Blog # 133...September 2022

I like to think that rue du Quatre-Septembre on the right bank in Paris recognizes my birthday. It also commemorates the founding in 1870 of the Third French Republic that lasted until 1940 - that's only seventy years...I'm still around.

Birthdays bring reflection. Maybe that’s what inspired artist Ed Pien's current show - Present: Past/Future at the Art Gallery of Ontario. Although he'd never been to Cuba (born in Taipei, raised in Toronto) and didn't speak Spanish, he was approached by guest curator Catherine Sicot who had long admired his work. She'd visited Cuba and fallen in love with the country and the people (as many of us have) and felt they would collaborate well to explore her ideas about Cuban society. 

Starting in 2014, Ed visited San Agustin, a middle class neighbourhood close to Havana, twice a year interviewing on video 13 elders in their homes and gardens as they went about their routine activities.

They spoke of many things, ambitions, memories of dances and parties, feeling about aging (one was 104!) and...the revolution - life both before, when they felt exploited by capitalism, but didn't have enough to eat and after, when some things were better, others became worse. 

Here's Ed Pien sitting amongst pieces of furniture from the apartments of the elders - in the background is a mural of a typical building in St Agustin. 

I sat in the same chair when I visited the show.

Two idols

Dionne Clementina Anyo Reyes

Several of the elders passed away during the project and Pien chose to mark their deaths by panning around their empty houses or apartments. We were moved to tears, feeling we'd lost friends we'd come to know on the screen and remembering the many Cubans we'd met over the years.

Another Torontonian, Haley McGee's show Age is a Feeling attracted lots of attention at this summer's Edinburgh Fringe. A one  hander, McGee observes life from her perch high on a life guard's chair. The audience gets to choose each vignette  that dives into our relationship with mortality at various ages and stages of life. There's a chance that she might bring the show to Toronto, we'll be watching for it

Ed Pien and Haley McGee are unique artists using their particular form to explore our world as we move through it over time.

We've all had different experiences over the past couple of years and two groups that I love are treating us to a look at different views from different folks.

The Secret Handshake and The Friendly Spike have both been supporting people with mental illness for many years by making a range of art forms available. Here's their latest initiative...

Reading of POEMDEMIC! a collection of poems based on lived experience of Covid on September 20 and 27 at 7pm EST..register at friendlyspike@primus.ca.

So, there's lots going on that's good as well as too bloody much that's not, be sure and take some time for the good stuff and I'll be back with more in October.

Blog # 132...August 2022

There's a  wonderful new mural in my neighbourhood, showing some of the beautiful imagery of indigenous culture and involving a spirit of collaboration...that's the indigenous way. 

The mural was conceived and created by 2021 Toronto Arts Foundation Indigenous Artist Award finalist Joseph Sagaj with contributions from artists Denise Aquash, Sonja Clarke, Larry M. Holder, and Mike Rowade aka Ron Wild. Sagaj also consulted with and sought the support of Elder and Knowledge Keeper Jacque Lavallee aka Jacqui Lavalley, Grandmother Donalda Ashkewe aka Winnie Ashkewe, Innu Consultant Naulaq LeDrew, and the AKIWIIDOOKAAGEWIN (Earth Helpers).

So the visit of Pope Francis last week to three sites of residential schools in Canada leaves over 80 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission still to go. He was welcomed with generosity and warmth - it’s the indigenous way. He responded with his own personal warmth and as much generosity as his office allows. Acknowlegement of the horrors of physical and sexual abuse that occurred in the residential schools and apologies for the actions of “individuals” was a small step, an important beginning - we’re not sure of what yet. 

What was missing, was much mention of the reason for the schools in the first place. The Papal bulls, in particular the one issued in 1493 by Alexandre VI (a Borgia!) dismissed indigenous people as savage and needing to be deprived of their language and culture in order to become “civilized”. Their behavior, in the main, throughout the past few days, the time throughout and since the TRC and even before has shown us what civilized really means. 

Francis did say the word genocide and referred to the cruelty of cultural extinction on the plane ride back to the Vatican, too bad it wasn't in front of the thousands who waited hopefully for that recognition.

I can’t help comparing the grace and sensitivity (mostly)of indigenous people over the past few days as they spoke of deep and long standing cruelty and injustices -  to the self centred  and unfocussed anger of members (again mostly) of the truck convoy that occupied Ottawa last winter.

If by any chance you haven’t been moved by the events of the past few days, try and take a listen to  CBC’s The House, hosted Saturday by Winnipeg journalist Niigaan Sinclair; it includes a great conversation with his father Murray!

It's a miracle that indigenous culture has survived concerted efforts over centuries to eradicate it.  That's hopeful and it's not just important to them, but for us. Elders' relationship with the land is already being consulted by scientists, considered valuable in coping with fires, floods, excessive hear and other climate crises. Their oral history tradition and story telling will survive the next Rogers shut down when our version - podcasts are silent. 

We have a lot to learn from their spiritual practices, and their sense of family, community and nature that sustain and nurture them and their culture. 

Thanks, merci, miigwetch!

Joseph Sagaj

See you in September.

 

Blog # 131…July 2022

It’s wonderful to be outside so much these days, especially when there’s refreshing and original art to see -  sometimes in surprising places. I’ve missed most of it, but thanks to my friend Google, have been able to catch up online.

I discovered Ed Burtynsky many years ago in a photo exhibit of the devastation caused by the Three Gorges Dam in China at a small gallery on Hazelton. He works in large format, kind of the Imax of still photos, continuing to record industrial landscapes and their impact on nature and on human existence …”capturing the underbelly of what humans accomplish,” as he puts it. Once you’ve seen these sights (and there’s a certain compelling beauty from a distance) you can’t unsee them. There’s a cruel irony in rich dudes spending billions flying into space rather than caring for the space where we live, sort of like getting rid of a car when the ash trays are full.

Ed’s had a series of thoughtful and thought provoking works in the years since the Three Gorges, His latest show, In the Wake of Progress, an immersive experience now housed in The Canadian Opera Company Theatre had a spectacular preview earlier outside on all 12 screens in Dundas Square.

 

Another open air piece of a very different sort came with the return of Judy Chicago  (remember The Dinner Party at the AGO in 1982?) Her Tribute to Toronto, a new work commissioned by the Toronto Biennale of Art, illuminated the waterfront from a barge off Sugar Beach with environmentally friendly, non toxic coloured smoke one evening early in June.

Seeking to soften and feminize our surroundings with an impermanent approach, merging colour and landscape, Judy hoped to  increase our awareness of the beauty of our natural environment.

 

And, adding a note of whimsy to my neighbourhood and giving new meaning to the elephant in the room, is Matt Donovan’s 1999 student thesis for OCAD. Resting on the lawn of a house on Yarmouth Road, Sally had an overhaul and face lift in 2013 and continues to dispense prosperity, longevity, intelligence and good luck to the house owners and all who pass by…that’s what elephants do.

 

 Hope you're having a calm and peaceful Canada Day, be back in August. 

 

Blog # 130…June, 2022

Wordl…are you one of the millions caught up in its challenges (and chance to exercise your competitive muscle) or maybe you do crosswords, play scrabble or engage with any of the other games, puzzles and brain teasers involving words – they're fun, distracting and reputed to ward off cognitive decline.

Words, words, words!  In the past few years, we’ve imported them - hygge,  schadenfreude and brio from other languages, woke and bespoke from  corners of our own.  And who knew that someone who took a picture of themselves with their mobile phone would coin a word that we hear dozens of times a day? Words change meaning - a thong used to be a rubber sandal coming up between your toes, an app was a shrimp cocktail, coke was a derivative of coal or a fizzy drink and a mouse was – well you get it.  We avoided anything that was viral and rap was what we did on the door.

Iceland has a noun and pronoun for non-binary people. The Inuit have many words for snow but not one for depression…they call it “thinking a lot and crying.”     

If like me, you’re interested in words and language, I bet you’d welcome The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows… sort of a weird title John Koenig chose for his collection of new words for emotions. As he puts it “to capture the delectable subtleties of the human experience…to shine a light on the fundamental strangeness of being a human being.”  Here are some of his creations:

Sonder:  the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.

Kenopsia:  the atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet.

Des vu: the awareness that this moment will become a memory.

Nemotia:  the fear that you’re utterly powerless to change the world around you…which makes the act of trying to live your own life feel grotesque and self indulgent.

Ironsick:  feeling hollowed out by excessive exposure to modern technology, which is so fast and stimulating that it makes everything else feel drab and messy by comparison…even though your life may be as peaceful and predictable as it’s ever been.

There’s something oddly comforting about having words put to experience,“The tiger named is the tiger tamed” a thought that comes to me from the recesses of memory – there must be a word for that.

Words are also being joined together in new ways…vaccine hesitancy, replacement theory, fake news and a host of others. Then there are the acronyms used by tweeters…LOL, LMK, BTW, BBL, WTF and my favourite, DILLIGAS*- a more nuanced version of whatever.

BIPOC, which I think in Canada should be IBPOC

And those precious, brave, suffering Ukrainians say рашизм to describe their enemy attackers, impossible to translate into English, the closest we can get is a combination of Russian and fascism - ruscism

All these words, phrases, acronyms, in an attempt to capture and understand our turbo world, we'll be back in July with more of them.

*do I look like I give a shit?

 

Blog # 129…May 2022

April was poetry month and in case you missed it, I’m here to celebrate poets and those lyrical forms that capture moods, feelings, sights and sounds like nothing else can.

I’m forever grateful that our high school English class required memorizing 200 lines of poetry every year…and being randomly chosen to recite in front of our mates.  I remember cringing as 13 year olds  monotoned their way through Ode on a Grecian Urn, dreading my turn. I probably wasn’t much better but the snatches of Browning, Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton and many other British poets that float up all these years later give me immense pleasure.  Rupert Brooke's nostalgia for home as war approaches " some corner of a foreign field that is forever England"  still brings a lump to my throat.                                   

In my twenties, thinking I was hip in my black stockings and turtlenecks, I loved the romance of Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXX with its lines on friendship,"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend/All losses are restored and sorrows end."  I discovered that poetry could advance activism with Allen Ginsberg and confront racism with James Baldwin. I found  Canadian poets  - Irving Layton and Leonard Cohen. And women, Dorothy Livesay, Miriam Waddington, Karen Mulhallen.

Karen captures the anguish in our northern communities with these lines from her poem Pikangikum:                                                                                         "Ask ourselves, "our first world"/with no game for hunters/no food, no shelter for birds, fish, animals/no clean water, no elders with stories/children take their rite of passage/journey to adulthood, sniffing gas."

I read poets who experimented playfully with form, words, sound and humour.  Ogden Nash delighted me with:                                                                                      "The turtle lives twixt plated decks/Which practically conceal its sex/I think it clever of the turtle/In such a fix to be so fertile.  

I loved the acrid wit of Dorothy Parker "Oh life is a glorious cycle of song/A medley of extemporanea/And love is a thing that can never go wrong/And I am Marie of Roumania."                                                                                                                                                  

Today, on a somber note, Warsan Shire, a refugee herself -  Somalian, born in Kenya, raised in London, now living in Los Angeles - is in a prime position to express her feelings in Home, a poem with achingly poignant lines:                                                             

 " No one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying leave, run away from me now./I don’t know what I’ve become but I know that anywhere is safer than here.                                                                                                             And... " You have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land."   

                                                                       

Poets show us how to hear - if we can bear to listen, they open our hearts and our brains to the joy and beauty, the tears and sorrow around us. Verlaine, Lorca, Rumi...and poetry can be found in the voices of the 90 million refugees displaced around the world. One who had lived in a camp for over 8 years was heard to say "My home is the people I live with now, the ones I wake up with, I have nowhere to go home to, home is not land but people."              

And if you're in Toronto on Sunday May 15th, you're invited to meet four Canadian poets who collectively, have been challenging and delighting audiences for over two hundred years! The special guest of honour will be Arlene Lampert, first and founding executive secretary of the League of Canadian Poets (1971-1979) who continues to love and support poetry and poets in Canada.

                    Poetry on Markham Street

                     3pm,  n/w corner of Markham and London Sts.

                                              Featuring

           bill bissett, Robert Priest, David Bateman and Honey Novick

 Funded by the Canada Council for the Arts through the League of Canadian Poets                                       Masks and distancing are suggested                      

Please keep yourself and those close to you safe and well, and remember how lucky we are to be able to stay home to be safe rather than have to leave.

See you back here in June

                                                                                                        

                                                                                                          

        

                       

                                             

                                                            

                                                      

                                                   

                                                      

 

 

 Blog # 128...April 2022

Now that Toronto's winter is on its way off to wherever it spends the rest of its time, we’re left with the candy wrappers, masks and dog crap that was hidden by the beautiful white snow…yuck!

But there are some lovely images to distract our attention. In the alleyway behind our house, Max, a golden retriever who lived next door when we moved in over 40 years ago, is immortalized, larger than life, on a garage door. It’s festooned with graffiti and says in tiny letters at the bottom -  "I love dogs."  So do I!

Last year, when we badly needed to smile, a neighbor, Martha Davis, created Panda Land on a nearby school yard lawn. It began on a small scale with one or two pandas sitting quietly and gradually expanded into a glorious celebration of what pandas might enjoy…sitting at the movies, eating in cafes, generally cavorting around in amusing ways.

My cousin Cindy, florist by day with a side hustle creating cakes for special occasions, sends us photos of her inventions. Happy Bassday is one of my favourites - maybe to open the fishing season or to celebrate a sportsperson's birthday.

Hanan Abdu, artist and occupational therapist, makes black muslim women feel important, portraying them as strong and fashionable. Using her personal and professional identities as well as her creative energy, she gives us a view of herself and other women as unique and beautiful,

And finally, the cover of The New Yorker always delivers a message, capturing what’s going on in that city and in the world - sometimes trenchant, sometimes funny and last week, heart wrenching. Artist Ana Juan’s Motherland evokes Madonna and child…with artillery accompaniment.

I’m having to extend my cognitive therapy inspired worrying time to handle all that’s going on! But, we'll be back in May, when the only certainty is that things won't be the same. I spoke too soon about winter being out the door though, and it wasn't an April Fool!

 

Blog # 127…March, 2022

I don’t particularly like the term differently- abled. It’s a bit clunky, but it does convey a better sense of how we all are…well, abled differently. Just as we’re gradually opening our hearts and minds, and books and films to include people of various colours, shapes and sexual definitions, we’re also accepting that we all hear, see, walk and talk at diverse levels of competence. Some of us may not walk up stairs as well or hear as clearly, but can sing Broadway musicals or knock off a great omelette.

I worked with children, most of them in wheelchairs, many years ago and found them thoughtful and unusually expressive…energy that other kids expended running around was available for thinking and talking to me. Alan who was 11 couldn’t walk unaided but he could beat me at chess. Eight year old Vancel came every day on his elbow crutches to take me to lunch in his taxi, making very realistic sounds of the doors opening and closing, the noise of the engine, the traffic’s honking and squealing brakes. Nancy, who was only 5 arrived when I was on crutches from a skiing incident, asked me who my physio was when I was little, which still brings tears to my eyes.

Ivan Illich (remember him from the 60’s?) had interesting ideas and wrote about  Disabling Professions. One of my greatest heroes, Oliver Sacks introduced me to the notion of hurling people at their deficits, as professionals put people through endless assessments from positions of power and authority.

Art can be an equalizer – think of the brilliant jazz of Jeff Healey; Daniel Laurie who plays Reggie Buckle’s Down Syndrome in Call the Midwife so touchingly because he lives there himself. Watching dance smooth out their tremours, we feel the music along with people with Parkinson’s and TV's Fashion Dis challenges traditional norms that lack inclusion in how we dress. An initiative to help people with disabilities achieve an MBA has been launched by a group of young people in Toronto...so things are happening in all sectors. 

And, coming up in a few days in Beijing – the Paralympics, launched in England after WWll at the Stoke Mandeville Hospital which specializes in spinal cord injuries. I always find it more interesting and inspiring to watch a blind speed skater or a skier missing an arm. How do they do it, and what courage it must take!

We’re being moved, sometime slowly but definitely surely into accepting and valuing difference, whether it’s in how we look, act, move or love....makes the world more vibrant, and also more accepting and less lonely for us in our uniqueness.

Here it is, another March... International Women's Day approaching, Spring and an unknown future. We've had enough surprises lately, and now the horror of the attack on Ukraine! And speaking of  unrecognized talents, we all wondered about the Ukrainians electing a comedian as president...now Volodymyr Zelenskyy is reminding us of George Vl staying in London during the blitz...and responding to offers to get him out with "I need ammunition, not a lift." Loving him for that as well as his brave leadership.

But wait, one more thing...actually two things that have made my spirit soar, at least temporarily, reading Indian in the Cabinet by Jody Wilson-Raybould  and watching season 10 of Call the Midwife.

Back in April with some beautiful images.