Mixed Tape
Like the mixed tapes I made in my youth, an eclectic mix of material – sports, seasons, sidewalk libraries, elections – and yes, mixed tapes.
November-December 2021
I was travelling at the end of November, and December is always pleasantly disrupted by holidays, so I’m doing a joint November-December newsletter for the end of the year. Being a two-for-one year-end wrap-up is my excuse for allowing it to be a little longer – but hopefully you’ll be taking time off over the holidays and have time to peruse the whole thing!
If you make it all the way to the end, you’ll come across a couple of new short occasional sections. The shout-out will be a way to highlight the remarkable work of friends and colleagues that might be of wide interest. And the catch-up will be a way to follow up on things I wrote about in earlier editions.
The Sneak Peek
I got a sneak peek at Spacing’s new book, Souvenirs of Toronto Sport, when I did an edit before it went to press. It features photos of all kinds of memorabilia of Toronto sports, reaching back to the nineteenth century, that are hidden away in Toronto’s archives – covering the whole range of athletic activities from professional sports to things like badges and medals from amateur community leagues.
Alongside the photos are a series of delightful essays on different aspects of the history of athleticism in Toronto, from Glyn Bowerman’s account of the history of downhill skiing in this rather flat city (ravines and old garbage dumps helped) to Jamie Bradburn’s wild history of professional soccer (some of which made its way into one of his weekly quizzes in the Toronto Star). I had no idea that the semi-pro Toronto Croatia soccer team took over Toronto’s NASL team in the 1970s, much to the league’s consternation!
It turns out those supply chain problems are affecting publishing too – shortage of paper – so the book’s publication was delayed until the new year – but it’s available for pre-order.
The Tidbit
I’ve always felt like the formal solar start to our seasons – on the solstice or equinox – lags the psychological start to our seasons – when we feel the season has changed. December feels like winter from the start, with all the leaves gone and holidays looming. Similarly, all of June feels like summer, while the beginning of September seems like summer’s end. Early March doesn’t usually feel like spring in our climate, sadly – but the fact skating season ends at the beginning of March because the sun is too strong does say something.
So I was delighted to discover that in fact there are “meteorological seasons” that begin on the first day of December, March, June, and September. Since the solar signposts wobble between days over the years, meteorologists seeking a standard, predictable season have decided that the first day of these months is a more reliable way to mark the seasonal changes. To me, they’re a more psychologically accurate one, too, at least in Toronto’s climate.
What’s Up
When I was a kid, I loved poring over the complete election results that used to be published in the newspapers after election day. Not just who won, but who came in second and third? And how many votes did the Rhinoceros Party get? (I seem to remember it came in a distant second in the occasional Quebec riding back in the days when the Liberals dominated that province federally.)
I’m still fascinated by elections and their results, and that got me thinking about electoral systems. Back in 2007, the province of Ontario held a referendum about replacing first-past-the-post elections, but the majority of voters cast their ballots against change. Since then, I’ve been thinking about how Ontario’s elections could result in better representation of voter preferences without asking voters to do anything different. In the run-up to next year’s provincial election, I’ve put together my original/eccentric proposal for Ontario electoral reform. Think “wildcard legislators.” Who could resist that concept?
(I published it on Medium, the self-publishing platform – “I published an essay on Medium” is a bit of a cliché these days, but it is convenient – which I’m hoping might be a good place for other random ideas too.)
Quotable
“[Making mixed tapes] is one of our first curatorial tasks as young people” – Zorana Sadiq
In that painfully brief moment when it seemed reasonably safe to go to live theatre again, Molly and I went to see a delightful one-woman show about music, Zorana Sadiq’s MixTape. The show is itself in part a mixed tape of the eclectic music – often sung by the performer, a professional singer – that shaped her from childhood through to adulthood.
Her above comment in an interview about the show struck me as so true to my own experience (she is likewise a Gen Xer). I can remember carefully curating those mixed tapes – in my case, usually recorded from the collections of friends and family. At first they were wildly eclectic – back in the early 80s, it was valuable just to capture one’s own copy of a song you loved, since unless you dished out for an album (I was pretty cheap so didn’t do so often, plus often there was really only one song worth having on the album) there was no other way to listen to it reliably. Later came more conscious curation – making tapes with coherence and a theme (one I made for the graduate common room at my Oxford college, with dance music on one side and Canadian on the other, kept getting stolen – a backhanded compliment). As technology evolved, I graduated to mixed CDs, but that’s old technology too now. I suppose the modern equivalent would be making a playlist on Soundcloud, but that technology has passed me by. Music now seems both more accessible – easy to find online – and in some ways less so – not so likely to be owned by oneself and passed around in a tangible format. In a way it’s returned to the aether from which recording technology originally captured it.
I still kind of love the extreme randomness of my first mixed tape attempts, though. Perhaps I will retrieve them from the basement to relive my youthful tastes sometime.
Pic Pick
My wife loves little free libraries, and has been mapping the ones in our neighbourhood. But on a trip to Atlanta to visit her sister and family, we came across this delightful variation. Usually, these book boxes are situated on private front yards. But at a mall in suburban Decatur, this newspaper box had been repurposed as a “sidewalk library” in a semi-public spot. Using a newspaper box feels robust and makes it easy to reproduce and place anywhere – I’d love to see this idea catch on.
The catch-up
A couple of months ago, my sneak peek was a report I advised on and copyedited, about creating a walking and cycling network in Scarborough. That report got some great attention and was discussed by two different committees of Toronto City Council! You can read the full “The Scarborough Opportunity” report here.
The Shout-Out
I’ve know Todd Irvine for almost twenty years, since we were both among the founders of Spacing, and it all that time his love of trees has been a guiding principle of his life. He’s recently launched his own business, City Forest. It's an arborist business with a vision, offering not just tree care but education and advocacy. If you have trees that you love, or someone who loves trees, you can get a gift certificate for a one-on-one pruning lesson, private tree walk, or yard consultation – contact todd@cityforest.ca .