Meredith Shaw plays the Annex WreckRoom Mar. 9. Courtesy Meredith Shaw

By Karen Bliss

This year’s Canadian Music Week  (CMW) is bigger then ever.
“The live scene is coming back in Canada, Toronto particularly. I think that’s important. We are using close to 60 venues, so that’s reasonably healthy,” says Neill Dixon, CMW president. “The festival is very multi-national now. The majority of bands are from Canada, but a large contingent are from England and Ireland, and we have artists coming in from France, Denmark, Australia, Israel, Greece, and, of course, the U.S.”

More than 800 local and international artists will play in over 50 venues over five nights from Mar. 9 to 13 in Toronto.

The opening party, at the Mod Club, features Finger Eleven and Desperate Union.
Other Annex-area hot tickets include pop singer Meredith Shaw at the Annex WreckRoom on the 9th, rock act Crooked Valentine, also at the WreckRoom on the 10th, followed by Montreal punk band Trigger Effect, and Crash Karma (comprised of former members of I Mother Earth, Our Lady Peace, and The Tea Party)  at the Mod Club on the 10 with Age of Daze.

At Clinton’s, expect the FACTOR breakthrough series to showcase some rising talent. The bill on the Wednesday card includes pop band M.T.L at midnight, whose album was produced by Justin Gray (who has produced for Joss Stone, Emma Bunton, and J.D. Fortune).
For anyone interested in the music industry, CMW’s “Tune Up Music Careers,” part of the conference (March 10 to 12 at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel), offers plenty of entry-level panels, covering everything from A&R, to songwriting and bookings. The celebrity interviews are with Nikki Sixx, Melissa Etheridge, and Sammy Hagar.

On the 10th, Young Galaxy play with Imaginary Cities, and Miracle Fortress at Lee’s Palace. In fact, one can’t go wrong with staying put at Lee’s all night for any of the CMW bills: on the 11th, step in for Toronto indie rock act Dinosaur Bones at 11 p.m., and on the 12th, headliners Electric Six are joined by Paper Lions, and The Balconies.

A $75 wristband ($85 walk-up, if not sold out) allows access to all these showcases, exclusive gigs, afternoon shows, after-parties, as well as the film festival screenings. Annex-area venues include Lee’s Palace (529 Bloor St. W.), The Annex Wreck Room (794 Bathurst St. 2nd fl.), The Central (603 Markham St.), Sneaky Dee’s (431 College St.), Clinton’s (693 Bloor St. W.), the Mod Club (722 College St.), and the Silver Dollar (486 Spadina Ave.). For more information on all aspects of the conference, festival, trade show, and awards, including schedules, go to cmw.net.

By Lindsay Tsuji

Decorative pole covers are going up on Bloor Street in an effort to prevent postering and graffiti in the Annex, but not everyone agrees it’s a good idea.

At a recent meeting at Kilgour’s Bar Meets Grill (509 Bloor St. W.), the board of representatives of the Bloor Annex Business Improvement Area discussed their plans. “Our biggest concern is street cleanliness with regards to postering and graffiti,” said chair Wade McCullum. “It isn’t easy to get cleaned and people automatically re-post things right away. This is an opportunity to re-brand the neighbourhood.”

Flyers advertising local indie bands, martial arts classes, and concert events, amongst many other things,  can be seen plastered on utility poles up and down Bloor Street.

The proposed pole covers are set to be 14 feet long, which will cover most of pole’s length, said Elena Flores, account executive at Street Graffiti Solutions, the company responsible for the pole covers.

They are made of a plastic material that doesn’t allow tape or staples to adhere to the posts.

The Koreatown neighbourhood has had similar covers for about a year and a half and have seen a reduction in posters in the neighbourhood, said McCallum.

“Poles that have been covered no longer have a postering problem,” Flores said. “It costs a lot for the city and the community to clean up.”

The total costs for this project won’t be determined until a decision about the logo is finalized.

The BIA estimates the base cost will be $619 per sleave, with as many as 35 poles being covered initially in the area. The total budget for the project is estimated to be $34,000, split halfway between the BIA and the city.

But some independent business owners and public space advocates see postering as an effective and free way to get messages across to the public, and aren’t happy to see these spaces gone.

“Placing community posters on utility poles is a perfectly legal albeit regulated activity in Toronto,” said Johnathan Goldsbie, campaign coordinator for the Toronto Public Space Committee. The current bylaw, adopted by council in 2006, attempts to establish a distinction between community and commercial posters.

It states that posters for community events, local culture, and services are permitted to display posters on utility poles.

McCallum maintains that the postering is an eyesore, and there are already plenty of public spaces in the Annex to get your message across. “Businesses are eager to put up signage on poles, but expect the city to clean it up,” McCallum said. “There are spaces like message boards at the corner of Spadina Avenue and Bloor Street available for community groups to use. But at the end of the day, hydro poles aren’t public space.”

“[Pole covers] would not be good for us,” said Mariam Mekvabishvili, store clerk at Buck-o-Books (758 Bathurst St.), a store which heavily posters in the area. “It has generated a lot of traffic and customers for us. Most of the people who come in heard of us through the posters.”

The pole covers will be ready this spring, in time for the annual Bloor Street Festival.

By Perry King

Carter's recent book tells the story of of his spiritual journey during his years of imprisonment and afterward. Courtesy Ken Klonsky.

When Gus Sinclair thinks back to his work on the Rubin Carter case, his immediate thoughts go to Lisa Peters and her love for the fallen boxer.

“There are two people who I’ve met in my life who had that unshakable will, one was Rubin, and the other was the woman that fell in love with him,” said the Harbord Village resident.

In Eye of the Hurricane: My Path from Darkness to Freedom, released at a book launch at the Ontario Institute of Studies in Education (252 Bloor St. W) on Jan. 28, Carter tells his life story, including his childhood and adolescence, incarceration, and dedication to working for the wrongfuly convicted. However, he does not mention the years he spent living in a commune with the Canadians who helped him find freedom.

Not a word is written about Peters. Sinclair lived in the commune with Carter for three years.

Carter, nicknamed “The Hurricane” because of his prowess as a middleweight boxer, was accused, tried, and twice convicted of a triple-homicide in Paterson, New Jersey in 1966. Much of the legal case was shrouded in late-1960s American civil unrest. A 1999 Macleans article says the prosecution pursued Carter because they perceived him to be a threat in the context of the growing race riots in American cities. Carter, and his alleged partner John Artis, were convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to three life terms.

Over the span of about 18 years, Gus Sinclair was a part of a commune of activists that assisted Carter in his release from prison and his eventual move to midtown Toronto.

According to the Maclean’s article, the commune—a non-partisan non-religious group lead by Sam Chaiton, Terry Swinton, and Peters—came across Carter’s book The Sixteenth Round: From Number 1 Contender to #45472 around 1980, and eventually took up his cause with his attorneys.

Their roles, depicted in Norman Jewison’s 1999 film The Hurricane, were democratic and equal, but Peters quietly became their de facto leader during the course. Her love for Carter, what Sinclair describes as a “jailhouse romance” is a topic less known in the larger public. “She wielded this group, who were not stupid people, to get her man out of jail. In six years, she did it. We were all part of it. I went to New York, along with four others, and we worked all day on the case,” said Sinclair.

“The record of the case, to think of our room as 20 by 20 feet, was three tiers of shelves all full of Rubin’s case history—I mean, from the day he was arrested in 1966 up to the present day, in 1984. But, we knew the record better than anybody, better than Rubin, in the end, and better than the lawyers. The lawyers were excellent guys, but they lived the law and we did the facts.”

The commune uncovered fresh evidence of a forged signature on a phone report falsifying the time of the crime. A combination of the new evidence, and a filed petition of habeas corpus in federal court by Carter’s attorneys, eventually lead to the judge’s setting aside of the convictions in 1985. In subsequent years, the group helped fight the federal court appeal and arranged Carter’s move to Toronto, where he lived with the commune until 1994.

The culprits of the triple-homicide have never been found. “His experience, in my view, it was almost unique. The fact these Canadians came to his aid, and for years helped him out in the most extraordinarily generous way, is one of the great stories of the twentieth century,” says Ken Klonsky, an associate of Carter’s.

Carter was in California when the Gleaner contacted him and could not be reached in time for this story.

As a result of resisting prison rules—to signify that he was innocent—Carter spent a decade of his sentence in solitary confinement. “My belief in my innocence and my stubbornness earned me many trips to solitary confinement, the black hole of silence,” wrote Carter in The Eye of the Hurricane, written with assistance from Klonsky.  “I was trapped at the bottom level of human society, the lowest point at which a person can exist without being dead … Aside from my innocence, I had nothing else to hold on to but my life.”

It was his prison environment and spiritual reawakening that has defined his life. Sinclair describes Carter as a strong personality, who is passionate and a dynamic speaker. “His personality is perfectly suited to [approach] something like opposing the New Jersey state prison system in that way. It’s those personality traits that don’t make him a team player,” said Sinclair.

According to the Maclean’s article, “Carter, who had developed a taste for solitude, chafed at communal living. In this house that prohibited liquor, he was also struggling with alcoholism. And he was constantly at odds with Lisa. After a string of splits and reconciliations, he quit the commune for good in 1994.” The sides have not spoken since.

Sinclair also left the commune, for reasons not stated, in 1988. “There’s all kinds of bruised feelings out there on the part of my former colleagues, whom I haven’t spoken to … They refused to see me because I walked out of there because it was a toxic environment and I was low man on the totem pole and I wasn’t going to take it anymore.”

But Carter’s relationship with Sinclair did not end there. After becoming appointed as executive director of the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted (AIDWYC) in 1993, Carter reached out to Sinclair and asked him to join the AIDWYC board. Sinclair accepted, and still sits on the board to this day.

Carter left his post as executive director in 2005 when the prosecutor of Canadian Guy Paul Morin, a wrongfully convicted man, was promoted to a judgeship and AIDWYC declined to support Carter’s protest of the appointment. Carter asked for five AIDWYC board members to resign, but was denied. Carter and Sinclair have not spoken since.

Today, Carter takes up the cause of the decrepit culture of prisons through his initiative Innocence International, established about seven years ago with Klonsky. “There have been big downs and big ups with this relationship, but mostly it’s been, I think, of my benefit. In the end, I think I’m richer. It’s more than a book, it’s an understanding of the world I simply did not have,” said Klonsky.

A chapter excerpt from Eye of the Hurricane has been included in Descant‘s ‘Writer in Prison’ issue. Descant’s fall launch was held at Revival (783 College St.), where Carter, Klonsky, and others read from their contributions.

It was at this launch that Sinclair and Carter saw each other for the first time in almost a decade. They nodded hello to each other, but did not speak.

To learn more about Rubin Carter and the Innocence Project, visit www.rubinthehurricanecarter.com/innocence.html

The Eye of the Hurricane can be purchased at A Different Booklist and at other book stores.

With the nomination of Tim Grant (above) in December, the HVRA chair seat will be temporarily filled by former chair Gus Sinclair. Perry King/Gleaner News.

By Perry King

When Tim Grant went to a Green Party policy conference two years ago to hear more about their platform, he was “prepared to be unimpressed.”

“The Green Party in this riding has been very weak organizationally. This is one riding where more people spend and donate to green causes than any other riding in Canada, so in a sense Trinity-Spadina is the greenest riding in the country, and yet the level of organization of the Green Party is way too small to rise up to that level of potential support,” said Grant, a publisher and chair of the Harbord Village Residents’ Association (HVRA).

But, that conference was an eye-opener for Grant. “I was instead very impressed by the high level of discussion. The pragmatism but also the vision wrapped together very nicely. I was impressed with the quality of the debate.”

It was this conference that began a process that lead to Grant’s nomination as the Green Party candidate in December, and he will run in Trinity-Spadina in October’s provincial race.

The only nominee for the Green candidacy, Grant has stepped down from his HVRA chair seat, and a constitutional provision has helped install a temporary replacement, former chair Gus Sinclair.

HVRA will be electing a new committee during their next AGM Oct. 19, two weeks after the Oct. 6 provincial election.

“He ran for, in good faith, and intended to fulfill his term and then this thing happened where he said, ‘I’m a very green guy, and if I don’t do it now I’ll never do it.’ It all happened and it’s fine, it’s legitimate, I encourage citizens to become engaged in the political process. There’s no right or wrong parties, and he’s an honourable guy,” said Sinclair.

Sinclair is not the only person with praise for Grant. “Tim is really a kind of an interesting study. I would sort of speak to what Malcolm Gladwell talked about in terms of the three main personal characters in The Tipping Point,” said Avi Lambert, a master’s candidate in environmental studies, whose mother is a neighbour of Grant’s. Lambert refers to Grant as a maven, salesmen, and connector, especially regarding Grant’s work producing the quarterly publication Green Teacher.

“In terms of his ability to connect people, he’s just an amazing facilitator in being able to find something in everyone to connect with. He’s one of those rare people that can create linkages with different communities and membership groups,” he added.

Grant has been producing the 52-page quarterly, which provides the North American education community with teaching ideas and cross-curricular activities that promote global and environmental awareness, for 20 years.

Perry King/Gleaner News.

Grant is excited about the coming months, where he can discuss progressive polices, but he looks at his possible success pessimistically. “I’m running for a fourth place party that is on the rise, but I think there’s only a slim chance that I will get elected. I’m really running for other reasons with other goals. If I was younger, I would be a bit more naive I suppose, but I’m not.

“In the cold light of day, I’m running for other reasons … I wouldn’t be doing this if it wasn’t for the sense that there was really a large number of people that already care about these [environmental] issues who weren’t well represented in the political spectrum. Thus, there was a sense that there was a real need and an opportunity for someone who could raise the issues more effectively for someone to do it, and I realized that maybe that person is me.”

Beginning the campaign early is also necessary for the party to raise adequate funds, a challenge for a party that Jo-Ann Shannon, interim president of the Trinity-Spadina Green Party’s constituency association, maintains is at a disadvantage, compared to the other parties that have larger bases of support. She acknowledges the financial challenge ahead, but is confident that having a candidate in the riding is a good first step. “Finding somebody who is energetic, putting himself out there and really into it, rather than just putting a name on the ballot [is a good thing],” she said.

“It’s been said that some ridings do that with the Green Party because they can’t get a good candidate. But, I don’t believe that.”

Rosario Marchese has been the incumbent MPP for Trinity-Spadina since being elected to office in 1990. He has been re-elected five times with at least 41 per cent of vote. The 2007 provincial election was Marchese’s narrowest victory to date, with about a 10 per cent margin between himself and the closest candidate, the Liberal party’s Kathryn Holloway. Equally, the Green Party received 11.5 per cent of that vote, their highest percentage to date. That result is a marked improvement from the 2003 and 1999 elections, where they received 5.8 and 1.7 per cent respectively.

Grant believes their chances are better this time around, but that there is plenty of work to be done. “The Greens will develop some momentum. The big challenge, though, if you have a tiny organization on the ground, your capacity for raising money before the election or doing anything else, developing a profile, are very limited,” said Grant.

“To be fair, most of the riding associations in Toronto are similar to ours. There have been a couple strong campaigns, but there’s a vacuum at the Green level, certainly in terms of strong green campaigns in the downtown area. I don’t want to be too negative to my colleagues in the party, but it is a sober recognition that we’ve [got] a way to go to build.”

By Emina Gamulin

If the board of trustees votes yes at their next meeting, the deal between the Toronto District School Board and Onestop Media Inc. will see as many as 74 secondary schools receive video screens in common areas with ads running 30 per cent of the time.

Two schools in our coverage area, Central Technical (725 Bathurst St.) and Harbord Collegiate (286 Harbord St.) already have these monitors, as part of a pilot program that was implemented in four secondary schools last year.

The potential decision has received vocal criticism from anti-corporate activists and the Toronto Star editorial board, amongst others. Public schools are no place for advertising, argue the critics. This is a precedent-setting slippery slope, they say. The Gleaner, respectfully disagrees, although not without a caveat.

If these screens were going up in grade schools we would be the first to cry foul, but these are teenagers, not children. These students have at least 14 years of media experience behind them and are growing up in an age where everything from double rainbows, to graphic images of war, to hardcore pornography, are accessible with a few key phrases and a mouse click. This is not to say that we should passively accept everything that comes our way, (we believe the exact opposite actually: that if nothing else, students should leave high school with the ability to think for themselves), but teens are savvy enough to see these screens for what they are: advertising from their school, their student council, and yes, select corporations.

The school board will still retain control of which advertising it deems acceptable to broadcast in schools. There is a real opportunity to incorporate these screens into class curriculum; it needn’t be an excuse to justify the ads. While a certain innocence is lost when advertising is brought into learning environments, our public schools are not currently sacred spaces free of corporate influence (vending machines promoting junk food and the sponsored milk chugging competitions held at this editor’s high school come to mind).

And yes, in an ideal world, all schools would receive all the funding they need, but in reality many Toronto schools are rife with crumbling infrastructure and outdated technology, with some so destitute that they live day-to-day with the threat of closure always near. For some, like nearby West Toronto Collegiate, the battle has already been lost; the school is expected to shut it’s doors this year. The school board has a deficit of $42 million this year. Our schools need money, and the province won’t provide adequate resources.

However, we take huge issue with the proposed deal the TDSB is cutting with Onestop. Currently, schools will only get 10 to 15 per cent of the revenue stream from the ads. This number is completely inverted from the normal agency-client relationship, where the selling agency (Onestop) would receive 15 per cent of revenues, and the provider (TDSB) would keep the remaining 85 per cent. While TDSB representatives did not get back to the Gleaner regarding their projected revenue stream, The Toronto Star reports an estimated $100,000 a year. If we do the math, each school will receive $1,351 a year from this project. Divide that by ten school year months, with an average of 22 school days a month, and each school is set to gain $6.14 a day.

$6.14. Setting up a table selling brownies in the cafeteria during lunch hour could bring in more profit. Our trustees should reconsider their deal with Onestop, and see the value in what they are selling.

Contemporary artist Michael Golland, beginning one of his multi-layered 'Heart' pieces. Tracy Chen/Gleaner News.

By Tracy Chen

This Valentine’s Day, people will have the chance to reach for hearts of a different variety.

Michael Golland, contemporary artist and longtime Liberty Village resident, is creating a wall of 40 heart paintings. These hearts will premiere at the “A Work of Hearts” event in Liberty Village.

A portion from the sale of these paintings will go towards the Laser Eagles Art Guild (LEAG), a charitable organization that supports artists with limited speech and mobility. Heart paintings by the Laser Eagles will also be on display, and LEAG-designed greeting cards will be available for purchase.

Golland wanted each of his heart paintings to be unique, yet also represent his signature style, which is a simple line with a washed over process.

Each heart follows the mathematical principle of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Fibonacci ratio. This proportion runs throughout the universe and has also been used in masterpieces, such as the Mona Lisa. “It gives a very harmonious result,” says Golland.

He has painted each heart a different colour. He says these are “the colours of the last century.” They include his personal favourite—burnt orange—as well as cobalt blue, ultramarine violet, and green-gold. He says each heart takes him “hours and hours” and he paints over each creation “at least a dozen times.”

The paintings will range in size, the largest is 4 feet by 4 feet, while the smaller ones are 2 feet by 2 feet. As each painting is sold, it will be replaced with another painting, replenishing the wall of hearts. The exhibit will remain for six weeks after the launch date.

Liberty Village has been Golland’s home for almost 20 years. He has seen artists leave the area, but has stayed because he says he believes in Liberty Village. “We have an opportunity still to keep it in the creative segment or we are going to lose it,” says Golland. He says that establishing oneself as an artist is “nearly impossible.”

“Whatever I can do to help out artists is very important to me,” says Golland. He met with the Laser Eagles artists last year and started thinking of ways he could help the organization. “When you see some one like the Laser Eagles who often can’t use their hands, I’m interested in finding a way for them to be able to use their creative edge,” says Golland.

LEAG will use the proceeds to finance art supplies, and towards the expansion of the program throughout Ontario.

Courtesy Tracy Chen.

The guild was founded in 2004 by Judith Snow, an advocate of inclusiveness issues for people with disabilities. Snow has lived with a type of muscular atrophy since birth. “Laser Eagles gives people the situation where they can’t help but notice that the artist is doing more and contributing more than the label would suggest they can,” says Snow. “It breaks the sense of disability.”

Laser Eagles is based on the Artistic Realization Technologies (ART) program developed by Tim Lefens. Lasers can be attached to the artist and the beam is then used to indicate their intention on the canvas.

‘Trackers,’ who undergo a three month training process are then matched with an artist. Trackers work with the artists to create the artists’ vision on canvas. The goal is to give the artists as much control as possible. Not all of the artists use the lasers, most prefer to use other forms of communication.

Michael Skubic, the tracker for Snow, has also tracked for artists who cannot speak. When tracking people who do not speak, he says that “it’s getting to know the person a lot closer and how they communicate.”

Skubic has tracked for an artist who didn’t communicate verbally, but kinetically. While going through colour options with her, she will get excited and be “bouncing around and having her head nodding,” when she wants a particular colour. However, when he comes across a colour she isn’t interested in, she will look “very sullen and look like she’s about to go to sleep.”

Skubic says that the Laser Eagles meeting is one of the happiest times for the artists. He describes a “different air” when everybody is there. “If I was going to put any single word to it, I would say inclusion,” says Skubic.

“It’s almost magical; it really feels different, even though it’s just space and people.”

“A Work of Hearts” will be held on February 11, 2011 at 6 p.m. at 15 Atlantic Ave. The wall of hearts will be continually replenished for the next six weeks. For more information, visit www.michaelgolland.com.

Once the "surreal" glamour of the gala was over, author Sarah Selecky became friends with her fellow Giller Prize nominees. Courtesy Sarah Selecky

By Jeromy Lloyd

Seven years ago, the short stories from This Cake Is For The Party moved with their author from Victoria to Toronto, where they found audiences in publications such as The Walrus and Geist. But it wasn’t until 2006 that the process of assembling these stories into Cake, Sarah Selecky’s first anthology, began.

The young author and writing instructor had just bought a home in Parkdale. There, she began an intense editing and rewriting process that fashioned Cake into a work so well-received it would go on to earn a nomination for one of Canada’s top literary awards—the Scotiabank Giller Prize—alongside such notables as Kathleen Winter and Alexander MacLeod.

“I have to go for a walk once a day through the neighbourhood,” she says of the daily rituals that produced Cake. When deep in her process, she’ll visit a few of her favourite haunts to watch Parkdale’s residents going about their lives. “Parkdale feels like such a little village to me. It’s a very supportive community.”

In contrast, big cities, or their obvious absence, play a large role in most of Cake’s stories. In “Where Are You Coming From, Sweetheart?” they’re a haven for the sullen fourteen-year-old trying to escape Sudbury and her father. For the simplicity-seeking couple in the midst of a marital crisis in “Prognosis,” they are an overcrowded past life. Characters always seem to flee either to or from them.
Selecky’s cities are anxious places, and characters often leave them to escape their worries. It never really works, leaving Selecky’s lost souls to cope with their choices far from home and comfort.
“I’ve had my brushes with [anxiety],” says Selecky, on the phone a few days prior to the Giller’s nationally televised gala ceremony. “Writing definitely brings that out in me. When I’m writing and it’s going well, I feel better than when I’m not [writing]. The panic that sets in when I’m not writing comes out in my stories.”

The Giller judges describe these subtle tensions in Selecky’s stories as “quietly apocalyptic,” which makes Selecky laugh when asked about it.

“When I was young I always had a fear of the Apocalypse, so seeing that word used in relation to my own work made me think, ‘Oh God, they can see that?’ Growing up I lost sleep over it. I never told anybody, and now I’ve clearly subverted it into something ‘quietly apocalyptic.’”

Personal disasters like death and betrayal appear throughout Cake, though Selecky says she’s never conscious of her writing patterns until readers show them to her. “A lot of themes from story to story are pointed out to me, and then I feel really exposed. It’s the oddest thing. I think I’m doing something completely different with a plot, then someone will say ‘There’s always a dinner party in your stories.’”

It’s true. Dinner and cafe tables are where characters reveal their conflicts. In “Throwing Cotton,” Anne, who wants a baby despite sensing resistance from her older husband, foresees an awkward weekend retreat over a spaghetti dinner with friends.

“The pasta should have been cooked for another five minutes,” Selecky writes. “It sticks to my teeth like masking tape … Sanderson is quiet, possibly craving a cigarette. Shona is the only one who has wine left in her glass. I wrap my ankles and feet around the cold metal chair legs and silently will Sanderson to not open another bottle. It’s cold in the cottage, even though the candles on the table make it look cozy.”

Selecky, a vegan and self-described foodie, says food is implicit in life’s emotional events.

“Cake’s stories are all about intimacy in some way. Food plays a role in that, whether eating for emotional fulfilment or not. In so many of our most compelling times in relationships and families and social situations, food always shows up: weddings, funerals, Christmas.”

No wonder, then, that Poor John’s (1610 Queen St. W.), the Mascot (1267 Queen St. W.) and Capital Espresso (1349 Queen St. W.)—with their vegan cupcakes, cookies and soups—are regular stops for Selecky. She sometimes ventures to The Belljar (2072 Dundas St. W.) for its avocado and pepper sandwiches.

While the Parkdalian didn’t win this year’s Giller Prize (Johanna Skibsrud, a Nova Scotian who now lives in Montreal, took the top prize for her novel The Sentimentalists, Selecky has become good friends with her fellow nominees. Once the “surreal” glamour of the gala’s television broadcast ended, the five writers found time to sit together and talk shop. They email each other regularly now, sharing photos from the night and discussing future projects.

While there is still some promotion to do now that Cake has a “Giller Prize Finalist” sticker on it, she’s set time aside this winter to work on a new project (which she hints may be non-fiction). Until then, she’ll walking her neighbourhood streets every day, recording the quiet apocalypses she walks past.

Celia Lottridge describes herself as a "loyal Seaton Village resident." Courtesy Fitzhenry and Whiteside

By Eddie Mumford

“Even though my neighbourhood has changed drastically, it still basically looks the same … so I thought it would be fun to think about what it was like in another time,” says storyteller group founder and writer Celia Lottridge, on why she set her new childrens’ book The Listening Tree in Seaton Village.

The Listening Tree features a young girl named Ellen Jackson, who, with her mother, is forced to re-locate to her aunt’s boarding house on Manning Avenue, after leaving their farm when their hometown is emptied by drought.

“I saw it as a time when life was full of practical problems—the majority of people were having to cope with the day-to-day of getting money … the Depression had a huge impact here in Canada, but I don’t think a lot of children or adults have any idea of how extremely hard it was. We like to forget about hard times,” she said.

This book creates a fictional yet realistic Toronto for children to learn from. “How can you learn about your country if you don’t have any fiction to read?” she said. “That’s what got me into writing, [the idea] that these books needed to be written.”

When asked if the character of Ellen was at all autobiographical, Lottridge said “Yes, in the sense that when I was a child my father changed jobs several times, so at least five times before I was 12 I had moved, [however], I’d say [Ellen’s] kind of extreme on the shy side.”

Lottridge has never left the greater Annex area since she moved to Toronto in 1975 and describes herself as a “loyal Seaton Village citizen.”

Ms. Lottridge is one of the founders of (and is now a trainer and consultant for) The Parent-Child Mother Goose Program (720 Bathurst St.), which began in 1986 as a not-for-profit organization that uses storytelling as a way to help nurture the bond between caregiver and child. “We still use the same pattern of how the program works—we still use the same training manual we wrote in 1989,” explained Lottridge, “As neighbourhoods changed and new groups moved in, we’ve learned how to incorporate material from different languages, and how to make people feel comfortable and part of a group.”

“Children who experience stories have a more complete experience of language, they learn about the emotional content, and they also learn that the stories have patterns. Even for small children, it’s like they tune into it, even though they don’t exactly understand the words.”

The program focuses on smaller groups of caregivers and children, rather than large assemblies, “We want to create groups where people feel comfortable and they know each other. It gives us time to help people relax.”

The Listening Tree is out in select bookstores this month. For more information on the Parent Child Mother Goose program visit http://www.nald.ca/mothergooseprogram or call (416) 588-5234.

This motion simulator platform is one of many technological advancements to be seen in the Toronto Rehab Institute's Challenging Environment Assessment Lab (CEAL). Courtesy S.K. Advani

By Melissa Sundardas

The new subterranean research lab on University Avenue is bringing a scale of advanced, breakthrough technologies for research that would make Willy Wonka proud.

Located just beneath Toronto Rehab Institute’s University Centre (550 University Ave.), this new facility—called the Challenging Environment Assessment Lab (CEAL)—allows scientists to safely and accurately develop treatments, technologies, and products that will help the elderly and disabled cope with everyday difficulties, especially during the winter. The facility will be ready to begin experiments in March.

“Sometimes it’s quite difficult to go straight from the laboratory into the real world,” said Geoff Fernie, vice president of research at the Toronto Rehab Institute (TRI). “For example, if we develop something that makes it easier for you to look after your mother at home … it’s difficult for us to knock on people’s doors and say, ‘Can we install this in your house and do you mind if we drill some holes in your wall? It may not work though.’ So we are building [the research laboratory] to do this sort of thing.”

TRI’s research has helped develop numerous beneficial devices like the Staxi transport chairs we see in parking lots, airports and big hospitals; Sole Sensor shoe inserts that help reduce falling by enhancing feeling and sensation on the soles of your feet that lessen with age; and Handi Audit, which tracks how often people wash their hands in the hospital.

With a 50-foot ceiling, complex glass cabins, a drawbridge, a robot safety harness, movable ice floors, snow, and the ability to generate air close to minus 20 degrees Celsius, this lab is teeming with high-tech wonders for the eyes and progressive, future developments in rehabilitation for society.

The research conducted will focus on a number of environmental and health related complexities that the elderly, disabled, and injured encounter. These include stair accidents, winter slips and falls, sleep apnea, spinal cord injuries, and head injuries.

“By the time you die, you’ll have been affected in some way by these almost certainly, so we take the big problems and we focus on them,” said Fernie.

According to the Public Health Agency of Canada’s (PHAC) Report on Seniors’ Falls in Canada, the fall-related injury rate among seniors is nine times greater than people younger than 65 years old, and almost half of seniors who fall experience a minor injury, with five to 25 per cent suffering serious injuries, such as a fracture or a sprain.

“As you know, falls are the scourge of growing old—everyone knows someone who has fallen and broken their hip, and they’ve never really recovered. Many die.”

CEAL will examine factors like the design of stairs, how the brain processes multiple signals when things are happening simultaneously, and the slippery, dangerous conditions of winter weather will  all be examined.

There are 17 carefully selected companies, both local and international, which are involved in contributing their resources and technology to aid in making the proposed research in the lab possible. The roster includes Composotech, CIMCO, Pure Ingenuity and Quanser to name a few.

“We’ve never worked on something this scale, but it was a great opportunity. They’re a local institution and the cause is a very worthwhile and it really interested us,” said Paul Karam, director of engineering at Quanser, which has provided the lab with a robot safety harness and a software called QUARC that allows researches to connect all various instances of their tests together and make a cohesive experiment.

He describes the experiments as putting a full room on a robot that can move in three positions and three rotations along with a tracking system that allows you to see in real time where a person is walking, how their limbs are, and their heart rate.

“Our software is structured so that everything happens at the same time—it’s very deterministic—so they can really come up with groundbreaking experiments that simulate real life conditions,” he said. Although the purpose of many experiments is to almost make test subjects fall or slip and record the data, Karam said that the subjects need to kept safe.

“[The robot safety harness] actually tracks the person and when it detects a fall, basically lets them fall to a very slow rate to the ground,” he said.

This state-of-the-art facility became a reality through grants the TRI won from the Canada Foundation of Innovation, an Ontario Innovations trust, the McGuinty government, donations from appreciative patients and philanthropists, and contributions from the industry.

Come March there will be many volunteer opportunities for the community to help with some research projects and organize tours of the lab.

“We love volunteers and obviously we’ll need more when it’s open,” said Fernie.

For more information, visit www.torontorehab.com.