The Yonge Street Riot of 1992

Queen Street during the G20

Lord knows there were plenty of ignorant things said during the G20 in 2010. Among them was the suggestion that Toronto had never seen violence like that before. Pfft! Anyone who bothered to check their Google would find that our city has had riots like that on a regular basis pretty much since the day Toronto was founded. We've had Protestants riot against Catholics. Nazis riot against Jews. Conservatives riot against liberals. We've had police riot against unions, against Communists, and against firemen. We've had firemen riot against firemen. We've even had firemen riot against circus clowns. We've seen riots that brought more than 10,000 people into the streets and we've seen riots where people died. In the mid-1800s, we were averaging more than one violent riot a year for twenty years.

But our riots aren't a thing of the distant past. In the late-1980s and early '90s, we'd riot every time the Ex closed for the year. We rioted on New Year's Eve to ring in 1992. And then, a few months later, when white cops beat a black man in Los Angeles and were acquitted, we rioted again. As South Central L.A. exploded into flames and destruction, a small group in Toronto protested the Rodney King case outside the U.S. consulate on University. Soon, the crowd had swelled and some turned violent. Something like a thousand people marched up Yonge Street, smashing windows, overturning hot dog carts and generally being destructive assholes. From the footage, it looks like some were even throwing molotov cocktails.

Somehow, that time, the police managed to handle the situation without completely ignoring due process or arresting more people than ever before in the entire history of the country. There were about 30 arrests, a few injuries, and—despite the usual warnings that "we might just see the face of downtown Toronto changing forever"—things got back to normally pretty quickly. So much so that  twenty years later most people seem to have forgotten it ever happened.

Here's the Citytv coverage from the day after, complete with painfully punny titles and an adorably young Ben Chin:

Dude Jumps Off The CN Tower

Dar Robinson (click to enlarge)

Dar Robinson spent the seventies earning a reputation as one of Hollywood's greatest stuntmen. He'd done stuff in Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood films, jumping out of helicopters  onto airbags, driving over cliffs and then parachuting to safety, leaping from tall buildings. He set world records all over the place. But the most famous thing he ever did was to jump off the CN Tower.

He did it twice. The first time was with a parachute in 1979, when he was Christopher Plummer's stunt double in Highpoint (I'd link to the movie's Wikipedia page but there isn't one). And the very next year, he did it again as part of a documentary being made about him (hosted by Chuck Norris, thank you very much). This time Robinson was attached to a cable system he'd invented. And, unlike the bag of water they'd tested it with, he didn't get smashed to a pulp.

In fact, he'd go another six years before getting smashed to a pulp. He even got to be in Lethal Weapon first. But then, while doing a motorcycle stunt for Million Dollar Mystery (nominated for three worst supporting actors and a worst original song at the Razzies), he missed a turn on his motorcycle and went flying off a cliff. Lethal Weapon is dedicated to his memory.

Here's part of the documentary about the CN Tower jump. It's kind of totally crazy:

Getting Napalmed As A Child In South Vietnam

Phan Thị Kim Phúc, 1972

Phan Thị Kim Phúc was nine years old in the summer of 1972. She lived in Trảng Bàng, a town in South Vietnam, which was invaded by the Communists in early June. Their troops dug in, waiting for the inevitable American and South Vietnamese retaliation, while Phúc and other civilians took refuge with some South Vietnamese soldiers in a nearby temple.
Two days later, a pair of South Vietnamese bombers appeared in the sky above the town. They circled and then dove, using eight napalm bombs to turn the ground below into a hellscape of liquid fire, mistakenly attacking their own troops and civilians as they fled from the temple. Phúc's clothes were burnt completely off her. Her back and one of her arms were turned into a mess of blisters and peeling skin. Third degree burns covered more than half of her body. She ran, along with her brothers and the rest of the survivors, down the road out of town, naked, screaming, burning.

That's when Nick Ut, a photographer with the Associated Press, snapped one of the most famous photographs ever taken. He was standing a few hundred meters down the road with a handful of foreign journalists. When Phúc got to them, they gave her water to drink and poured some over her wounds. She passed out. Ut gathered her and some of the other children into his car and rushed them to the nearest hospital, in Saigon. He was sure she was going to die. So were the doctors. It would take 14 months and 17 operations before she was finally well enough to head back to a home that had been destroyed.

Meanwhile, in the States, Ut's photograph had given even more momentum to the rapidly mounting anti-war movement. The image became a thorn in Nixon's side; privately he wondered if the whole thing had been staged just to erode his support. Finally in 1975, nearly three years after the bombing of Trảng Bàng, he reluctantly withdrew the last American troops from Vietnam.

Phúc grew up in what was, in the wake of the war, a thoroughly Communist country. She started studying medicine at university, but the government pulled her out of school so that she could use her time to give interviews, pose for photos and generally be used as a propaganda tool for the state. She hated it with a passion; thought about killing herself. It took years before she finally convinced them to let her continue her studies in Cuba, at Havana University.

It was there that she met another visiting Vietnamese student, Bui Huy Toan. They fell in love. Got married. And went to Moscow on their honeymoon. On their way back, when the plane touched down briefly in Gander, Newfoundland to refuel, they applied for asylum. And they got it. Soon, they were Canadian citizens, having moved to the suburbs of Toronto and settled down.

That's where they still live now—in Ajax. At first, Phúc led a private life here, not wanting to relive the memories of the bombing and the horrifying photo that made her famous. But when the Toronto Sun tracked her down and put her face on the front page, she decided to use it as an opportunity to re-enter the public eye and do some good. In the years since, she's given speeches and interviews, started a foundation helping to find medical treatment and psychological counseling for children affected by war, and worked for the UN as a UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador.

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I guess it's cheating a bit, since she doesn't actually live within the boundaries of the city proper, but this is the story that leaps to mind every time Rob Ford repeats his absurd idea that Toronto can't afford to take in any more immigrants. Phan Thị Kim Phúc told her story to NPR here. And talked to the BBC, along with one the filmmakers who helped save her life that day, here. Nick Ut also talked to them, which you can find here. There are more deeply disturbing photos of the napalming and her burns here and here. Here's what she looks like all grown up. And, finally, I'll post footage shot by a film crew who were standing there with Ut that day. As you might imagine, it's upsetting as all fuck:

Video: TTC Commercials From The '80s

YouTube is full of these TTC commercials from the '80s, and each one is better, cheesier and more fluorescent than the last. The one I've embedded is from 1985, and there are two more jingle-based ones from a couple of years later here and here. There's one with a bunch of big name celebrities like "Soap Opera Broadcaster" Vic Cummings and "Consumer Advocate" Lynne Gordon here. And in 1988, they did a whole series highlighting all the fun things you can't do on the TTC, like watch a movie or a hockey game or eat dinner. Then, in 1990, someone was clearly fired; they suddenly went in a completely different, much more poetic direction.

Robert De Niro Does A Shitload Of Coke And Gets Laid In The Bathroom

Robert De Niro

Okay, so things were getting a little sketchy for Martin Scorsese in the late '70s and very early '80s. He'd already released Mean Streets and Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver—all hits—but followed them up with the giant bomb that was New York, New York. And he didn't take the failure very well. He spiraled into a vicious depression, a state of mind that wasn't helped by his already insanely high levels of cocaine use—like so high (excuse the pun), that when he ran out of blow at Cannes once, he chartered a plane to have more flown in from Paris. Another time, he over-dosed so badly that he arrived at the hospital with blood pouring from his eyes. His family fell apart. His career was a mess. His whole life was on the skids.

But then his friends stepped in to save him. First it was Robert De Niro, at his bedside in the hospital convincing him to kick coke and make Raging Bull. Scorsese threw himself into the film as if it was going to be the last movie he ever made—and he came out the other side with a masterpiece. Then, in the wake of that triumph, Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel arranged a tribute to Scorsese's films at the 1982 edition of the Festival of Festivals—the fledgling Toronto event which  would soon be renamed the Toronto International Film Festival.

It was a big deal. The festival was only a few years old, but it was already attracting the biggest names in the business. Two years earlier they'd held a similar tribute to honour Jean-Luc Godard and it had been a smashing success; Scorsese's would be no different. He was hailed as an artist and surrounded by the friends who'd come to support him—including De Niro, Harvey Keitel and Robert Duvall. Scorsese still credits the tribute as a turning point in his recovery.

But really, that whole story is just a way for me to get to tell you the bit you've been waiting for since you saw the title of this piece: To celebrate their director's new, sober success, De Niro and Keitel hit the town. According to Toronto Life, they ended up at an after-hours club "snort[ing] more coke than Tony Montana on a tear." High and horny, Robert De Niro got a film festival staffer to guard the bathroom door. Then he and "a new female friend" slipped inside to fuck.

Awesome.

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It was the Toronto Life article on the festival's most memorable moments that tipped me of to this, which you can read here. Oh and as a weird bonus, I should mention that at the same festival exactly 19 years later, Harvey Keitel would meet and fall in love with his second wife. On September 11, 2001. Which just so happens to be where I was that day, too, stumbling out of a morning screen at the Uptown Theatre to discover the world had gone all crazy.

Video: Building the CN Tower

It's un-narrated and, at six minutes, a little longer than it really needs to be, but here's some neat raw footage from the CBC's archives on YouTube. It shows a bit of the CN Tower's opening night in 1976 and then some shots of the construction of the very top of the spire, with people pulling over on the side of the Gardiner to watch and take photos, and a few fellows who clearly have a better relationship with heights than I do.

Keanu Reeves, Gay Werewolf

After living in Beirut and New York City, Keanu Reeves came to Toronto, where, as you probably already know, he spent most of his childhood. He went to Jesse Ketchum Public School before bouncing around from one high school to another, finally giving up on education entirely after he got kicked out of the Etobicoke School for the Arts (which happens to also be where Broken Social Scene's Kevin Drew, Metric's Emily Haines, Stars' Amy Millan, The Deadly Snakes' Andre Ethier and members of The Most Serene Republic and The Diableros also went).

But all that's just a way of introducing this Wikipedia quote about what he did next: "Reeves bounced between odd jobs, television commercials and theater gigs – including Brad Fraser’s 'Wolfboy,' a gay-themed drama with werewolf overtones".

I really want to see that play.

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The Toronto Blessing

Catch The Fire/Toronto Airport Vineyard/
Toronto Airport Christian Fellowship

So there's this crappy-looking church housed in a former conference centre out by the airport. It's called "Catch The Fire". It's surrounded by a wasteland of highways and parking lots and ugly hotels, located pretty much directly under the flight path of the enormous jets that scream into Pearson International every few minutes. It is also, as unlikely as it may seem, home to a congregation which witnessed the birth of a religious movement that swept across the globe in the mid-'90s: the Toronto blessing.

It all started in January of 1994. Back then the church was called "The Toronto Airport Vineyard" (part of the Vineyard evangelical association) and was held in a smaller building by the end of one of Pearson's runways. That month, Randy Clark, a minister from St. Louis, was invited to preach to the congregation. And boy, did he ever: by the end of his first sermon, he had the 100 or so in attendance rolling around on the floor, shaking and weeping and laughing and moaning in ecstatic worship. They hailed it as a "divine visitation". The Holy Spirit, you see, had filled them to the point of bursting.

They called the phenomenon the Toronto blessing (or The Anointing, The Awakening, The River, or The Fire depending on your taste in cheesy names for bizarre religious practices) and it also included everything from speaking in tongues to roaring like a lion. And it was popular. Like really popular. In the next couple of years, hundreds of thousands of people would travel to the church from around the globe. It would be forced to move into a bigger building. Hotels would start running shuttle buses. Worshipers would line up for hours to get in six nights a week. And then those worshipers would take the Toronto blessing back to their own congregations, thousands of them around the world, in Europe, in Africa, in south-east Asia, in Australia and New Zealand and Iceland and the Middle East. In fact, the phenomenon got to be so big that it even made its own small dent in popular culture, appearing in Petter Mettler's Gambling, Gods and LSD documentary and turning up in an episode of Law & Order: SVU.

But not everyone was thrilled. In 1995, the leader of the Vineyard had the church expelled from his organization. And others suggested that maybe, just maybe, all those people weren't actually filled with the Holy Spirit at all—maybe they were just being psychologically manipulated. By the turn of the millenium, the Toronto blessing's popularity had begun to wane. The church faded from popular consciousnes.

Even now, though, years later, people still show up at that ugly-ass church just off Dixon Road every week to roll around on the floor and worship their god. If you'd like to experience the blessing yourself, they've got a handy how-to on their website, here. And yes, one of the steps to salvation does involve browsing through their online store.

Here are some folks in Boston doing the whole Toronto blessing thing. It's, um, worth watching. And there are a bunch more related videos on YouTube.