Continuity Communities by neil
by Neil Balan
[Note: for the record, initiate celebration. This is my first generation using Open Office, which is now running brilliantly on my laptop. Go open source.]
Bear with me.
Last week, Nat and I headed down to the besieged Gladstone Hotel for a reading and discussion of two new books by their respective Toronto authors. It was an event hosted by Pages Books, one of Toronto’s better independent bookstores, and was part of larger winter/spring program, entitled “This Is Not A Reading Series.”
First, on “besieged”: the Gladstone—still a darling (in my mind) among the refurbished and retrofitted “cultural venues” on the Queen West West strip (maybe one “west”…?)–is in the midst of working hard to retain its singular status and resist the generic flattening vis-a-vis other related places nearby. I tend to think that, for the most part, a lot of those places constitute a familiar but derivative arts-&-culture vibe, but I don’t want to suggest a valuation based on degrees of fidelity to some credible and “authentic” ideal (though words like “derivative” certainly go there on their own accord). The Gladstone hasn’t been as rigorously colonized and uptaken as some of its cohorts and has, after a very generous and gorgeous renovation phase, yet to have its intestinal track removed by any combination of overdevelopped commercial interests and the commodifying cooling agents from the city’s other geographies.
So, you guessed it: these things coincide with the much-discussed g-word, gentrification.
Gladstone is somehow managing to straddle the interests of local communities without imploding under its own vision, without outstripping its own local and rooted character in the interest of something else. Certainly, it’s already an iconic fixture; further, its an index, symptomatic of the development both intentional and unintentional ongoing around it; yet, lastly, it has yet to succumb to symbolic status as a representation of what happens when good ideas are extracted and exhausted to the point of having little to do with the mandate with which something begins. The Gladstone is fighting its own becoming an agent of gentrifiction…
Cosmopolitan literary hermenuts notwithstanding (i.e., uppity Nat and I), the above-mentioned reading pitted Toronto’s ideal-type benefactor of nepotism—all-the-parties socialite and part-time columnist Leah McLaren—against Katrina Onstad, a local cultural critique and commentator on Reel-to-Reel, Toronto’s own film/cinema weekly program on public-access, non-profit TVO. “Against” is the operative word: McLaren’s book, The Continuity Girl, follows the epiphanic exploits of a continuity girl (or person, the one on film sets who at the director’s side and who, take-to-take, ensures continuity and the consistency of the mise-en-scene and all diegetic things generally) living life meaningfully amid “sperm banditry” and “murky social waters” in a journey-themed trajectory of redemption; Onstad’s novel, How Happy to Be, is a tongue-in-cheek critical assessment of fictive Maxime, a vapid and vacuous manifestation of the local media scene and opportunistic purveyor of her own celebrity status.
(Onstad is taking aim at the scene; McLaren resides within in it, though perhaps Katrina deserves more scrutiny- she too is part of the craftiness of “cultural work.”)
Though I overdraw and reduce whatever potential and capacities these books may possess, the point is that the cosmopolitanites in tow were on-site at the Gladstone for a battle: suggestions had circulated that Onstad’s character bore more than coincidental resemblance to Leah, the self-absorbed manufacturer of drivel so-called “smart” people like to hate. Nat and I, as tortured McLaren haters (who can no longer withstand the trashy personal machinations of her “column” in the Globe and Mail’s Saturday Style section), acknowledged that our desire to partake in the event was mostly an exercise in voyeurism of the best kind: we wanted Onstad to roast McLaren. Suffice to say we were disappointed: everything was polite; there were a few remarks issued by Onstad that drifted into the realm of insinuation but we heard agreements of a politely conceded common point-of-view between “authors” rather than a more political and socially inflected debate. We spent most of the time selfishly belittling others around us, playing the game of “Who here is here for ‘encounters with literature’ and who is here to see a roast?” Then we realized we were just as petty and vacuous so we decided it was time to go.
The Gladstone is a hub for this, a dependable conduit, a cultural machine, a place i could fit into my circuit and feel relatively good and decent about patronizing: it leant itself to a kind of suture that wouldn’t want ruptured, that I could swallow in its seamlessness and my familiarity with it. Leaving, what remained in my head, then, was the notion of continuity (McLaren be damned for suggesting its efficacy). I caught myself thinking along a trajectory of the local character of the immediate Gladstone environment, the gentrification issues and processes in the city, and the implicit demands made by local residents who patronize the area to love and live locally, close to the ground in a particular neighbourhood, who also attempt to carve out a space that activates an anachronistic sense of the goodness of the mythic urban versus the vacuum of the suburbs and Toronto’s edge cities.
I realized that, in terms of the inputs one would desire supplied, the matter was one of a logistics of continuity: literally, the desire for a continuous kind of environment where one can live locally, without car or commute or other late-capital ill, a kind of city life as political praxis as argued (some time ago) by gentrification scholars David Lee and Michael Caulfield. Then, I started to think about the class-dimensions of these demands (Who can afford to live in the neighbourhood? At the expense of whom? Bourgeoise-what?) and further, had a bell ringing in my head in relation to a housing ad that Nat had read me recently. The ad, listing amenities and stating at the outset the apartment’s proximity to the West-End YMCA (Dovercourt and College) also included under “amenity” (i.e., bonus, motivation) the new local Starbucks as a definite asset. Starbucks: one syntatic piece of urban grammar required for continuity; assembled, editing, juxtaposed with the YMCA—a perfect continuous link, Starbucks, like a visual match-on-action or a rudimentary sound bridge, is a continuity device.
Now, I tend to think that the whole “Starbuckization” discourse is moot to the extent that if it takes the erection and installation of a Starbucks outlet to set off the alarms, we’ve all missed the boat by a good 5-7 years. People should be raising their eyes when the 7-Eleven comes out to play. Brand, symbolic power, ubiquity—whatever. Starbucks is but the finishing move in a series of events that prepare and pave the way, that prioritize its very own inclusion to the amenable list as a defining pillar of the community akin to something like the West-End Y. Actually, Fuse Magazine’s recent issue, “Pimping the ‘Hood”, gets at this prodcutively and in a Toronto-context, right from the bombastic graffiti on the new Starbucks at Queen and Dovercourt reading “Fuck You Drake [Hotel; cohort, but no equal, of the Gladstone], you did this.”
One more thing on Starbucks: beyond the coffee-shop fall-out zone map I want to create, I notice that there is never any consideration of Starbucks as a franchizing vehicle for economic and commercial integration by newcomers to these neighbourhoods, especially immigrant families attempting to carve out a space in service or retail. It is newly arrived families who undertake the operation and management of these places, which themselves serve as ways of participating in public life; hence the coffee house and its legacy… Certainly, the globalizing impetus of Starbucks as a hegemonic corporate entity and cultural agent of Americana leaves little for debate; I don’t doubt this and I want to redeem less of it. 2 dollar coffee is not fair trade by any extent, regardless of the official seal. Yet, getting beyond a monolithic conception of how these outlets become specific avenues to those who undertake their operation is of great concern. This opens a whole other series of debates about so-called “integration”, about who one’s neighbours are, and who we or you or I think they ought to to be.
Further, in terms of continuity and amenities, ongoing in Toronto is the development of self-enclosed and contained “communities” usually comprised of new mid- to high-rise condos with an offering of affiliated retail and commercial-corporate spaces to keep residents tied locally to their most necessary and relevant consumer/lifestyle requirements. One such place under construction goes by “Battery Park”, no doubt drawing on mythological connotations to the urban zest of New York’s place of the same name. They’re effectively touted as ergonomic and efficient modes of contemporary urban life, little concentrated islands of urban experience. Again, the question begins as one of artifice and authenticity but any urban space is artificial at the outset, a built-environment with tendencies to synthesize and self-organize in certain paradoxical ways, freely but with the soft guidance of what its users and residents as citizens express and demand. That’s why most of Montrèal has a depaneur, a fruit/vege shop, and a small cafe. Recall also the Parisian entresol as the example of choice for this sort of constructed proximity and density of action.
But these new continuity communities are an entirely different thing. They’re preplanned and are totally modular, and as such can travel and establish a kind of monoculture of the worst kind, enabling an altogether different “garrison mentality” than Northrop Frye intended. Also, something is driving this market and that drive is desire. These new organized environments remind me of a film, Waydowntown, where four (?) co-workers wager on who can stay inside the longest using the interconnected PATH-like elevated and enclosed pathways in downtown Calgary that run between their condos and the commercially-oriented skyscrapers within which the work. Though they each in turn redeem the outside, taking the mildest of discontinuity over the hegemony of coherence, there’s a hint of something ominous that remains unsettling. I don’t mean to offer a didactic analysis of the film but rather want to suggest that this enclosed and contained little environment raises the stakes as to who does get in and out, and who and what we want our neighbors and urban environments to become. Dionne Brand’s complex and resilient novel, What We All Long For, comes to mind. What tendencies are becoming embedded? What are we embedding?
Regarding the plight of the Queen Street corridor—both in and of itself and in relation to communities like Parkdale, which have been bracing for years against developmental fall-out—there’s a debate on the table over the planned building of two higher-rise condo complexes just south of Queen Street near Dufferin Avenue. Word is that, in their planned form, the buildings as designed would cast shadows at certain points of the day on to the strip, leaving residents and local-venue users alike miffed and frustrated. The community of cultural workers, weekend tourists, and working poor would have to absorb more in the way of demands placed on local services and daily living space while also giving way to the condos, which would bring the pre-packaged continuity components, ironically drawing business away from local independent haunts that most likely serve as symbolic draws for the efficacy of the cool-factor of the development itself. Talk about feedbacks. Whether this would erase the Gladstone from the paradigmatic warehouse of experiential elements vis-a-vis some sort of local continuity is the question. If I can’t head down to the joint to see literary slurs and make self-deriding fun of the local hipsters, or if I have to do it farther west, I’ll know that things have moved to the point where the status-quo is less disposed to disjuncture and more oriented to a kind of territorialized seamlessness that is clinical in outlook and barrier-like in type.
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