It's easy to complain about your hometown. It's certainly easy to complain about mine, a city in a perpetual identity crisis, loathed by the rest of the country, where the cost of living keeps rising as more and more beloved businesses close. But like most of us who have a love-hate relationship with our town, I'm fond of it, I don't like it when people insult it, and I feel most like myself in it, for better or for worse.
And I love to see Toronto on screen, especially when it looks glamorous or grimy or like New York. In some ways, Toronto looks more like New York (there aren't many alleys in NYC, but they're a fundamental image of the city and something Toronto does better). Our Toronto writers note the cold and corporate look of the city which forces one to fantasize, or how it might simply be a container for the details of our lives, or prove how much we would rather think of someone else's hometown. For this issue's cover, we wanted to pay homage to a Toronto classic and one of the last video stores in the city, so we spent a morning with our staff, our columnists, and some of our contributors getting in the way of the very accommodating staff at Bay Street Video.
When I think of Toronto on film, I think of Patrick Bateman running alongside the glossy black Toronto Dominion Centre, impenetrable and tall like the monolith in 2001, or the evil game that drops down in Reboot. When it was built in the late '80s, early '90s, it was controversial. My father told a lawyer friend that it was ugly, overpowering and grim. But she told him to stand across the street and really look at it. He did, and noticed the harmony, the calm produced by their symmetry, and the inky black quality of the glass that was actually elegant instead of cold. There's a lesson there, something about looking closer at the things we pass. American Psycho also features a scene in Senator Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in the city, a place my dad once took me (I ordered mac and cheese) and I keep meaning, and failing, to go back.
I think of a midnight years ago, after another boring shift at the Eaton Centre, when I walked out to find the pavement wet, although I could tell by the air that it had not rained. I walked north on Yonge where there was oddly no traffic, and soon found myself in an enormous crowd stuffed onto the sidewalks. I heard the word "Batman" and stood for a moment staring across the intersection. A purple car came roaring up the street, screeching past the H&M and disappearing a moment later. I walked down into the subway. That summer, I was in Paris and feeling lonely, so I went to a movie theatre to see something distracting. Suicide Squad, when I recognised the street corner, the billboards, the purple car, and remembered I was there watching.
As much as we love our city, we were a little worried that all our submissions would be from Toronto, or at least, various small and medium towns in Ontario. But we're proud to say this issue collects hometowns from all over, tiny places that come to represent a big, and smothering, idea, metropolises that have been memorialised on screen over and over again, passerby places that become romantic destinations, and towns that only ever existed on screen.
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine
It's easy to complain about your hometown. It's certainly easy to complain about mine, a city in a perpetual identity crisis, loathed by the rest of the country, where the cost of living keeps rising as more and more beloved businesses close. But like most of us who have a love-hate relationship with our town, I'm fond of it, I don't like it when people insult it, and I feel most like myself in it, for better or for worse.
And I love to see Toronto on screen, especially when it looks glamorous or grimy or like New York. In some ways, Toronto looks more like New York (there aren't many alleys in NYC, but they're a fundamental image of the city and something Toronto does better). Our Toronto writers note the cold and corporate look of the city which forces one to fantasize, or how it might simply be a container for the details of our lives, or prove how much we would rather think of someone else's hometown. For this issue's cover, we wanted to pay homage to a Toronto classic and one of the last video stores in the city, so we spent a morning with our staff, our columnists, and some of our contributors getting in the way of the very accommodating staff at Bay Street Video.
When I think of Toronto on film, I think of Patrick Bateman running alongside the glossy black Toronto Dominion Centre, impenetrable and tall like the monolith in 2001, or the evil game that drops down in Reboot. When it was built in the late '80s, early '90s, it was controversial. My father told a lawyer friend that it was ugly, overpowering and grim. But she told him to stand across the street and really look at it. He did, and noticed the harmony, the calm produced by their symmetry, and the inky black quality of the glass that was actually elegant instead of cold. There's a lesson there, something about looking closer at the things we pass. American Psycho also features a scene in Senator Restaurant, the oldest restaurant in the city, a place my dad once took me (I ordered mac and cheese) and I keep meaning, and failing, to go back.
I think of a midnight years ago, after another boring shift at the Eaton Centre, when I walked out to find the pavement wet, although I could tell by the air that it had not rained. I walked north on Yonge where there was oddly no traffic, and soon found myself in an enormous crowd stuffed onto the sidewalks. I heard the word "Batman" and stood for a moment staring across the intersection. A purple car came roaring up the street, screeching past the H&M and disappearing a moment later. I walked down into the subway. That summer, I was in Paris and feeling lonely, so I went to a movie theatre to see something distracting. Suicide Squad, when I recognised the street corner, the billboards, the purple car, and remembered I was there watching.
As much as we love our city, we were a little worried that all our submissions would be from Toronto, or at least, various small and medium towns in Ontario. But we're proud to say this issue collects hometowns from all over, tiny places that come to represent a big, and smothering, idea, metropolises that have been memorialised on screen over and over again, passerby places that become romantic destinations, and towns that only ever existed on screen.
Gabrielle Marceau
Editor-in-Chief, In The Mood Magazine