Future Billboards and Missing Toronto

Last night I saw the new movie Children of Men — it’s about a dystopian Britain in 2027 where all the women are infertile, so the human race is going to die off. It’s pretty good and relentless and depressing, but the art direction in it is great and there are a whole bunch of futuristic looking billboards around some of the sets. Moving LED screens on the sides of busses, ads that sort of floated in the air and standard-but-totalitarian ones like the one pictured above — it was a bit like an updated take on Blade Runner’s vision of the future, and fun to watch for that reason alone.

I saw it the Cameo cinema here in Edinburgh, and nice old art house theatre attached to the Cameo Bar. It’s very civilized, they let you bring your drink into the film — maybe the Camera Bar down on Queen Street would have survived longer if Ontario’s weird liquor laws allowed for such things. I also watched V for Vendetta again the other day too, another dystopic vision set over here (here is “Scotland, not Britain” — as has been established — but the plumbing is the same and terrible on this whole island, so I’ll offend everybody and pretend it’s all one thing). Both films use Britain as analogy for the US, complete with references to Homeland Security, Abu Ghraib prisoner treatment, black hoods, Gauntanamo Bay and the worst: the ultra cool BBC turned into a Fox News outfit (why can’t the CBC be like the BBC?).

Britain, or Scotland, is a fine and good place — but a side effect of being away from Toronto for too long a time is that everywhere else starts to pale in comparison, and these movies in a very selfish and irrational way, felt good to watch even when you can do it liquored up. Toronto is home, and home is always good, but it’s useful to go away from it for a while and remember why it’s good for reasons not altogether sentimental. All these places I’ve been lucky enough to be for various reasons over the last few months — Glasgow, Malta, San Jose, San Francisco, Chicago, Madison (and if you read this wire regularly, places others have been to like Sweden) all have exceptionally neat elements to their cities that are far ahead of what Toronto is doing in that particular area. Those bike paths along the expressway in Stockholm, impressive architecture in Chicago or the two hour transfers on San Francisco’s MUNI system. Here, Edinburgh is a fantastically compact walkable city with no sprawl, the kind of thing we hope for Toronto — but then unlike Toronto, cars have the right of way all the time, so you’ve got to always look over your shoulder, and the sense of fear that a car will whip around the corner at anytime hasn’t left me. I yelled and gave the finger, as I would in Toronto, the first time I was cut off but that was met with a barrage of Scottish swears involving genitalia, so I give in to cars now like everybody, not something I expected to do in walkable Europe.

There is no easy way to articulate why Toronto is good — it doesn’t lend itself to grand statements — and when people do it always seems a little awkward. It’s a city where the sum of all its parts tower, like the CN Tower (an exception to this rule), over everywhere else. Very few cities can match the breadth of even the things we talk about and care about in Toronto, and I’ve left people who live in the world class cities open mouthed and saying things like “I wish we could do that here” when talking about our city. How do you tell people how easy it is to live in Toronto and still experience Metropolitian Life — how do you tell people how nice it is to cross some of the streets in Toronto without fear of being nailed, those times on Bloor when you can pretend to be Moses and the cars just sort of stop and part, letting you jaywalk.

When you’re away you know what you miss, and right now I miss all these parts, and it will be good to get back to those parts tomorrow because, at the very least, I can stop enjoying films about another country for all the wrong reasons.