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A psychogeography of the city A walk through Toronto with Stroll author and Spacing magazine editor Shawn Micallef text and photo by DAN SELJAK I’ve heard it’s frowned upon to begin an article with a cliché, but in the case of Shawn Micallef, an exception must be made — the man has literally written the book on walking around Toronto. Two years ago, Micallef published Stroll, a collection of essays on what one learns and observes by travelling through Toronto neighbourhoods at walking speed. Today, he’s a journalism fellow at Massey College, and a senior editor and owner of Spacing magazine. From the Massey College quad on the first real spring-like day of March, Micallef sips his coffee and recounts the beginnings of his career as a writer. He half-jokingly refers to himself as a flâneur — the French term describes a character who explores and observes cities. In his intro to Stroll, Micallef calls the flâneur a “perfect idler” and a “passionate observer,” referring to the definition originally coined by 19 th - century poet Charles Baudelaire. Essentially, the moniker is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the most basic distilled version of what Micallef does: he walks around cities (mostly Toronto) and then writes about what he sees and learns in the process. After moving to Toronto from Windsor, Micallef became interested in the parts of Toronto that were outside of the typical out-of-towner’s reach — the places outside of the main stretch of Yonge, the CN tower, and the Eaton’s Centre. “I found there were dark places on my mental map of the city, so I just started wandering from where I lived at the time, Yonge and St. Clair, kind of just drifting through the city.” On his travels, Micaleff met others who were into the same thing, so he began writing about his strolls for Toronto websites. Eventually, the observations made on his walks became a recurring column in Eye Weekly, which had two iterations — one called “Stroll” and the other called “Psychogeography.” 8 the VARSItY magazine “Cities can be very utilitarian — we’re busy, trying to get to our work, or to our lover, or to wherever it is, so we’re not really paying attention to spaces. Writing about cities forces people to stop a bit and think about the places they go through and spend so much of their life in. And maybe if we think about and appreciate that, life is better — but then again, that might be a stretch.” He also notes that the fresh perspective of an outside observer can make an often seen or visited place new. “Sometimes it isn’t until you read something about the place you live from someone else that you notice the things around you. There are a lot of things we overlook. I overlook things and it takes someone else to point out things they’re totally into, and then suddenly that’s part of your life.” While he was working at Eye Weekly, Micallef also joined a small magazine devoted to urban living in Toronto called Spacing. He came aboard after the first issue, and since he knew several people who had started the publication, he was able to, along with five others, become an owner when the magazine was incorporated. His work for these publications became fodder for what would eventually become Stroll. “Each chapter started as either a little piece in Eye, or a piece in Spacing, or articles from a few other places, like The Star, and then I was able to expand on them.” Noting the finished product ended up being more than three hundred pages, Micallef laughs, “When it was done, I was like, I don’t remember writing this.” After publishing Stroll in 2010, Micallef continued with Spacing and Eye Weekly (until Eye shuttered in the spring of 2011), and became a Massey journalism fellow in June 2011. Offered to four mid-career journalists or writers, with an additional two international journalism fellows, the Massey Journalism Fellowship gives writers a chance to take a sabbatical and to study freely for one academic year at U of T. “It’s nice because there never is any time to pause and think when you’re out there doing stuff, jumping from one thing to another. It was really wonderful, that first week, to remember what aca- speed feels like. It’s a much more humane sane speed.” Micallef smiles wryly, demic “My analogy of it is when the Millenium Falcon comes out of warp or whatever it is, and the blur of the stars all slow down. So to kind of slow down and be humane for a while was nice. Of course, now it’s speeding up again and the anxiety is coming back.” Micallef sees studying cities as almost something that enables their progression and growth. “When you study the past and present of a city, this worry that people have about change, and this anxiety about change can be mitigated a bit. “This idea we have of a single historic view of the city doesn’t exist. There was a series of historic moments in the past, not a city in the past in some sort of monolithic way. That isn’t to say we shouldn’t save old stuff; we should save it, old good stuff, that is, but we should be a little more sanguine about change. If there is any common defining thing about a city is that they are always changing … which makes them extremely exciting.” This attitude, along with his own research, has given Micallef perhaps a more optimistic view on the future of Toronto than we’ve seen in the recent combat- “This idea we have of a single historic view of the city doesn’t exist. There were a series of historic moments in the past, not a city in the past in some sort of monolithic way.” ive language from City Hall on issues like LRT and the Harbourfront. “It’s a little hard to talk about right now really. We’re in a funk, but there is no other time in history I’d rather live in Toronto than now. It is the most exciting time for Toronto … because of all the new elements coming in: new Canadians, new buildings, new infrastructure. I compare Toronto to these mythic places like Paris or Berlin in the ‘20s, New York in the ‘50s… The momentum of the city is way more powerful than whatever political leaders are in City Hall. The city is going to be fine, if that’s what one is worried about.” Micallef sums up his thoughts on the future of Toronto succinctly. “Physically, the city will be certainly recognizable, but it will be thicker, taller, and — I think — more fun.”
The only game in town How ZED.TO, a new Toronto-based alternate reality game, hopes to reinvent the genre by ALEX ROSS, illustration by JESSicA MuRAcA It’s Tuesday morning and you’re waiting beside a phone booth. An email from an unknown person has instructed you to wait for a special call that will give you further instructions. Someone gets into the phone booth to make a call of their own. You’re anxious. If the line is busy, you might miss out. Eventually, the person steps out and gestures for you to go ahead and enter, completely ignorant to your real intentions. Finally, the phone rings. You pick it up and hear a voice read out a series of code words. You scramble to scribble them down on a small piece of paper. After the call is finished you rush home and share the code words with others. They’re members of an Internet forum and they’re participating in the same experience of solving the obscure and difficult puzzle. Such is the popular image of alternate reality games, or ARGs, cemented by the success of games like The Beast, which was used to promote the movie A.I., and I Love Bees, which was used by Microsoft to promote Halo 2. However, David Fono, lead designer for the upcoming Toronto-based ARG, ZED.TO, wants to get away from that term, especially since ARGs are no longer just fun promotional tools. “They tend to be more about stories… The puzzle aspect has become a lot less of an essential component over the years,” he says. “When you say ‘game,’ people think about challenges, about winning and losing, about objectives. ZED.TO doesn’t really have those; it has interactivity, but it’s not about winning or overcoming things. “It’s about story and making choices within YONGE STREET STREET Before David Cronenberg made any promises to the East, he was better known as the Canadian director with an affinity for blood and guts and an unapologetic love for his home city. His Toronto city symphony Videodrome shows a classic Cronenbergian descent into insanity, framed by TTC cars and visits to Spadina storefronts circa 1980. that story.” In that way, ZED.TO sounds a bit like the game Myst, a popular PC game adventure series from the ‘90s where players could only experience the story by solving different sets of challenging puzzles. However, for Fono, ARGs — or as he prefers to think of them, “live interactive performative narratives” — offer many more possibilities for storytelling than a traditional game does. “A well-done ARG with money behind it [will] have all the same kinds of roles that you would see in something like a major film,” he explains. “What defines an ARG is its use of so many different things, so it’s kind of unlimited in terms of what’s involved. An ARG designer is a generalist, a person who does a whole bunch of different things. I’m a developer by trade, so I do a lot of that myself. ” Fono and his team hope to bring that ambition to ZED.TO, which revolves around the story of a Toronto-based company, ByoLogyc, which inadvertently ushers in the apocalypse. In addition to the current online campaign (where you can even see a “promotional video” from fictional ByoLogyc CEO Chet Gertram), the game will include some major live theatre events. “There’s going to be a show at the Fringe Festival, we’re going to have an installation at Nuit Blanche, and then we have a finale show running between mid-October and early November,” Fono explains. “And all of these are not going to be traditional theatre shows; they’re going to be highly interactive. We’re taking the ARG philosophy and putting it into a theatre show.” Top five TO movies YONGE STREET Videodrome (1983) Resident Evil: Half Baked (1998) Apocalypse (2004) After cringing at the unresolved plot of the first Resident Evil film, I was very surprised to see the making of Resident Evil: Apocalypse. Still, Apocalypse gets points for parading Central Tech, the Gardiner Expressway, and essentially every nook and cranny of Toronto as the zombie-ridden Raccoon City. With its climactic fight sequence at City Hall, Apocalypse is Torontonian in all its efforts. The goofy stoner bro comedy Half Baked is remembered by many as a good introduction to scriptwriter Sir Smoke-a-lot’s (Dave Chappelle) comedic flare. Still, any Torontonian, stoned or sober, couldn’t miss the iconic Sam the Record Man sign or the Yonge street Pizza Pizza shop that serves as the backdrop for a police horse’s death by junk food. YONGE STREET Goin’ Down the Road (1970) Don Shebib’s Goin’ Down the Road is an oldie but a goodie — and the best thing about this Canadian landscape film is that it proudly grounds itself in our city. With a distinct Toronto flair, Goin’ Down also goes to show that Yonge Street had a hell of a lot more strip clubs in the ‘70s. by BRAndOn BAStALdO illustrations by dAn SELJAK YONGE STREET Scott Pilgrim vs. the World (2010) One of the best things about the screen adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s graphic novel Scott Pilgrim vs. the World is that, like its source material, it doesn’t use Toronto to represent bigger or bolder cities than our own. The beauty of the film lies in its visits to the likes of Lee’s Palace and Casa Loma, all of which confirm its status as an endearingly Torontonian movie. MARCH 19, 2012 9
Page 1 and 2: THE VARSITY MAGAZINE C ties VOL. V
Page 3 and 4: THE VARSITY THE STUDENT NEWSPAPER T
Page 5 and 6: Cleaning up Toronto’s expert in S
Page 7: Let them eat pie Wanda Beaver of Wa
Page 11 and 12: Shortages in the Albertan labour ma
Page 13 and 14: JJ: Going to Chinatown. My mom work
Page 15 and 16: An ode to King Street East, before
Page 17 and 18: 18 the VARSItY magazine Smoke & mir
Page 19 and 20: What makes a city move? A history o
Page 21 and 22: $ © 2012 H&R Block Canada, Inc. *$
Page 23 and 24: Like the magazine? Email features@t
Page 25 and 26: School of Law Start your LLB in Sep
Page 27: Around the world by Catherine Fried

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