Well well well

For those who care about such things, according the New York Times travel section, Toronto’s West Queen Street West is the new Queen Street West.

Firstly, congratulations to my lady for living in such a fashionable part of town. And a runner-up prize to me for living just a few blocks north — the lower end of my street just squeezes onto the map that accompanies the linked story.

Secondly, in one of my former moods, a post on this kind of subject would have been accompanied by an abrupt mention of the fact that Toronto’s biggest hipsters are, not-so-secretly, bereft of ideas and imagination. And yes, I’ve seen a lot of uniform-wearing, and experienced a bit of hipster exclusivity… but for the moment I’m willing to remain open to the possibility that interesting things are being made or acted out in this city — in any part of the city, in fact. The collective artistic / imaginative output of a large metropolis depends on the city behaving as an organic whole, and fragmenting that whole into little tribes is the quickest way to bring about the idiocy and complacency that inevitably comes around once a place has become too cool to think for itself. And of course the worth of a city — even its artistic worth — can never be evaluated by looking only at its artist-class.

But finally, just to put these things into perspective, for me the most important thing featured on that map of this little stretch of the city is the green area, at the mid-left and very top of the map. This is exactly the best spot in Trinity Bellwods park for hearing bats singing at dusk, or crickets chirping at three o’clock in the morning — just far enough from the buzz of the night-time traffic and the chatter of the “night-crawling club kids” to enjoy some space in the area’s soundscape. That’s more my kind of scene.