Michael’s mom with bread and mint

“Is it the bread-soaked-in-meat-juice holiday?”

Such is the uncomely moniker I once used when Michael and I would receive the invitation to gather with his family, including an extended family of neighbours and friends, in early May. Not knowing much about the Portuguese Festa do Espirito Santo, or Festival of the Holy Spirit, I simply equated it ...
Continue reading ...

Bathtub basil planter

I snapped this shot in an alleyway just north of Trinity Bellwoods Park during Toronto’s 2007 Alley Jaunt event. I was visiting Michael and the rest of the Wireless Toronto Art Squad and their installation of network “music” and poetry. On the Sunday afternoon, the two of us had slipped away for ...
Continue reading ...

Dome of battery-powered fluorescent lights, Trinity Bellwoods Park

Toronto, the “free all-night contemporary art thing” looked good on you. Oh, I know you hosted Nuit Blanche last year too, but from all accounts you outdid yourself from 7 p.m. Saturday night until 7 a.m. Sunday morning. Final numbers aren’t in yet, but word on the street is that you drew ...
Continue reading ...

Neighbourhood network poetry: “Fort Awesome,” by Jodi

For one weekend in August, an invisible facet of the Trinity Bellwoods neighbourhood in Toronto’s west end became tangible — mapped, manipulable, audible. And all it took to render the unseen visible was a WiFi-equipped PDA, a GPS data logger, a couple of laptops, some nifty programming, and the imaginations of a handful of good-looking ...
Continue reading ...