Jan 25, 2009

How much is that skull in the window?By Peter GoddardTheStar.com

Once was, the best shows over the holiday season and into the new year weren’t in the theatres but in store windows.

Giddy throngs of shoppers were mesmerized by tin-plated mechanical elves capering in automated holiday spirit. Electric trains snaked through decked-out window displays festooned with gifts. No Disney was needed with these clockwork dioramas around. Their gizmo fakery was as transparent and enjoyable as Tiny Tim’s best wishes.

Miserly retail practices years ago put the kibosh on most window-dressing dazzle. A cowed economy won’t coax it back soon. As for big-box stores in the ‘burbs – like, show me the windows in those monsters. Yet the spirit lives on in a few stores where the art of window dressing has taken on an indie alternative vibe. The leader of this particular pack is Sonic Boom, the used CD/ DVD store at 512 Bloor St. W., near Bathurst St.

“Used” doesn’t do justice to Sonic Boom or its windows, even if the word is cited on the store’s website to describe its merchandise. Even when nearly empty, Boom is alive with sounds of a rapid-fire clack-clack-clack. Some hardcore music fan is flipping furiously through boxes of plastic-covered used CDs, smacking them hard against one another, looking for that impossible-to-find Psychedelic Furs compilation.

This obsessive edge found inside the store in fact starts outside with Boom’s grand street-front windows. It’s not so much there in the ho-ho-ho-themed display now in the window to the east of the main doors. It most certainly is there in the grabby panorama on the other side, depicting a cartoon baby-rising-out-of-the-ooze flanked by frozen art nouveau wavy froth framing a dramatic city vista.

The sun-blasted urban scene in question replicates the cover art for The Chemistry of Common Life, a recent release by Toronto punksters F—ed Up. Bad boys on the local scene for years – we’re talking weird forays into anarchist propaganda and recorded tracks of (oh, the horror of it) people whistling – F—ed Up have seemingly mellowed and maybe grown newly hopeful. Matador Records suggests that Chemistry delves into “the mysteries of birth, death and the origins of life.”

To me, this sounds more like Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. But it sufficiently energized Tim Oakley, the Boom’s chief window designer, to conjure another one of his heralded storefront window spectaculars. In so doing, Oakley keeps alive – if only just barely – any faint hope that the art of the window display has not entirely been forgotten.

Oakley’s just 28 years old, so his only link with the halcyon days of window display in the ’50s and ’60s came through what he’s seen in photographs. But the former English student from Barrie has become something of a local window-display pioneer, crafting album promotion spectacles no record label dared to imagine in these days of diminished promo budgets.

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