TheStoreFront Community story / My testimonial

I’m sorry.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

That’s how I’d like to start. It’s for everyone that I pissed off, everyone that felt confused, interested but unsure how to help. It was a complete mess and I was stuck in it. 

It started off in September 2007 when I chose to take a Think Tank 3 class with Bruce Hinds with just under 10 people in the class. Hey guys, I’m still on the project! It sure was fun diving into a neighbourhood that we didn’t know anything about. Our class project was to propose some ideas for what the Bloorcourt Village BIA could do with their money to improve the area.

Questions: What’s a BIA? What’s in the area? What kind of people live there? What kind of cultures are there? What groups, schools, parks, community centres and festivals are there? That took a few months of research. Walking around. Taking pictures, talking about proposing a Town Hall, something to do in Christie Pits, festivals, storefronts…lots of talking, that’s what ThinkTank classes are, really. Ideas are great! But the class ended and we thought that our pitch to the BIA about taking an empty storefront and transforming its use would be a great way to go about designing for the neighbourhood.

Nothing happend after our proposal. No one gave up a storefront, the BIA didn’t get back to us, the City didn’t find anything for us and we were stuck complaining about how nothing was happening. 

BIG was happening then. They were meeting at Bloor CI to plan their festival for June 2008. We met them in Novemberish I believe. Long story short, our idea for having a festival cooincided with their festival planning. I fell in love with all this neighbourhood stuff, and all became history after that.

I was brought onboard to help BIG out and ended up being the designer for the chaotic, grassroots, community organized, inaugural event that shook Bloor Street like never before in history. I took an Independent Study after the class ended in December and for the 3 months after I took on the mission to get a storefront. I knew I had to move to the area, I was living with my parents in Thornhill and in April 2008 I moved out, lived with 2 roommates off of Craigslist in a house just next to Dufferin Mall.

I managed to talk my way through. This person to the next, Sara Diamond (OCAD preseident) gave me $3000 and I had the key in my had with Rafael Gomez (ThinkTankToronto), Keith Rushton and Bruce Hinds behind it all with me. Robert Markovits liked the whole OCAD name, liked the vision, asked for 1/4 of the rent monthly and off were were to prove something. We approached it institutionally — part of the reason why it didn’t work, caused me stress and ate up my insides. Well, I let it do that to me, and I was hard on myself.

The collaboration with ThinkTankToronto saved me from dying obviously. Ralph gave me a research position to go around with a survey to research Toronto’s BIAs. That let me feed myself and pay my rent, plus some money from the BIG team, I was doing fine on the surviving and just needed to get something to start happening with the space.

Let me tell you how much an empty space can drag you down. It opens the door to so many possibilities that will come at you like maggots and circulate around your head and never leave you. I felt like I was opening up a shop, with no money, no management, no clear idea and no team. I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I picked one day in June and called it “Everything Local” and off I went. 

People started coming, friends started helping, neighbours offered support. It was crazy. It was beautiful. It was intense, it was livid, raw, dirty and full of sweat and tears. The event happened and I had a breakdown. PRESSURE!!! ART is IT! Make it an art space — make it an art gallery — use it for all kinds of things — i can help! tell me what to do — what do you need? — lets use it for film screenings — artist studio — i can do fundraising — i can organize a show etc. etc.

My answer to all: “Thank you so much, yeah, awesome ideas!”

What the hell am I doing? Pick something! Okay, so we picked a graffiti mural removal case, just next door, same property owner as my space, Robert. That became the next event and I took a lot of shit from the City and OCAD for standing up against the removal of a piece that had no right to be removed. It was so political. It got in the Toronto SUN front cover. We did a neighbourhood graffiti walk, had a discussion and connected to all sorts of people in the city supporting legal graffiti art. It was a milestone of TheStoreFront project.

But I still had to deal with: “What does this space do? When are you open? How can i get involved?”

I’m thinking to myself, “I have no fucking clue what I’m getting myself into and it’s driving me insane. I love it and hate it at the same time and I can’t stop going.”

So I kept saying “yes” to everything that came to me. My whole “yes we can” approach was long before I knew Obama was running as president. My “yes” approach was deadly and I schooled myself with it. It taught me more than I could have ever imagined and I’m thankful for every single person that hopped on the plane in this journey. It proved to me that without others, and without collaboration with others and help from others you can never be successful at anything you do. You must speak people’s language, bow to them, work for them, care for them, put yourself aside, and they will do the same. It’s not about money, it’s about sweat and heart. People see through you and if you don’t come from pain, they know you’re not real.

I knew I was the reason why people were coming to me. I wanted to run away though. I didn’t want to be the person. I didn’t want to deal with all the pressure, the expectations, the voices, the suggestions, the emails….but I did. So I had to choose a side of me and I chose “leader”. With my leader side, I attracted “chance” and lots of cool people became my friend. NEVER EVER EVER would I have met these people in an institution, in a workplace, in one field. I realized that the school of life and community is everything that matters. It’s a language of humanity and nothing will make you realize until you throw yourself at it and deal with chaos. Dealing with chaos is how you find your true “self”.

You think I knew what I was doing when I was running around trying to find a storefront? I had no plan, no management, no money, no bodies…I had absolutely nothing but my gut. And when I got there, I figured it out, or “it” figured itself out because it was being shared.

Now ofcourse, I ran into a lot of criticism, confusions, battles and realized the toughest thing to do in life is how to manage “help”. How do you organize people? How do you allow people to do what they do best and support you while they do it? How do you find an organic structure in an inorganic space. How do you deal with politics? How do you know who is your boss?

For 8 months I hustled and talked my way into streams of money to pay the rent. I was certainly not being paid for all my sweat, but then again without Rafael’s support on the back-end, nothing would have happened.

I got an article in the Globe & Mail on Nov. 22. It was really well written. The reporter was amazing and she followed me around and listened to the chaos with me.

A lot of shit went down in 2008. 

On Dec. 2, I held a meeting that jumped to my mind (discussions, people, photos). Got lots of people that I had made connections with in one room and let them take leadership in coming up with ideas on how to maintain this concept. As soon as I did that event, I realized, wow, people care so much and coming together is magic. It’s amazing how much people care about bringing an idea to life. They all got to see eachother and the energy in the room was incredible.

A spark went off and I realized it wasn’t about maintaining that space. It wasn’t about fitting rennovations, shared studio space, organizing events, music fundraisers, projects, ideas for the streetscape, parks, cultures, families, students and entertainment in 957 Bloor West. It was about DESIGNING A SYSTEM that allows for all this to happen. It’s about people connecting with eachother and working together. It’s about business improvement by having people take ownership of place. The BIA is the root to connecting with cities and neighbourhoods need better communication systems to be able to engage in spaces!

It took me 2.5 years of thinking about what the hell to do with the Internet with a design thesis project that popped in my head in 2006, to all come back together in a new form but exactly what I wanted to do in the first place.

So that led me to MEconomist.com and 957 right now is empty. I’m sorry, but 8 months of standing there and taking charge was hard enough and brutal enough for me to deal with, and I hope there are no grudges held against me for not programming more things out of that space. But beleive me I tried to make it sustainable, and I’m sure it can be anything from a gallery, to a multi-use office space, to a cafe, a music venue or any other creative hub. I just cannot do it and I never wanted to worry about something like that. It’s all about MONEY. And getting money to run a space means business. My business is online, cheap and will do all these things that we think is great because it will be a SYSTEM that will aim to do that.

We need to design SYSTEMS. We need INFRASTRUCTURE and we need LEADERSHIP. Most of all, we need patience and a big vision!

2009, I’m coming. I’m almost dead but really I’ve never felt so close to being ALIVE. Get out of school and school yourself everyone. Life is chaos and if you can’t suck it up and live through it, you will be your own worst enemy. People care and you care about people. Just make something that you think will work and see if it does! It’s one big experiment and can make a BIG BANG if you get it right!

 

WITH LOVE

TO ALL OF YOU WHO BELIEVE!

Stay young, stay passionate and go through pain. It’s the best schooling.

Filed under: activism, city, community, education, experience, life

revolution finished

 

GOD and HUMAN

MOTHER and NATURE

CHICKEN and EGG

MAN and ROOSTER

INVENTOR and INNOVATION

can’t go backwards

LIFE is always forward

and equal.

 

be born

re-birth

revolution

sex

acceptance

Filed under: activism, art, city, community, creativity, cycling, design, education, experience, future, humanity, iran, life, love, music, nature, philosophy, poetry, politics, school, student life, sustainability, work

ZEITGEIST – It’s time to wake up!

Forwarded to me by my friend Eg, this is what you should be watching. We need to think for ourselves. We need to “zoom out” as Eg says. We need to wake up and understand that there are people guiding our lives and we don’t even know it.We need to read more BOOKS not NEWSPAPERS! Television is not the truth! Leave it! Stop believing illusions!

This is part 3 of 3 – watch the entire thing when your eyes pop out. watch the full movie

Filed under: city, community, documentary, education, politics

Bloorcourt Village Festival

I am taking a Think Tank 3: Action class here at OCAD with Bruce Hinds in conjuction with Lewis Nicholson’s class working on the same target. Our class’s project is about making a difference in a community and the community we are working with is Bloorcourt in Toronto (from Bloor & Christie to Bloor & Dufferin). The neighbourhood needs revitalization. It is a targeted neighbourhood that needs improvement and a group of city workers / volunteers in the area assemble the Business Improvement Association (BIA) in Toronto. Keith Rushton’s Think Tank class last year got a great deal of recognition for what they did with Ward19 and the solution they presented to the City of Toronto was what has gotten OCAD a lot more involved with the City; they want our thinking to solve their problems.

The third week of class we had members of the BIA come in and we had a panel discussion on what the problems and issues were in the neighbourhood. We then all wrote a response to that meeting and started discussing possibilities for our approach to the project. I must say…this is what I love doing. I love listening, observing, discussing, coming up with ideas, researching then discussing more and coming up with more ideas and loop loop loop. We traveled to the site many times, took photos, and talked some more. The neighbourhood has many great qualities to it: 3 parks (one of which is Christie Pits: one of the largest most active parks in the city), local residential community, lots of ethnically authentic stores and restaurants, lots of diversity, full of artists and inarguably full of potential. The downsides are just like other downsides of a neighbourhood in demise which includes empty storefronts, drug dealing, bad lighting, no visual interest…basically nothing that really puts an identity to the neighbourhood to make it a destination.

We are about to change all of that.

We had a meeting that we had prepared a presentation for yesterday first with the City in the morning and then with the BIA in the evening. They both went exceptionally well and the room was filled with so much energy and excitement.

We ended the presentation with this:

“We propose to design a plan for holding a (possibly annual) festival event using the street and Christie Pits Park. The festival’s engagements and activities will be entirely based on the collaborations we make with local places including highschools, elementary schools, community centres, restaurants as well as current and former residents.

We intend to hold discussions, create excitement, document submitted ideas and creative input, and feature the results in a gallery/studio within Bloorcourt to encourage the revitalization of the neighbourhood and establish a genuine and visible vision
with a unified identity for the BIA of Bloorcourt Village.”

They are so excited and so are we. This is going to be such a fun project and you bet it’s going to hit the press; and it’s going to take it by storm.

Watch out OCAD and Toronto…here comes Think Tank.

Filed under: activism, art, bloorcourt, city, community, creativity, design, humanity, life, photography, school, student life

lifecycle

One day in the early months of last year, when I was in Toronto, I decided I wanted to buy a bicycle. Why? I still can’t remember exactly how I got into it, but after I built on the momentum, a serious cyclist friend helped me pick out my five hundred dollar Trek3900 bike — the cheapest bike in the shop. I bought it from Duke’s Cycle on Queen West. We hopped around a few places but they were all pretty much out of my range. We went back, I spent all my investments for a vehicle and rode my killer twenty four speed mountain bike from the shop to my (now former) house. My friend wished me a safe trip and I was on my way uphill along Bathurst street for a ten mile hike… for the first time. Honestly, it really wasn’t that bad. I think I was sore for the next couple days but I really loved it. I traveled from home to downtown roundtrip, I’d say ten to fifteen times that summer. I found a bike path too, so I wasn’t on the dirty Bathurst street any more. There aren’t enough bike lanes in Toronto, what’s up with that? I’m glad people inspected all the rouds and found paths for cyclists, otherwise you have to find your way beside cars and the angry drivers.

So, cycling became my new sport. It was since I had left Iran that I hadn’t been on a bicycle. In Iran — oh my goodness, I don’t want to get to my childhood memories because I’ll cry — it was heaven. I had a wonderful childhood amongst nature, fruits and vegetables, large swimming pool and large family gatherings that will only exist in all our memories and reveal their documented beauty through photographs. Back there, I biked a lot, that was the point I was trying to get at.

I went down to Sarasota Florida (as some of you may know or have noticed) for a mobility/exchange program through my school in Toronto Canada. I lived there for five months without knowing a living soul. I met my roommate through craigslist on the phone and it turned out to be one of the most amazing experiences in my life. Anyway, again, the point is, I bought a bicycle the second day from a non-profit bike shop called the Alliance for Responsible Transportation (A.R.T). It was forty five dollars. I went everywhere with it. Biked to Lido Beach the first week, biked all around Sarasota and biked til I dropped. Florida is just natureful. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I loved the bird sounds, the palm trees, the aloe veras, the customized colourful houses and their mailboxes, and I absolutely loved the weather.

Getting back on track, so, now I’m here in Chicago doing an internship at samatamason; if you read the last post, you’ll know the details about my daily roundabouts, and if you read even before that you’ll know where I got it from.

The difference between my bike now and my previous two bikes, is that it’s a road bike. It has thin tires and you lean forward — it works your triceps a lot. It was quite a drastic difference between my other bikes. It’s really easy to pedal hands free with my Trek bike because the steering head doesn’t move and you can feel that it’s stirdy and secure. With this bike I couldn’t do it. It was way too risky and every time I took one hand off and then tried the other, I’d immediately go off balance and grabbed on to the steel. Must be the bike, I thought. Well, I’m going to write about the moral of the story after this entry, just so I can get all my thoughts together.

Filed under: city, cycling, experience, life, public transportation

cycling is life

I wake up every morning to the sound of my twenty dollar pre-paid Cingular phone’s alarm that I bought during my first week here in Chicago at either six or six thirty in the morning (depending on whether I catch the seven sixteen train or the eight oh seven train). I get up and with the time I have before I hop on my bicycle — which is the reason why I’m writing this post — I do some or all of the following (depending on whether I feel like it or if I have enough time to do it):

• take a shower
• make a salad for lunch
• eat breakfast (either toast and jam or cereal)
• check emails
• put contacts on
• brush teeth
• put on some clothes (okay I do this everyday)
• put on helmet (this is new)
• out the door at least twelve to thirteen minutes before the train arrives

I ride my sixty dollar bike for five to seven minutes from my place that I’m sharing with my roommate — who I barely see at home — who works at samatamason after being an intern like me last year. The Metra railway is outstanding. I have to say I am very proud of Chicago.

There are a lot of interesting, educational and just plain fun things to do in Northeast Illinois and Metra can get you where you want to go. The 495-mile Metra system serves 230 stations in the counties of Cook, DuPage, Lake, Will, McHenry and Kane.
On Metra you can reach Chicago’s beautiful lakefront, museums, zoos, sporting events, shops and restaurants, concerts, special events, schools and colleges as well as quaint, historic suburbs and small towns. In some cases, Metra can take you practically to the front door – in other cases, your destination is easily in reach via Pace buses, and/or CTA buses and trains. -metrarail.com (their website design does not do them justice)

I get on the Milwaukee West Line train at Western with my bike and lock it up in the designated area. The conductor comes around at every stop and yells out, “TICKETS!” for the new passengers to pay their distance-dependent fare. So, for me from Western to Elgin is five dollars and thirty cents for one way, which is the most you’d pay on that line. The system is pretty old-skool but it works. He comes around takes your cash and change, and gives you back change if you need it using his chain belt that has coins from nickels to quarters released individually with one force, like pushing a button. Then he punches the ticket paper a few times with some type of paper puncher that doesn’t actually leave bits of paper anywhere; I still don’t know what it means when I look at it. For the month of July I bought a pass for one hundred and thirty nine dollars which saves me sixty dollars a month. This pass looks like a coupon and is given to you like a coupon, as in, it’s a flimsy small piece of paper, mind you designed very badly. I sit and either sleep, or take out a book (or do some of both) for one hour where I get off at Elgin.

I could not be any more privileged to have a bike trail right beside the station that ends off right beside the studio. The trail is five miles along the Fox River without any sight of cars or buildings or noises or trucks honking at you for reasons I could only get more annoyed by. It’s a peaceful, meditative, relaxing, muscle-toning ride of at least twenty five minutes of pedalling. It is through this daily cycling that I learn about life, yet again, through my mind, self and people.

Filed under: city, cycling, life

Taste of Chicago

I went downtown to check out this annual Taste of Chicago festival that’s supposed to be THE event of the year. Toronto, I miss you.
I have to say, Toronto festivals are a lot cooler than this event. There actually IS diversity and culture and the vibe is entirely different than an American setting. You clearly KNOW that you’re in America. Where are all the East Indians, West Indians, Chinese, Korean, Philipino, African, European, Iranian, Arabs and so on and so on? You never ask yourself that when you’re in Toronto because it’s so embedded in everyday life that you see people of completely different cultures together…EVERYWHERE! Toronto = Multiculturalism to an unprecedented level, I think…in the world.

I personally disliked it the 20 minute experience. Ethnic food? Yea right! Ethnic, maybe the hamburgers and fries and fried crap might be ethinic to Americans. I saw a Persian/American cuisine booth, and I went up to it all excited that I’m going to see some Iranians. Nope. They were hispanic, white or black, who were working there. Hummous? Hummous isn’t Iranian! I looked at them with disgust. That’s not culture to me. Plus it was so overly expensive! They make you buy tickets 11 for 7 bucks and if you want to get anything for a decent size it’s 5 tickets and a small “taste portion” which is barely anything, is 3 tickets. I ended up getting two small samosas and a serving of 6 dumplings from a thai and an arab booth. They weren’t bad, but I wouldn’t say they were worth the experience. Too many people just walking around through all these stupid booths that sell crap to you, from best buy and phone companies and other consumerist culture crap that you can’t escape anywhere you go.

Wow, I sounded bitter there. It’s probably a much different experience if you go with your family and sit on the lawn and jam to some country music. I think it was because I went alone and expected something else and couldn’t handle it, so I left and went off to the River North Gallery District, which was absolutely amazing. I got MY taste of Chicago and I took lots of pictures. Check my Flickr out.

Chicago’s art community is definately amazing. I’m really starting to like going to galleries and seeing art. I feel really connected to it. I think I need to start getting more in touch with my actual artistic side and embracing my expressive abilities through colour, texture, and form. It’s something I never really contentrated one all throughout highschool and thus far in college. But going to galleries really brings back a feeling, a connection, an emotional response. I think I’ve really grown since high school, which seems like yesterday. I began with art, and that’s why I’m here. I never got too much into expressive, contemporary and modern art at a young age. You just don’t understand it at that age. But once you go through four years of school and throw yourself in the art and design culture, you change and you grow. You really begin to value deeper things in life.

I do really like Chicago though. The city is beautiful. The architecture is mesmorizing and it’s a great place to live, I think, in America.

Filed under: city

Exploring Chicago

What a beautiful hike to Downtown Chicago I had.

First of all, I must say Chicago is a brilliant city. I have never seen so many bicycles and cyclists in my life! Even at 11:00 p.m. there are people on the street with their street bikes riding around. It’s such a beautiful thing! Chicago embraces bicycle culture. When I went towards Lake Michigan (which is where the skyscraper beauty of the city is clear to see) there were bike rentals, bike taxis, bike routes, bike trails, bike globes, bike buddies, bike bodies, bike life…everything was about bicycles! It was amazing.

The subway was really great too, and pretty cheap. Chicago is a larger city than Toronto so the subway system is built for a larger population and encourages public transportation because of how much traffic there are on the streets. I like Chicago better than New York or Toronto, because it fits just in the middle. City life, healthy people, trendy, hip, big, variety, environmentally conscious, and lots and lots of bicycles EVERYWHERE! It certainly doesn’t beat Florida and it’s beaches for relaxation, but it’s more ME and more of a place I would actually consider LIVING not just temporarily.

I haven’t started work yet. I start next week. I have a week to go around and see Chicago and relax because I will not have a chance to do that starting next week. I’m still debating whether I should buy a bicycle or not for these next couple of months. To go to work, I need to take a train for 1.5 hours. So, I don’t know how much I would be using it.

I love the stores here, the shops, the diversity of people, the place I’m staying at, my roommate…everything seems to fit really well so far.

Lets see what else I discover by the end of the week.

Filed under: city