Blog # 40…December 2014

T'is the season to be thoughtful and kind, eat everything you deny yourself the rest of the year…and take some time to appreciate interesting things as you move through the holiday rush - they’re not always where you’re expecting to find them either.

Pop-ups are popular and more and more murals are appearing on walls and fences, disguising city utility boxes, often reflecting the neighbourhood past or present and making us smile as we hippety hop to the barber shop or trudge home from work. 

On the north side of Bloor Street, opposite Varsity Stadium - a cheeky reference to the Royal Conservatory of Music on the opposite side.

                                                                                                        

Toronto as it looked in 1943  on the cover of a city function box on
Charles Street between Church and Yonge.  

                                 

                            



Words to live by in this stretch of Jane Street north of St Clair

The King of money and mufflers whizzes by as the subway approaches the Keele station.

And this is just a glorious fantasy of colour, no particular message - just to enjoy, make what you want of it.

This is a very Toronto-centric piece - I'm making a collection of outside art from other places too, so if you see something you like in your corner, send it along.
Great pics from Norm Nicholls, thanks Norm, and happy holiday wishes to you all, back in January

Blog # 39...November 2014

These days in Kabul a group of women get together regularly to read and talk about poetry - they're free to meet openly. Women in smaller centres and rural areas face severe punishment if they're discovered approaching education or the outside world but they do it anyway, slipping under the radar.

Mirman Maheer, Afghanistan's largest literary society is patterned on the Golden Needle, a Taliban era group who met, pretending to sew, to talk about literature. Their members meet, talk and provide a lifeline for many women outside the city who must risk finding a phone, the call being their only link with other women and with learning and language.

 From Meena:
"I am like a tulip in the desert,
I die before I open and the waves of desert breeze blow me away."
She isn't sure of her age..."Because I am a girl, no one knows my birthday."

Saheera Shariff, the founder of Mirman Baheer, is a member of Parliament from the province of Khost. Although she doesn't consider herself a poet, she expresses herself vividly when she says "A poem is a sword, and literature is a more effective battle for women's rights than shouting at political rallies. This is a different kind of battle."

Language and poetry have a long and rich history in the harsh landscape of Afghanistan... legend has it that 11th century Afghan Queen Rabia Balkhi used her last drop of blood to write poems. It's especially hurtful that so many women are denied developing their own voice and the freedom to speak freely with their sisters. Despite the repression though, traditional poetry is handed down orally as means to express themselves and share experiences.

From Dowser

Pashtun folk poems have always been about rebellion and often rail against forced marriage with wry humour
Couplets like this are called landai:
"Making love to an old man is like
Making love to a limp cornstalk blackened by fungus."

A contemporary woman, Zarmina, who described "the dark cage of the village" was beaten when she was discovered reading her love poems and faced marrying a man chosen by her father. She set herself on fire, dying in protest. One of her friends wrote:
"Her memory will be a flower tucked into literature's turban
In her loneliness, every sister cries for her."

Lina, who thinks she's 11, wrote this rubaiyot (an Arabic quatrain):
"You won't allow me to go to school,
I won't become a doctor,
Remember this
One day you will be sick."

Injustices against women, wherever they happen, diminish us all. Speaking out is always challenging, often dangerous, but women keep doing it.
                        ......................................................................................................................

Not to get all 1984 on you, but has anyone else noticed ads relating to the content of e-mails appearing on their screens? No longer a question of any privacy on the internet...we're all in our underwear, better make sure it's clean.

Blog 38…October, 2014

Early in my life as a physiotherapist, I worked with children with a variety of physical disabilities. It was the beginning of a growing movement, led in many cases by the people directly involved, to make room for those amongst us who have difficulty with curbs, stairs and heavy doors. So, architectural accessibility became a common concept and the law in many areas.  People who are less than fully mobile are now able to enter most schools, theatres, public buildings and transportation. The effect of these moves over the past five decades means that we're accustomed to seeing people who use a variety of aids to get around and we take it for granted that they pursue many of the same activities as we do, although with some difficulty. 

There have also been creative initiatives both large and small, institutional and personal to develop insight into the world of those of us who are disabled in some way…and we're all less than Olympic performers in many areas, especially as we age. 

In the film Margarita With a Straw, director Shonali Bose introduces Laila, a young woman in Delhi who faces many issues because of her athetoid cerebral palsy. Her curiousity about life in general and her sexuality in particular lead her to study in New York where she explores both with a young woman she meets at an Occupy demonstration. Khanum is a blind activist, half Pakistani, half Bangladeshi. It’s a touching story, hitting on four delicate topics at once without being preachy. It bothered me a bit when I heard that the actress who plays Laila is not disabled, but she’s very effective and the film’s message is clear…and that’s why they call it acting.  

Closer to home, a young Toronto couple – he’s disabled, she’s able-bodied – are combating the stigma about their relationship while teaching others about sex and love.  As it says on the mural behind them...
                           Welcome to Paradise.

They kicked off the opening of their Rose Centre for Love, Sex and Disability with a fashion show at Buddies in Bad Times recently…called I’m Sexy and I Know It., featuring models both with and without disabilities.

Dancer/choreographer Michelle Silagy has decided to use dance with different bodies as the topic for her MFA thesis. Her interest in the notion that dance isn’t exclusively done with the lower limbs began when she was doing some work in a hospital and was unexpectedly presented with a dance class of patients in wheelchairs.

The more we stretch our ideas about what’s acceptable for our body size, shape and capabilities, the more comfortable we’ll all be with ourselves living together on our planet.  And we need all the comfort we can get these days.

Blog # 37…September 2014

We’re surrounded by an amazing work of art...our environment. Despite the careless way we take it for granted, it's an endless creative marvel.  Last week-end thousands of people in NY City hit the streets to demonstrate their love and concern for our home planet with banners, posters and their colourful selves. Thousands more around the world joined them, taking their distress about the environment to the streets. I hope the climate change deniers were watching, including our head of state who decided not to attend the UN climate summit…oh well, at least he’s consistent.

 

New York City, September 21, 2014

 Haida village abandoned over a century ago

Recent view from a zodiak

I was in beautiful British Columbia this summer where their closeness to nature gives them an extra edge in appreciating it as well as lending urgency to their feelings of protectiveness. The islands of Haida Gwaii should be an inspiration to all of us and we should all know the story of the blockade the Haida people staged against the logging companies on Moresby Island in 2005.

Raven, a watchman at SgangGwaii

Art with a message

We owe an incredible debt to native people for their past and ongoing defense of the land.  The Council of the Haida Nation are now participating with different levels of government on a blueprint for forest management, a work in progress that has kept clear cutting to a minimum, at least for now. And since an agreement signed by both parties in 1993, Gwaii Hanas National Park, a UN Heritage site occupying a  large section of Moresby Island, is run jointly by Parks Canada and the CHN,

In This Changes Everything, out last week, Naomi Klein urges us not to depend on native people to defend the land, it’s time we took up some of the load. The Rockefeller heirs are withdrawing from fossil fuels and investing millions into clean energy production...I’ll leave it up to you to decide what you can do.

I wish the smart young dudes who spend so much time making things smaller and faster and adding more and more apps to devices would turn some of that brain power to coming up with some solutions to energy production, transportation and consumption. Just saying.

Public art has become something valued, whether as a political statement, a reminder of a person or place important to our history or something beautiful to turn a utilitarian object into an objet.                                                              

Workers records

Their faces

  These pieces greeted me as I came off the sea bus from downtown Vancouver…they’re a tribute to workers in the shipbuilding industry on the former site of the yards.  I’m starting to notice art out on the streets and in the alleyways here in Toronto too, more about that in future blogs.

                                         And a photo credit and a big thanks to Anne and Roy Strickland.

Blog # 36…August 2014

Under construction in 1929

For more than half a century, thousands of Torontonians visited their physicians in the stately Medical Arts Building at Bloor and St George.  Of many art forms, the art of medicine touches us all directly or indirectly at some time or other. Over the past couple of decades though, technology has swooped in to shift the balance from art to science, replacing in many cases the doctors’ eyes, ears, nose and fingers with mechanical scans and probes and a range of tests of various body fluids and tissues. Now, headquarters for the Uof T medical school  is called the Medical Sciences Building.

The skill of diagnosis by applying a doctor’s knowledge and experience has been losing ground. Today’s practitioners are balanced on a knife edge, trying to keep a sense of the infinite uniqueness of each patient in the face of ever increasing pressure to know more and see more patients. Patients often arrive armed with information (only some of it correct) gleaned on Google and not so likely to be passive recipients of advice.

There’s no question that technology has brought enormous accuracy and speed to diagnosis, lessened the intrusion of surgery and made many treatments more targeted and effective. What’s been lost, as in many of our systems that have become faster and cheaper, is the ability to deal with the unusual, the situation that doesn’t fit the pattern…the zebras that technology may mistake for horses because it only hears the hoof beats, doesn’t see the stripes.

Dr Herbert Ho Ping Kong, known affectionately as HPK by colleagues and patients, is an internist trained in Jamaica and Britain.  He's currently senior consulting physician and co-founder of the Centre of Excellence for Education and Practice at Toronto Western Hospital.  His commitment to maintaining an emphasis on the human factor in the doctor-patient relationship, paying attention to both mind and body led him to write  The Art of Medicine, Healing and the Limits of Technology, released in February of this year,   

It’s an interesting history of his personal development as a diagnostician and teacher, interspersed with chapters from colleagues, a hospital administrator, psychiatrist and an educator amongst many others, who have been influenced and inspired by the HPK view of medicine.

   

HPK has given us  a huge gift.  We’re all grappling with many areas of our lives, trying to figure out how to maintain the value and originality of human thinking and behaviour while taking advantage (and control) of the technology that surrounds us. Not to dismiss the science but  the art form involved in living means a lot to all of us and we need to practise it.  

Blog # 35…July 2014

In 2004 when Izzy Camilleri was approached to design a winter wrap for Toronto Star reporter Barbara Turnbull, her eyes were opened to a totally new way of thinking about fashion. Barbara arrived at Izzy’s studio in a wheelchair which she’d been using since 1983 when her spinal cord was severed by a gunshot fired during a robbery of the convenience store where she was working. She wanted something to keep warm in her chair that would be easy to get in and out of and… she longed for something beautiful. 

Izzy had never considered the difficulties of dressing for sitting but jumped at the challenge and over the past decade, has created a whole new adaptive line. She met with and listened to many people who are wheelchair users and has developed patterns and skills at cutting, placing seams and closures to ensure comfort and fit.  The garments must be easy to put on and take off for the wearer and/or their helper, they need the room and shape to accommodate sitting without extra material to bunch and they should sit smoothly over the shoulders…rather like we all want our clothes to fit. She didn’t want to sacrifice style or beauty either, using materials like leather, fur, silk and velvet. 

Although there are many different body shapes amongst her clients, she uses the concept of designing for an L shaped body rather than an I shape, in other words, the shape of someone sitting. Another important notion is placing the opening at the back of shirts and jackets so the arms go in straight forward and the clothing wraps around and fastens at the back where no one sees it anyway.

People with disabilities are marginalized in so many ways and face so many challenges, large and small that it’s wonderful to see some attention being paid to both the practicalities and the esthetics of their clothing.  And, Izzy Camilleri is now moving into designing for the aging population who want smart comfortable items that suit their figures and their tastes.

There’s a delicious small show just opened on the 4^th level of the Royal Ontario Museum called Fashion Follows Form: Designs for Sitting,  a collaboration by Barbara Turnbull, Izzy Camilleri and Alexandra Palmer, Fashion and Textile curator at the ROM, on until January 2015…worth a visit.  

Also, Judith Thompson‘s play Borne, featuring actors who are wheelchair users is playing at Soulpepper Theatre this week.

Blog 34…June 2014

I was lucky to be born early enough to be forced to learn 200 lines of poetry every year at school. It’s one of the things I value most about my education, although it didn't mean much to me at the time and was confined to the 18^th and 19^th century English poets, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Mathew Arnold - Rupert Brooke was the most modern and Bliss Carmen the only Canadian. Many of those lines still circle around in my head, called up by something I read or hear.

Now I enjoy seeing contemporary situations and events being interpreted with poetry... expressing, exploring and expanding our feelings about what’s around us as we struggle to make sense of things. When Mustafa Ahmed’s close buddy was shot and killed in Toronto, his response was a tough and moving poem that finished “Those friends may be close but they don’t know the chambers of your heart”. Cuban born, Boston based physician Rafael Campo uses poetry to help his patients (and himself) contain emotions and find metaphors for pain. Renee Sarojini Saklikar, who lost several relatives in the horror of the Air India crash, composed a series of poems as an elegy to the 82 children who died. There’s even a group of Toronto poets who love mixed martial arts and find poetry in its conflict and movements.

In 2011, in an effort to diminish the “intellectually brutalizing” affects of medical school and stimulate creativity, Yale University and University College London joined together to establish an annual poetry competition for their students with a generous prize. The poems help students develop abstract thinking and realize the commonality and universality of their experience.

In downtown Toronto, The Secret Handshake is a peer support cultural centre presenting a gathering spot and daily programmes of dance and movement and visual arts. Once a month, on a Sunday evening, established poets read alongside individuals struggling with mental illness. Traditional medical treatment only takes people part way to recovery, words and other means of communication free and extend emotions and diminish isolation by linking the artists and the audience with emotions we all feel. 

I’ve consoled many young girls turning thirty with Ogden Nash’s lines “How old is Spring Miranda?” and made toasts borrowing from Shakespeare with  “But if the while I think on thee dear friend, all losses are restored and sorrows end.” from Sonnet XXX.  The holiday season isn’t complete without listening to Dylan Thomas’s resounding voice deliver A Child’s Christmas in Wales. 

As well as many other wise things she said, the angelic Maya Angelou told us that poetry is music for the human voice. Whether it’s a limerick, a sonnet, haiku, a villanelle or a piece of doggerel on a Hallmark card, poetry gives us a way to express what we’re feeling and thinking when other words fail us.