November links n’ things

Be like the bee

Bee Simulator says: “Something ends something begins”

I made a meme

I’ve been undersleeping again. Which means:

G🌻A🌻Y

There’s a really cheeky sculpture on a building in Downtown Toronto. Most people pass by it by without noticing anything strange. Oh, but I noticed.

It is above the entranceway to 297 Victoria street – The Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University (oops, sorry, “Toronto Metropolitan University”) The building was completed in 1939 and served as the headquarters for O’Keefe Breweries.

Here’s the sculpture:

It’s a brewery. So we have one guy stroking the other’s barley sheaves, and the second guy yanking on the first one’s hops.

Dear Reader,
Have you ever gently yanked on some hop flowers like the guy in the sculpture? They grow in peoples’ yards in Toronto, and I have touched them: my hands get so itchy from the little “hairs” on them that I want to crawl out of my skin. It’s a whole thing. It isn’t something that you’d see brewers doing casually.

Just imagine all the brewery bigwigs standing over the plans in a wood panelled room. The blueprints are spread on a large oak table. Of course, they’re all smoking. They review the plans for the sculpture. One of them sees two fellas that are getting each other off. But he can’t say anything: it takes a gay man to know one, no?! And several other guys in the room are thinking the same thing and they never say anything – and the sculpture gets all the approvals.

This sculptor, through sheer panache, managed to put up a sculpture celebrating homosexuality. In full view of the prudes of Toronto. In 1939.

I love it!

Who is the sculptor? Well, the work is generally attributed to Loring – oh, hey, my girl Loring! Just a 30 minute walk from my home there is a parkette commemorating Frances Loring and Florence Wyle. There are bronze statues by them, and loving portrait sculptures of each other. They were significant Canadian sculptors. And were also gay.

There is some debate as to whether the sculptor is actually Loring. It doesn’t quite look like it’s done in her style, to me. It is possible that the creator is Charles McKechnie. But he apparently died before the building’s construction was started.

Now, this sculptor wasn’t a brazen gambler, taking an irreversible risk here. Take a look at the horizontal seam in the sculpture – just above the men’s elbows. Did the sculptor leave themselve’s an “out”, where they could change the position of the hands in case the scheme was caught?

Or did the sculpture start out looking differently, and the hands were repositioned at the last moment? 😈¹

More blind men and the elephant

While looking up an image for the aforementioned meme, I found this drawing of the blind men and the elephant:

This is not AI generated! The artist is David Meng and he also creates freaky monster models, like the cat below. Check out his site https://davidmengartworks.com/sculptures

Music

I’ve re-listened to this album at least 3 times in November:

And I’ve also been liking… Fat Nick. His producer, Mikey the Magician, is 🔥🔥🔥(Listen when your mommy and daddy aren’t at home):

Around the world

The Great mosque of Samarra:

Scrubs

I discovered the concept of “Playing the Game like a Scrub“. This was me when I was an entrepreneur: I held onto certain values very tightly and it lost me money unnecessarily. I could’ve been a lot more successful if I picked my battles more consciously.

Art

Lulu Lin draws bizarre airbrushed faces. (Confession: I collect “how-to” books that feature 80s art techniques like airbrush drawing and marker art)

Claire Partington makes great ceramic figures that harken back to figurines from 200 years ago.

Jenneral HQ

In November, I was following along with half the Internet as this Toronto story unfolded: Jenn wrote first about my dad could still be alive, but he’s not., then she discovered a new dimension to her father and wrote after my dad died, we found the love letters. And finally dissolution.

Jenn is such a good writer. I’ve started following her blog.

November Quote

Some people just win the Face Lottery.

– Uttered by M. out of the blue while scrolling Instagram.

That’s all. Have a wonderful December!

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1. Notes for future research on the Brewery building:
   Toronto archives box 179812 – 3 indicates that the Victoria st. location was a bottling plant? Or maybe they built another plant on the same street? 300 Victoria O’Keefe’s Brewery Retail Building Box 157913
   297 Victoria (Check the Kyle Rae archive records) ↩︎