NIGHT OF THE LIVING HOTELS

the radio report on the protests in Ottawa was finally broadcast yesterday morning, a very rewarding experience for guy stevos industries which will hopefully turn out to be awarding if I can get my act together and shop it around. we can’t get enough of it over here, we’re throwing files into the air in anticipation of the next scoop.

we headed down the hudson’s bay trail of coolness that is the queen w. strip, a relatively new environment for the stevos crew. it appears that hipness is traveling even further westward these days. I’d heard about it for so long, and finally, i got to see what all this fuss was about surrounding these new hotel-cum-full-club-experience dotting the edge of the strip.

the drake looked too glitzy for my taste, but they didn’t bat half an eyelash at me when I snuck into a private party for some well needed free dinner in the lounge, although I didn’t dare venture upstairs (you must have THIS much money to enter). i retreated to the drake underground (where they let the children make noise) where stephen marshall of the guerilla news network screened a number of clips and shorts from his work as creative director and chief video artist/activist at GNN. we got us a good one hour report in the works, yes sir. he showed some clips from battleground, his on-the-scene documentary from the frontlines of iraq, as of yet unreleased in theatres but selling well on dvd and looking to hit the festival circuit hard real soon, and this revolution, the film that got him and rosario dawson arrested in new york this summer during the republican national convention.

i ran into the infamous and dark peter m, who after letting marshall know how offended he was by his work, dragged me to the gladstone just down the street, which was a rather happenin’ place filled with the 20-40 crowd, but of course, the select few of them who are so bored with their own neighbourhoods that they have to come all the way to queen and landsdowne to grind with each other on a hump night in what was once the lobby of one of toronto’s more hard-up hotels. oh, but of course, they’ll never cross the tracks past gladstone ave, so the frontier has been drawn. finally, an end to dutch elm disease that is queen st.’s western expansion.

oh well, I pity those poor folks at blow up’s new location, where someone just got stabbed on the weekend and now ceases to be alive.

toronto gets really violent over the holiday season. no one really knows why it happens now instead of other times of they year. we’ve seen two family suicides and three stabbing deaths over the past two weeks. I know, it happens all the time around the world everyday, but having all this shit happen too often in your own city around xmastime just makes it so shitty in a more personal way than anyplace else.