Monday, May 22, 2006

Street Archeology: Ossington Avenue, Toronto

This is a departure from the usual fare of well, not much lately, but I hope you'll enjoy this stroll along one of Toronto's most interesting and evocative north/south streets – Ossington Avenue. I suppose you could call this a flâneur, as I do like to fancy myself an acute observer of street and social life. However, there was no one around Ossington today, due to it being a holiday (Victoria Day) here in Canada.

Moreover, instead of stealing from Beaudelaire and Benjamin, I'd prefer steal a concept from Foucault – well, I'm not even really stealing it from him either, I'm really just name dropping - and take you on a kind of archaeological dig through the history of Ossington as I imagine it to be. Our tools will be unequal parts empirical and conjectural, and best of all, there will be photos.

When you come at Ossington, heading south from Dundas Street, you find yourself in the centre of the Rua Açores, one of the Portuguese areas of the city.



[An aside. Toronto self-identifies itself as a massive agglomeration of “villages”, represented by street signs letting you know what “village” you're in. Could it be that nice-looking street signs are a major reason why Toronto is, for the most part, a decent place to live? I wonder how all the people who live in these areas deal with the kind of village they're a part of. And if you think they don't, consider this – I'm rooting for Portugal in the World Cup this year.]

Here you have some of the elements of what makes an area “ethnic” - the local butcher and fishmonger sell dead things with their heads on them. The peixaria pictured above is a particularly interesting and affordable place to buy fish from. You won't find sushi-grade tuna there, but there are a kinds of fish there that I've never seen anywhere else in the city.

The papelaria in the photo is also a sign of another ethnic influence on Ossington – Vietnamese. Yes, the Papelaria Portugal is run by a Vietnamese family. And so here we find the two communities who make up what I'll call the “ethnic presence” on Ossington – Vietnamese and Portuguese. (yes, that is a strip club above the pool hall).



The Portuguese presence appears to manifest itself through food and building materials. The Portuguese community is well known in Toronto for helping to supply manual and skilled labour in the building trades for the booming construction industry here, although a good number of Portuguese were recently deported back to Portugal by the Conservative government.


So there are hardware stores, kitchen and bath stores, bakeries and fishmongers – one could do nearly all their renovating shopping on a single block of Ossington.

The Vietnamese presence is very different. Where the Portuguese community lacks restaurants, the Vietnamese community abounds. I believe there are six Vietnamese restaurants on Ossington Avenue between Queen Street and Dundas Street. Many of these restaurants also have Karaoke, as you can see from the picture below.



Ossington wasn't always this way. If the information on this site is correct, Ossington's name, like many streets in Toronto, is an homage to a distant British nobleman. In this case, the 1st Viscount Ossington, John Evelyn Denison, whose family owned the area immediately west of Ossington.

Ossington is also home to those seeking refuge from the crowds and rents of Queen Street West. Also known as West Queen West, the area along Queen to the east and west of the foot of Ossington is arguably the hippest place in the city, with shops, art galleries and restaurants galore. One can see how West Queen West is beginning to bleed over onto Ossington, just as the Portuguese influence made its way south along Ossington from Dundas. In between these two influences is a kind of everyman's land, where old and new mix with the hip and ancient.


Take for instance i deal coffee, at the midpoint between Queen and Dundas on Ossington, between Little Portugal and the Hipsters.

i deal's second location (the first is in Toronto's legendary Kensington Market), has all the shabby couches and stepping-into-someone's-basement-apartment-kitchen feel of the original on Nassau. As usual, the coffee's great, and the crowd lively. This is something that would have been unthinkable five years ago, when the cool part of Queen street petered out before Trinity-Bellwoods park, and the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (Ossington ends at its main entrance) still remained a kind of psychological barrier for people in the community, keeping house prices low and shop fronts boarded up. That a great coffee shop and roaster like i deal would open up on Ossington leads one to believe it won't be long before the Vietnamese karaoke bars are replaced with places like this one:



It's called the Sparrow. Those heavy maroon blinds are always drawn, and when you can peer inthrough the door, you notice something rather unusual for much of Ossington - it's always busy. Always. I've never actually set foot in there, because I cannot imagine I have the icy coolness to survive in a place like this. And the menu speaks for itself:



This is ahistorical, decontextualized dining at it's best. Not a Vietnamese or Portuguese dish in sight – you could be anywhere in the city with this menu. It's a slice of trendy Queen Street for the people who can't stand Queen Street anymore and felt the need to colonize somewhere new.

And you see, this is the future of Ossington. The people in the Art and Design district who cannot stand people like me, moderately well-off bourgeois dilettantes with a keen eye who simultaneously manage to drain everything authentic out of a community and replace it with Subways and Starbucks (because it's what we know), need somewhere to go too.

Like those ethnic communities along Ossington, these people are fleeing something, in this case the gentrification and homogenization of Queen Street, where every little mom and pop store has a brand manager, and making their way to Ossington for something authentic. And I'm not too worried they'll take over Ossington, and its cigar factory (can anyone say an outdoor staging of Carmen?),



or its wine grape warehouse,



and turn them into a Banana Republic and a Quizno's. I want to keep thinking Ossington will defy the very descriptions I am trying to impose upon it.

My little excavation reveals a number of layers, each of which has influenced the later ones. The remaining Victorian homes from the turn of the century, alongside industrial buildings. One then finds the artifacts of the people who lived and live around here, through the ethnic communities. Finally, like much of Toronto when it undergoes gentrification, a kind of well-designed, poorly lit group of shops and restaurants, each trying to help lighten your wallet.

To me though, the most interesting spot on Ossington is this vacant block:



Why? Because despite all the business that has emerged in the past few years, it remains stubbornly empty. What should be the centre of Ossington's street life sits vacant. Right now this block is a bit of real space that contains a multitude of possibilities. It's been vacant for years now, but what can you imagine it to be? A bookstore? A architect's office? A Burger King?

I have neither the money nor the aptitude to reclaim this property from its empty misery. Someone will come along, and all I can hope is that whoever does reopen those doors appreciates the depth of history and multiple aspects to its character, and adds a new layer to an already complex urban space.










Wednesday, April 12, 2006

Wozzeck

The other Canadian Opera Comapny production this month was Alban Berg's Wozzeck. I have a special fondness for this work, and for the music of the Second Viennese School in general, so I was looking forward to seeing the full staging of this masterpiece yesterday. Alas, the current production was a disappointment.

The production itself was interesting, and the singing was pretty good, if a bit distant. I think where the production really let me down was in conductor Richard Bradshaw's handling of the score.

I don't know if was that he was conducting for the audience (there was no intermision in this short 3-act opera), but he seemed rushed, and there was little connection between what was going on in the pit and what was going on on stage. There were also some serious balance problems between singers and the orchestra, something I've never seen to this extent before at the COC.

At the end of it however, I think there was a fatal misunderstanding of the context in which Berg wrote the score. We tend to see the early atonal works as representing a break from the past. Although there is something to this from an analytic perspective, Wozzeck is very much a work imbued with a romantic sensibility. Where was the brief pause between the first and second beats of the waltz parts of Wozzeck? Where, if I may say it, was the warmth? It was all too cold, which may work with serialist Boulez works of the 1950's, but doesn't have a place in this piece.

Anyway, for a work that is rarely performed in Canada, this production could have been much more, especially given the COC's usual sensitivity and overall appreciation of other modern works for the stage.

Thursday, March 23, 2006

Bellini's Norma

Please indulge while I interrupt my dry attempts at political insight for something closer to my heart!

I'm too tired to attempt anything resembling a proper review, but if you live in Toronto, go see Norma. It's a great show, a tight two-act bel canto masterpiece that shows off Bellini's genius and points towards the paths taken later on by Verdi and Wagner, who both cite Bellini as an influence.

The production doesn't bog down, and the singing is great. It's worth the price of admission just to hear June Anderson skip up and down the scales in some of the coloratura passages with a delicacy and clarity one isn't used to hearing at the Canadian Opera Company.

Torontonians are a clap-happy lot when it comes to the opera, but she and the rest of the cast deserved it in this case. So Torontonians, go support your local big-box cultural institution and see Norma!

Sunday, March 05, 2006

Rodney Graham: Sincerity and Delight


This fall, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal will host an exhibition of works by Vancouver-based artist Rodney Graham.

Two years ago, my daughter and I took our weekly Saturday morning trip to the Art Gallery of Ontario, also known here in Toronto as the AGO. Art galleries are at their best on a Saturday morning. It’s usually quiet, just you and whatever you happen to be looking at, and it’s a good time to take a child, as they can ask questions and linger at the works they enjoy, something I’ve discovered kids are more apt to do than adults.

On the façade (now just a memory) of the AGO was a giant poster of a man in a convict’s outfit playing a piano. It looked goofy, and given my own conception of modern art at the time, led to a bit of an eye roll and I thought to myself, “I suppose we can always go downstairs and look at the Group of Seven paintings” (my daughter loves them).

So we went upstairs to this new exhibition, and found nearly the entire second floor consumed by Rodney Graham's work. As you enter, the main walls were covered in the wallpaper at the top of this post (image from the Donald Young Gallery website). A man kicking another man in the ass. Things were looking up!

As we walked down the hallway, we could see that there were a number of small, dark rooms playing films.

Like many encounters with new works or events, it was the first work I saw that had the largest and most favourable impression on me. It was a short looped film entitled City Self/Country Self. It involved Rodney Graham playing both of the central characters, a bourgeois gentleman and an ambling country bumpkin.

When I walked in, the gentleman was getting his shoes shined, looking at his pocket watch. The bumpkin, walking down the street, looks up at a clock tower. The bumpkin starts to walk up a street, as the gentleman approaches him on the sidewalk. A carriage passes the bumpkin, who walks out into the street directly behind the carriage. The carriage drivers look over their shoulders, to watch the gentleman kick the bumpkin squarely in the behind. The kick is played slowly, over and over and over again, and then normal time resumes, the bumpkin picks up his hat, the carriage drives away, the gentleman walks up the other side of the road, and the bumpkin walks along and looks to a window where he fixes his hat, while the gentleman gets his shoes shined, and looking at his pocket watch. The bumpkin, walking down the street, looks up at a clock tower. The bumpkin starts to walk up a street, as the gentleman approaches him on the sidewalk…you get the picture.

I do not know how to describe this work any better than this. It is something you have to encounter to fully appreciate the richness, the initial humour and ultimately, the power of this film as a work of art. I sat there with my daughter for about 20 minutes, just watching it over and over again. There was no beginning and no end, just endless repetition. The moment you inserted yourself into the work was the moment the narrative started. You laugh the first time he gets kicked, but then the humour begins to fade, and you start to see it all as an elaborate trap, where both the viewer and the characters are locked in a struggle to come to terms with their place in the world.

Am I making too much of this? Perhaps, but his other works bore out a similar message.

It’s easy here to invoke Nietzsche’s concept of the eternal recurrence, keeping in mind Graham’s recurrence in his looped films is immediate, adding a kind of ruthlessness to the concept that I don’t know Nietzsche himself envisioned. The gentleman and the bumpkin know what’s going on, they are both players in this drama, and yet they never give you that winking eye, that twist to let you know that this is all bitter irony. I suspect this is because it’s not meant to be ironic.

This is what I believe both separates and lifts Graham’s work above many other contemporary artists. He is sincere. He wants you to laugh because you'll think about the arid, abstract things he wants you to think about more easily. However, he doesn’t wink, and let you know that you don’t have to take any of it seriously, even though his every work nudges you to laugh, to take it all lightly, to chortle in knowing amusement. Graham refuses to let go.

We are bathed in irony these days, and like God, despite rumours of its recent death, it corrodes our ability to judge or to know, and so it refreshes the spirit to see someone, as nonsensical as it may sound, do irony straight.

Nonetheless, his works are a delight to watch, to look at and be a part of. Graham hasn’t fallen for the trap that many contemporary artists do, that in depicting reality, we have to show the seedy or gritty side of things. Instead, works like City Self/Country Self finds its ultimately nihilistic message in a lovely medieval French town.

This is another thing about Graham’s work - it is beautiful. From his upside down trees, to his reading stand for a loop he discovered in Georg Buchner’s Lenz, Graham strives for his works to look beautiful. I wonder how this reconciles with his constant engagement with, broadly speaking, Romantic artists such as Wagner, Buchner and, dare I say it, Freud.

I wonder this because his works strike me as beautiful in a classical way, in the way a period staging of a Baroque opera is. The figures stop, they pose, and in that pose they represent our deepest feelings and thoughts. The realism in Graham’s work is formalized, idealized. (Only when talking about art can one talk about an idealized realism and mean it- logical positivists need not understand my words here, although they’ll get what I’m saying if they see Graham’s work.)

Rodney Graham’s art managed to recode my understanding and appreciation of modern art, and what it can be, how it can reconcile itself and negotiate with earlier periods and yet stay entirely modern in its mode of expression. These days, the Group of Seven or the impressionists no longer intrigue me the way they used to, and I’ve come to instead look forward to the latest works by living artists. I encourage anyone who is in Montreal this fall to visit one an exhibition of one of Canada’s greatest living artists. You may even want to pick up his latest rock CD, but that’s for another post.