Okay, okay, okay. I thought I was done with talking about Luminato. And I was, I really was, I swear. I even moved on to doing other things like the art reviewing and artist/curator interviewing that pay the rent when I'm not Spacing-ing out. And then, in the course of an (initally) innocent interview with Musee d'art contemporain de Montreal director Marc Mayer on the occasion of the Quebec Trinnial, the subject of festival futility reared its ugly head again. Mayer, ex of the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Albright Knox, and the Power Plant, was just so delightfully provocative in pronouncing festivals "the crack cocaine of culture," as well as calling cities out on their cultural rivalries, that I felt compelled to revisit the subject. Here's an excerpt from the condensed interview published in today's National Post:

It's June 16. After more than ten days of intense media coverage from all the major print, web, and broadcast media, Luminato has wrapped at last. And you know what? I'm still confused about whether it was successful or unsuccessful, accessible or elitist, public fete or public failure. I headed out to events. I saw some public art. I read the coverage. I listened to my friends and acquaintances in the arts and urban advocacy community. (Including Matthew Hague, who did a great post on the Link boat earlier today.) And I still can't tell. Such confusion is exacerbated when fellow commentators like Martin Knelman—who I do think can have a lot of valuable things to say at times—reports that we needn't worry about accessibility at LuminaTO because it has “143 events and 860,000 moments over 10 days, and more than 70 percent of them free.” Excuse me if we skipped this in my undergrad physics and stats classes, but I'm quite unclear on what a “moment” means statistically. One second? Ten? Must tears or laughter—or Kodak—be involved? And this magic number of “860,000 moments”—where on earth did that come from? One second times 860,000 projected spectators/passerby? Do you count, as Luminato did on their events calendar, things like the CN Tower being lit up—which it is every night anyway—and people seeing that from the Gardiner? Or, um, not?

As Pug Award fever reaches its apex tomorrow night, I thought it might be time to shine a light on smaller-scale design issues. The area where I live, on the Danforth between Coxwell and Woodbine, doesn't win a lot of prizes for streetscape design. Though there's a few trees in concrete planters—and the promise of more from the newly formed BIA—as well as a real gem in East Lynn Park, the general combination of empty/“aroma massage” storefronts with four lanes of speedy traffic make the main street stroll, well, a little bare and unpadded at times. However, there are some small businesses that do a lot to beautify the stretch, the most prominent of which are the fruit and flower shops that turn their sidewalks into veritable gardens of vegetation and colour during their open hours. The corner of Glebemount and Danforth has two of these right across the street from each other, with Prince of Wales Market to the west and Natural Florist to the east: As you can see, they really brighten up the sidewalk: Natural Florist is open year-round, which is much appreciated visually during the dank, grey winter months, even if the flowers are behind glass. (For this, I presume we can think the O'Connor funeral home, which sits right across the street. Other close-by funeral homes are also likely part of the reason flower shops seem quite popular along the strip, even in the non-yard-work months.)

Last night marked the launch of Spacing's Spring '08 print edition, which is chock-full of good stuff. But sometimes we get more good stuff from our contributors fits into both our daily blog and print issue. And a review from frequent Spacing contributor Ron Nurwisah on the daily blog of The Next American City magazine was one of these good things, so we're running it here. Review: The Next American City Daily Blog www.americancity.org/daily The Next American City is a not-for-profit that's trying to get Americans thinking about new ways to improve their urban ...

I was a bit distracted this morning when I heard CBC radio news report that McGuinty had made some big announcement at the ROM yesterday. And hearing the words "free access" "Tuesday" and "million dollars" sift through my other tasks at the time, I must say I felt some margin of hope rise up in my museum-cynical soul: Could it be that a free evening at the ROM was actually being reinstituted? That perhaps the museum had woken up to the fact that since much of the collection it manages belongs to the public, the public has a right to see it for free? Sadly, a little bit of poking 'round the interweb quickly grounded that wild flight of fancy: it turns out that the new Tuesday-access plan only offers free entry to "full-time students attending a post-secondary institution in Canada."

So it's a bit late for this, but I wanted to share a few thoughts from the Toronto: A City Becoming launch that happened on Monday night at the Gladstone. Ron Nurwisah reviews the book itself in our new issue, so I'm not going to address the print version per se. But what I noticed at the panel could perhaps apply as well. While the event's panel did offer a bit of enjoyably spirited discussion (the most heated of which involved artist Michael Awad proclaiming that he loves the Island Airport—a brave admission in a room of west-end denizens), the overall feeling for me was that the Toronto this book is addressing is way too insular. This critique can be made of many media outlets (including, to be fair, this one), but perhaps being beholden to it in standing-room-only style was all a bit much. As architect John Von Nostrand noted during his turn at the mic, the Toronto that exists north of Eglinton is severely disregarded in city planning. Sadly, it quickly became apparent that the area is also disregarded by books about city planning, like this one. Also, although columnist/panelist Linda McQuaig is usually a class warrior par excellence, her adamant dislike for the suburbs did seem to paint the people who live there (and not just their architectural features) with one broad (and ignorant) brush.

Following up on developments (and/or degenerations) in access to Canada's public museums, I was struck by net-law expert Michael Geist's latest Star column. In it he notes that some prominent Canadian museums have been overcharging for digital images of artworks that are technically in the public domain. As Geist explains, In 2006, London's famed Victoria and Albert Museum became the first museum to erase charges for the reproduction of images in scholarly books and magazines, to considerable acclaim. According to documents obtained under the Access to Information ...

Today in the Toronto Star's op-ed section, Martin Knelman argues that Toronto is finally getting the funds it needs to compete with Montreal as Canada's seat of cultural avant-garde. He even ups the urban-rivalry ante by writing that "Toronto's cultural all-stars [by which Knelman means the AGO, Luminato and the ROM, all of which have received millions from politicians of late] are upstaging Montreal's, which is the equivalent of the Leafs winning the Stanley Cup by beating the Canadiens in overtime." Millions or no, I have to say that from where I sit, ...

I just returned from a museums conference in Ottawa and was just sorting through my notes to post soon on a few of the surprisingly positive public space approaches that were discussed there, when my usual cynicism about the commercialization of museum spaces was restored by the following news item: ROM wants city to move street vendors from view of Crystal. It reinforces perceptions of snobbery and elitism that come with opening an empty starchitect-designed building and charging $20 a pop for people to simply walk through its spaces. Though the museum has filled up a ...

There was a lot of press on memorials and remembrance over this November 11 weekend — among it a mini-tour of unusual war memorials I wrote for Saturday's Globe Toronto section. One thing I discovered doing research for the story didn't fit in with the theme of that piece but still seemed like it would be of interest to others: namely, that Queen's Park's newest monument, the 2006-installed Veterans' Memorial, lists among its honorees those killed in “The Campaign Against Terror.” Though I have respect for all those Canadians that gave their lives in the name of someone else's getting better, this wording struck me as peculiar. I didn't know that the “Campaign Against Terror” was considered such an official military operation by the Ontario Government, worthy of listing along with historically recognized conflicts like World War I and II.