National Post

Calum Marsh on a form of art poised to disappear: neon signs.

TANJA-TIZIANA IS GONNA SET YOUR GLASS TUBING ON FIRE,

- Calum Marsh

For nearly 50 years the great gleaming neon sign that crowned the Sam the Record Man storefront on Yonge Street had a strong claim on being the most distinctiv­e landmark in Toronto.

What a sign! 1,500 feet of neon tubing, more than a quarter-mile of the stuff, looped into a pair of huge resplenden­t circles, like luminous vinyl records, their electric-blue light set to flicker on and off round-the-clock, to simulate the spinning of a turntable. In the centre of those azure LPs, in blazing scarlet: “THAT’S ENTERTAINM­ENT,” like the Band Wagon song. The sign stood 36 feet high and 49 feet wide. It could be seen twenty blocks away, at all hours — a dazzling beacon, a cultural guiding light.

Tanja- Tiziana, in her new coffee-table photo book Buzzing Lights: The Fading Neon Landscape of North America, finds this Yonge Street landmark in a rather less dazzling state. Colossal it still looms in Tiziana’s photo, hardly less the marvel against a gunmetal overcast sky. But it’s burnt- out, shut down, fried and decommissi­oned — as it was officially, lamentably, in 2008, just one year shy of its halfcenten­ary.

Today, the Sam the Record Man sign languishes in a kind of bureaucrat­ic purgatory, the property ( and responsibi­lity) of Ryerson University, who were obliged to install it on the facade of the opulent Student Learning Centre they erected in the record store’s place but ultimately never did. ( The sign wasn’t compatible with the Learning Centre’s modernist character, the university claimed.) It is now undergoing restoratio­n, apparently, and will one day end up atop the nearby Toronto Public Health building on Victoria street, overlookin­g Yonge- Dundas square. Nobody can say when that might be.

“That sign …” Tiziana says wistfully, shaking her head. “I used to be in Toronto when that sign was still up. When it was lit up and spinning it looked incredible. A place like Sam’s, it wasn’t just a business. It was an entity. It was iconic. It’s not just that it was a cool store with a cool sign. You should respect the space and what went on there — how it defined that strip of Yonge Street for decades.”

The city made an effort to keep the sign intact and find another home for it in the neighbourh­ood; better the top of the Toronto Public Health building than the bottom of the landfill, after all. But this sort of preservati­on is by design a half-measure: what remains of the history will be fundamenta­lly changed — in this case incontesta­bly for the worse. “The idea of putting that sign on top of a building like that just kills its awesomenes­s,” Tiziana insists. “Its awesomenes­s in a literal sense.”

Tiziana is uniquely qualified to make such a judgment.

The talented photograph­er — by day she’s responsibl­e for all those wonderful Now Magazine covers — has spent the last decade carving out a niche as North America’s premiere neon chronicler. She’s shot motels in Arizona, theatres in Kansas, club marquees in Portland, cinemas in North Carolina, retro diners in New York. She’s shot every lurid glimmering eyesore you can imagine in Las Vegas, and she’s scoured the Canadian countrysid­e for neon relics you’d never believe we still had. All this she immortaliz­ed in the form of an all- things- neon blog — by some measure the most beautiful time sink you’ll lose an afternoon to if you aren’t careful. The blog made Tiziana the de facto neon expert, and that expertise brought more and more neon her way. “People kept contacting me,” she says. “’Oh, you’re the neon girl? There’s this great sign down here near me. You should photograph it!’”

And photograph it she very often did. This September Tiziana collected a decade’s worth of neon shots, culled the stockpile to its essentials, and self-published them as an Indiegogo- funded photo book: 176 colour pages, a staggering anthology and a rich history of a curious form.

Much of what Tiziana has documented here — so many of these marquees, storefront advertisem­ents, names in bright light — is doomed to the scrap heap, even if only figurative­ly. She nurses grudges over memorable casualties like the massive neon palm tree that used to soar up over the El Mocambo on Spadina.

“It showed up on f—ing eBay,” she snaps. “The El Mocambo palm tree! Going to the highest bidder!” There’s a marvellous shot of the El palm in Buzzing Lights. Between that and the shot of the Sam’s sign, the book is already a document of a Toronto of the past.

“Las Vegas’ sign-makers work so far out beyond the frontiers of convention­al studio art that they have no names themselves for the forms they create,” Tom Wolfe wrote of the city’s neon fixtures in the 1960s, when this stuff seemed radically new. “Signs have become the architectu­re of Las Vegas, and the most whimsical, Yale-seminar-frenzied devices of the two late geniuses of Baroque Modern, Frank Lloyd Wright and Eero Saarinen, seem rather stuffy business, like a jest at a faculty meeting, compared to it.”

Wolfe overstated the artistic innovation­s of the neon visionarie­s for comic effect, of course. But it does seem in retrospect that the novelty of the style was possessed of merit both aesthetic and historical. Neon signs were decidedly important — and yet because they were so often dismissed as vulgar kitsch, hardly anyone balks when they vanish. What Tiziana’s captured with this book is a form of art that’s poised to disappear.

SAM THE RECORD MAN LANGUISHES (IN A) BUREAUCRAT­IC PURGATORY.

 ??  ?? Toronto photograph­er Tanja-Tiziana fell in love with the vanishing glory of neon. She’s preserved the best of the art form in a new photo book.
Toronto photograph­er Tanja-Tiziana fell in love with the vanishing glory of neon. She’s preserved the best of the art form in a new photo book.
 ?? HANDOUT ?? “A place like Sam’s, it wasn’t just a business,” writes Canadian artist Tanja-Tiziana. “It was an entity. It was iconic. It’s not just that it was a cool store with a cool sign. You should respect the space and what went on there — how it defined that...
HANDOUT “A place like Sam’s, it wasn’t just a business,” writes Canadian artist Tanja-Tiziana. “It was an entity. It was iconic. It’s not just that it was a cool store with a cool sign. You should respect the space and what went on there — how it defined that...

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