It Finally Happened!

No, I am not specifically talking about Joe Biden dropping out, though that is something that has felt inevitable for a long time now.  I do feel badly for him, but I do wish he had realized his limitations and just how much the Presidency had sapped his abilities, and set up a better succession plan.  An 80 year-old man (or woman) really shouldn't be President.  I felt the same way about Reagan's second term, i.e. being too old, and he was only 73 and in better overall health than Biden, though apparently towards the middle of his second term there were some significant declines in his mental abilities.  Exactly how well Kamala will do is anyone's guess, and I fear she will lose anyway, but at least it feels like there is a chance she would win.  As ever Democrats finally get around to doing the right thing versus the GOP where concepts such as acting in the best interests of the country are meaningless.

Instead, I am sad to report that after all these years, I have finally come down with COVID.  I caught it either at the conference in Baltimore (where there were a few people coughing up a storm!) or on my way there.  (There was generally little drama on the way down.  I'll talk about the epic struggles to get home in a later post.)  A handful of people, particularly the handful of Canadians in attendance, wore masks throughout the conference or at least part of the time, but I'm not sure how much that would actually help once you factored in eating in the large group dining room.  (As the food was generally pretty dire, I might have been better off skipping the lunches, though I don't think I would have worn a mask.)

I felt pretty bad on Thurs., but attributed to stress over trying to cover for two people (one other person was supposed to come to the conference but came down with COVID the week before!).  Then I was working on two proposals, and again the person that was going to write the majority of the proposal went on holiday, so I had to do that and finish up my presentation!  So I was sleeping very little, and then was out walking around in some extreme heat, since I was staying about a mile from the conference hotel.

I kind of forced myself to go through two museums Thurs. evening.  (They were only sparsely attended, so I don't feel that I spread COVID much at that time.)  I actually pulled myself together a bit on Friday, though the travails of trying to travel during the global IT meltdown didn't help.  I was actually feeling more or less ok by the time I finally got home (on Sunday!), but I took the test anyway, and I got the dreaded second line.  So sad.

I had almost decided I was immune after all that time with the exposure at Union Station and never (knowingly) catching it.  And not catching it after my son had it!  What is true is that I am almost symptom-less, aside from a bit of a cough, trying to bring up some junk in my lungs.  But I don't have any major aches or pains.  I still have my sense of smell and taste.  My appetite is undiminished.  I'm tired, but I'm always tired...  So it's very hard to square this away with the dread of catching COVID, though I know several people that have caught it recently and really did suffer quite a bit, but in my case the symptoms aren't even as bad as a typical summer cold.  Go figure.  All I can say is clearly the vaccines have really done a good job of preventing anything worse, and that perhaps I have gotten a strain that has mutated to be less dangerous to the host to better increase the spreading potential.  (Some scientists think this is a likely outcome.)

So it does suck, and I really hope to be testing negative in only a few more days.  I already had to skip going to The Rex for one show, and I probably can't see the group playing at the tail end of this week.  I also had to reschedule my tickets for Hamlet in High Park (I was going on Tues. actually).  I am really going to be upset if I have to miss any of the concerts that are part of TO Summer Music next week, so I guess I need to drink lots of fluids and get as much rest as I can.  So on that note, I'll just sign off now.

Last Day of the Fringe

On a more positive note, I've been off seeing quite a few Fringe shows.  I even went to a children's show (Madame Winifred's Circus of Wonders).  I had thought it would be aimed at a slightly older crowd, but it was squarely aimed at children under 10, and wasn't quite as interesting or charming for the adults in the crowd.  I would highly recommend it for children, however.  It actually is coming back with an extra show on Sunday at 3 pm as a Patron's Pick.

I really enjoy the sketch show You Lost Me at Alumnae.  I saw this on Friday.  It looks like they have a few tickets left for Sunday at 5 pm.  It's a young cast with lots of energy doing different sketches, including a Zoom office call that turns into a rave, and listening to classic rock on the radio where every artist is singing about having a 13 year old girlfriend.  (The 70s really were a different time...)  

I also enjoyed the two improv shows I managed to see -- All Our Parents are Immigrants (and indeed I think this is basically the same show I saw in Aki Studio a few years back) and Before We Go, which is about what happens on the last night of the world.  I managed to get in to see both of them another time, which is often worth doing as improv is always so different between shows!  Immigrants runs tomorrow at noon (a few tickets left) and Before We Go at 1:45, so I will have to rush between the venues on my bike, but it should be doable.  It does look like the last show of Before We Go is sold out.  (Great for them, but not for you...)

I had debated going to see Gringas, but kind of hesitated, and then the reviews came in really strong.  However, the best day for me to see it was Wed. at 7, and it was sold out.  If the Sat. show had been a bit later, I could have seen it right after Madame Winifred, but I just needed a bit more time between sets.  At any rate, I looked first thing this morning, and Gringas had one more show added as Patron's Pick at 7:45 on Sunday, so I scooped up a ticket.  Score!  (My lucky 13th show of this year's Fringe!)  It appears there are still a few available.  So that will be a good way to round out the Fringe, even though tomorrow is quite busy!  I'm also going to squeeze in Bus Stop, a murder mystery set at a Toronto bus stop, and Death of a Starman, which is about an astrologer on the run from the mob.  I haven't really heard much about either of them, though, given that the reviewers are thin on the ground these days, that is kind of to be expected though certainly unfortunate...

I did hear positive things about Monks but just couldn't find a way to see that.  I hadn't really wanted to see 86 Me, which is about the Toronto restaurant business, as I got a bit triggered by the raccoon.  It did get quite good reviews, however. Maybe if either of them transfer somewhere else (like Crow's Theatre), I might try to check them out.  On the whole it was a pretty good Fringe, which is great.  I've more or less given up on SummerWorks, as they barely have any traditional plays at all any more.

The rest of Sat. was pretty full.  I ran right over to BMV and managed to sell off a few more CDs and DVDs.  I'm slowly making a dent in the stacks of random things in the back office.  Oddly enough, they wouldn't take Rushdie's Victory City, which is his very latest novel (well, not counting Knife).  Maybe they got a bunch of them remaindered or something.  All I know is when I was looking to pick up a copy, nobody had them in stock, so I had to order a copy, and now it isn't worth anything.  Fudge.

I put in about an hour of work at Robarts, then ran down to The Rex to see the Chris Hunt Tentet.  It was sort of absurd seeing them all crowded together on the bandstand.  

Generally they were a bit too loud for my taste.  I only got about half a page of my planning saga written, whereas last Thurs (when I saw Neil Swainson with Dick Oatts), I managed 10 pages!  I also dropped off a copy of a Woody Shaw CD to Neil, since he had never seen or heard of this release, so that made it especially worth going out.  

Today, I left after the first set, and then ran over to the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair (which runs Sunday from 10 am to 5 pm).  I saw a few pieces I liked quite a bit.

This artist, Ximena Montecino, is heavily influenced by Alice in Wonderland.

This artist had a whole series of paintings and etchings of a fairly creepy merry-go-round.

Oleg Lipchenko, Carosello Divina - Carousel V

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This artist, Zia Syed, made three dimensional friezes of architectural elements of imagined cities (not entirely dissimilar to Calvino).  I'm very tempted by the piece on the left, but I am trying to hold off on buying any more art for the time being.  Maybe I'll sleep on it and see how I feel in the morning.

If I had a bit more time, I probably would have dropped in on the TMU Image Centre. I probably have seen their current exhibits but am not 100% sure. Next weekend, I am hoping to get back to The Power Plant and the AGO to show my son the modernism exhibit they are running, esp. the Rothko (back on view for the first time in ages!). If there is time, maybe we can swing by 401 Richmond as well.

Mark Rothko, No. 1, White and Red, 1962

So in the end, it was a pretty busy day, and tomorrow is even more jam packed.  I probably ought to get some rest, so I am not dragging all day...

So Many Deaths

I guess this is what happens as you get older, so many of the celebrities that you grew up with start passing away.  Nonetheless, it seems like an awful lot lately, including Shelley Duvall, Richard Simmons and Dr. Ruth!  Curiously, the Guardian had run a feature on Duvall's best films (very controversially listing Popeye higher than Nashville, which is completely risible).  I'd actually seen Nashville for the very first time less than a week ago, so it is quite fresh in my mind.  What an achievement, and it is even more amazing when you realize that the actors wrote nearly all the songs in the movie!  I really do need to get around to watching 3 Women (which is indeed probably her greatest role) and Gosford Park, just because I never have seen it (though Duvall is not in this one, with its almost entirely English cast).  I wonder if perhaps the Paradise can be sweet-talked into running 3 Women as a bit of a memorial to Duvall.  Her part in Nashville is interesting, though a bit one-note.  I think someone summed her up as the heartless chick in hot pants, and that's pretty accurate... 

Anyway, there was one death deferred.  There was an aborted assassination attempt on Trump at a Pennsylvania rally.  I'm not going to mince words.  I am not planning on denouncing political violence in this case.  Trump will get it sooner or later, and I certainly won't be sorry...  A recent Guardian article pointed out that fully 10% of Americans are willing to resort to violence to prevent Trump from becoming President, and a large number of them are armed of course.  This is what happens when every guardrail (that in a sane society would have simply disqualified him from running again) has been systematically discarded by the GOP and even more appallingly the Supreme Court, who simply made shit up, for instance, to say that the 14th Amendment is completely toothless, and then more shockingly saying that any official act, if carried out by the President, is completely outside of the realm of law enforcement.  It is batshit crazy stuff, and would get most of them tossed out of law school, but this is typical of the Right and their complete lack of morality nowadays (and that scumbag Alito no longer bothering to hide the fact he is trying to usher in a theocracy).  As noted there hundreds of thousands of people (and actually probably closer to 10 million angry Americans) who simply will refuse to accept him in the White House again, especially as Trump has made no bones about acting like a mafioso in his second term and lashing out at all his enemies.  If this hastens a Civil War so that the Blue States can throw off the yoke of the Red States, i.e. the Electoral College and its skew to smaller states, so much the better.

Open Secrets Redux

It's been a tough week for Canadiana lovers.  We've just lost Alex Janvier, as I note here, and we've just found out that Alice Munro was, quite frankly, a monster who put her own needs far above those of her daughter, Andrea.  In many ways the news just gets worse and worse, in the sense that Alice had multiple opportunities to rethink her position, and moved from being personally hurt by the betrayal (but at least believing it happened) to completely siding with the abuser and denouncing her daughter as a liar when the police came to investigate the abuse.  Later on, after her husband, Gerald Fremlin, pled guilty and was prohibited from any contact with children under 16, Alice Munro complained that her daughter lived too far away for Alice to visit her and Alice's granddaughters (but without Fremlin in tow) because she didn't drive.  (This was the last straw for Andrea to become complete estranged from Alice.)  Andrea's biological father wasn't much better, not intervening when he could have.  And then there were all the people, including reporters and Munro's biographer, who knew and remained silent.  They certainly will have to decide how to live with themselves.

I'm used to separating the artist from the art, or I couldn't enjoy and/or appreciate Miles Davis or Picasso, just to name two of the most prominent problematic artists.  I do think recently with the rise of cancel culture, people are less forgiving these days, or at least they are until an artist they can't bear to lose slips up.  Still, it is likely true it hits harder when the artist with feet of clay (or indeed a truly terrible person as Munro is shaping up to be) is a writer, as readers have much more identification with the work and how it speaks to them.

I was just a bit over halfway through Munro's work, and I do intend to see it through, though unquestionably I will be more critical now that I know what a raging egotist she was.  But I won't be hanging onto the books I have read with perhaps one or two exceptions from the early part of her career.  I will not criticize anyone, however, who decides that they have to cut her from their lives.  It's just a sad, sad story that provides yet another example of how terrible some people are and how many others then fail to do the right thing.

New Art - RIP Alex Janvier

I meant to get around to posting this a while ago, but I needed to get a few things in order first.

Quite a long time ago (sever years ago!), I had been really struck by the Alex Janvier exhibit at the McMichael.  My son was on that trip too, and he also really liked the art.  There were just piles and piles of the catalogues, so I held off on getting one.  Given how many there were, I was sure they would end up at BMV or wherever these sorts of books go.  Where I really kick myself is that eventually the AGO had a handful in stock, and I should have just grabbed one with my member's discount, but I think I was in a hurry that day.  When I went back, they were all gone, and I wasn't going to go back up to the McMichael.  I think I got up there a year later and they were completely out, which seemed so weird to me.  So I kept my eye out when I was at the National Gallery and just in used bookstores.  At some point, the book was fetching $250+ on Bookfinder, and I continued to chide myself for the lost opportunity.

In a spare moment, I was doing some searches on Janvier, and I stumbled across his on-line gallery.  After some discussion with the people there, it turns out that they actually do have a small pile of the books and sell them for only $50!  Being so interested in the fact that Janvier is still an active artist, I scrolled through the art for sale, most quite reasonably priced for an artist of his stature.  After a lot of thought, I decided to purchase one of his recent pieces.

Alex Janvier, Birthday Cake, 2023

It finally turned up, and I am supposed to have it framed.  Ideally this weekend, but if not, then towards the end of July.  You can see the birthday cake right in the middle, and then perhaps a duck's head to the left.  It's definitely a fun little piece.

Indeed, there is another purchase I made.  Deepti Saxena is a local artist.  I had seen her work at the Toronto Outdoor Art Fair in 2023, and this piece made an impression.  I went ahead and bought it nearly a year later (after I got my tax return...).  I had said I would pick it up at the Leslieville Art Walk at Jimmie Simpson Park, but Deepti actually delivered in person the day before.  This was just as well, as it is larger than I remembered, and I certainly couldn't have brought it home on my bike!

Here is Deepti in Leslieville.

Here is the artwork hung up in one of the spare guest rooms.

The Toronto Outdoor Art Fair is just around the corner -- next weekend in fact.  I'll swing by and see what is on display this year, though I probably have purchased enough art for the immediate future.  I also have more or less run out of room to hang art, though I guess there is a bit more wall space in this guest room.

Update (7/11): I was coming home from work yesterday and saw the news that Alex Janvier passed away at the age of 89.  As the article stated, he was painting until the very end, and the piece that I bought, Birthday Cake, was created last year, so one of his last pieces.  I'm glad I was able to support his work, even if only in a small way.  I think it is also encouraging that he did get a fair bit of recognition during his life, unlike those artists crowned as geniuses after they are gone. 

Bike Issues

I alluded to the fact that I had another biking mishap.  I guess it was a couple of weeks ago, on a day when it had rained very heavily in the early morning but was slowing down to more of a drizzle, like Vancouver rain, so I decided to risk it.  In hindsight I wish I hadn't.  However, I have to admit a big part of the problem was getting so frustrated by a driver who didn't know what they were doing, i.e. did they want to park on King or not, and was clogging the lane, so I missed the light at Parliament.  Then I turned right to do a quick u-turn on Parliament but the traffic was backed up a lot more than it usually is.  I went to cut between two cars and I hit the streetcar tracks and the bike slid out from under me.  (Now later I went back to the scene of the crime.  There is no way that hitting wet tracks, even if not at precisely a 90 degree angle, should have caused such a skid.  I noticed there is a big metal plate across the street, and that is likely what I hit.  So maybe a one in a thousand chance.  So frustrating...)  I was awfully shocked but I jumped up to get the bike out of the street, but the front wheel was jammed a bit, and I fell a second time in front of this car and a very shocked driver.  It took a bit of time to finally get out of the street and try to recover.

I could barely move the front wheel, but I fiddled with it a bit.  Then I turned around and slowly pedaled over to a bike store on King and River.  They were completely booked up and couldn't do a tune-up, but the mechanic did unhook the wheel and straightened it a bit, as well as the brakes, so at least it was rideable.  I debated going home vs. pressing on to work (where I was exceedingly late by this point), and I went in to work.  I believe I biked one more full day, though not really trusting the bike, and then I was able to book an appointment with my local bike shop and they did a more thorough tune-up.

I'm certainly not happy about any of this, including my bad luck and bad judgement, but it could have been so much worse, either to the bike or to my body.  So in that sense I am (relatively) grateful.

My knee/leg doesn't actually hurt that much, so it looks worse than it feels.

My ribs, which seem to have gotten the worst of things, do seem to have largely returned to normal.

The following week, I actually biked in every single day to work, so it hasn't really impeded my travel patterns, though I will probably be even more unwilling to ride in the rain this summer and fall.

Speaking of rain, I thought it definitely was going to rain hard in the late afternoon, so I went home early and took my last calls of the day there.  I wish it had rained, as we are supposed to head over to Budweiser Stage and see Daryl Hall and Elvis Costello.  It currently looks like there is a moderate chance of rain in the evening, which would stink.  I'm definitely hoping they are wrong for once, or if it does rain, it doesn't really impact the show.  I think, but am not 100% sure, that we have covered seats.  I guess I'll find out soon enough.

Bookish News

I just noted that I finished Rushdie's Victory City.  I also quite recently wrapped up Envy by Yuri Olesha, which is a Russian novella published by NYRB.  I liked the first sections of Envy but enjoyed it less and less as it went on, as it became increasingly hard to tell what was a hallucination and what was "reality."  Still, it was short, and the reading time wasn't drawn out.

Despite its length, I made decent time getting through The Decameron.  I'm pretty sure I mentioned that Shteyngart's Our Country Friends was basically a disappointment, perhaps because it didn't use any part of The Decameron in its structure.  I'm still leaning towards dipping into The Heptameron, maybe on the trip out to Baltimore.  I should balance this with some shorter works.  I will likely be finished with Drabble's Jerusalem the Golden by then and perhaps my rereading of Camus's The Stranger.  Fante's West of Rome is pretty short, so I might take that, as well as Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

I am definitely feeling pretty gun-shy about taking Dickens along again.  I pushed through 500 pages of Nicholas Nickleby, and I finally gave up.  It reminded me so much of the worst aspects of Smollett, particularly Roderick Random, not least of which Nicholas is a pretty hot-headed youth who solves most of his issues with his fists, and indeed many people think he is just spirited and has his heart in the right place.  Blah.  About the only parts of the novel I could stand were when he was in Crummles's acting troupe.  I just lost the will to continue when I hit some plot twists that seem to have directly inspired Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick.  I went and read the plot summary, and the final plot twists are frankly so stupid that I never intend to go back and finish this.  I'm going to give myself permission to drop Dickens a lot sooner, particularly the doorstoppers that are 700-800 pages long.  Honestly, aside from Bleak House and A Christmas Carol, he kind of leaves me cold.  I never liked George Eliot much either.  The only Victorian era novelist that I consistently enjoy is Trollope.

I forget to mention in my post about Age is a Feeling, that I did pick up the script for sale for those with FOMO and who wanted to read all 12 episodes.  I had kind of hoped she would stick around and sign them, but it turned out she had signed a big stack of them already.  No guarantee all of them were signed.  Maybe I was just one of the lucky ones.

In addition to dropping Dickens, I also made a somewhat radical decision in giving up on a jigsaw puzzle.  This is the first puzzle that ever beat me, but I just wasn't making any progress at all.  It was a large Monet scene but I just couldn't get anything connected aside from the white section in the very middle.  I actually moved this from one room down to the basement, and even got another board to spread out the pieces, but it had literally been 3-4 years with making effectively no progress.  Perhaps what is the saddest aspect of this whole sorry saga is that I simply wanted to put the puzzle together and give it away, but since I thought there was a very good chance a few pieces were missing, I just threw it away instead.  It was not only giving me no joy, it was actively preventing me from working on things that I cared about more, like other puzzles or indeed the quilt I am working on for my son.

It is just really hard for me to give up on things like that, but clearly it was the right decision.  I switched to a smaller and infinitely more fun puzzle involving cats, and had it put together in 4 days!  

I have a puzzle of boats to do next, and then a Stuart Davis puzzle that I had initially planned on doing right after the Monet!  So much for that plan...

Edit (7/3): Well, best laid plans and all that.  I was over in Robarts returning some art books, and I decided to check out Frederick Seidel's The Cosmos Poems and a few of his other collections that aren't available on-line.  Before I knew it, I had a tall stack of poetry books, all American poets from P (Michael Palmer) to S (Paul Strand), and one novel - Soft Water by Robert Olmstead, which is part of the Vintage Contemporary line.  So I guess I will quickly skim the poetry and read Soft Water, and then I'll tackle Darkness at Noon.  I think after that it will probably be Fante's West of Rome, Powell's The Golden Spur, Cela's The Hive and The Quick and The Dead by Joy Williams.