my incredulity.

Some Fb ranting ensued —  starting from general comments re: the TTC,  on to what Toronto lacks for dynamism, social fluidity and everyday engagement. The recent G20 shenanigans figure, as does a recap of the thinking that went into the development of Toronto’s St. Lawrence neighbourhood. Here it is, mostly unedited, in its rough, epistolary form. (NB: Greg Spencer is a post-doctoral fellow at the Munk Centre for International Studies, specializing in economic geography.)

Christopher Frey: Has anyone seen the new plexiglass barriers on streetcars to protect the driver? Is this a late night precaution or has the TTC lost its bloody mind? Are we so savage?

Greg Spencer: A TTC driver is assaulted every day of the year. So yes, we are.

This seems part of a larger pattern so typical of Toronto, a city that over-reacts on the side of caution/safety, irregardless of the affect on how we socialize with one another… There are smarter solutions… this is ridiculous. Especially when TTC service can be so shitty, and the system as a whole is so behind other cities’ metros. (Why are we so late in implementing pre-paid pass cards for example?) … After spending so much time in other cities, especially Rio, & using public transit daily, I’ve developed a keen sense for what keeps Toronto from being a really vibrant, interesting place: social fluidity, quotidian engagements with people outside yr usual circle, plus what brian fawcett once called safety nazis. public transit is an important space where we’re forced to interact with our fellow citizens, and the people who work for the city we live in… In some symbolic & behavioural way the glass partition just altered the way I interact with Toronto.

Greg Spencer: http://www3.ttc.ca/Jobs/transit_operator_drivers_recruitment.jsp

Teresa Morrow: I think nice liberals like me are fence sitters when it comes to authority and the enforcement of rules. I deplore the guy who punches the bus-driver, and I grouch and curse about TTC employees and their smug and callous ways. Ditto re: the cops. And we have a lot of people in our city who are outsiders for one reason or another. Whether that means they don’t give a shit about the rules, or are afraid to get involved lest they become the victim of authorities that can be racist & discriminatory… I feel like we are civil people resisting our own strong undercurrent of antipathy.

Greg Spencer: Very true – way too many people take way too many things for granted. We love to complain and yet we do very little. We wear our political choices on our sleeves like it’s some kind of status symbol but we tend to put very little actual thought or action into our ‘beliefs’. I feel that there is a real lack of knowledge about the political/governance process. Part of this is the fault of our political class which does a horrible job at communicating with the public and part of it is a lack of true engagement on the part of citizens. The result is shrill voices on both ends of the political spectrum spewing conspiracy theories that people are all too eager to accept. We are very fortunate to live in a country with very strong public institutions but I do worry about their adaptability and resiliency in the face of rapid societal change.

Christopher Frey: When it comes to burden of proof, sometimes it seems conspiracy theories get an easier ride than traditional media. People mistake plausibility for proof.

Greg Spencer: Chris’ earlier point about atomization is very important. In a large diverse society where everyone has access to specialized media that is congruent with their own set of beliefs what is the glue that holds society together? How can people chastise others they believe are ‘wrong’ when people have very different ideas of what ‘wrong’ is?

Ken Dobb: Who are you people? And how did this discussion end up among the usual inconsequential chatter on my Facebook page?

This discussion reminds me of the theorizing that preceded the development of my neighbourhood – St. Lawrence. The designers of the neighbourhood were taken with the findings – then popular – of the urban theorist W.H. Whyte. Whyte’s findings indicated that fencing off space had the counter-intuitive consequence of actually increasing violence and street crime in public spaces. What worked, he claimed, was having private individuals invested in public spaces – eyes on the street. It’s why we have medium rise buildings with residential units that open directly onto the streets. And to a large extent, this theory seems to have worked in this neighbourhood where – despite its social composition, on-street criminal occurences have been roughly on a par with those of Rosedale, at least until recently.

I agree with Chris that the plexiglass shields are an abomination, an abomination that just might have the counter-intuitive effect of worsening the incidences of violence on public transit. If something is happening in the driver’s space behind the glass shield, what interest do I have to leave my space to intervene?

Archeologists and a team of scientists at the University of Tubingen believe they have found the oldest sex toy in the world, after piecing together over a dozen fragments. A spokesman from the university said the  28,000-year-old/stone age phallus was most likely used as a sexual aid rather than to light fires or club rivals. The eight-inch stone carving was found in a cave near Ulm in Germany. Made from siltstone, the appearance of carved rings around the polished “head” confirmed the researchers suspicions. The fragments were found in a cave complex associated with the activities of modern humans and not their pre-historic “cousins”, the Neanderthals.

Via BoingBoing

On one of the last days of COP15, the United Nations climate change convention in Copenhagen last December (you know, the one that failed, the one that Naomi Klein called “the world’s biggest poker game”), I sat at a cafeteria table and propped up my legs on an empty chair. I was trying to check my email while also checking out French photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand, who was at the next table. The same day I noticed NDP leader Jack Layton. (He didn’t recognize me.) Later, I waited for my next interview subject at the entrance to the media room and there, in fire engine-red pants and with his unmistakeable squint, was Thom Yorke of Radiohead. He wasn’t there to perform, unless you considered his newest gig a kind of performance. Hundreds of delegates had been shut out of the overcrowded Bella Center, but Yorke had snagged a coveted press pass and was wandering around the convention centre. (Yorke didn’t recognize me, either.)

The gloss celebrity brings to world affairs and to journalism isn’t new, but it reappeared Monday with not one but two guest editors at the Globe and Mail. Bono – he who sees the world through yellow-coloured glasses – and Band Aid founder Bob Geldof breezed into Toronto over the weekend to helm the Globe’s special on Africa. The Globe’s website carried stories about their progress, and the visit seemed to eclipse the news itself.

I followed this on the Globe’s website and it appeared as if Bono and Geldof were there for about five hours or so. It’s like Mario Batali going into one of his kitchens and straightening a piece of grilled asparagus on a dish before sending it out.

This isn’t the first time Bono has taken up residence as guest editor of a publication. In 2006 he edited an issue of the Independent and he’s a regular op-end contributor to the New York Times. He worked with Graydon Carter on Vanity Fair’s July 2007 issue. His editor’s note (called “Message 2U”) was transparent about his goals, quoting former U.S. Treasurer secretary Robert Rubin:

We are serious about our stuff we will have to improve on two fronts: (1) communicating to America the scale of the problem, and (2) convincing America that the problem can be solved. He added the challenge that we would need the kinds of marketing budgets Nike and Gap have at their disposal.

(Bono went on to give a shout out to companies like Gap and Apple, who support his charities.) Considering he had already edited an edition of The Independent, doesn’t that make the Globe issue seem like a rehash? If you’re going to go gimmicky, shouldn’t it be your own gimmick?

That’s not really the point, of course. On the one hand it reaffirms Bonos self-appointed role as an advocate for Africa. On the other, it draws celebrity power to the slowly dying world of newspapers. As former Globe and Mail reporter Stephen Strauss reminded us: “It’s good for brand Globe and Mail.” Strauss thought the Monday issue was fair, but brought up a question that needs to be asked every time a celebrity takes part in such stunts (see a list of other celebrity guest editors below):

Does this work? Working here means does it benefit the interests of all concerned? Does this stunt make a difference to the mesh of idealism and self-interest that the editorship is about? In a much, much larger sense does anyone believe that the problems of Africa are going to be fundamentally addressed by a billion articles in a Canadian newspaper? The issue, and Ken Wiwa referenced this in his essay on the matter in the paper on Saturday, is that Africans themselves have to figure out a way to reconstitute their ways of life so that they can participate in and add to the wealth generating and technology-creating symphony of modern life.

That’s precisely what’s so irksome. One of the potential covers for Monday’s Globe and Mail that Bono put to a vote in the newsroom on included a prominent logo for his own NGO, One. Think about how it would appear if the CEO of a multinational company or a bank were guest editing the issue and splashed its logo across the front. (See the cover the Globe went with here.) Lea Zeltserman put it this way: “By putting celebrities in charge, the paper limits itself in its ability to engage with Africa and issues around foreign aid and development. Bono and Geldof are a part of that debate, and a newspaper’s responsibility is to examine their role critically, not help facilitate their work.”

As Toronto writer David Hayes, who wrote Power and Influence: The Globe and Mail and the News Revolution, noted, bold-faced names are tapped all the time to dictate the news. “Stephen Colbert guest edited Newsweek a couple of years ago and Wallpaper makes a habit of it. Guest editors over the past couple of years include Karl Lagerfeld, Philippe Starck, Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and artist/sculptor Louise Bourgeois. Penelope Cruz just guest edited French Vogue last month. (I loved one ‘news’ report, which noted: ‘The Spanish actress has left the movie sets for several days to devote her attention to the new activity.’)” Hayes pointed out that Tina Brown recruited comedian Roseanne Barr to consult on an issue of the New Yorker. Was it a success? Hayes points out that Gawker quoted Brown on the subject of celeb guest editors: “They don’t know how to get it right, any more than I would know how to commission a bunch of songs. As an editing idea, it’s fraught with road kill.”

We journalists can be a little prickly when rock stars usurp their turf. So can activists. The Globe recruited Ory Okolloh, the blogger-lawyer behind Kenyan Pundit, to run globeandmail.com coverage on Monday. Okolloh commented in her editor’s note:

I’m sure they have the best of intentions, but the role of the African voice both in addressing our problems and the solutions to those problems is one that needs to remain at centre stage if the continent is to make progress. So while the paper edition might focus on what the world can do for Africa, my role as the guest editor will be to return to the question of what can Africans do for Africa and what are we doing for Africa (and indeed for the rest of the world) by highlighting different voices and stories from around the continent.

Came across this while preparing for my assignment in Brasília last week (more to come on that later): the digital typeface Utopia, which, according to its makers, “portrays the mixture between the modernist architecture of Oscar Niemeyer and informal occupation of the urban space that shapes major Brazilian cities.”

And in poster format:

At the outset of World War II, several Latin American countries had fairly close ties with Nazi Germany, among them Brazil. Or at least they were avowedly neutral. Although the United States hadn’t yet entered the war, in early 1941 the State Department convinced Walt Disney and his collaborators to tour South America (underwriting the excursion), with the purposes of creating films that would curry favour with the governments and peoples of Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Peru. Four films were produced, the last in the series being “Aquarela do Brasil” (Watercolour of Brazil), which introduces the recurring character of José Carioca. José shows Donald Duck around Rio and gets him staggeringly drunk.

In 1942, Brazil entered the war on the Allied side, the only South American nation to dispatch troops to Europe. Like the U.S. and Canada, it also shunted its Japanese, German and Italian immigrants in internment camps.

I’ve already filled an entire notepad here in Rio, trying to keep track of all the Brazilian-Portuguese colloquialisms and portmanteaus that are relentlessly shared with me, a good number of them either derived from or alluding to anatomical parts and sex acts. Perhaps my polling has been distorted by the circle of carioca friends I keep. Nonetheless, a brief internet survey of the relevant academic literature scientifically confirms that the Brazilian genius for carnally-obsessed linguistic invention is nonpareil. (Thus, I will be needing many more notepads.)

There are, of course, plenty of other non-sexual idioms that are commonly used, the best of them possessing etymologies and back-stories that, in a few words, and what image they convey, neatly summarize entire episodes in Brazilian popular history.

One such story begins twenty-two years ago, when marijuana traffickers on board the Solano Star fishing trawler spotted a Brazilian coast guard vessel on the way to intercept them. They pitched their cargo into the ocean: more than 20,000 kilograms of maconha, all of it sealed in 1.25 kg tins, that would never make it to its intended destination in the U.S.

Within days the cans, about 15,000 of them, started washing ashore, lofted by the tides over a vast swath of shoreline between Rio de Janeiro and Santa Catarina. The surfers couldn’t believe their luck, and those fishermen quick to realize what was happening allegedly made fortunes. As word of mouth spread, scores of people arrived on the beaches at night to scavenge for flotsammed ocean-bud. This went on for a few weeks, some of the littoral’s glaneurs patiently acquiring stocks sufficient to last a lifetime.

As this new, unexpected supply of maconha, supposedly of African origin, circulated widely among cariocas, it acquired a legendary reputation for its high-grade quality.

Those months in 1988 famously became known as the verão da lata — the summer of the can. For the maconha had arrived at a portentous moment. Brazil was struggling with hyperinflation and the failure of the cruzado plan to bring it in check; intensifying workers’ strikes had paralyzed industry; the military dictatorship was teetering, its weaknesses picked at by the Diretas Já mass movement that demanded direct elections;  and a former leftist guerrilla named Fernando Gabeira, convicted in the kidnapping of the U.S. ambassador, made national headlines when he returned from exile and showed up at the beach in a very wee crochet thong (it was actually a woman’s bikini bottom, his cousin’s).

A Brazilian blogger writes: “In an effervescent moment at the beginning of 1988, the one thing that came was the least expected.” The summer of 1988 has become a part of Brazilian pop mythology in the same way the summer of 1977 did for New Yorkers — when so many era-defining events and the arrival of new cultural trends were compressed into mere weeks.

“Da Lata”, which means “from the tin”, was quickly transfigured into an all-purpose synonym for “It’s good!” (or “muito bom” in everyday Portuguese). Eg. “Did you like the restaurant?” — “Da Lata!” The expression became a fixture in popular culture, widely referenced in television and music. Its use is a little archaic today, but you still hear it said occasionally, even among some young people who don’t know where the expression came from. But for those who are old enough to have lived through the verão da lata, it’s remains a shared code in the collective experience.

Thanks to Fernando Frezza for help with this post.

“The eye of infinity is the sea free of pain.” Graffiti on a wall in Lapa, Rio de Janeiro.

1. In Rio, after the war, Polish Jews earned a reputation for being the most attractive and adept of the city’s (female) prostitutes. They were even celebrated in famous sambas of the day. (Lyrics to come.) Legend has it they arrived in Brazil via a white slave trafficking ring.

2. Madonna’s current boyfriend is a Brazilian model named Jesus Pinto da Luz — a name that translates as Jesus with the Cock of Light. I’m told that the building in Glória I’m presently living in was where Jesus spent part of his childhood.

3. It’s believed the Tupinambà Indians, original inhabitants of the area around Guanabara Bay that is now Rio, inspired Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, Michel de Montaigne’s famous essay ‘On the Cannibals’, and a succession of eighteenth century French thinkers including Rousseau and his ‘Theory of Natural Man’ (although, contrary to received wisdom, Rousseau never actually used the expression “noble savage”).

4. A young Oscar Niemeyer was among the architects who submitted design proposals for Maracana Stadium — built to host the 1950 World Cup. Niemeyer’s idea was to construct the stands at street level with the playing field forty feet below. As the area around Maracana is prone to flooding during the rainy season, the pitch would have been frequently transformed into a swimming pool. Rio chronicler Ruy Castro: “Faced with this possibility, Brazilian football would have had to adjust — perhaps it would have been played with flippers instead of boots — and it would have been very different from the game that in the future would give us Garrincha, Pelé, Toastao, Zico, and Romario. We might not have become five-times champions of the world. As the writer and journalist Sérgio Augusto said, at the outside we might have become five-times champion in water polo.”

Alex Molotkow sends along this addendum, regarding point 1…

From “Anglo-Jewry and the Jewish International Traffic in Prostitution, 1885-1914″ by Lloyd P. Gartner:
“Constantinople, Bombay, Alexandria, and Rio de Janeiro were other destinations at various times, but Buenos Aires was long the main terminal for Jewish prostitutes. Jewish girls, it was reported, were the most in demand and fetched the highest prices from the merchants of prostitution overseas.”

This won’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s followed the rise of K’naan, M.I.A. and grime MCs like Tinchy Stryder, but there’s been some pretty exciting, forward-looking music coming out of the developing world and its diasporas over the past few years. Stuff like eight-bit Afrikaaner rave-rappers Die Antwoord.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Those are some inspired slow-mo shots of dude’s junk trying to escape his Dark Side of the Moon boxers.

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London-based Afrikan Boy, whose flow on the M.I.A. track “Hussel” pretty much stole the show. He’s just released a video for his song “Lagos Town”.

Click here to view the embedded video.

And Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya, whose collaborations with Radioclit are well-known by now. “Kamphopo,” his elaboration of an Architecture in Helsinki track, is one of my favourites.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then there’s Logobi, an infectious combination of break-dancing, mime, and the kind of dance moves you see at Mbalax clubs in Dakar — a minimalist break-dance popular with the kids of French West African families in the suburbs of Paris. Here are a couple of clips of the Black Kitoko crew.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.