A rising sun barely shone on the Humber River as seen from Dundas Street on 27-January-2009
TORONTO, ONTARIO - Have I mentioned that it's still winter here? Oftentimes during this season, I will listen to Buffalo, New York radio stations and hear near-cataclysmic forecasts for snowstorms while only modest precipitation is predicted here in Toronto. Such was the case on Monday, when a storm was predicted to shut down Buffalo on Wednesday but not lead to much accumulation here. By Tuesday, the local forecast had changed to something closer to the Buffalo one, and sure enough, it snowed for most of the day on Wednesday. Officially, we only received 13.4 cm, but it looked like nearly double that in my neighborhood. Yes, it's winter.
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Helping us through the winter are comforting voices on the radio. For the past month, the normal host of the afternoon program Here and Now, Matt Galloway, has been filling in on CBC Radio One's Metro Morning show. As much as we hope that the current absence of regular, veteran host Andy Barrie is temporary, the month with Galloway in the chair offered a glimpse of the future. Barrie will retire someday and Galloway is young enough to be his successor. I will miss Barrie--just like I've been missing him since November as he attends to family matters--but if Galloway takes his place, I'll still feel informed and perhaps will start the day with even greater enthusiasm for this great city.
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When I wake up to a voice other than Barrie's or Galloway's, there's a certain emptiness in my morning. This week there's also been a certain emptiness in my e-mail "in" box. For the first time in recent memory in the past week, I've actually managed to clear out my computerized "in" box. For as long as I can remember, there's been a networking e-mail in there that I was waiting for a certain time to follow up on, or a friend that I was waiting to get back to after something happened, or some other long-term message sitting in there as a reminder. I had reason to act on all those old e-mails, and thus found myself with an empty box, and in fact it's empty as I type this right now. Of course, the "in" box on my physical desk is not empty, and has zero chance of being so until after tax season.
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I didn't want to wait until after tax season when I was given the opportunity to check out the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) for free, and I managed to do that in the past week. I will have more to write about my visit in the future, but suffice to say that it was a worthwhile visit. While I do not think the new Frank Gehry-designed building is worth the price of admission as some have proposed, what is inside the structure is certainly worthwhile, from rooms full of Cornelius Krieghoff paintings to a fleet of model ships to a temporary exhibit with two famous Paul Rubens paintings together to some very interesting modern art.
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One of the things I learned at the AGO was the meaning of "exquisite corpse". I first heard the term in relation to the very odd NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu. After his often very dark commentaries, it is mentioned that he is an editor of an on-line journal with that name, which I assumed was just as weird as his essays. Actually, the term has been used since the 1920's to refer to a piece of art in which different artists make different portions of a work in a pre-defined way without knowing what the other artists were doing. In other words, one artist could draw a person's head, another the torso, another the legs, and another the feet, and the resulting drawing would be an exquisite corpse. I feel a little better about the term now that I am no longer ignorant of its origins.
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Another thing I learned at the AGO was that Vancouver group N.E. Thing Company in the 1970's came up with the idea of ART as an acronym for "Aesthetically Rejected Thing" and ACT for "Aesthetically Claimed Thing." Needless to say, they were more interested in an ACT over ART. In the spirit of the N.E. Thing Company, one wonders if I will ever turn this blog from a BIT ("Blog of Irrelevant Things") to a BET ("Blog of Exciting Things").
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