Minneapolis Institute of Art

It seems as if it has been almost 20 years since I visited the MIA.  I believe it has undergone some expansion, though not as extensive as the ones in Cleveland and St. Louis.  However, the details are all a bit blurry.  Most of my photos of the artwork turned out.  It's probably simplest to just post them in the order I went through the museum, which was starting with the Asian and African art, then seeing the special exhibit on Modernism, then the rest of the 20th Century art, and finally going through the art before 1900 galleries.  I arrived 2 days to early to see the Martin Luther exhibit, but that's probably just as well.  Flipping through the catalog, I wasn't all that interested in the art itself.  I heard from one of the docents, that many local churches were planning on booking group tours, and that they expected this to be a major hit.

The Asian gallery were quite nice.  I generally was most interested in the pieces from Japan.

The International Modernism exhibit appears to be drawn from the museum's collections and will run until May 2017.  There was another smaller exhibit on American Modernism from the Kunin Collection, which runs through mid March 2017.  We weren't supposed to take photos of this exhibit, so you'll have to imagine it.  The International Modernism opened with this somewhat foreboding O'Keeffe painting. 

Georgia O'Keeffe, City Night, 1926

There were quite a few paintings about war and revolution, and I found the expression on the horse in this print to be quite curious.  Is the horse more upset to have been dragged into the conflict, or is the horse disappointed that its master is asleep at the wheel, so to speak, and not actively smiting the enemy?

Natalia Goncharova, Saint George the Conqueror, 1914

Niles Spencer, Behind the Square, 1932

One of my favorite painters, Stuart Davis, had a couple of paintings in the exhibit, which obviously didn't get scooped up for the big retrospective at the Whitney.  This one was nice.

Stuart Davis, Rue Des Rats #1, 1928

The Modernism exhibit led me to the stairs up, where the 20th Century art was to be found.  This was certainly my core interest, and while the cubist paintings were a bit middle-of-the-road, I did like this one, which is almost Cubist lite.

Roger de la Fresnaye, Married Life, 1912

I was particularly excited by the Expressionist gallery with the Beckmann triptych, some Kirchners, and a Kadinsky.  I tried to stay in there the longest, soaking everything in.

Max Beckmann, Blind Man's Bluff, 1945

Beckmann, Blind Man's Bluff (right panel)

As far as the more modern works, they had a Guston (from his abstract period), a Chuck Close, a Kiki Smith and several others.  I liked this George Segal sculpture the most.

George Segal, The Girl Friends, 1969

I was starting to get a little worried about the time (though in the end I could have stayed at least another 30 minutes longer than I did).  Also, while I like Impressionist painting, I am generally less interested in painting before that era.  So I went fairly quickly through the Renaissance and Baroque rooms, though I was very taken by this El Greco.

El Greco, Chrst Driving the Money Changers from the Temple, ca. 1570

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I'll close this post with a few of the pre-1900 paintings I liked (a mix of Impressionist and other styles).  All in all, the Minneapolis Institute of Art has a very solid collection, and I enjoyed the visit.  Probably my single biggest gripe is that they let their compact Gallery Guide go out of print, and now they basically only have a highlights booklet, which is just too thin.

John Singer Sargeant, Luxembourg Gardens at Night, 1879

Camille Pissarro, Place du Theatre Francais, Paris: Rain, 1898

Paul Signac, Snow, Boulevard de Clichy, Paris, 1886

Vincent Van Gogh, Olive Trees, 1889

Quick trip -- Minneapolis & Chicago

I believe I mentioned that I was going to fly out to Minneapolis and thence to Chicago.  (I was one of very few people not there to take in some of the World Series atmosphere, since my trip had been booked several weeks back.  Anyway, it is just as well, since 1) I had already booked my hotel rooms and didn't get blindsided by a big increase in the going rate and 2) I didn't leave Chicago as heart-broken as most fans.  It would have been nice had they won at least one game while I was in Chicago, but I don't feel all choked up over it.)  Given how much I did in just a few days, I think I will write a quick overview in this post, then I will have separate posts for the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Norman Lewis exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, and perhaps a bit of a review of two plays I saw while in Chicago.  That's a lot of posts, but I'll see how quickly I can get them in.

I left Thurs. right after work.  I normally try to fly out of Billy Bishop Airport, but Porter doesn't serve Minneapolis.  Hopefully it will some day, especially if they get pre-clearance at Billy Bishop.  So I caught the UP Express.  It is a nice ride, though it is now taking 25 minutes, not 20.  Also, a lot of people have started taking this service as part of their regular commute.  The train was standing room only until the Weston stop at which point the train pretty much emptied out.  That was a big surprise to me, though with Presto, the ride from Union to Weston only costs $5.00, so that is something we will probably investigate a bit in the future.

Anyway, the trip to Minneapolis was fairly routine.  I stayed out at a hotel near the Mall of America, and indeed the flight crew on my flight all stayed at the same hotel and we took the shuttle over.  I heard them discussing some of their flights to Afghanistan and Pakistan.  While it is fairly common for pilots to have direct or indirect military experience, it seems more rare (in my view) for a flight attendant to also have made those flights to Afghanistan.

I had been reading Muriel Spark's Symposium on the flight and finished it up that evening.  I didn't like it at all.  I believe I mentioned already that I am just not on the same wavelength as her.  I was not particularly enamoured of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, and I didn't like A Far Cry from Kensington, since I felt the main character was snobbish and quite judgemental.  There are three more books by Spark that I probably "ought" to read (Memento Mori, The Girls of Slender Means and The Mandelbaum Gate) and a few others that I would probably read if I actually liked her writing, including The Public Image and Loitering with Intent.  At this point, it is unlikely that I will read anything more by her, but I do retain the right to change my mind.  Anyway, I left the book at the breakfast buffet at the hotel.

I managed to get to the Mall of America transit center just before 9, and I got an all-day transit pass for $4.  Not a bad deal.  Anyway, I would never have been able to figure out my itinerary without Google maps, which allows you to make these odd transit connections that most natives wouldn't know about.  I made it to the Minneapolis Institute of Art just before 10, which was when it opened.  I was reading The Federalist Papers and finding them fairly hard going, and this raised some interest at the front desk (Hamilton is on most people's minds this year due to the Broadway show).  I should manage to get through the book by the election, however, and I'll probably put at least some of my thoughts down at that time. 

I'll go into much more detail about the MIA in a separate post, but I was sort of intrigued by this large Chihuly piece they had hanging over the entrance.  It's looking like I will take the kids to the Chihuly exhibit at the ROM this weekend, though things are still a bit up in the air (sort of like this piece, ha ha).

I wandered through the collection for just under 3 hours, and I believe I managed to get to all the individual galleries.  I will note here that I did manage to see the Beckmann triptych Blindman's Bluff, so I can verify that I have now seen 8 of 9 in person, and I'll just have to get to Munich one of these days to complete the set...

I just managed to catch the bus to my next destination, the Walker Art Center.  Or rather the bus took me halfway there -- to Nicollet and 15th St.  I ended up eating at the Nicollet Grill, which was quite good.  I would go again if I was in the neighborhood.  I then walked along 15th St. through a park and finally crossed a bridge to get to the Walker Art Center.  

I knew that it was under construction, but this was way more torn up then I expected and the sculpture garden was completely closed off.  I think the last time I was here (I believe 1997!) there was some construction going on in the sculpture garden, but this was a whole new level of disruption.

 

I enjoyed the visit to the Walker, though I wish they had more older material on display as part of their 75 Years retrospective, but I'll write more on that soon.

I managed to catch a bus downtown and still had a bit over an hour to look around.  I actually had to stop at the library for a while to recharge my phone, since it had been completely run down, due to all the photos I took.  I managed to get a few more decent shots of the downtown and the near-deserted Nicollet Mall, then I caught the Blue Line out to the airport.  Even though I know unemployment is relatively low in Minneapolis, the downtown felt a bit more forlorn (or perhaps just poorer) than on my last visit, but maybe I was also a bit put out at how much my routes were disrupted by construction.  I was reasonably impressed with the Blue Line and thought that the ridership seemed fairly healthy.

I got to the airport in plenty of time, but the flights to Chicago were all messed up because a plane had caught fire on one of the runways at O'Hare and NTSB was still investigating!  I guess we finally got airborne around 10 pm, which wasn't so much later than my scheduled flight, but it still felt I was at the airport for far too long around far too many cranky people. 

Fortunately, I was staying at the O'Hare Hilton so I didn't have to go anywhere once we finally arrived.  I was even able to sleep in a bit.

Saturday, I hit the Cultural Center first.  I enjoyed the Norman Lewis exhibit, though to be honest, I don't think I'd recommend traveling much more than 150 miles to see it.  It makes more sense just to pick up the catalog.  I then headed up to the Water Tower on the Mag Mile and had just about 45 minutes at the MCA before Life Sucks started at Lookingglass Theatre.  I liked this a lot, to the point where I might even catch it if it plays Toronto.  Anyway, I would recommend it to people who love theatre and have at least a passing familiarity with Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.  I think it runs two more weeks, and I'll write more about it soon.  I still had some time to kill, and I stopped by LUMA (the Loyola Art Museum) but the exhibit (on Spanish colonial art) didn't do anything for me, so I didn't go in.

So I went north to check out Rogers Park.  Actually I just managed to squeeze on the train, which was full of soon-to-be-disappointed Cubs fans.  Mercifully, the train was almost empty after Addison.

It was kind of interesting checking out how the neighborhood had changed.  Generally, I am kind of depressed when I am in downtown Chicago, but Rogers Park looked better than it did when I lived there.  If it weren't for the fact that the Red Line has slowed down to the point that it takes an hour or so to go from Howard to the Loop, Rogers Park seems like a fairly convivial neighborhood now.  I didn't remember this bookstore near Sheridan and Pratt, though it might actually have been located on Clark back when I lived in Chicago.  Anyway, I took a look around and restrained myself to only buy one book (my backpack was already quite full).

I had dinner and still had some time to kill, so I went into the Heartland Cafe and drank some tea (maybe the single most impressive thing about the weekend is that I didn't slip up and order any soda at restaurants or even on the plane).  At 7, I wandered over to the theatre to see Shinn's Dying City.  I think the actors really did a fine job, but I do have a few issues with the play.  It was still worth seeing, and I felt a bit glad that I helped fill out the audience just a bit, since their box office has been suffering with the Cubs in the World Series.  (I recall one play years and years ago was cancelled when the Bulls were in the Finals and no one was doing anything aside from watching them.)  This was the final weekend, but they said that the previous week they had done reasonable business.

I then turned around and took the El all the way to Midway and then took a hotel shuttle. I managed to get there around 11.  Fortunately, the flight back was fairly uneventful (and wasn't delayed at all).  I still had time to get to the library and buy the groceries and still help out a bit with the kids' homework.  Now I just need to get some rest, since Toronto does Halloween on the actual night and not on the nearest weekend.  Fortunately, the forecast is for a dry evening tomorrow.

10th Canadian Challenge - 8th Review - Kay's Lucky Coin Variety

It was about a month that I stopped by the Word on the Street Festival to hear Ann Choi reading from Kay's Lucky Coin Variety.  She was one of 5 finalists for the Toronto Book Award, though in the end she wasn't the winner.  Still, very impressive for a first novel to be given so much attention!

In a way, her story is quite inspirational (she had been living with the idea for this novel for something close to 20 years and then finally took a writing course where she managed to finish it and find an interested editor, which is almost a fairy tale story in itself) but in other ways it makes me a bit jealous that I haven't pushed through as much, and that a few of the gambits I have used just haven't worked out (the writing group didn't pan out, I am having trouble getting my work staged, etc.).  In different ways, I am jealous of the author of Floating City.  Given that there is a bit of deviance in both books, I thought about writing a gigantic review combining the two, but there will be enough asides if I just focus on Choi's novel, so I'll just do that.

In her comments before the reading, Choi said it was great to be part of a movement where Asian-Canadians got more recognition, and she was thrilled that Kim's Convenience had gone from a successful play to a network sitcom.  (I've generally heard good things about this show, and probably I'll check it out some day (whenever I actually start watching TV again).)

One thing that the sitcom and the novel have to do is spend a bit of extra time explaining Koreans to white people, so there is usually a bit about why Koreans, or at least older Koreans, hate the Japanese.  (To be fair, I have a fairly similar moment in Corporate Codes, though it is a young Chinese woman voicing the same thoughts.)  In particular, Choi needs to discuss why Koreans are so concerned about face and not sharing troubles with outsiders, since quite a few plot points in the novel don't quite make sense if only people talked to each other.  In some ways, the main character Mary (Yu-Rhee) is a bit unstable in the sense that most of the time she is quite passive, but then at other times she is quite assertive when the plot calls for it.  It is quite hard to believe she would have been quite so forthright (or even rude) to Joon-Ho's mother.  If she was so strong in this case, then why wouldn't she have been tougher with her own parents to stop putting Joon-Ho on a kind of pedestal?  I mean, some of this can be explained by a fairly immature girl caught between two cultures and not quite knowing how to fit in.  Even so, Mary made a few quite bad choices, like calling her stalker up after her brother went looking for him.

I think my biggest issue with the novel was that it basically was a bit too melodramatic.  There are about 6 major traumatic events in this book when 2 or at most 3 would have been a bit more realistic.  I do feel less is more in a novel that is already trying to do a lot in terms of showing how Koreans fit into Toronto.  

As a lesser complaint, I was kind of disappointed in the portrayal of Will Allen, who was her English teacher.  After she graduated high school, she more or less seduced him and they have a short fling.  I wasn't quite as horrified over that as some people.  (I grew up in the 70s and early 80s when a few teachers (and particularly college professors) married former students.  While there are power imbalances to be sure, they didn't seem any worse than in most marriages.  Of course, today's morality police view things in black and white terms and don't recognize the complexity of people's desires.  But that's definitely a discussion I don't want to get into today.)

In a way, it is kind of a neat twist that she lands the blue-eyed guy of her fantasies, and then finds out he is really not quite what she wanted after all.  I didn't mind that, but I felt Choi made him such a small, weak character when all his frailties were revealed.  I would have liked a slightly more nuanced (or perhaps more generous) view of Mr. Allen.  It is a bit hard to believe he could have been such an inspirational teacher and yet was so moody at home and so blind to his own shortcomings as a writer.

The other thing that was sort of interesting, but perhaps a bit disappointing, was how telescoped her college years are.  Her entire college career is covered off in 5 pages or so.  I think there were mostly there to make a point that she has succeeded in Canada, even though it was her parents’ dream not hers to come to a new country.  Ann Choi herself seems far less ambivalent about trade-offs about growing up in a different culture.  She was glad to be a Canadian and very glad that her mother, in particular, had given up a career as a school teacher, to come to Canada for a chance for a better life for her children, including Ann.

On the whole this was an engaging read, and I did read it in only a few short bursts.  While the novel is a tad too melodramatic, the interactions between the family members, particularly Mary and her brother Josh rang true.  I particularly liked the way the novel "triggered" me into recalling Toronto in the early 90s; even though the novel is largely set in the mid 80s, many aspects of Toronto hadn't changed that much by the time I rolled into town.  I guess more than anything else, Kay's Lucky Coin Variety (and the portrayal of sad-sack Mr. Allen) ought to serve as a big kick up my backside to get working on my novel.  Maybe one day I can read to a crowd from my published book and be as excited as Ann Choi was at Word on the Street.

Lo and Behold (Herzog)

I've been holding off writing this review of Werner Herzog's Lo and Behold for a couple of months now.  How appropriate that I have been struggling so much with my internet connection for months as well.  It is sometimes the Wi-Fi adapter and sometimes the router that has to be reset, but it is very rare that I go 48 hours without having major connection problems that drive me so batty that I have to go off and read a book to cool down.  Not that spending some time off-line is a bad thing, but I want it to be on my own terms.  These are my local problems, nothing to do with wider internet outages.

Of course, most people are aware that there was a huge cyber-attack that compromised the web for several hours on Friday (Oct 21).  The wikileaks people tried to claim their supporters had did it, but that seems fairly unlikely.  The more probable claim is by a group called New World Hackers, who say that this is only a dry run for an even bigger attack in the near future.  Oh joy.  Due to the nature of the attack, perhaps the only good to come out of this is that it will slow down the "internet-of-things" where all kinds of things are connected to the internet for no good reason.  For instance, this man spending 11 hours trying to get a kettle hooked up to the internet so that he could start it boiling on his way home from work.  However, I also realize that some of these "improvements" that seem so silly to us now will be seen as essential and basically inescapable in the future.

The real problem is that after a certain tipping point, you can't go back.  It is too hard to be the lone hold-out when everyone else has migrated some particular business line to the internet.  This actually happened to me a few weeks back when I went to get my bike from a bike shop.  The merchant had no internet access and couldn't figure out a way to take payments without an internet hook-up.  I somewhat pointedly asked about the machines that took a credit card impression, and he said you couldn't buy them anymore.  I strongly doubt that, but rather he just didn't want to be bothered.  At any rate, I wasn't willing to walk four or five blocks to an ATM and he seemed pretty hopeless without the computer telling him what to do.  (He couldn't even calculate the tax.)  While this may have been a particularly inept manager, it does speak to what happens when we move too many functions to the digital realm and let computers (or other machines) do all our work for us.  (Emerson warned about this as far back as 1841 in Self-reliance, but then also Forster's The Machine Stops (1909) and Pixar's Wall-E (2008) portrayed the danger of getting hooked on mechanical aids.)

In any case, it happens that the internet of things and over-reliance on the internet are two of the ten "chapters" in Herzog's documentary about the internet.  It appears that you can already stream the documentary on Amazon, and in about a month it will be coming out on DVD/Blu-ray.  However, those of us in Canada are screwed yet again with no apparent release date.  However, we did have the chance to see the film, at least in Toronto.  Apparently, this Friday the documentary final will be screening in the UK.  I'm sure the DVD will eventually make it across the border, and of course if not there are always the torrent sites...

It's sort of interesting checking out a couple of reviews (here and here).  I would not really agree with the Guardian review that this is an overall upbeat assessment of the internet; I thought it was considerably more pessimistic about the negative aspects of the internet, not least of which it is so hard to escape it.  Actually, this Wired article about the documentary gives you a much better sense of the documentary, including the fascinating tidbit that the whole documentary was actually paid for by an internet security company called NetScout!  (Herzog retained final cut.)

I liked the documentary a lot, though I felt there were several areas where Herzog had gone in for a symbolic story and I wanted a broader grappling with the issue.  I'll come back to that shortly, but I want to digress and engage in some internet nostalgia.

Herzog manages to track down the original computer that sent the original email message.  It was supposed to type "login" but hung at "lo."  This leads to some elevated banter about "lo and behold," which of course became the title.  Another computer programmer involved from the very beginning hauls out a phone directory of everyone who was on the internet at that time.

University of Michigan was among the first universities outside California to be part of a computer network: a Michigan only network in 1971 and then they were linked into the T-1 backbone by 1988.  I can't quite recall when I first got email but I know that I was able to write the equivalent of email messages to other UM students by 1989.  Actually I had played text-based games off of a computer mainframe before that, probably by the mid-80s, but it that case you had to be seated at a terminal and log into the system.  You couldn't dial in from just anywhere.

The other thing that is a bit hard to remember is that it wasn't particularly easy to just get an email account, even if you had a dial-up modem.  AOL was just starting to take off.  I don't think I ever signed up with them, however.  And there really wasn't all that much content on-line, though it was still easy to waste lots of time.

I still remember going from a super primitive browser (probably Gopher) to Lynx, which allowed hyperlinking between articles.  This was probably 1993 when I switched over.  But within the year, everyone moved to Mosaic, since it had graphic capabilities.  Nonetheless, the internet still was fairly text-heavy in the beginning.  From my perspective, 1993-1998 or so was a great time for emails, and I still have some long back and forth missives saved.  This was a time when I was the most connected to a lot of people whom I no longer saw face to face.  It was sort of a perfect embodiment of Simmel's Web of Group-Affiliations (the part where he talks about long-distance associations of like minded people).  But the trend has definitely been away from writing emails (and long-form blogs) and towards shorter, pithier messages as well as pictures, including pictures of what one is eating.  To me, these developments have been quite a disappointment, and, in that sense, the internet has not lived up to its potential, but mostly through human laziness.  Still, it was neat to be around to see it all happen.  (However, I am particularly glad not to have lived in an era where everything ended up on the web.  The 80s are basically a black hole as far as the internet is concerned.)  My children will have no understanding of growing up in a less-wired era and they will also always have to be aware that almost everything they do will end up on line (and they will almost certainly be cyber-bullied at some point or other).

That's enough with the digressions.  I thought the documentary was quite good on robots, driverless cars, computer security (basically an impossibility as long as there are people in the loop) and the total collapse of Western civilization that will arrive once hackers (or a solar flare) can take down the internet for a week or more (essentially, we have eliminated so much redundancy in the system that there are no non-internet back-ups as that bike shop owner claimed).  Where I thought he needed to go deeper was on internet (and particularly internet gaming) addiction.  He brought up the case of the Korean parents who let their child die because they were playing an on-line game (about raising an internet baby).  And a treatment center in the U.S. for internet gaming addicts.  However, I would have liked some discussion of whether this is really any worse than the video game addicts of my day.  What proportion of internet users or even gamers are truly addicted to the internet, and is this substantially larger than other types of addicts?  I suspect that a certain percentage of the population has an addiction profile (whether truly genetic or not), so if it wasn't the internet it would be something else.  On the other hand, the way that the internet feeds the need for "the new" might make it a truly new and more challenging source of addiction.  I definitely wish the documentary had delved a bit deeper here.

I was going to write something about trolling and cyber-bullying, but this is a huge topic (only illustrated by one horrifying case in the documentary), but this review has already gone on too long, so I'll hive that off into a separate post.  It should be clear that I found this a really rewarding documentary that just was a little thin in a few places.  The Wired article hints that Herzog has a lot left in the can (including material on bitcoin) and that he is shopping it around to become a mini-series of sorts.  I definitely hope that happens, but if it does, he has to make sure that Canadians have the right to watch it too!

Childhood cliques

I have really tried to restrain myself from writing much about the children, but I think I can say that I was quite saddened to find out that one of them is always the center of attention and one is left out at birthday parties. To some extent, this is age-related sorting, and there isn't much to be done about that. (I don't think in this case there is any intentional cruelty going on.)  It will get somewhat better as they get older, but it would be unwise to claim that the patterns laid down in childhood will be completely effaced in adulthood.

At any rate, I will pivot to write more about my childhood, which is safer territory. I think it must have been different for many of us growing up as Gen Xers that there were certainly kids around but most neighborhoods weren't bursting at the seams with them, like it was for the Boomers. There weren't any kids my age or my brother's age on our block, and there were a few kids closer to my brother's age one block away.   My friends were further, and I did spend a fair bit of time with them, but I had to travel a fair bit.  Fortunately, we lived in an era where even 2nd and 3rd graders could go by bike many blocks away.

We moved into a different neighborhood just before 4th grade, and the kids next door were my brother's age or younger. I still had to travel several blocks to see friends from school. This held all through high school. I was also in the Boy Scouts, so I wasn't quite as isolated in childhood as it may sound at first. As I got older, I was able to go pretty far afield to see my friends, and by high school I was actually able to drive halfway across town to hang out with various friends. My brother and I were both latchkey kids and were raised basically free-range, though I had a later curfew than he did, since I was more trusted and a bit older.   In one way, I am sorry that my kids won't have the same essentially guilt-free freedom to drive all over town (Kimmy Beach's In Cars really captures this era well). Not only is there too much congestion now, but you have to do all this moral calculus whether the journey justifies the emissions. On the flip side, they are living in a city where transit will take them almost anywhere they want to go.

I do have some fond memories of times I spent with schoolmates, including hanging out with Neil, who lived on a small lake on the south edge of town. I got to go on their sailboat a few times and tried water-skiing, though I was not good at that at all. I also hung out late at his place and we played some of the very early games for Mac and watched movies like Brazil and The Quiet Earth. Occasionally I got invited to Tim's house for pool parties. On a couple of occasions Brian and Ryan invited me to go sledding. But I wasn't particularly popular, and often I was invited as kind of an afterthought, and sometimes I only found out later that some people had been hanging out. There were quite a few Fridays I spent staring at the phone before giving up and playing Atari in the basement...

I think there are a lot of reasons for this, including I can be seen as a bit of a wet blanket and in particular I didn't want to be around people who were drinking. (It's interesting and sad how this reputation somehow stuck in college (and even grad school!), and the parties that I threw were inevitably huge flops (even though I had bought alcohol). Curiously, the only year I was ever completely part of the in crowd was during my Master's program at UToronto.)

Being always somewhat on the periphery means that you become far more independent and self-reliant and yet lonely. You tend to be less swayed by popular opinion, since you have to justify to yourself that you are following the right path (and of course there is a huge danger in coming across as too judgemental or self-righteous). In my case, I think of friendship as fleeting and somewhat contingent. It doesn't surprise me that I have to do most of the work in maintaining friendships and when I stop working at it, then we drift apart. But there are advantages in not having strong ties, namely that you are more open to changing careers and, in my case, moving to different cities and even countries. And perhaps I should say that I usually end up having interesting discussions with work colleagues that stand-in for the talks I would have with friends, but you do have to be more guarded in talking with colleagues and they tend to only last for a few years, at least given how often I change jobs. For me the trade-off has been worth it to prioritize openness to new opportunities over stronger place and personal ties, but barely so.

I'm getting closer and closer to taking up The Study Group again. What I would like to capture is a bit of this insider/outsider perspective. Even among the smarter kids there were kids who ended up kind of loners and some that were more popular. I suppose I was relatively lucky in that, in my high school, the academically talented kids weren't completely shunned and some were quite popular indeed. There were some weird tricks that we played on each other (notes in Latin in lockers and such). Probably we were completely insufferable to everyone else, but as I said I don't think it was quite as extreme as what you saw in the TV shows Square Pegs or Geeks and Freaks. In my high school, you didn't have to be ashamed of being smart, but there were still other somewhat painful dynamics involved. I'll just see if I can represent it adequately, and then I'll see if anyone else is interested in this particular story. So stay tuned.

Double Bill at Buddies

I mentioned briefly that there are two shows playing at Buddies at Bad Times.  These are actually a production of Nightwood Theatre, though at this point they may be a bit of a co-production with Buddies given they are so prominently displayed on the Buddies' calendar.  I wouldn't say I go to Buddies all that often (probably once a year), though I do try to check out their calendar from time to time.  What is even a bit stranger is that at this point, probably 2/3rds of the shows I've seen there have no appreciable queer content -- that includes last night's shows (Quiver and Mouthpiece), Lorca' Blood Wedding (being reprised this season) and Anthony and Cleopatra.

It looks like this season they are doing an experimental version of Thorton Wilder's Our Town (though it may still not incorporate that much gender-bending).  I'm thinking of going to see Sky Gilbert's It's All Tru, which is much closer to the shows Buddies is best known for putting on.

Both Quiver and Mouthpiece are somewhat experimental.  The actual story in Mouthpiece is extremely thin -- a youngish woman is trying to deal with the death of her mother, which happened the previous day.  She has a number of tasks -- picking a coffin, getting flowers, choosing the dress for her mother to be buried in, and then writing the eulogy.  It's been almost exactly 20 years since my mother died, but I still remember how there is a sort of an assembly line of things to do when death occurs, and people that sort of need to prompt you to keep going through the numbness of it all.  In my case, I didn't have to deal with the eulogy, but I think I was somewhat involved in lining up speakers to read various inspirational writings (mostly from the Bible, but also e.e. cummings and a few other things).  I didn't feel quite as alone or as overwhelmed as this woman.  It does seem to be the pressure to say something meaningful in the eulogy that is the final straw for her, and she teeters between a bit of a feminist-inspired harangue and the nice, proper eulogy that her mother would have expected (just confirming that in many ways the mother was a "doormat" (in her daughter's eyes)).  The same dualism creeps in when she decides how to respond to some random catcalling on the street as she is coming back from the florist.

So the actual story is fairly thin, but what makes it special is that there are two performers representing the chaos in this woman's mind.  About 80% of the time they speak the same lines in essentially the same voice, which is already tricky, but then they also parrot back different voices on the telephone (an aunt, a couple of self-involved friends and perhaps an ex-boyfriend).  When they do different voices in tandem, the effect is quite stunning.  I can't imagine quite how much time they put into rehearsing, but it must have been a lot.  From a purely performative perspective, this is worth checking out.

However, if you are more interested in plot, and can only see one show, then Quiver is a bit meatier.  What makes this stand-out is that it is one performer playing all the roles in a show, using a voice processor.  The video here gives a fairly good idea of what the show is like.  It is basically the story of a single mother and her two teenaged daughters with the main focus on the younger daughter, Maddie.  In a way, it reminds me a bit of the family in Freedman's Sister Cities, though if we were watching the mother when she was still in her salad days and was kind of running through men.  It's certainly a bit tragic how Maddie has to grow up so early and become the responsible one in the family, but you do have a sense that she will emerge from the wreckage of her childhood as a fairly strong person.  I just thought of another connection -- Tremblay's Yours Forever, Marie-Lou -- where there is one conservative sister and one fairly wild sister.  In this case, Tremblay somewhat reverses expectations and our sympathy basically lies with the wilder one who ultimately has a healthier attitude towards society and relationships, while the conservative one is just too closed off from the world and a bit priggish to boot.  In Quiver, we aren't supposed to dislike the older sister (she's self-centered but not really a bad seed), but the balance of our sympathy is with the younger one.  Anyway, it was worth taking a gamble on it.

Edit (11/1): It's sort of interesting that most reviewers seem to favor Mouthpiece a bit over Quiver.  I don't mind that so much, but I found this review troubling, since it in some ways just reinforces the idea that women tear down other women, almost as much as they tear themselves down. The quote is "we’re left wondering why describing a woman’s strength means using terms invoking women who operated in traditionally male roles and music that operates in a traditionally male sphere."  This to me just reeks of the dead end that many branches of academic feminism have found themselves in.  Is it not up to women to decide how they want to find their own voice?  Wouldn't the reviewer be carping about how stereotypical it would be if the artists used weaving or macrame or something along those lines instead of singing?  I think the reviewer is being somewhat perverse in claiming that women can't find an authentic voice in a male-dominated profession, i.e. music, when by that token she shouldn't find her voice in writing for newspapers, where the ownership and control is at least as male dominated as the music industry.  I've had a number of issues with this reviewer, and I think at this point, I will just stop reading her reviews.  I would still encourage interested parties to check out the double bill at Buddies and not to worry so much about the fact there is singing involved...

Tarragon - The Circle

I'm just back from The Circle by Geoffrey Brown at Tarragon.  This was preview week, so it is possible they will get even more amped up throughout the run, but this was pretty intense.  It's somewhat interesting that while I sometimes don't mind reading about delinquents (juvenile or otherwise) -- and characters from Madison Smartt Bell's first few novels definitely come to mind -- I am a lot less willing to see them up close and personal as with theatre.  I just remember in high school actively avoiding the kinds of people that populate this play, so it wasn't all that fun getting dragged into their lives now.  And beyond just being delinquents, these characters are truly trouble magnets.  I'd say there were echoes of Bogosian's subUrbia, but this was even a bit darker.

The set was pretty cool -- all set in a garage in suburban Calgary.  I still had a bit of trouble believing that the parent who let her daughter's boyfriend live in the garage (mostly because he paid rent) wouldn't draw the line at his bong collection.  (One big blue bong was named Trudeau!)  Rock and grunge music played in the background for much of the show, since the play was about a get-together that became a sort of party.

Overall this wasn't quite my cup of tea but I liked three things about the play.  First, I knew something bad would happen, but what it was truly caught me off guard, though in retrospect it was adequately foreshadowed.  So props...  Second, I liked how the rest of the play explained the opening scene, but Brown didn't feel compelled to repeat the opening scene, as if to say "remember this?"  The audience had to make the connection on their own.  If this was a movie or especially a TV movie, the edit would almost certainly have repeated the opening scene, at best from a different angle.  Third, though this is a bit of inside baseball, there is an inconvenient in-coming cell phone call that impacts the plot.  One of the more amusing moments in David Henry Hwang's Chinglish is when a cell phone goes off in the main character's pants.  Here the sound effect is similar, though the outcome is quite different.  I'd be very surprised if Brown had seen Chinglish, since it hasn't even been produced in Canada as far as I know, and its Broadway run was quite short.  It's more of the spirit of the times.  Maybe the single strangest thing about this production is that the Millennial characters (actually shading into Gen Z) aren't always texting other people on their phones (and one of the characters is studiously ignoring calls coming on his phone), but that may simply be yet another marker of how much they are all outsiders.

In some ways, I was pretty sure I wouldn't be completely sold on this production, since this is focused on such a narrow slice of today's youth.  Even in the piece I wrote about teens hanging out outside the 7-11 (and I really ought to dust that off and submit to Toronto Cold Reads) they weren't quite such no-hopers.  But I was interested in seeing the dramatic possibilities of a bunch of kids in one room (here the garage).  I think I will push on and write about a bunch of academically talented kids with a very different set of problems all gathered in one kid's basement.  But I'll have to make sure that there really is enough dramatic interest in this set-up.  It might just be too flat, which is definitely an issue with a number of my plays.  I don't like having completely improbable things happen, and I definitely don't like terrible things happening to my characters, which can be seen as too limiting, at least to some theatre-goers.  Anyway, food for thought...