Mersiha Gadzo, Jessica Moy, Patrice America , Christina Cheng and Kayla Kreutzberg at the launch of Eject (absent: Maryam Shah)

Known to be a contemporary Canadian design store filled with handmade furniture, unique lighting fixtures, and one of a kind home accessories – MADE Design blends into the Queen Street West vibe through its quirky, artsy, and modern environment.
When I opened the heavy glass doors of MADE, there was a welcoming scent of fresh wood furnishing.

I looked to my left and was greeted by storeowner Shaun Moore, who was sitting at a harvest table with his MAC computer and notepads scattered in front of him. The soft-spoken entrepreneur wore a plaid shirt and brown thick-rimmed glasses.

I walked around the store. It was set up like a master-suite living room with clean-cut couches, oddly shaped mirrors, and desks placed neatly with a variety of office knick-knacks and vases to fill any empty desk space.

The glazed wooden shelves are filled with a variety of home accessories. My eyes stopped when I saw a couple of ceramic black and white vases with tiny bumps on the front, made by Toronto designer, Jessica Lertvilai.

“It’s a love letter transcribed into braille,” Moore explained.

The vases don’t actually reveal what the letter says. The artist hopes everyone will understand the universal message, “love is blind.“ I grazed my hand over the small bumps, fascinated by the idea and charm.

The vase had me questioning if Toronto had its own hidden message within its design aesthetics. What defines Toronto design? Do we have a unique look that differs from other cities?

“Natural materials. Stereotypical, reclaimed lumber,” said Josh Brasse, CEO and founder of Ideacious, describing his opinion on Toronto design.

He admits our city creates a feeling that is as natural as it is modern.

“[Canadian design is] not trying to hide how the products are made and embracing the materials for what they’re worth,” Brasse explained.

Ideacious combines creators and buyers of the design world. Brasse’s studio features natural sunlight from the window overlooking Toronto, desks in the middle of the room, a foosball table to the left and prototypes of his designs on high-rise bookshelves.

As he adjusted his baseball cap, he showed me an example of a true Toronto design.

Local designer, Karen King, made the re-claimed hickory bookshelf where Brasse’s prototypes are currently being displayed. It has a built-in ladder in the front, which can swing outward, or hide within the design of the bookshelf.

When it comes to Toronto furnishings, re-claimed hickory may be healthy for the environment, but sustainability is what you should look for when purchasing new furnishings – at least, according to MADE.

“It’s more than just material. It’s about contributing to [the] economy and growth of local things. Ikea can make something of green materials, but it’s going to be in the landfill in a year and a half,” Moore said.

He explains MADE sells items that last a lifetime.

Co-owner of MADE, Julie Nicholson adds, “It’s an heirloom…you don’t need to keep buying the object over and over.”

When purchasing new furniture, stay away from exotic woods and buy local, Moore says. Knowing it’s North American hardwood is better, for you have comfort that the harvest has been controlled.

As much pride as Canadians have for their creations, Nicholson says Canadians don’t tend to talk about their design work the same way as they do in Europe.

“People [in Europe] are okay with saying ‘I’m a designer, this is my profession’, they accept that as a regular profession,” Nicholson said with her British accent. “While [in Canada] the general public doesn’t perceive it as a very common practice, it actually is, but it’s an undercurrent contribution to the economy.”

Born in the U.K. and having attended arts school in Australia, Nicolson’s been managing design stores in England before she came to Toronto. She opened MADE with her business partner, Moore, in 2006.

Previously, both owners have managed design stores in Europe. They see the difference from how people in Canada differ from those in Europe when it comes to displaying their work.

They agreed Canadian designers have not received enough media recognition. It was all about what’s the big brand name and not looking at the quality of the item.

“It was more like ‘What’s new and hot from Italy?’…It bothers me ‘cause people are generally not open to how interesting things are [in Canada],” Nicholson said passionately by leaning forward and moving her hands frantically in front of her.

Now, media outlets such as “Azure Magazine” in Toronto generally focus on local designers and architects that once starved for attention.

According to Azure contributor, David Dick-Agnew, when it comes to Toronto contemporary design, “it’s pretty no-fuss.”

Toronto, or Canada for that matter, may not be on the map for famous designs, but according to Dick-Agnew, we do have a unique style.

“At least in terms of contemporary design,” Dick-Agnew adds. “Ornament is out, and usability is in.”

This theme extends not only to residences, but restaurants and pub designs around the city as well.

Moore agrees Toronto design is more withheld, but adds it’s getting more progressive.

“Hits of colour. Buying a neutral sofa but wanting to add a red table lamp,” Moore said.

Sustainability, according to Dick-Agnew, is now considered cradle-to-cradle. There used to be a life cycle for products, for example, a landfill. Now experts say it’s the goal of the industry to have every product’s life cycle end with it being recycled into a new product, “making the materials side of production a closed loop,” Dick-Agnew said.

When it comes to eco-friendly, the Toronto design industry is top notch in recycling old items and making them new again.

MADE showcases Vintage Pop Bottle Lights made by Brothers Dressler, which are hung by walnut collars and feature light bulbs inside 1960 soda bottles. This was sold back in November for $1,100.

They also feature a baby blue dresser by Toronto designer, Rob Southcott. He found the dresser, sanded it down, and designed an unusual stain application to re-sell it as new.

“Old piece presented in a new way,” Moore said.

When it comes to Toronto designs, Brasse says he has prototypes waiting to be put on the market. No product says Toronto more than something hockey related.

He recently designed a penny hockey set. No bigger than the palm of your hand, it can hold three pennies.  When you pop out the sides, the pennies come out and the two sides become nets.

“It’s a promotion product I came up with, pad print or put a label on the back to promote your company, but also a cool toy you have in your pocket,” Brasse said.

MADE also features their own hockey product, a light stand made by Canadian designer Barr Gilmore. With red and blue lights, they feature full-length solid ash hockey sticks, which surround the colourful lights. It stands by the blades of the sticks which support it and goes for $2,500.

“Sticks alone are cost. –what does that mean  sticks alone are cost? They are solid wood and only one place left in Canada makes them,” Moore said.

MADE, unlike every other store, avoids trends. They search for longevity in their products.

“They’re not of-the-minute, they’re interesting things people want to live with for a long time, not just three years later go, ‘Oh I’m tired of orange,’” Moore said.

I asked Moore which product was his favorite out of the entire store. He took a few minutes as he looked around “hmm-ing” and “uhh-ing” before he turned to me and said the Cedar Stumps, which are literal cedar stumps with a bold colour painted on top.

Following the trend of “natural,” it’s safe to say Toronto design can be defined as re-claimed lumber, hockey influenced, and pretty no-fuss.

In 2012, experts predict new and big trends in Toronto will be among us, such as modernism and futurism.

According to Dick-Agnew if you want to look at modernism, look at it in a sense that the present is different from the past.

“It represents a break with history, rather than a continuity with history. I think the way we look at design is slowly undergoing one of these revolutionary epiphanies,” Dick-Agnew said. “It will take a generation, but I don’t think its importance can be overstated.”

Illusionist Jake Ryle makes a quarter disappear. A few seconds later, it reappears printed on student Alexis Mayorca's ten dollar bill, kept in his wallet.

By Mersiha Gadzo

As 14-year-old Alexis Mayorca pulled out his ten-dollar bill from his wallet, a crowd encircled around him. All of the students watched attentively, eager to witness another incredible magic trick.

Slowly, he unfolded it. Upon seeing the imprint on the bill, the crowd broke out into excitement, screaming simultaneously at the top of their lungs and running around the courtyard.

“Let me see! Let me see!” many of them shouted as they all tried grabbing Mayorca’s bill, trying to inspect it closely themselves.

Sure enough, upon closer examination, they saw it was really there- the imprint of the quarter was marked on the bill.

“Holy shit!” “Oh my god!” they shouted.

“It’s not valid anymore!” another student teases Mayorca, referring to the bill.

Standing farther away from the dispersed crowd, smiling while watching the enthusiastic crowd react to his trick, is 18-year-old Jake Ryle, or as others call him, “The next Criss Angel.”

At his former high school, Silverthorn Collegiate Institute in Etobicoke, everyone knows him for his magic tricks, which he would often perform during breaks, school performances and even during class.

After graduating last year, he came back for a visit one late November afternoon, just as classes were ending, to show some tricks once again to his former audience.

The students start piling out of the front entrance doors, and once they see him, they immediately start asking for his tricks.

“Yo, Jake! Are you gonna make yourself disappear?” asks one boy, laughing, as he walks towards him in the courtyard.

In the past, students have witnessed him fuse a toonie and a loonie together into one coin. In another trick, a spectator signed their initials on a toonie. Ryle then swallowed it and pulled the same toonie out of his eye, with blood gushing down his face.

Ryle about to take out a quarter bent in half from his mouth

Today in the school courtyard, he holds a jack of hearts card one minute, turns it over to face him, swiftly blows on it, and as he turns the same card over again- it’s a four of diamonds.

“It’s pretty weird how he does this shit,” said 14-year-old Peter Perovic, a spectator. “He doesn’t even change it [the cards], he doesn’t put it in his pocket, he doesn’t even have those long sleeves [to hide them.]”

But, it’s the imprint trick that garners the most attention today. Ryle told Mayorca to keep his bill in his wallet. Ryle then drew a small line on a quarter with his blue pen. (Another boy offered his blue pen, but Ryle needed his own blue pen specifically).

He kept the quarter clenched into his fist, blowing on it a few times. Rubbing his fingers together, bit by bit, he slowly unfolded his hand, to show an empty palm- the quarter had disappeared.

“Now, I want you to open up your wallet,” Ryle told Mayorca.

“Take out the bill.”

An anticipating silence ensues for a few seconds before Mayorca unfolds his bill.

Mayorca shows his bill with the quarter imprint

“Open it up,” Jake said.

That’s when the shrill screams start ringing out from the courtyard as they marvel at the feat.

The screams of wonderment are what Ryle loves most about being an illusionist, as he explained at the local McDonalds, just down the street from the school, where he sometimes performs.

“People love to see things that are impossible right in front of their very eyes. That’s the art of it. That’s what I love doing,” Ryle said.

Just the other day he made a girl scream so loud after seeing his card trick that they almost called security, Ryle said laughing.

He’s determined to follow in the footsteps of the famous American magician Criss Angel ever since he saw him on TV one summer four years ago. Angel was performing a stunt where he was set on fire, and fire extinguishers surrounded him, trying to put it out.

Ryle was shocked to discover that one of the fire extinguishers ended up being Angel himself. From that moment, he was hooked on magic.

Just by looking at him, you wouldn’t be able to guess that he can pull a toonie from his bloody eye. He has blonde hair, blue eyes and rosy cheeks- contrasting Angel’s gothic look.

Sitting at a table at McDonalds, wearing a black leather jacket, he’s glad to explain which tricks have garnered the loudest of screams.

For one of his tricks, he wrote his initials on a deck of cards. He then asked one of his spectators to roll up their shirt sleeve to see his initials imprinted clearly on their arm. It leaves spectators shocked, gaping with their mouths wide open.

“I call that telegraph,” Ryle said. “It’s short for teleporting autograph. That one got a phenomenal reaction. It’s not easy to do. It’s all about psychology too.”

Ryle explained there’s a reason why they’re called illusionists.

“It is an illusion, it’s not real,” Ryle admitted. “That’s the good part, it’s all a trick.”

They’re cleverly made illusions mixed with psychology, which make these tricks possible to pull off.

“From the audience point of view, when they would think about it [the trick], they would always think of the magic part, not the logic,” Ryle explained. “They would think, ‘how is that magic possible?’

“They would freak out, but really, if you think of the logic, when you figure it out you would think ‘oooh, that’s the way to do it.’”

Ryle has spent over $2,000 worth of DVDs over the years, imported from the US to learn these tricks. Often, he would be surprised with how simple the tricks really are. It seems so obvious, once he finds out how it’s done.

Just like every illusionist, he won’t give away how he does his tricks- not even to his parents. But, he did give away one beginners’ mentalism [the art of reading one’s mind] trick for us.

An illusionist would ask the person to think of a number from one to ten. While the illusionist stares at the person intensely, displaying showmanship as if he’s trying to read their mind, he would quickly draw a number in the air, like the number seven for example.

This movement would catch their eye subliminally. The person would think of the number seven without realizing why they chose this number.

You would be forcing them to think what you want them to think, Ryle explained.

“It freaks people out,” he said, laughing.

“Sometimes I would get lucky, and oh man, the reaction is just incredible,” Ryle laughed. “That’s one secret I can let you know, the rest I can’t.”

It’s psychology, trickery and use of props that create illusions.

Props can cost hundreds of dollars, Ryle explained. They’re used for all tricks, from making a toothpick disappear to levitating oneself or disappearing.

One Youtube video shows Ryle holding a large black sheet in front of himself. He waits for a few seconds, and then quickly pulls the sheet over his head. In the few seconds that he lets go of the sheet, it falls flatly to the ground and Ryle is nowhere to be seen.

Students at Silverthorn C.I. agree it’s the most amazing trick they’ve ever seen on video.

So, how come Ryle won’t be showing off that trick this time at Silverthorn’s courtyard?

It’s because his props broke and it takes time to fix them, Ryle explained.

“I’d explain further about how they broke but then you would know how to do it,” he laughed.

These tricks have left students at Silverthorn baffled, marveling how it’s possible to be done.

Angel exposes many tricks similar to Ryle’s, such as levitation, on his TV show.

He shows himself wearing a special type of black pants with hidden panels and magnetized shoes, which appear to be his feet to the audience.  In reality, his legs are hidden inside these panels.

He makes sure he stands right in the centre, with his back facing the spectators. Angel explains, he’ll distract them while he unveils the secret panel from his pants and stick out one of his legs (dressed in black tights to blend in) to step up slowly on a ledge.

From behind, where the camera is filming, it really looks like he’s levitating.

“Remember, it’s important to create some misdirection,” Angel explained on the show. “You don’t want them concentrating on your legs at this point, you want them looking elsewhere so you can do the dirty work, which is probably the most difficult part.”

He distracts the audience by raising his arms, looking up into the air, pretending that he’s floating in air, while he discreetly pulls his leg out, to stand on the ledge.

But, don’t illusionists ever feel bad for tricking people so easily like this?

“People love that wonderment, that’s why I do it,” Ryle said.

He remembers his first magic trick that he learned- making a coin disappear. One day, while he was at Centennial Park in Etobicoke with his family, he went up to a kid and did the trick for them.

“Their facial expression was unbelievable, I never got that before,” Ryle said smiling. “So, I thought you know what, I’m doing magic.”

He’s been practicing magic for four years now, and the passion is still strong.

Performing tricks successfully isn’t easy. Learning how to levitate a duffel bag took him two years to learn, Ryle explained. Sometimes his fingers are covered in bruises from rubbing coins and cards too hard, trying to carry out a trick.

But the hard work is worth it in the end, when he sees his spectators left bewildered.

“He’s the devil!”

“He’s possessed!” the students yell at the courtyard outside.

15-year-old Ahmed Dirie tries to unseal two cards with his fingers, which Ryle somehow put together into one. On one card, Jake signed his name. A volunteer named Nicole signed her name on another card. Now the two cards have been fused together into one.

“What the fuck? That’s one card!” Dirie said, giving up.

“No, no, no, no, no.  That can’t be. It’s fake. That’s not logical,” his friend insists.

They have no idea how Ryle did it, and that’s just the way he wants it to stay- an illogical illusion.

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By: Christina Cheng

VIDEO: Araabmuzik live at The Hoxton- Toronto

November 3, 2011
Araabmuzik
The Hoxton
Toronto, On. Canada

VIDEO: Araabmuzik live at The Hoxton- Toronto

November 3, 2011
Araabmuzik
The Hoxton
Toronto, On. Canada

Steve, owner of Matter of Time on 229 Jones Avenue

Walking into Steve’s secondhand and antique store is like walking into Ollivander’s Wand Shop in Diagon Alley. Sure, you feel like Harry Potter as you stumble into this massive pile of clutter and wood and old radios and things that can only be called contraptions with forgotten functions.

Matter of Time is Steve’s baby, his secondhand, vintage and antique store on Jones Avenue in East York. Ever since his 11-year-old self laid eyes on his first rusty, iron-hinged trunk in a back alley near Moss Park apartments, all things old, odd and rare have subtly fascinated him. He gets a regular stream of customers throughout the day, looking for everything from antique radios to brass doorknobs.

“It was the first time I’d ever seen cockroaches in my life,” he said, smiling at the memory of his first ‘antique.’  “We dumped these uniforms out and oh, it was just horrible. But the trunk was so interesting because it had oak, it had wood, it had leather, it had also interesting iron hinges and strips.”

His store smells like Grandma’s old closet: musty and warm. While breathing in the smell, you know there’s human DNA floating in the air from all the hands that have brushed against the old green barber’s chair, the box of emergency buttons from the 1940s, the orange Pennsylvania Dutch vase with a hand-painted flower on the side.

That smell is time and people, and the intimate relationships the two have created over the past couple of centuries.

But the antique market is not what it used to be. With the rise in vintage becoming trendy again, with Halloween costumes from the ‘60s being worn as everyday clothing and hipsters buying used furniture to reduce their carbon footprint, it’s a surprise to see that business at antique and vintage stores is going down.

Mart Van Vliet owns and runs an antique store called Mermaid Antiques in Elora, Ontario. He opened it in 1994, after he and a friend dabbled in antique sales as a hobby. He said that his most profitable year began when he moved away from antiques towards reproductions from Thailand.

The market is changing, according to Van Vliet, and not for the better.

“Our parents are living longer and downloading their stuff to us as they downsize,” he explained. “So people over 45 have too much stuff and people under have stuff from Ikea.”

This trend is similar to the ‘50s. People had chrome and glossy new furniture. They took pride in how modern their décor was. Rustic wasn’t in style, and vintage today was cutting edge back then.

Until a few years ago, Van Vliet couldn’t stock antiques fast enough.

“Every Friday night I would buy one truckload of furniture and by next Friday [it would] be gone,” he explained. “Now I bring pieces in and they sit for months. China and glass, you can’t even give it away.”

Canada’s antique market is not as big as down south, since it’s a relevantly young country. Toronto has 28 members listed in the Canadian Antique Dealers Association, with many more going unlisted or classified as nostalgia shops or pawnshops.

“I can’t speak to what’s going on in people’s brains,” Van Vliet said about current trends in furniture. “I think it’s all about the aesthetic of the house. This is the stuff of people’s lives so they have to decorate with it.”

Sandy Neilly, founder and editor of the Wayback Times, a bi-monthly publication about the antiques and collectibles world, disagrees with the notion that antique stores are slowly becoming irrelevant. Given the growing trend in green living and recycling everything from old radios to five-and-dime-store cups, she finds that Douglas Coupland’s Generation A is more enthusiastic about reusing objects of the past.

Sandy and her husband Peter adopted the Wayback Times in 2006. They publish six issues each year and they host the annual Wankworth antiques show. They also own their own antiques store called Meadow Creek Barns, located in Hastings, Ontario.

“Actually, we feel that antique stores are more relevant now than ever with the need and desire to recycle,” she said from experience. “We’re starting to see a tremendous increase in nostalgia sales and many younger people appear to be the buyers.”

We do know of many young dealers as opposed to shop owners. In fact, Bradley Higgins of Prince Edward County is only 14!”

Neilly finds that people at antique shows and auctions range from the casual young urban couples shopping for household items with function to serious collectors with a nose for unique original items.

“Between these two groups is the most typical buyer, the person who loves antiques and enjoys browsing at shows,” she continued. “Usually this kind of buyer is looking for a specific item, something to bring character and life to a room.”

Gloria Amos, the owner of a Queen Street West store The Painted Table, finds that her shop ends up as a community drop-in center most of the time. She lives on a farmhouse in Georgetown, and drives forty minutes each way to set up shop downtown every day.

“The people that you saw today, these are all customers that have become like friends,” she said, folding an old blanket in the back of her shop, where a retro ‘60s style bedroom was set up.

Amos has had her store for seven years on Queen Street West. She was recently notified by her landlord of a $500 rent increase, on top of her $800 monthly rent. She finds that the city is not very friendly to small business owners, particularly secondhand and antique-store owners.

“I think more people are actually getting out of [antiques] just because of rent, because [of] the demographics,” she said. “Young people are really not so much into antiques.”

Residential rental increases are tightly controlled by the city. The increase was capped in 2011 this year at 0.75 per cent, the lowest increase it’s ever been.

But, commercial rental increases are left to the owner’s wishes.

“If you’re going to do that and you’re going to tell me that small businesses are the backbone of the economy of Ontario, you got to do something at the other end to protect them,” Amos said. “For me, profit is not a dirty word. But greed certainly is.”

Apart from uncontrolled rental increases, secondhand antique-store owners also have to contend with the city’s ambiguous classification for their types of business.

A registered secondhand goods store must pay a $700 licensing fee every year, whereas an antiques store don’t pay anything.

“[The city] classifies antiques as anything over 100 years old,” Amos said, speaking of an incident where the city sent someone to her store to check. “They went away scratching their heads.”

This is because in the antiques business, it is hard to only sell items that are over 100 years old. Amos’s store has more than its fair share of used goods from the past 50 years.

Before she dove into her antiques passion, Amos worked in the corporate world, for Barrymore Carpets. After a slightly hostile merger, she left to travel around the world with her husband Jeffrey. She was 36.

“I’ve collected since I was 16,” she said. “I used to go to auctions, then I stopped. I traveled with my husband. And I came back here when I was 50, from India.”

Then Jeffrey got sick with cancer and died.

“I was like ‘Okay, I’m a middle-aged woman, totally afraid of getting emotionally and financially stuck’ because there’s no life insurance, we spent all our money in airfare,” she recalled.

She had been a free spirit for too long, she said. She knew she couldn’t go back to working at a desk.

Unlike Steve, who has been in the business since the late ‘70s, Amos was a newcomer to the business of buying and restoring antiques. She opened her store against the advice of her closest friends. Today, it is going strong but she sees problems in the future. The decreasing value of antiques is hitting the industry hard.

“A pine blanket box could command $600,” she said. “You’re lucky if you can get $300 for one now.”

Technology has affected the way old things move around the globe. Neilly points out the importance of the Internet revolution in the evolution of the antiques industry.

“Online auctions like eBay flushed out all of the collectibles that, until then, had to be searched out by means of physical travel, letters and phone calls,” she explained. “It literally changed the entire structure of the antiques and collectibles market.”

“Antiquing is the ultimate form of recycling and how can you beat that in this day and age?” she added.

By Maryam Musharaf Shah

Kaile Glick operating her Spontaneous Prose Store on a street in Leslieville

By Mersiha Gadzo

Chik chika chik chik. DING! Ziiiiiiiiiiip. Chik, chik, chika, chik.

It’s a nice nostalgic feeling hearing the sound of a good old, obsolete object being brought to life in today’s digital age.

The sound is 23-year old Kaile Glick typing away at her 1950s Smith Corona typewriter outside on a street in Leslieville. She writes custom-made prose on the spot for any person who stops by and gives a pay-what-you-can donation.

Sitting at an elementary school style table with a cigarette hanging loosely from her mouth, there are no pauses as she types, creating her 100^th and something piece of prose since she started her gig last June.

Chik chika chik chika chik.

Her eyes behind the black thick-rimmed glasses don’t look up from the scroll of paper, rolling up her words until the prose is completely done.

A green knit hat sits comfortably on her disheveled red hair. A self-made sign on the table next to her, propped up against a chair reads The Spontaneous Prose Store.

Her customer, Ellie Arscott, a Leslieville resident, waits patiently a few minutes while Glick creates her personalized prose. Glick works diligently, moving her invisible ideas scattered in her imagination into meaningful black-coloured words typed on white paper.

DING!

With her work finished, she hands it to Arscott, who smiles while reading it to herself.

“I find it pretty amazing how creative and how much of a story was told in just the beginning of a sentence. She took it to a whole different place,” Arscott said after reading it.

“I think she’s made a little cozy nest that she could create these amazing prose.”

Glick’s typewriter, chair, sign and table create a relaxing nest where her lifelong dream of writing pretty words for money is now possible.

“That was my big dream so I went about it in the most direct way possible,” Glick said, while smoking outside.

Although she does admit she got the idea for The Spontaneous Prose Store while living in San Francisco as a student. She first saw a man at Fisherman’s Wharf operating the store, and thought it was a neat idea.

“If you want a job, you’ve got to treat it like a job. So, I’ve been working hard to just write as much as I can for better or for worse I guess,” Glick said.

It’s not a lot of money, but it’s a start. Most people give her a few bucks, but in Yorkville she gets billfolds- no change. Now she says, it at least pays for breakfast.

Although the writing business is known to be infamously difficult to break into, Glick has shown plenty of creativity and perseverance to pull herself through.

She’s Toronto’s (and Canada’s as far as we know) only Spontaneous Prose Store writer.

Glick first started the store at the corner of Bloor and Brunswick, but after a while went exploring in other neighbourhoods. Setting off with her trusty typewriter on her bike, riding through the streets of Toronto makes her feel like Don Quixote.

“And then it just became an addiction,” Glick said.  “It’s fun to interact with people that way, to challenge myself like that. It’s like travelling without going anywhere.”

It’s opened her to a world of interesting characters right in her very own hometown.

“I came to the parade but I got so embarrassed because I keep getting caught staring at boobies,” is her favourite title ever requested.

A person who looked something like a clown requested it, wearing a blue wig and headgear, who talked in a cute, high-pitched voice, Glick said.

It was during Pedestrian Sunday at Kensington Market. The clown didn’t have any money, so they decided a bag of grapes would be a suitable commodity to be traded for prose.

From the wide variety of prose-seekers who visit her, there have been consistencies among the topics requested.

Cats, love and lust, weird philosophical questions, and even broccoli are all popular.

Glick explained, there are nights when it seems that everyone has broken up, and other nights when people seem to be in the mood for asking abstract questions like, “Who am I?” “How am I not myself?” “What is love?”

But being put on the spot to instantly compose wonderful prose for the strangest of topics within a few minutes would probably be difficult for the average writer.

“It was a response to writer’s block in a way,” Glick explained.  “I write, I guess, deliberate prose. I was working on this project and I got stuck and I was so frustrated and I wanted to write anyways.

Inspired by her creative writing and poetry teacher in San Francisco, Alexandra Teague, Glick says she’s learned how to write, “short little bursts of whatever comes to mind,” which she incorporates in her prose.

“It’s like forget form, forget editing, just write what you feel all the time,” Glick explained. “She [Teague] really taught me the value of both form and editing which really helped me build my skills.”

Glick is taking her Spontaneous Prose Store one step further. Last November, she opened an actual store with the same name at Leslieville’s Arts Market, where she sells second hand books and her custom made prose.

Her anthology of the hundred prose pieces she’s written over the summer on the streets of Toronto is also expected to be published before the New Year.

Reading books and writing poetry defines her life and she’ll strive for it to stay that way.

“I can’t remember ever not loving it,” Glick said smiling.

By: Christina Cheng

Aerosol paint, acrylic paint, stylized smears, colored tags, bubble art, stencil stamps, letters, numbers, faces, places, signs, logos, a mixture of colours, a layer of colours, visual textures- rough lines, smooth lines, rough edges, smooth edges… This is street art at its finest.

In general, street art is known as graffiti and it has been seen as an element of the hip-hop culture that has often been misrepresented and misinterpreted by the mainstream media.

In an interview with CanadaOne.com’s Julie King, Angel Carrillo who is also known as “Cruz1” in the Toronto graffiti community said:

“[Graffiti] was a way for me to just get away from the traditional gang scene… I just didn’t want to do anymore gang activities or be related to it or have anything in common with that lifestyle, and [graffiti] is a very creative outlet and it’s just something that I like.”

When Cruz1 first started painting, he began in sewer areas by Old Weston in Humber to hide form getting caught from police and said, “In those days I’d see pimps, corrupted cops, you see a lot of stuff you don’t want to be around.”

“I ain’t no preacher but do what you need to do… If visually, graffiti stimulates you then explore it but don’t be lazy. Go out and educate yourself,” he added.

Although perceived otherwise, Cruz1 is an OCAD and George Brown College graduate and has received commissions from organizations like Adidas and Holt Renfrew.

“Going to OCAD and George Brown was just something I needed to do for self; just to say I could do it… I did [school] by the rules and right now, I’m doing graffiti, which is kind of without the rules. Either way, at the end of the day skill is skill and that’s all it is.”

Stefan Lialias is the executive director of Street Art Showcase, which he had formed a production of street art done all over the world and all over the city of Toronto.

“What was first conceived for Street Art Showcase was to really find a medium to break the misconceptions and stereotypes that people had of these graffiti artists as thugs and criminals… It was about bringing these guys to the forefront, allowing politicians to understand who they are, what they are, what they are about to the public and vise versa,” he said.

“We wanted to bring all the people of different groups and different stakeholders in the community from the artists, to the small business and the government to get together, learn about each other and hear what their issues were and then work around a legitimate plan.”

Graffiti vandalism versus graffiti art has been an ongoing battle in addressing a comprehensive plan to determine the two but progression has been made.

According to the City of Toronto’s Graffiti Bylaw, which was adopted in February of 2006, it prohibits graffiti, which is defined as: “one or more letters, symbols, figures, etchings, scratches, inscriptions, stains or other markings that disfigure or deface a structure or thing, howsoever made or otherwise affixed on the structure of a thing, but, for greater certainty, does not include an art mural.”

‘Art mural’ is a term that remains highlighted in the bylaw and by the graffiti community because it has been exempted.

The city’s bylaw defines art murals as: “A mural for a designated surface and location that has been deliberately implemented for the purpose of beautifying the specific location.”

Since then, the city’s Graffiti Transformation Program took a positive effect to the situation and shed light in neighbourhood improvement and revitalization issues and addressed youth unemployment. From there, the youth were hired by local organizations to take part in removing unwanted vandalized graffiti and tagging off the walls and to resurface it with attractive murals.

As a result, the city announced that, “over 9,000 individual tags have been removed, over 300 sites have been cleaned and 430 murals have been created. An estimated 1,276 youth have received paying work as well as training in the technical aspects of graffiti removal, outdoor art, and business skills.”

In February when mayor Rob Ford declared ‘war’ on graffiti in Toronto, initially no one other than the graffiti community took notice, but all of that changed once small businesses were handed notices from the city to clean up the graffiti on their premises with a two days notice.

“That’s not fair to business owners because the cost of the removal ranged from hundreds of dollars to ten thousand dollars for some heritage buildings and the big concern was, we wanted to work with the city but if we removed the graffiti what’s to stop it from coming back the next day?” said Robert Sysak, Business Improvement Area (BIA) executive director of West Queen West.

The West Queen West BIA represents over 300 business owners that stretches between Bathurst Street and Gladstone Avenue.

“They can’t keep paying those costs all the time, it just wouldn’t be feasible and plus it would be like making a victim of a victim out of the situation.”

After months of rallying in force against the graffiti removal plan in May 2011, Lialias partnered with the City of Toronto and organized the Toronto Graffiti Summit Town Hall meeting at the Drake Hotel.

Councillor Michael Thompson, the chair of the economic development and councillor Cesar Palacio, chairman of Licensing and Standards Committee were present to enforce all the bylaws, and from that meeting, the city came up with one of the most progressive graffiti plans around.

It was there that Palacio first made a public announcement to the Street Art Showcase community that the movement they’re making is in fact, “an exciting and positive example of public-private partnership working together towards a positive solution.”

On June 29, 2011 the city of Toronto council passed the new progressive Graffiti Management Plan that looks to “eliminate graffiti vandalism that has a detrimental impact on property owners, neighbourhoods and City image, while supporting graffiti art and other street art that adds vibrancy and artistic delight to our streets.”

This decision took many Torontonians by surprise because mayor Rob Ford initiated one of the most successful consultation processes in the city of Toronto.

Some suggested the Graffiti Management Plan created by him would make him the “Art Mayor” of Toronto.

Torontonians didn’t expect Ford to be a catalyst for an art movement in the city, but “Deadboy”, a Toronto street artist who disguises his face with a white gold metallic plated skeleton mask, emerged as the star in the graffiti community as he became the movement to the city’s new graffiti management plan. He is now known as one of the mayor’s favourite street artist icon.

Graffiti artists are now welcome to express their art at designated areas in the city that are being decriminalized and they can also work with store owners in BIA’s to have their art work put up on their walls without the need of the city’s approval.

“The city’s not getting involved in what’s allowed or permissible anymore unless it’s racist under the Canadian Human Rights Act, but other than that, they’re can’t tell you what’s art or not art,” Lialias said.

“The graffiti ally on Queen West is a graffiti zone so anybody can go in there without recriminations in charge or anything like that… So there are some real positive things happening and the government is also giving more money to areas where they’re looking to subsidize murals and graffiti for artists to have more outlets.”

For Cruz1, he says this new movement is important to him because now it’s all about working with the community and trying to educate them about the true meaning of graffiti through an art perspective.

“To me, graffiti is the art of polygraphy and a lot of people don’t understand that,” he said.

“So, if I’m able to provide something for instance, that’s black and white, it’s still graffiti because I’m using aerosols as my medium but at least they get a different visual or concept of what it means to them. It becomes a different meaning to them and that’s why I do it, I do it for that change, that’s it.”

Cruz1 wants the people of Toronto to appreciate murals as graffiti and to view it as an asset to their growing city.

“If you look at a mural like graffiti, try to understand the technicality behind it; I mean, there’s not just the dimension, it’s also how the person is able to technically come out with something clean or visually stimulating,” he said.

Sysak says more street art will be beneficial to Toronto’s rapidly growing city and is eager to do more walls on the West Queen West BIA and is also looking to possibly have some tours with regards to it because he believes “It’ll help drive some traffic to our area.”

To street artists, graffiti doesn’t necessarily mean a whole bunch of colours, letters and designs but more about their actual passion and story behind it all.

“As an artist being able to express myself is important because if you’re not yourself you can’t be your art,” said New York artist, Akstar who describes himself as an “art design phenom.”

“You can’t express yourself if your art isn’t reflecting you and your personality and what you’ve dealt with and what you’re dealing with, what you want to deal with and you can’t be yourself without freedom of expression through art,” he said.

According to Sysak, he said he admits that he initially thought the people doing graffiti were “a bunch of punks” until he had the opportunity to meet Street Art Showcase artists: Cruz1, Deadboy and Zion and that’s when his perception changed.

“From speaking to these artists, I received the chance to understand how they create graffiti, how they create this street art and I realized that it’s part of their life experiences.”

Sysak said he met one young graffiti artist who didn’t start tagging or doing graffiti until one of his friends had passed away “and that’s how he was able to pay homage to his friend.”

There are many reasons for graffiti but for every artist; whether they’re a street artist, a graffiti artist, a singer, a rapper, or a painter, art is a way for them to artistically express what they have inside vocally and visually.

“A lot of people express themselves in different ways and some people can talk about it, musicians can rap or sing about it but us artists, all we have is art materials and we try our best to express how we feel and we try to share that feeling with other people and make them understand it even though a lot of people don’t but we still try to make them understand it,” Akstar said.

According to him, graffiti is just a form of expression.

“In an urban community it’s a form of marking your territory because if you have a big enough graffiti name, people won’t dare to write over your name so it’s like I own this whole spot… That’s basically what it is, just an expression of yourself- you want everybody to see your name and your art.”

Akstar explains that being a graffiti artist is like a form of being “low-key famous.”

He said he did a couple of graffiti work in New York City and the last one he did he got arrested for it.

“I thought I was going to get away but I was locked in a cell for thirty hours… Cops treat graffiti like it’s guns and drugs in New York because there’s so many bad graffiti artists who make it worse for the good graffiti artist that when we do something that’s cool or meaningful it’s all looked upon as the same shit,” he explained.

Akstar finds it upsetting that he got arrested for expressing his artistic side and as a local artist, he just wanted to expose his own personal logo and brand.

As an indie artist, he explains that, “Graffiti is big in the indie culture because you gotta start from somewhere, you gotta be independent before other people can believe in your art and believe in what your doing that’s why graffiti and all types of artists are indie until it gets to those commercial successful levels.”

According to Elyse Parker, director of the Private Realm Section of Transportation Services, says because theses indie artists fought to take a stand for their art, the new Graffiti Management Plan now looks to support the great street art community of Toronto by trying to find ways that there are more opportunities for that community to create great street art and to enhance Toronto’s streets.

Graffiti artists can official call Toronto home.

Anjum Chaudhry shares her thoughts on marriage.

Some do it for love; others do it for their mum and dad, and yet others do it for money. Some simply give in and do it for the tax benefits.

Then again, some don’t do it at all.

Marriage. It’s a loaded word. Put “second,” “broken,” or “gay” in front of it and you’ve got a story told in no time.

According to the 2001 General Social Survey, more than 16 million Canadians are married. That’s more than half the country’s population engaging in one specific activity. If that activity was reading Twilight or flushing regrettable reptilian pets down the toilet, the military would be all over it.

Simply put, marriage is an overwhelmingly socially acceptable way to live with a member of the opposite sex and reproduce/fulfill one’s sexual desires. However, alternatives are becoming increasingly common, with surprising results. Statistics Canada’s 2006 census found that out of a population of 2.5 million in the city of Toronto, around 472,000 of them were common-law couple families. That’s one fifth of the city’s population. Numbers for married-couple families are not that far ahead, at around 670,000 for the same year.

So where is human co-existence headed? Will marriage head straight out the door or through a fiery revival due to the gay rights movement? Will it die as an institution with no purpose, replaced with other legal means of establishing a long-term relationship?

Statistics show that one third of all Canadians don’t stay in their marriage till the 30^th year. In fact, they divorce much earlierFrom the hippie flower-wearing days of the 1960s till the present, the ultimate point of marriage has changed from a focus on being a reproductive family unit to each individual striving for personal happiness.

Meet Joel Clark. He’s the 35-years-old general manager at the University of Toronto’s Scarborough Campus Students’ Union. He lives with his common-law wife Veronica and his 6-years-old daughter Sophie in a house they rented right after he and his wife split up.

That’s right, they split up. They didn’t find each other as romantically compatible as they were 11 years ago.

“It’s a little non-standard,” he said. “It works really well for us.”

Born in Stoney Creek, Ontario, Clark aimed to get out of his hometown as fast as he could. He moved to Toronto when he was 18.

His story is astonishingly eye opening. He and his wife basically dated other people while raising a child together and living as friends instead of ex-lovers living and dealing separately with unresolved issues and custody battles.

“There’s all kinds of different ways to have a relationship and nobody gets to tell you what to have except you,” he explained.

Then there’s Anjum Chaudhry. She comes from a conservative South Asian culture but was born to a relatively liberal set of parents who insisted that she get a career as an award-winning journalist before thinking about marriage.

One day she met her husband but she didn’t even think twice about it. It was at a mutual friend’s summer barbecue, she wasn’t exactly looking, and he didn’t think she was exceptionally hot.

Less than a year later, they were happily married.

Mark Kuiack is a university student with parents who are married and literally live on opposite ends of the globe from one another.

“They’re married but they’re not really married,” he shrugged. “I don’t know if they’re really in love anymore.”

These people are not anomalies. You’ll meet them in class, at work or on the street. Maybe your story mirrors one of theirs, or maybe yours has more shock value.

Point is, we can’t lump all married couples in Toronto under one of three umbrellas: happy, working-on-it or unhappy. We can no longer lump ourselves into one of five umbrellas either: single, married, divorced, widowed or cheating.

Kelly Rankin has been with her “significant other” Kyle for around 15 years. She hesitates a bit at using the term “husband” to describe him but soon realizes that it’s silly to be afraid of a label.

Rankin works at the University of Toronto, updating its news website. She’s a little taken aback when asked to evaluate the reasons behind her decision to live common-law. She’s nervous, carefully mulling it over in her head.

“When I was younger, in my late teens and early 20s, some of my friends at the time, people were getting married and everything,” she mused. “It was one of those things I wasn’t in a hurry to do.”

Common-law unions are becoming less unusual and may even be the result of higher socioeconomic status and better education. Statistics Canada’s 2006 census shows that common-law families have on average a higher median income ($70,000) than married couple families ($66,000).

Even then, the language surrounding marriage and the proper way to live with a partner fails to catch these changes.

“A waiter at a restaurant once said ‘You’re married but not churched!’” she laughed. “I thought that was a funny way of putting it.”

Clark was never a fan of weddings. He and his partner were engaged for a while but after giving birth to Sophie, they decided that rearing her was a bigger priority than throwing a grand shebang to announce them married.

Instead, they became common-law. Veronica is the only one of them who has tasted marriage before, having moved to Toronto from Ottawa with her first husband. She is decidedly bitter about it, according to Clark. Surprisingly, the way they found each other and moved in together sounds like a Nicholas Sparks novel compared to her first marriage.

“I thought it was pretty cheesy,” he said. “I was couch surfing and my cat needed a home (I have four cats) so my cat went to stay with her and she was excited because her ex-husband was allergic. She loves cats. Then I ended up staying there more and more often and then she was like ‘You might as well move in.’”

The fairy tale stops there. Both of them were still putting themselves through school. Sophie came into their lives in 2005, brightening it.

But in 2009, Joel and Veronica ceased to exist as a romantically-involved couple. Instead, they decided to remain co-parents living in the same house. He has his room, she has her room. They see other people. They are not political about it, and few friends know until they ask.

“As far as [my parents] are concerned, if we’re acting like a family, we’re a family,” he explained. “As far as her parents are concerned, if we’re acting like a family, we’re a family and we should just suck up our differences and get married. Church or not, legally get married.”

That feeling is in no small part due to Veronica’s mother being a lawyer. Both families are concerned about the legal ramifications of remaining common-law. If something were to happen to one partner, the other would not receive the same benefits or legal rights unless they were married.

Clark is open about why his relationship changed shape.

“Everybody’s post-adolescence is extended,” he said. “In terms of background and culture, that didn’t mesh very well. And that’s a gross simplification.”

He recalls being in his mid-twenties, stressed out over graduate school and wanting to just study, play videogames, and then go back to studying.

“Guys of my generation are still in that extended man-child kind of world and it takes a while to sort of settle down and decide what you want to do as a job,” the Rotman School of Management graduate said.

The couple frequently took last-minute weekend vacations with other friends to ease the constant pressure that built up over time. Now that Sophie is 6 and college will be a reality within the next ten years, Clark isn’t sure about where his family is headed.

“We may go our separate ways, she may move back to Ottawa to take care of her parents, and I may stay here or go wherever my job happens to be,” he said, half-thinking out loud. “And then we’ll just be sort of a remote family.”

Kuiack’s parents are the definition of a remote family. With his mother in British Columbia, his father in Australia and he himself in Toronto, he finds that his family is more or less together in name.

“Two people agreeing to stay together isn’t necessarily natural,” he explained. “I think it’s absurd to think that two people for 50-60 years are going to be the same as when they were in their twenties.”

He has set views on marriage: it doesn’t have much importance for him.

“I kind of see it related to the decline of the importance of religion.”

Television shows with the marriage theme have also numbed an entire generation of young adults to the fact that marriage was once sacred.

“You have TV shows like ‘Marry a millionaire’ and it cheapens the concept of marriage, the value of it,” he continued.

Kuiack also asks the question about why monogamous heterosexual unions carry more legal weight in terms of tax benefits than polygamous heterosexual unions.

“If you have tax breaks for married people, does that apply to polygamous marriages?” he asked. “If that’s the case, why can’t you have ten people all marry each other?”

He also finds it ridiculous that in order to visit your significant other in a hospital, being a well known loved one or a common-law partner may not be enough.

“Is it a huge problem that strangers are going in to visit people in the hospital that they need to have laws against that?” he joked.

Anjum Chaudhry sees things heading in a positive direction. Marriages and the obligations and social norms that come with them change over time as a society changes. Things that were once abnormal are now ordinary, even expected. However, some things never change, such as the importance of having a traditional wedding.

“It’s your marriage but your parents wedding,” she said. “You marry a family and vice versa.”

Coming from a culture that is often stereotyped worldwide for having arranged marriages, she finds that her experience was wholly different.

“In this day and age, really?” she said. “I think families are just happy that you have someone as a partner in your life.”

She also finds that having options open to couples has made it easier to make tough decisions.

“Maybe if you’re common-law, those obligations aren’t that strong or you don’t feel that strong affinity to him, because I’m not married to him, I can leave any time I want,” she wondered, concluding that whether one is “churched” or declared common-law, a commitment is a commitment.

Clark knows of couples who openly live in polyamorous relationships and are ardent advocates of opening people’s minds to different ways of living.

“But they were the same way about being vegetarians, they were just a political group of people,” he chuckled. “And they give the rest of us a bad name.”

The most important question on anyone’s mind will obviously be: what about the children? And he has an answer.

“Her perspective on it is that the way we act as a family is not unusual,” he explained. “We all work together, we all keep the house together, we all do family things together, and we do things separately.”

He admits that occasionally, his “painfully cute” 6-year-old will ask her parents to get married but he attributes that casual request to getting caught up in the elaborate drama of family friends’ weddings.

“She’s a career flower girl,” he added, rolling his eyes over the memory.

Like Chaudhry, he finds that things are changing for the better. Living with a partner outside of marriage was frowned upon to some extent even ten years ago. Nowadays, it’s becoming normal to live common-law with your spouse before deciding to marry. The GSS shows that almost 15% of respondents lived common-law with their first spouse before marrying.

However, he has a problem with people trying to fit themselves into pre-defined categories they can’t possibly hold true to.

“If you’re not good at monogamy, don’t make monogamous commitments,” he said firmly. “Make serial commitments or find somebody else who has parallel commitments and that’s okay.”

The day a government form has checkboxes for every type of relationship human beings can have with one another is the day we will have acknowledged that everyone has an equal right to the pursuit of happiness.

By Maryam Musharaf Shah