Waiting for the Great Pumpkin: Epherma & Other Epiphanies

As a connoisseur of vintage Hallowe'en dross and other ephemera, I keep a keen watch on pumpkin crop predictions.  However, unlike previous years where I just wait for The Weather Network to run some human interest story to fill in the gaps between the rote repetition of plausible but improbable predictions about the weather, this year I planned an Homeric bicycle tour of local artisan pumpkin nurturers ('organic farming' is so over, the more holistic 'food nurturing' is topping teen trend charts at the moment) to survey their colour, heft, and general orbness personally.

Pumpkin surveying is thankless work.

In preparation for my fantastic voyage, I donned a pair of vintage Rayban Wayfarers, enwrapped myself in a plaid hoodie to brace myself against the frigid elements, and saddled 200lbs of touring supplies on my moderately immoral and sniffly brakeless touring bike (I stop by the sheer power of my will), and then walked it down the sidewalk like a pretentious twat

Walking my moderately immoral and sniffly brakeless touring bike of doom down the sidewalk to the outskirts of town, I realized that I would be missing tomorrow's much vaunted Art Spin finale.  Since traveling trivial distances by bicycle to view trivial visual stimulus is also an important part of my life, I decided to catch The Weather Network's round the clock coverage of this season's pumpkin nurturing on the TV later and turned back to prepare for the Art Spin ride instead.

Wondering about the proposed route for the Art Spin ride, I sat down beneath a tree and pulled out my Toronto Cycling Map to review what route planning the City of Toronto thought fit to send cyclists out upon.  However after staring at the map for sometime in a desperate search for some sensible and meaningful route, my mind gradually began to wander and my eyesight began to blur.  Gradually my sight focused and my mind noticed, not the bike lanes and proposed routes, but the enormous blank spaces between them.

I saw meaningless stubs and yawning chasms and began to feel strangely trapped.  Gripped by this alien sense of entrapment, I wondered when new urban planning would liberate Toronto with more facilitating infrastructure till a kindly hobo interrupted my train of thought and offered me a cupcake and a swig of his bourbon.  We chewed the moist cupcake in thoughtful silence when he suddenly extended a hand and introduced himself: "Estragon."  At that moment, I was suddenly seized by a realization so shocking I nearly added extra cushioning to my riding shorts.

I glanced up at the barren tree leaning over me.  Sitting under a barren tree?  With a hobo named Estragon?  Waiting for something that will never come in my life time?  And then I saw it...

I fell into a dizzy stupour and swooned into the kindly hobo's arms.  Coming to my senses, I stuttered madly like St Michael of Monday, so overflowing was I with prophetic revelation.  The hallmarks were all there: the apparent randomness of our journey; the search for meaning and guidance; the ultimate realization of the aimlessness of it all; the frustration and despair at the emptiness and the sense of insignificance; the attempt to impose a path to meaning and instill a sense of personal significance from within if not from without.

A gap in a bike lane that dead ends a few blocks away anyway?

Yes, I suddenly understood: Toronto's infrastructure isn't real infrastructure at all; it's actually an enormous Absurdist art installation.

Seen in Etobicoke: 'Use other sidewalk'?  What other sidewalk?!

Toronto cyclists aren't participants in an alternate modal scheme; they're the audience of the greatest wool-pulling in human history.  They pick their way across a patchwork of ridiculous routes, encountering disparate and random bits of 'infrastructure' that appear to offer meaningful guidance but ultimately lead no where.  Some search for guidance, but find none and begin to despair.  In the face of such despair, some impose their own routing of their journey and set forth regardless, while others wait for the Godot of Progressive Infrastructure under the wilting tree of city hall.

This realization got me wondering: who needs Art Spin when there's an entire exhibit waiting outside your door?

Bike Art: I See White People

Like any groomed and well-read university graduate, I find farting hilarious.

Naturally then when I glanced the Toronto Sun headline "Artsy Fartsy" my curiosity was piqued.  It took some time to find the article (mainly because, like any groomed and well-read university graduate, I read the Toronto Sun from back to front), but when I finally managed to review Joe Warmington's article I too sat broken-hearted, having paid my dime, but no wiser than I started.

Warmington's article decried the attempt by some Toronto councilors to convert the Salvation Army's Bethany House at 420 Pape Ave into an artists' residence.  Warmington tries to cover his clear discomfort with the topic of art by raging against government subsidies for the Arts as a waste of taxpayers' money.

"Just what the east end needs," he huffs, "a hippie style commune for poor, starving artists."

Warmington likely meant this as sarcasm.  Amusingly, however, this is very likely what Warmington reader's do want.  A local artist hippie commune is a means to the end that Warmington's suburban landowning readership loves the most: rising property values.  White people, as Christian Lander has sagaciously observed multiple times, eat that kind of shit up.  More verbosely, it's called gentrification.

NYC's Greenwich Village is the most cited case-study for artist-induced gentrification but any Torontonian is familiar with the beatnik mood of Queen St W, 401 Richmond, St Lawrence Market, the Distillery District, and Kensington Market.

Bribing artists to squat and act weird in your neighborhood isn't squandering taxpayer money.  It's shrewd investing by scheming social architects who want to capitalize on the enduring fundamental truth that a yuppie and his money are soon parted.  Or as well-meaning but oblivious white people like to describe it: "Investing in our community," even though it's not theirs just yet.

Rob Ford, predictably, vowed "to open up and rip up" such "deals" if he becomes mayor ...and presumably not recycle the paper either.

I initially suspected Joe Warmington, Rob Ford & Co. revile this kind of fiscal policy because they just don't get the concept of Return On Investment.  Then I thought they're trying to cloak their naked philistinism with the mantel of fiscal prudence.  More likely though, they're using penny-pinching politics to mask their primary aim of maintaining the current social architecture of drivable suburbia.

You see, artists do evil Communist things like walk and ride bicycles to ad a veneer of wistful romanticism, mindfulness, and profundity to their existence.  It's also because they're poor.  And that makes them cool.  Unless they're stopped, artists and their eco-loving yuppie attendants will inundate council with requests for baby-killing Communist inventions like bike lanes and pedestrian festivals in the east end.  This can already by seen in the west-end at Art Spin events where a gaggle of White plaid-laden 20-through-40somethings toddles around the downtown on rattling cruisers, taking in visual stimulus and sucking on croissants.

Sometimes a croissant is just a croissant.

I can hear the Rob Ford campaign ad already:

"City councillors want to increase the artistic presence in the east end.  

Artists on bicycles.  In our city.  We're not making this up."

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A NOTE FROM THE CLOG: If you didn't get the croissant sucker image, then be blest; you are truly pure of heart.