Invention Convention: these kids are sharp!

It was one of those cases of almost being too late to catch a really good deal. Which was a perfect illustration of what the Glenhaven Senior Public School exhibits last Thursday were all about. You have to get ‘em while they’re hot - the early bird gets the worm - strike while the iron is hot - and all those other clichés about being just in time.

I caught the students 15 minutes before the exhibit closed down, so we had to talk fast. But Aniththa Umamahesan, the initial spokesperson at the first booth I approached, would have been doing that anyway. She plunged into her pitch like a natural saleswoman: “Have you ever had trouble cleaning your blackboard? Maybe you haven’t, but I have…” Then she and the other two girls in her group, Ayesha Rahman and Paras Shoaib, gave me a demonstration of their invention, the APA Chalkboard Cleaner, that could clean a blackboard without leaving behind any residue.

These grade seven students, and their schoolmates manning other booths along the food and shopping court beneath Brookfield Place (formerly BCE Place) in downtown Toronto, were part of a competition called the “Invention Convention,” put on specifically for grade seven and eight students by a group called The Learning Partnership. This non-profit organization’s aim is to promote critical thinking through programs that will help kids transition into the work world when school is over, hopefully into careers in science and technology, and also to integrate arts into the school curriculum. The organization’s Investigate! Invent! Innovate! program takes students through the inventive process as they identify needs and create solutions to them, and then through the commercialization process as they learn how to bring their product to market.

Even during my incomplete tour, I could see the work these kids had put into their projects. They were required to conceive a product and company name, do some market research (the chalkboard cleaner booth had a lot of graphs), create marketing materials, a sales slogan and sales pitch, and even design their own business card. They presented their materials in an upbeat yet professional manner, and also dressed as professionally as possible.

Next to the chalkboard cleaner was Corporation Mars Inc’s model of a new vehicle with six special features that made it superior to any other vehicle currently on the road. Beside that booth, MJANN Industries presented a revolutionary new type of oven, the El Ovenino, with internal racks that extended outward and lifted up when you pressed a button, so you’d never have to burn yourself again, reaching in. (Believe me - I’d buy that one. And only $750! What a steal.)

While the booths began to be dismantled all around us, Aniththa and her group briefly explained the process, of narrowing down all the groups in the six classes of grade seven students in their school, until the winning groups were chosen to display their booths at the public venues. (Other displays were taking place in other locations at the same time, such as City Hall.) Just as I wondered if groups that weren’t chosen felt envious of those who were, Aniththa confided that some of them were a little relieved too. It’s a scary thing, doing those presentations below a couple of the most hard-core business buildings in the city, for some of the most high-flying passers-by from the financial world. But that’s one of the things I admired about these kids: they clearly knew their stuff, and made their sales pitches with confidence. If they didn’t feel that confident, they’d learned to hide it well.

I was also impressed, even just glancing at a few other booths, to note that most of them considered environmental factors when conceiving their inventions. The El Ovenino packed a double whammy, in fact. Not only was it to be powered by solar panels, but one of its inventors remarked that you could even help the environment by not having to toss so many bandaids into the garbage. Now, there’s a detail person for you.

These kids did such a good job, I was kicking myself that I didn’t go downstairs earlier than I did, to spend more time with them. Just think. I could’ve gotten in on the ground floor…

 

We can’t get where we’re going till we know where we are

We packed the Gladstone Hotel ballroom Monday night, several hundred of us at tables, in tight rows of chairs, or shoulder to shoulder along the walls, most of us there to do what Torontonians are very prone to do. We were there to talk about ourselves.

Not the way the rest of Canada imagines, though. Sure, we can’t figure out why other Canadians think Toronto is cold, unfriendly, and snobbish when it’s pretty much the exact opposite. So we’re always fretting about that, but not in a “we’re better than you and why don’t you agree” sort of way.

The topic preoccupied us for different reasons this time. At the latest event in Pages Books’ This is Not a Reading Series, Key Porter Books launched Toronto: A City Becoming, an anthology of essays by several prominent Torontonians, edited by David Mcfarlane. What we dearly wanted to know was — “becoming what, exactly?”

As five contributors to the book discussed their ideas about the city, moderated by CBC Radio One’s Jian Ghomeshi, there were as many separate conceptions of Toronto as there were panellists.

One idea that took some unexpected battering was the “city of neighbourhoods” characterization. It’s my most cherished Toronto label, yet Globe and Mail city columnist John Barber finds it meaningless. He asks what city isn’t a “city of neighbourhoods,” and fears the concept is being corrupted along ethnic lines lately. Meanwhile, architecture and urban design professor Michael Awad believes it’s a fragmenting, “adolescent” conception, meaning Toronto needs to grow up and be whole. And architect and urban planner John Van Nostrand points out that there are no “neighbourhoods” north of Eglinton anyway, in the sense most Torontonians mean when they use the word.

That “north of Eglinton/south of Bloor” divide entered the discussion frequently. Linda McQuaig, political author and Toronto Star columnist, decries the growing gap between the inner city rich, and the poor being shoved to the suburbs. Van Nostrand agrees this is a problem, though for structural rather than class-related reasons. Poorer people have always taken root at the more affordable edges, but the city then reached out with services (e.g. streetcar routes). Today, most municipal money goes inward, south of Bloor, and not outward to connect poorer citizens with the wider city.

The panellists concurred that there’s no single idea that sums up Toronto. Awad goes further, deriding the “branding” that the city repeatedly attempts. (What did the ad campaign of two years ago, “Toronto Unlimited,” actually mean?) If there’s any unifying aspect to the city, says Awad, it’s Toronto’s “history of failed Master Plans.” Which, incidentally, is a Good Thing. He agrees with Van Nostrand that we need less grandiose planning, allowing Toronto just to be itself.

What “really” goes on in Toronto, says David Mcfarlane, is barely connected to what visitors see; he views tourist attractions as “impostors.” Of tourists, he says you almost “want to invite them to your home so they don’t have to go to Casa Loma.” He means that the ongoing, day to day richness of Toronto life can’t be encompassed during a short stay. In fact, Mcfarlane reverses the old saying: this is a great place to live, but not to visit.

One moment stood out that perhaps belied the panellists’ belief that Toronto can’t be characterized by a single idea. A questioner from London, England, asked what Toronto contributes to the “human project” that can possibly compare to what London contributes. John Barber responded firmly that nothing like Toronto’s ethnic mix has ever happened in the world before. This is the one city on the planet where that is being worked out, and we will get it right (implication: because we have to, or else), and we will teach the rest of the world how to do it.

Perhaps, as Jian Ghomeshi suggested, Toronto should come to terms with not being and having everything, and recognize that that “cultural product” is what Toronto is ultimately known for. That alone would be a pretty spectacular legacy.

Do I want to read this book? Given the fact that these and many more fascinating perspectives await me in this volume — and given the fact that I’m a Torontonian, and like to read about myself — of course I do.

 

I like the reno, I don’t like the reno, I like the reno, I…

When I decide for sure whether I think the Museum Station platform renovations have turned out to be a good thing or not - I’ll let you know.

One the one hand…everything looks crisp and clean and sharp. It induces the visual equivalent of the “new car smell.” You know what I mean.

On the other hand…why did they pick the muted, rather dull, dusty rose colour for the station walls? Though it’s a nice colour, it just doesn’t seem to go with anything. Not with the red pillars that mimic those from the Forbidden City in Beijing. And certainly not with the huge bright orange “M-U-S-E-U-M” letters with the inscribed black Egyptian heiroglyphs, sunk into the rose walls at the forward end of each platform. Striking though the contrast is.

If the idea was to link this renovation with the Royal Ontario Museum and the Gardiner Museum aboveground, as the designers said it was, it might have made more sense to go with something in silver, black, and grey, to match the new look of both those institutions.

On the other hand…those pillars do look sharp. alternating from the Doric Greek columns, to the Toltec Warrior column, to the Egyptian Osiris with crook and flail, to the First Nation house pillar in the shape of a bear, to the Forbidden City columns. They march in orderly procession down the platform, each one illumined with its own special light, and you really feel like you’re strolling down a corridor in a museum somewhere.

On the other hand…did the designers really have to make most of them dark gray?? The carving is intricate and detailed and clear - but they’re gray! In the original published “artist’s conception,” we were presented with rows of pillars shaped like Egyptian sarcophagi, painted in authentic colours, so that you could have imagined yourself walking through a real pillared hall in an ancient Egyptian temple. Even if the designers did eventually change from all-Egyptian pillars to the variety we see now, would it really have been that much more expensive to paint these columns to resemble their real counterparts? Even though the Doric columns at least are creamy white, the only real colour is the plain red of the Forbidden City pillars - which, as I said, clashes with the dusty rose walls and their big orange letters.

On the other hand…it gave me goosebumps, staring up at that impassive Egyptian face in its striped headdress, arms folded across the upper chest, crook in one hand, flail in the other, with heiroglyphs marching up the other three sides of the column. Or peering at the fierce bear growling from the house pillar, claws raised as though to strike. Or gazing at the other-worldly face of the Toltec warrior (even though he does rather look like he’s about to stick out his tongue). These do really feel like museum pieces themselves.

On the other hand…although the roof above has been fixed and cleaned up and painted a fresh white, I looked at the obvious cement surface and the stark electric lights and thought, “basement ceiling.” Granted, the subway is underground, but it doesn’t need to look like a basement. I have a feeling they were trying to make the ceiling plain enough that it wouldn’t distract from the other artistic elements, but that cement plainness itself was a big distraction for me.

On the other hand…the whole area is fascinating and educational and makes even a short wait for the train much more interesting. In my few minutes there, as several trains went by, there were always lots of people clustered around the big information plaque, learning what each pillar stood for, and what the heiroglyphs said. This, too, carried overtones of a real museum experience.

So in many ways, the designers have achieved their goal of taking the aboveground experience down into the adjoining subway station, either to get incoming museum patrons into the mood, or else to ease outgoing visitors down gently. I just don’t know, yet, if I think it all works.

But on the other hand! We can now say for sure that nobody will be wrapping these pillars in gigantic vinyl toothpaste or toilet paper ads. So that’s one good thing we can agree on already.

(Some of my photos of the renovation can be found here.)

The Christianity that might have been

The problem, you see, was the apostle Paul. At least that’s how Barrie Wilson, Professor Emeritus in Humanities and Religious Studies at York University, views things.

Last night’s book event, sponsored by the University of Toronto Bookstore, might not have had the pizzazz of recent similar events (what, no musicians? no free donuts??), yet Innis Town Hall was packed to the gills, needing extra chairs as people just kept piling in.

All for a book about the first century “Jesus Movement,” the Dead Sea Scrolls, and how the apostle Paul made Jesus “Christian.” Not subjects usually discussed over breakfast or in the elevator, but obviously of massive interest to many people.

Professor Wilson, during an interview with long-time colleague and fellow professor Patrick Gray, addressed three things from his study of Christianity’s early history: 1) how the very human Jesus of the gospels became the pre-existent divine being who was written about, 100 years later; 2) how Christianity separated from Judaism; and 3) why that split resulted in such bitter Christian anti-Semitism.

Part of the answer is to ask another question: which Christianity do you mean? Because there were at least three versions. We know about Gnosticism, and of course are familiar with the Paul-inspired version of today, but not many know about the “Jesus Movement” described in the Dead Sea Scrolls, led by Jesus’s brother James, which included Jesus’s family, the remaining eleven disciples, and people who actually knew and followed Jesus during his lifetime. They believed in keeping Jewish law, visited the Jerusalem Temple regularly, and got along with other religious sects of the time: Essenes, Zealots, and even Pharisees.

Then came Paul, who avoided these believers, who never met Jesus, and whose writings rarely quote or refer to Jesus and his ministry. Paul developed a religion about “the Christ,” a more mystic understanding of a divine being with cosmic, salvational purpose. This was the religion he preached to Gentiles, which had little connection with the actual Jesus or his teachings.

But equally significant was the growth of anti-Semitism in Paul’s writings and those of his followers. As Wilson says, you can trace this development through the documents, decade by decade, starting with Paul’s eagerness to throw off the Torah (Jewish law), and continuing with attacks on Jewish leaders as well as claims that Jews never had a covenant with God to begin with, or that it had been replaced by “the Christ.”

When Emperor Constantine and various church Councils chose which writings to make “official” while imposing Christianity on the empire, it was documents written from the Pauline perspective (even the four canon gospels) that they picked. Wilson did not speculate whether the fact that these men were mostly Gentiles might have determined their choice, but one wonders.

What Wilson does say is that if we view Jesus through the “prism of James” rather than the “prism of Paul,” we discover a very different Jesus.

The most striking element of last night’s interview, and the audience questions afterward, was the friendliness. Professors Gray and Wilson have been disagreeing on last night’s topic for many years, but chuckled about it quite amicably during the interview. Canadian theologian Tom Harpur, who contributed a word in the book, adheres to an even more radical view, that Jesus didn’t even exist, being simply another manifestation of the pagan Mediterranean “dying god” myth. Yet Wilson was equally glad to have Harpur’s endorsement, despite this major disagreement.

I kept waiting for someone in the audience to yell, “Why do you hate God? Repent and be born again!” But it never happened. Apart from the fascinating subject matter, last night’s event demonstrated that there are still rational venues where you can disagree on religious subjects and not need to get upset - let alone want to kill each other.

If that attitude had prevailed at those early church Councils or in the centuries afterward, we might have a very different world today, and indeed a very different Christianity.

Do I want to read this book? As a long-time student of ancient religious history, and after listening to such an amicable discussion, I want to read it very much.