Overheard on Dufferin

From a trio of teenage girls leaving the Dufferin Mall:

#1: ....It's all old guys there. If you don't watch out, they'll take your hand and put it on their balls.

#2: And if they find out you're high--oh fuck!

#3: [Nodding head emphatically] Uh-huh, uh-huh!

Preaching to the converted

Seeing Toronto the Good at Factory and Travesties at Soulpepper (by Soulpepper?--do they own the Young Centre?) in the same week left me with debate-play brain freeze.

Andrew Moodie's contemporary work follows a black lawyer who must defend a female cop against charges of racial profiling. He happens to be married to a Franco-Ontario (read: white) woman and the story frequently abandons its legal-procedural core to show her worrying about her jaded students while waiting for street cars. The acting is excellent and some of the lines are quite good, but its left-right axis and middle class focus (the few characters who are on the front lines of the gun-violence issue get little to say though, in fairness, the snooty character who traces his lineage back to the family compact is also given only perfunctory treatment). In trying to balance the classic left-right arguments so perfectly, Moodie leaves out other voices that would have made the debate more dynamic, more unpredictable.

Travesties is a debate about the social usefulness of art that playwright Tom Stoppard has ramped through a vaudeville act that includes singing, dancing and pulling a rabbit out of a hat. I don't buy the arguments that what Travesties has to say about the culture wars is relevant today. Yes, we still debate about art, but the debate has evolved and changed, making Stoppard's main question here--does art have to be socially useful?--largely irrelevant. No, art doesn't have to be socially useful. Art can be anything. Canada's current debate about art is: Given that art doesn't necessarily have to have any social use, should the government fund it? Which makes Travesties seem awfully dated, despite how hard it tries to make us giggle.

Moodie's play might lack the Stoppard's encyclopedic theatre knowledge and self-referential smugness, but at least it's an argument we're having right now.

AGO a go-go

It took me a long time and several visits to take in the newly renovated Art Gallery of Ontario. Unlike my initial visits to the renovated Royal Ontario Museum--it should be apparent now that the do-a-bit-have-an-opening-do-a-bit-have-an-opening approach frittered away any sense of the magic of the place--it was a process of discovery, as each turned unveiled something surprising and usually delightful. There's already been volumes of commentary written, but here's my two-cents:
- The grand glass front and the Via Italia are great, but they are misleading in their architectural claims to be the main lure, which is actually the new contemporary galleries in the blue box hidden in the back. Only by approaching from Grange Park do you realize that it's the star attraction.
- With all the new floor spaces, they succumbed to the temptation to throw too much Cornelius Krieghoff on the floor. Habitant overkill.
- The themed exhibits find an ideal balance with chronologically arranged work--I think to organize things by pure theme would be too disorienting, but I can tell you that the work that was more contextualized held my attention for much longer. It's a much harder gallery to sweep through now.
- The new contemporary galleries remind me a little of the Whitney and it's a fun playing the "I remember where this was before" game in there.
- The new audio info devices look cool but the OS is not so intuitive as it should be.
- I want to host a party on one of the upper spiral staircases. This is one public building where the elevators will be seriously underused.
- The miniature boat collection in the basement seems random but, strangely, is a weirdly refreshing break from art history, per se.

It's already clear that in the tortoise-hare race between the AGO and the ROM that the tortoise has won the race.

Recessionary measures

As I was heading to the Dufferin Mall the other day, I thought to myself, "From now on, always see if you can pick something up at Dollarama, if possible, before checking out pricier options." I arrived at Dollarama to find they now had items for $1.25, $1.50 and, gasp, $2. Just when Ontario's lead dollar store should be coming to our rescue, it's sold us down the river.

Overreaction

I'm going to try this approach next time I'm given a hard time at the airport. It can't hurt... until they bring out the tasers.

Mexico's media bigwig

Having just returned from Mexico where everybody was talking about Carlos Slim Helu, I returned to the upper two-thirds of North America to find that everybody here is talking about him, too. Sanborns, his chain of restaurants/stores, with its selection of food, prescription drugs, magazines, books, eletronics and other gifty items, is an iconic Mexican institution, a weird mix I haven't seen attempted in any other country (the Western Canadian London Drugs, featuring shampoo and computers, comes a distant second). Mexican friends of mine travel in Mexico with a particular friend who refuses to eat anywhere else.