About a year ago I got a call from the Toronto writer Shawn Micallef. Turns out Shawn was sounding me out to see if I might be interested in editing/lead blogging an online version of Spacing that was being planned for Ottawa. I was honoured by the suggestion, and a few weeks later I took him up on the offer. I’ve loved every minute of working with Spacing Ottawa, and I’m still grateful to Shawn for thinking of me. I first knew Shawn from his association with [murmur]; he helped a group I was with to set up a murmur-inspired project in Hintbonburg. I came to know that Shawn also wrote a column on pyschogeograpy for Eye Weekly magazine. The best of those columns, expanded, and joined with new writing by Shawn and original illustrations by Marlena Zuber, have been turned into a book launched last month, called “Stroll”.

But what the hell is “psychogeography”, you might well ask? Well, the Wikipedia entry is here, but for now the first paragraph will do:

“Psychogeography was defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as “the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals.” Another definition is “a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities…just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape.”

In Shawn’s case we can supplement that definition with the Amazon blurb from “Stroll” :

“Eye Weekly columnist Shawn Micallef has been examining Toronto’s architecture for many years, weaving historical information on its buildings and their architects with expansive ambulatory narratives about the neighbourhoods in which these buildings exist [Micallef’s writings] situate Toronto’s buildings in living, breathing detail, and tell us more about the people who use them, how it feels to be exploring them in the middle of the night and the unintended ways in which they’re evolving.”

What I like best the about wonderfully subjective nature of psychogeography (and I don’t buy Debord’s “precise laws” business for a second ) is how it works best when something interesting from the practitioner is brought into the mix. Shawn is interesting. He is quietly but firmly of his own opinion on many matters, and over time I’ve noticed that he is a staunch defender of well-designed brutalism, is appalled by the practice of killing animals for meat, is bored rigid by foodies, believes that there is far too much pissing and moaning about snow and winter (which he loves), is completely unimpressed by fancy cycling wear, is proud to be from Windsor, and a dozen of other things besides. They all are available to him as he forms his psychogeographic observations, and each helps to bring the reader far closer to an exact spot on Shawn’s mental map, which is the location that really counts.

Of course, such a map is an ever-changing matrix, and charting it anew is a daily project. So how is that done? Well, one way Shawn does it with his twitter feed, often accompanied by a photo snapped from his phone, and often after dark. When others are getting ready to turn in, Shawn’s energy level seems to peak, and he heads out the door and starts to walk, or pedal. Over the years it will have been thousands of night-time kilometers he has paced off, mostly through the streets of Toronto - but also in whatever city he finds himself it - and about 12 months ago he started to use twitter to document the moments when what he sees sparks an observation he wants to record. Then, in 140 characters or less, a concise stream of association is produced and shared with his followers.

I could talk all day about why I think Shawn’s photo tweets are so great, but at a certain point it’s best just to show you what I mean. So, I collected some of my favourite photos into a slideshow, with the accompanying tweets as captions. Some of the moments are extraordinary in themselves, as when he was among the first to arrive at night-time fire at Honest Ed’s, but as you’ll see, most often it the intersection of the person with the place that make the story. His photo tweets are so good they inspire me to post more of my own, even if I can’t match his artistry. Shawn, if you ever read this — apologies for the music — I know it’s boomer, from before your time. But driving along Lake Shore Boulevard in the early 1980s, the tape deck playing on a warm summer night, 25 years before twitter, and before I learned to walk through a city; that’s where my own Toronto associations start in.

It’s been years since the online content of the CBC news site had a moderated comment section, and boy does it ever show. Right-wing racists across the country now know that they can throw up any bile they want, and the CBC site will publish it with no questions asked.

In our public broadcaster’s comment section, you can call First Nations people any names you like, suggest that any one who dies at the hands of police or jail authorities deserves it, say perfectly vile things about gay people and AIDS, suggest all Muslim people are terrorists, or post any other hate-filled rant you want to share with your set of far-right loons.

These sociopaths try to out-do each other with “final solution” type answers to any given problem; just about every topic quickly resolves to someone quickly suggesting that certain people need to be executed, often en masse. Torturing the victims before killing them is not infrequently advocated.

As might be expected given this state of affairs, most moderate or left voices have long since abandoned the CBC comment section. Of course, they pay taxes too, but the fact that they typically choose to frame their remarks with respect for other groups in society counts for nothing with the administrators of CBC site, who have taken a Lord of the Flies approach in allowing the loudest bullies with the simplest answers to rule the roost.

They will take down an comment that is complained about, if it’s vicious enough, but the reader has to draw it to the CBC’s attention first.

They thing is, the CBC is going to need all the sympathy it can muster from the great moderate centre of Canadian public opinion if it’s going to survive a few more years of Harper and still look anything like a semblance of itself at the end of it.

A web presence that doesn’t employ a discussion component that makes most Canadians turn away in disgust would be a good start.