A Chorus of [murmur]s
We first encountered EYE WEEKLY contributor Shawn Micallef in 2004, when our then associate editor (now City editor) Edward Keenan was working on a story about the absence of historical plaques in Toronto. For a city with a then-severe (and still lingering) identity crisis — “world class,” anyone? — our lack of pride and self-confidence seemed tragically mirrored by the failure to trumpet our own significant past on the streets where people could see it; to create what then-EYE WEEKLY editor Bert Archer later called “a city of the imagination” by mythologizing our locations and personalities.
We dialed up Micallef, who was a co-founder of the then-new [murmur] project, which took a more grassroots, less official approach to recording local history — literally recording it, on audio tape, and then making it available in snippets via cellphone to people standing on the street. A pedestrian encountering a [murmur] sign on a hydro pole could phone an number and hear a person tell them a story about the very place they were standing.
Shawn Micallef @ eyeweekly.com
Shawn Micallef writes the Psycho Geography column for Eye Weekly.
