Nothing to say...

...but I'll post anyway, 'cause I know if I don't soon, I'll start hearing about it.

I've been sickly of late, nothing major, just sort of congested and tired. I spent pretty much all weekend in bed, as a result, with only a brief foray on Saturday to engage our downstairs neighbour in an altercation. Faithful readers will recall the characters of Ali and Ali, shoe purveyors, from an earlier cameo. Well, Ali 1 (aka Fat Ali) continues to labour under the delusion that music played loudly and bassfully will lend an impression of attractiveness to his egregious footwear offerings — and trust me, this is not merely sour grape-juice, they are egregious: I've seen Eastern European call-girls wrinkle their noses. Anyway, feeling more than usually put-upon in my unwell state, I marched my elevated goat down to his door and requested that he adjust his levels. And to my amazement, he refused. A somewhat clumsy argument ensued, marred equally by his imperfect grasp of the English language as by my imperfect comprehension of his version thereof. Little in the way of entente was achieved, an interest in involving the slum-, I mean landlord in all future dealings being the one point on which we were in agreement. I mustered what sniffling dignity I could, and exited.

Fortunately I care little for the fallout as we are moving — hooray! We finally found a place downtown that we can afford and that would not require a complete abandonment of our standards. It's actually fairly nice, parquet flooring notwithstanding, but the best thing will be its location: five minutes walk from Thom's work, a ten-minute bike-ride from mine, and a few short blocks from St. Lawrence Market and the waterfront. And best of all, we get to see the (wide) back of our dismal landlady. I suppose I'll miss the pierogies and the paczkies, and the long summer nights smoking non-filters with Jerzy and the boys under the brass pope outside the Catholic Credit Union...good times, but it's time to move on.

Debrief

I suspect I should feel sufficiently cowed this morning to delete the previous post, but that would be censorship of a kind — of my true character. Yesterday, at about 4:00 p.m., we received a phone call from our dinner guest of the previous evening. He had just checked himself out of the emergency room. Yes, taking a cab home at about 1:30 a.m., the pain had become insupportable and he diverted the cab to Mount Sinai Hospital. They informed him, after placing him on a morphine drip and doing a battery of tests, that he had a case of aggravated gallstones that would require surgical attention sometime in near future. Allegedly the doctor said it had nothing to do with my cuisine, but in my mind the connection is irresistible. Was it the pot-roast, the rice-flour soda bread, the gluten-free berry pie — or was it, all together, a recipe for murder?

In other news, to reward Canadians for having to wait months to see delayed broadcasts of the addictive drivel Project Runway, we have been given our very own version, Project Runway Canada — hosted by none other than Iman. After some initial awkwardness (she seemed at first like a second-rate actress playing a supermodel), she settled into what I suspect is her natural tone of ruthless disdain, like a panther recently awoken from a nap. Even her compliments, delivered in a velvety baritone, sound like veiled threats. The locks of hair on one of the final two contestants before elimination were literally trembling under her gaze! I anticipate a trail of tattered mediocre prêt-à-porter, and maybe even a little blood, in her languid wake.

What if...

A scenario for you: You invite someone over for dinner, serve them a meal you've spent all day preparing, of which they consume three gusty helpings. Sometime between the main course and dessert, however, your guest begins complaining of gastric discomfort, and begins belching to relieve it. Several belches a minute. Not swallowed discreet belches, either, but open-mouthed windy ones. Fine. You're friends and adults, not to mention males, who of course are predisposed in your undifferentiated masses to find irresistible humour in stomach-gases. OK. The guest starts to wince in a less-than-humourous manner, and adjourns to the bathroom. Some twenty minutes later, your guest emerges; you suggest, in your hospitable way, that he lie down, and your own bed being the only bed in the house, you suggest he do so there. An hour passes. The clock strikes midnight; your guest shows no signs of rising. Your partner, unconcerned with these developments, proceeds to watch a documentary on the ear-bleeding musical stylings of Bob Dylan. You are relegated to the kitchen where you have spent the entire day anyway. Hot acid fury drips down your brain...

Man down

I am writing this from our kitchen table, despite the fact it is 4:00 p.m. on a Wednesday afternoon. Yesterday morning, hubris overcame reason: rain notwithstanding, I chose to ride my bicycle to work. Outfitted with a slicker, I imagined all risks had been covered. Wrong. I forgot the advice of many a seasoned Torontonian bike-rider to navigate with the greatest of prudence the streetcar tracks that crisscross our city, and blithely took a downhill swipe at the most diabolical tangle of them, thinking to outrun a row of approaching cars. True to legend, tracks become slick as ice in the rain and will suck any incautious bicycle tire without ruth into their vortex. Down went I, hip-first, sliding in a spectacular diagonal across the intersection. Cars mercifully braked and their drivers paused expressionlessly while I gathered myself, my tangled bike and the shredded vestiges of my dignity from the rain-swept tarmac and hobbled to the corner. I can only imagine I was sort of numbed by shock and pain and rain, because after a brief inspection of the bike, I remounted and continued my journey to work, believing myself only superficially affected by the fall. But my concern slowly mounted in proportion to the increase of pain in my hip-joint. By the time I got to work, I could barely walk. It was fairly pathetic. I did a disposable ice-pack from our first-aid kit, which brought brief relief, but soon it became clear that I was quite helpless and very possibly facing a fracture or at the least a sprain. So home I came, hobbling at an excruciating pace up and down the staircases of the public transport system, too cheap (yes, me!) to shell out 25 bones for a cab.

It was a painful night, relieved by painkillers and cold-packs, and this morning I decided the attempt to get to work would probably do even further damage. So here I sit, never far from our institutional-grade walking-cane left over from T's bouts with sciatica in the early oughts, watching AbFab clips on YouTube and feeling the cool wave of laughter therapy wash my aching limbs.

To alleviate concern, I am on the mend; it can't have been a fracture or even a sprain, as I am walking mostly without pain. I imagine another day or two and it will be fine. It better be as I expect to get back on the bike tomorrow. I know, have I gone mad? Who is this person? Yatsu expressed some concern recently about the perils of my biking in the city, and I've thought about it a bit since then. There's an undeniable aspect of defiance, of independence, of daring fate to act. I wouldn't call it a death wish; quite the opposite; a life wish. For a person who has allowed fear to guide so many of his decisions, it feels great to conquer that fear in at least this one arena. It's not bungee-jumping or alligator-wrestling, no, but it keeps the small warrior inside me alive, if just slightly bruised.

Nuit Blah

On Saturday night, I learned the secret that has tickled the corners of Mona Lisa's mouth for the past few decades: people, when gathered in their droves, ruin art.

Nuit Blanche is billed as an "all-night art party" - hundreds of artists take over public spaces with installation art and the public comes to ogle from 7:00 p.m. to sunrise. What a great idea, huh? Emphasis on "idea" - just as the emphasis in the event tagline ought to be on "party". I am inclined to be charitable (in a patronizing, supercilious sort of way) to the hordes of wide-eyed suburbanites and stoned adolescents that flooded the streets of Toronto: perhaps it was a hunger for art that drew them out. I thought that at first, courting death on my bicycle, as I set out for the night. But one hour later, the only "art" I had seen was a homeless gentleman playing bones on a city trashcan. What "art" there was was either obliterated by the crowds or by the artist's concern to create something more likely to entertain, or mystify, rather than actually provoke thought or introspection or debate. What resulted was mayhem, at best a freshman Burning Man (a football field of spaced-out undergrads lying on the grass, pondering the grandeur of a string of blue fairy lights attached to a cluster of helium balloons), at worst an extended commercial (numerous pieces offering a number to text a message to, which would then be projected on a screen or building-face - all appropriately branded by a major phone company).

It was actually a very interesting event, at least philosophically and in retrospect, given my last blog about Warhol, who said at some point in the seventies that commerce was his art. From that perspective, this was the ultimate Warholian declension: an event ostensibly about art, branded to distortion by its sponsoring financial institution (whose name I refuse to give anymore airtime to), and dressed up like a party. I guess, in the end, the art itself was neither "art" nor "culture", but a collection of (unintentional) baits set up to draw the event into place, and demonstrate the actual state of culture: a braying drunken bloated thing, desperate to filter every experience through some sort of technology - a camera, a screen, a phone - and I suspect, heaving, on the evening after, a collective sigh of familiar relief in front of its television set.

OK, yes, I am an elitist. I have no problem admitting this. But am I in favour of separating art from culture (society), essentially the work from the people? I give myself that impression and it concerns me. I wonder, sometimes, if I am the one missing the point.