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• 1 2015-11-24T17:19:04-08:00 November 1971, Toronto (actually does not ring a bell in me at all) 19 plain 2015-11-24T18:36:38-08:00 Therefore I research. These are the things that came out from my random Google search. It seems like there were two big public issues in Toronto around 1971: highways and gays. Hippie culture against high modernism, at the peak of the cold war. Oh well, what can I say about the world in that significant moment and location?
   
  1. "The Toronto Sun" was first published in November 1, 1971.
  
  1a. And "The Toronto Sun" immediately (November 1, 1971) started homophobic propaganda, exactly what a proper and tidy society need especially when the Vietnam War is going on full force:
  
  
  2a. And more homophobia from the same day, same newspaper:
  And the newspaper felt very comfortable adding-editing lines of the young women in the photograph. Because why not, right? They are "obviously" not decent girls. If they were decent girls they would have let their husbands or fathers to talk for them and not run down naked in streets but instead wear bras and corsets everyday which cuts back some of the oxygen accessible to their lungs but makes them look prettier. That's why anything can be said/written/published about them. End of discussion. 
  
  2. "The Body Politic"s first issue was November-December 1971. 
  
  
  3. This is so alien, it doesn't resonate at all. - Santa Claus Parade, November 1971
  
  
  4. Underground culture against highway plans: Stop Spidina!
  
  
  5. Highways
  
  
  6. More highways. Around the time Jane Jacobs becomes an urban activist. 
  
  So what do I gather from these archival photos and bits and pieces of information? These clues somehow gives me a scary image of a city and society that is too tidy and too proper for me. The highways, as the forefront of high and mighty modernization scare me and I can academically decode this fear to you - not through psychoanalysis but through urban planning. And this "light-hearted" mockery of the gay moment scares me too, it is not a full force attack - it is physically less dangerous but somehow gives me an image of nervous-rending, as if little people (very little people indeed) rend my fingertips and since I can't get rid of them I need to exchange my sensitivity with the safety and comfort of highways.  
  
  And what does this superficial information provide me about Maria's story? About growing up in 1971, Toronto? (I can't stop thinking about my mother's memories of being in the Camlica Girls Middle and High School in Istanbul at that time. How she watched the snow covering then empty hills of the Anatolian side of Istanbul, how she knew the meanings of the colour coded lightings on top of the Beyazit Tower, informing locals about the weather - red means fog? blue means snow? something like that. Ironically when she eventually graduated from that prison she went to Istanbul University in the historical Beyazit campus, right under the tower. And what does 1971 Toronto mean to me? What can it mean to me at this moment in my life?)