Archives /// Grey Spaces

It's a cold Wednesday night in February, and the windows of 572 College Street are steamed up. Eighty people are packed into Soundscapes Music, peering around the racks of shrink-wrapped CDs for a clear view of Bruce Peninsula, the choral folk-rock ensemble that is the talk of the city's indie music scene. At this in-store performance, the store sells 28 copies of the group's debut disc, A Mountain Is A Mouth — a big number for an underground band. Our independent music and book shops exist between public and private space — in a zone where culture and capitalism, business ...

When I was a boy in Flemingdon Park, all of us kids who resided in the public housing units had to trek across the broad east-west hydro fields on schooldays. The fields cut through the community, separating the school from the apartment buildings and labyrinths of townhouses where we lived. In springtime, the fields flooded. Sloshing through ankle deep puddles under the 230,000 volt transmission lines on a rainy day became a lesson in electrodynamics. One of us discovered that if you held the metal shaft of your umbrella in one hand, and with the other, placed your index finger ...