It's time to start again

It's time to start again. It's time to change, again. It's time to say goodbye to dear friends and much loved things and places.



After six years of living in Toronto I'm leaving. First for two months on a lake at home in Northern Ontario, then a year in London UK, and then who knows. It's so hard to believe as I sit here in this apartment that I love so much that soon this place will no longer be mine. Not just the apartment, but the city. I won't be able to say "I live in Toronto". I won't be riding my bike to work every day past the Gladstone Hotel and the quirky - if somewhat pretentiously hipster - shops, bars and restaurants of West Queen West. I won't be going to work for a community-based non-profit at the Artscape Wychwood Barns, with a wonderful crew of young people who care to work alongside.

I love Toronto! I love working where there is such a warm feeling of community, with kids running around the park, with a garden outside and with art happening all around me. I love running along the boardwalk and Lake Ontario in the early morning, and doing yoga in the tiny sanctuary space near my house. I love going shopping for beautiful vintage pieces and buying sweet dresses from the independent designers themselves. I love long hot baths in our clawfoot tub. I love this apartment, with its antique stove and chandeliers, stained glass windows, and my tiny but cosy top floor room with its slanted ceilings. I love that our house is old and vine-covered and in the middle of a quiet tree-lined street, hemmed in by the most pulsing of city arteries - King, Queen and Dufferin.


I'll miss my roommates, who keep me sane and make me laugh and let me cry and cry and cry (because I do that, you know). I'll miss my dear friends, who I've hand-picked to trust and love because they are all so genuine, so interesting, so un-judging and just such lovely people. I'll miss the dinner parties, the dancing, the live music, the late night street meat, poutine and shawarma. I'll miss the plays.

I'll miss my place in this place. Maybe that more than anything. I feel that I belong here now, which I didn't always think I would. I feel connected to a community of people that care, and who want to make a difference. Who inspire me every day even though the future does not look good for our world right now.

I have been lucky to work with so many organizations who do such good work and who have such passionate people at the helm. Organizations like Not Far From the Tree, the STOP Community Food Bank, Bells on Bloor, Pleaides Theatre, PEN Canada, Clay and Paper Theatre, Schools Without Borders. I'll miss this feeling of connection, and belonging.

I remember just before moving to Toronto that I had this idealistic vision of what it would be like to live here. I would live in an old apartment with eclectic charm, I would go home at night and put on some jazz, I would grow herbs on my windowsill, have tulips on the table, and cook delicious meals with my roommates. I would know interesting people, and we would have deep and important conversations.

It seems silly looking back on that, it was naive of me I know. But in another way I think that even then I did know what I wanted, what would really make me happy, which I don't think is that common. Happiness is so slippery, so hard to define. I didn't want a lot. I just wanted a place where I belonged, where I felt at home. A place I could make my own, build a life for myself on my terms and around my personal values. And I think I've done that.

The thing is, I don't know if it's one of those things in life you can just check off and say - done. Or if it should be something that once you have it, you should hang on to it?

The Doras

This morning I attended the Dora Mavor Moore Awards press conference, where the nominees for that award for the 2007/2008 season were announced. This season, which is now coming to a close, is the first season that I have been a figure – albeit a small and inconsequential one - in the arts scene in Toronto. But here I am, in this room, at this event, part of it all. What a great feeling. How lucky I feel today. I don’t know everyone in the room, but I know quite a few, even if they wouldn’t recognize me I know them and their contributions, I respect them, admire them and feel a camaraderie with them. I have seen many of the shows that were nominated for awards, and more excitingly have worked with quite a few of the people who put them on, since they were performed on our stages here at the St. Lawrence Centre for the Arts.

What an amazing thing to be part of this community. To be in a room with the actors, dancers, opera singers, producers, directors, playwrights and administrators who make the Toronto performing arts scene hum. Who work together and collaborate and support one another. Who create and perform and support productions that electrify and provoke people, who evoke tears and laughter, fear and anger in their audiences. To see people honoured, like Fiona Reid, the late Richard Bradshaw and Bluma Appel, who have worked in this field for years to not just add to the aesthetic of the city – although that aim also holds its place in this city of concrete and steel – but who are political. They are dreamers, but they are active dreamers, who take it past the questioning to actively challenge the way things are and put forth ideas of how things might be. Who give their life and their personal finances to stage performances that provide this platform for questioning and change because to them it is what must be done. These are artists! Not flakes, not irrational idealists, but pillars of society, no less than lawyers and doctors, who are dedicated against some phenomenal odds to this career choice – no, this life choice, which is important, essential, and very, very difficult for so many reasons. As Ken Gass, Artistic Director of the Factory Theatre, put it, these are people who work to put bread on the table and raise families but who do so with a conscience of what is happening in the rest of the world. Above all, I think, they are free, and that is what the artist in me envies and admires the most. They have done what they wanted to do, and the results are beautiful.

Public Art - An Ode

I was riding up the Yonge subway line to meet my sister at Yonge and Bloor after work today. The car stopped at Wellesley Station and as we waited for the doors to close I looked out onto the platform and noticed that one of the gigantic subway ads was not an ad at all but a work of art. I barged my way through the crowded car, excusing myself as best I could, and ran out the open doors just as the last ding sounded and they closed behind me.

The car pulled away. I stood more or less alone on the platform, looking at a giant photograph. The picture was of a souvenir “Indian Brave” perched in the foreground, the same size as the CN tower way in the background behind it. It was a trick of perspective. The other three photographs were the same. Kitsch souvenirs placed in the foreground of the frame with well-known Torontoscapes in the background, placed in such a way that the former dumbed down the latter. A toy the same size as the lauded CN tower. Familiar landscapes, our urban spaces, made to feel unfamiliar, comedic, insignificant. The writeup nearby had a quote from the artist, Jeff Thomas, about his work: “As a transportation hub the subway station is a perfect example of how urban spaces simultaneously belong to everyone and to no-one. Here is a place where any cultural division –‘us’ versus ‘them’ – is blurred.”

I don’t know how I immediately recognized these images as art over advertisement. Maybe there was an earnestness in them that I couldn’t miss. I do know why seeing these photographs caused me to run frantically out of a subway car onto the platform. I have a thing for public art. I was touched beyond words to see these images here. They mean so much more in a public place than anywhere else. Hundreds, thousands of people mill by these photographs every day. They’re not much different than the advertisements that fill the other poster cases. They’re just images, after all; images that are there to take the viewer out of their present scene and make them think about something else. Only these images are not there to make you buy something, or want something, or feel you lack something. They are there to invoke feeling. The artist feels alone in the city. He is a Native man, caught between the Reserve and the city, caught between the past and the present, caught between racism and acceptance, between wanting to blend in and wanting to be unique, between wanting to have his culture be relevant and celebrated and wanting to not be judged or stereotyped. He is a specific story but his images – these photographs - are everyone. They are every person in the subway station. They are everyone in Toronto. They are isolation amongst the masses. They are the individual subverted by the congregation. They are loss of identity, the feeling of un-belonging, the eerie feeling that in this setting everyone is replaceable. And if this is the case what makes us so sure we really exist at all? We are all overlooked. We all overlook one another.

As Thomas said, the subway station is a perfect place for these images. In these types of spaces, nothing belongs to anyone. In a public urban space, no one individual is responsible; no one individual is accountable. A piece of garbage, a homeless person, a woman crying on the subway, an injured pigeon in a public square. No one has to stop. No one individual needs to stop and help, or care, or even look and notice. The city gives us glorious freedom: freedom from responsibility. It absolves us of our personal accountability to others.

Whenever I think about this societal phenomenon, it reminds me of learning how to use “soft focus” in professor Trisha Lamie’s theatre class. Soft focus was part of the Viewpoints technique. It was incorporated into our movement classes, one of my favourite performance classes of my undergrad. You stand in a group of performers and together you focus on nothing specific until your awareness slackens and you acknowledge your surroundings in a peripheral way only. If any one person begins a movement, the entire group must copy and follow through with it. A group in soft focus moves in flawless unison. A society in soft focus acts in glorious collective irresponsibility. These are natural to humans acting and living in shared spaces. Collective action or collective inaction. Mass movements or mass stillness. The subway cars fill with discarded newspapers and rolling bottles. We are all just kitsch; symbols of people placed beside the CN tower to see which one comes into focus. Which is the background, which is the fore.

Toronto

Sometimes, Toronto is in your face, loud and incoherent:

A man on the subway railing about Canada’s ignorance of Mother Nature, its subsequent impending doom. His improvised speech speckled with obscenities and flying spit.

A Gatorade bottle, yesterday’s paper, garbage bric-a-brac framed by wire mesh of a TTC fence.

Sidewalks outside the Catholic School at Bathurst and Bloor covered in dirty cigarette butts.




Sometimes, Toronto is soft and subtle, revealing hidden beauties:

Streetcar tracks glistening in the rain along Bathurst.

Old houses’ stained glass panes: swallows and peonies lit warmly from within.

University of Toronto footpath imprinted with ghosts of fallen leaves.

Streetlights at Queen and Spadina blinking rhythmically in thick night-time mist, comforting refrains: green, yellow, red. Green, yellow, red.

Green.

Yellow.

Red.

An oldie but goodie

I was just reading through one of my old journals and I came across this poem I wrote, November 11 2004. I really liked it, so decided to post it here.

I know a place
Of mine - a rock - I think
Where water laps
And soothes
Asleep in gentle rays
And loons call out in black
And white so simple
Geen and good
The Earth I touch Her
Know her
Still inside I feel Her
Come to me and hold me
Mother let me crawl inside
And lie there
While the world is
Changing
Melting
Lying
Take my sins
And wash me in your warmth
I know your grass will hurt
My feet but I will walk
Through fields so warm with
Sun and smell of haylofts, sunbeams
Take me back and learn me
Hold me
I forget me
Let me
Be me
Take me
Love me
Leave me
Free me
Free me
Free me
Free me

Under Attack!

There are many reasons I dislike the city. Urban pests now top that list.

You see the thing is that I really have no problem with mice. In fact, I find them to be quite adorable little creatures. When I was little I once saved a poor mouse from the jaws of death (i.e. my sister's cat) and put the little shocked thing in a box until it felt better and then set it free in the forest. Apparently such consideration to their kind was not enough to appease the mouse gods, because I am currently, at 6:15 in the morning, under seige by what seems to be a torrent of little mousy bastards, but could quite possibly be just one particularly nervy little runt.

So why am I awake at 6:15 in the morning, and not only awake but feeling compelled to sit and write out my sorrows on a computer? Because these mice are not only crawling around my room being incredibly noisy, but one actually had the audacity to crawl into my bed - forcing me, yelping in surprise and disgust, out of it. This mouse has crossed the line, I say. CROSSED THE LINE!

To make matters worse, I have had the worst sleep in the history of the world. First there's the fact that I can here the little mouse (or mice) running all around my room, crawling in my garbage can, munching on this and that, leaving me to speculate what millions of things I might find to have been nibbled on in the morning. I told myself to just ignore it and go to sleep, hoping the furry little monkey would find its way to the lovely meal of peanut butter that just happens to be situated in just what I once saved that poor mouse from long ago - the jaws of death (ie a mouse trap).

Comforted by this thought, I had nearly drifted to sleep when I began a shallow dream of two spiders crawling around on a box in my room when I realized that the dream was actually referring to something insect-like crawling on my neck, which presently started some kind of strange vibration dance. I was thus rudely jerked from my near slumber in order to shake the thing off, and watched it go crawling behind my bed as my instincts were not yet intact enough to smash it to smitherenes.

This time it was even harder to go back to sleep, because on top of the little mouse ravishing my room I now had to deal with the thought of this potential spider crawling back onto me and continuing his vibration dance, which in my sleepy state I felt sure was some crazy way of sending spider eggs into my skin from which trillions of tiny spiderbabies would be hatched at a later date. This is an example of why urban legends are dangerous things.

The ironic thing is that I have a few times slept under the stars with only a sleeping bag to protect me from the elements and been less disturbed by creepy crawlies than I have been tonight, in my bed, in a house in a huge city. That is just not fair!

I don't know when I will ever feel safe to return to my bed, but it definitely will not happen this morning. I may as well do some of the pages upon pages of readings I have to do for tomorrow.

Yawn. I hate mice.

Toronto poems

On Bathurst

On Bathurst everything is busy.
I have an apartment here, just down the road from
Shining Honest Ed’s super duper discount store.
We sit on the roof and drink beer
Watch the CN tower blink into the smog
And talk about the philosophy of sex.
We are students, after all.
What else would we do?
Our bottle collection is impressive
And we have mice.

Toronto has many interesting sites to see
A dirty man on the streetcar has steely sneaky eyes
And tells me and two strangers that his friend
Started a boat fire at Ontario Place.
“All the boats are burning”
His eyes are deadpan and we are not sure
Whether to laugh or to believe.

Just North of Ulster there is a parking meter
With a pizza crust shoved in the coin slot
Who thinks of that?