From Montreal

A recent journalistic skirmish occurs between Chicago and Toronto as the latter has overtaken the former in population.  Chicago says--Yes, you now quantitatively beat us, but we qualitatively beat you:  no one sings about you, Toronto; the films shot in your city are set somewhere else.

True.  But the point misses the point; it speaks from the grave of an age.

Chicago, as a city-state in the world's last super-republic of modern civilization, thumps its proud and hairy chest according to established simian and republican laws.  Toronto, as a city-state in the world's first postmodern nation, a nation of text and indistinctions, fashions itself into the new civilization of numbers and disappearance.  Chicago produces yet another musical on the stage of spectacle, Toronto yields Gould, who walks away from the stage into the virtualized purity of the abstracted studio, who camouflages himself in the white bed of the north, the black bath of space.

If Toronto is what i imagine it to be, it will not compete with common American bombast, European ponderosity, or Asian production, but will enter the future with the future's trade, which by no means uses the materials to which we have become accustomed--volitional opinion, staked-out individuality, lit&networked reputation--to assert itself above or over, but uses these same materials (for they are inexorable) to non-assert alongsidedness, inness, throughness.  Toronto has the potential to be the first human settlement founded not on land and assertion, but text and disappearance.

(This is why a figure like R. Ford, who naturally belongs as a sheriff in the swamps of Louisiana, is a brilliant creation of Toronto and should not be dissed but celebrated, viewed in the manner one views television--as a parody of anything human--humoured as a babbling baby in a crib.  We cleverly erect him as a caricature of the Republic:  a post-man, a perfected corpulent blend of amusement and death, barely clinging to the corpse of the last man, an embodiment of our return to our ape-roots, aesthetic primitivism made flesh.  We should vote him as our eternal mayor, encase him in a glass hamburger above Nathan Phillips Square, and pretend to honour and respect him.)

Let Chicago sing its worn tunes. Toronto casts its digital discus past the tired orbits of time.  There is a new exchange.  America remains addicted to its stocks of garbage, patriotism, sentimentality, militarism, the bored game of unsullied virtue, the proud and hairy stage.  Toronto  should shrug at these maudlin qualities and quietly smile as it obliviously walks a new path of nonchalant virtuality, as it walks away from barbaric and republican chests into spaces without present circumference or definition.