Stuck in T’rono.

15th September. Thanks to the astute manoeuvres of the Pill, we are in Toronto, Canada (T’rono pour les intimes). What to say about this place? At first sight, a run of the mill North American city: monotonous, verging on the hostile. Such cities fare better when observed from afar, most of their energies focus on a skyline; once you get closer they pixelate like a low resolution digital photo and what seemed a dense, multi-layered world turns into flattened spaces: parking lots, motorway-sized roads, strip-malls. If you try to reach the core it will exhaust you in unrewarding marches through displays of neurotic corporate fun and staged ‘cultural diversity’, all contained by a ruthless grid that shrinks your perspective to a tunnel. We keep searching like a vanquished sailor in a labyrinth of fog.

What sets T’rono apart though is the ambition to prove itself a “world class city”, leading to some hilariously pompous experiments. Horrible condos erupt all over the place like stubborn acne; the local architectural fashionistas seem to favour a cross between ''cheaply updated 1980s'' and  ''props in sci-fi B-film" and crown their creations with names like "Couture", "Ice", "Prestige" or "Shangri-La", making the city looks like a mouth with several teeth knocked out and some fake-gold implants

Except for the back alleys, its most honest and attractive side and some intact shabby neighbourhoods still displaying what a French artist visiting the city called "Psycho houses".