Table of Contents
Letter from the Editor
Visualizing the night
On the night shift
By night in Santiago
Taking the blue night
Lighting the candles
Basement dancefloors and nonstop drumming
Good fathers, bad characters
Dream diaries
Harsh, lovely, perfect
Capturing darkness
Playing the Dream
The Science of Dreams
The warning lights
Beware of the murder bar
Getting home safe
A brief history of Toronto streetlamps
Letter from the Editor
A few nights ago I took a standardized test. Stepping out of the test center after hours spent hunched in a cubicle, the city looked strange. Tall buildings were lit up and screens were flashing in front of television studios, but at 9.30 pm the streets were almost empty. All this seemed to blur past me as I walked quickly, trying to clear my head. I called friends, looking for some sort of distraction or release. But everyone was busy or about to catch up on lost sleep.
So I ended up by myself at a Korean 24-hour restaurant, eating a mackerel and more kimchi than any person should consume in a single sitting. At the table next to me a group of effortlessly cool friends were chatting boisterously, one of them tending to a grill laden with pork belly, his bleached-blond hair hidden beneath a acid-green toque. A few tables over, a few ESL students were eating soup and practicing their English with each other. Neighborhood old-timers sat down and ordered huge spreads of food, while bleary-eyed youngsters walked in wearing flip-flops, casually ignoring the chill of the night. I was alone, but sitting in the welcoming, noisy restaurant I somehow felt included.
In the end it was a relaxed night, something all too rare during the vortex that is magazine production. But the variety that night can encompass is partially why we chose it as our magazine theme: an evening can be good, bad, or lead you somewhere completely unexpected. There are nights where you feel lost, dropped into a completely foreign, turbulent city, as Graeme Myers discovered in Santiago. Other nights you’re able to find comfort in the little things, like the diner coffee that Ethan Chiel wandered the city searching for. During the night you can dream, or even go to work. Nights have the potential to be gloomy and dangerous, but they can also be a time of wonder and captivating mystery. In the dark the past can feel strangely more accessible, like it did for Elizabeth Haq as she looked back at her father’s motorcycling days in 1970s Pakistan.
For this magazine we wanted to capture all the unique aspects of night. Here’s hoping it will inspire you to wander down alleys, walk into restaurants at 2 am, and zip along roads through the hills, all the way to some amazing nights of your own.
Simon Frank,
Varsity Magazine Editor, 2012-2013
Visualizing the night
What is the essence of night, and how can you visually represent it? The design team had to tackle this question to shape the identity of this issue. It’s tricky to select a palette of colours and a set of motifs to play with that will link an urban diner in Toronto with nighttime in Santiago, and the midnight hijinks of a motorcycle gang in Pakistan.
Our decision was heavily influenced by our geography. The lights of the cosmopolitan centre in which we work and study inspired the issue’s colour scheme. In the city, the dark hues of blue and purple in the night sky complement the rich orange of headlights and street lamps, while pink and green streaks of neon pierce through the darkness. Filmore’s, an iconic downtown gentleman’s club, while rough around the edges, nicely embodies this theme. We played with its famous sign, and made our mark on some recognizable real estate.
Inside, our table of contents plays with the lunar phases — each of this issue’s 24 pages is paired with one of these phases. Each article’s sign-off note is a reflection of your progress through the phases of the issue.
The magazines offer an opportunity to bend the rules, to offer something different both visually and in terms of content. What you see on these pages is our effort to do that — if only for the night.
The Design Team
