On Memory

Perhaps it is the impending milestone, but my thoughts have lately been turning to how much I have forgotten over my lifetime.

What triggered this today? I was browsing through the archives of the Varieties of Unreligious Experience, and I realised that I do not remember most of what was written here in May of 2005. And I don't mean that I don't remember the arguments, I mean that I do not remember them at all.

This is rather unsettling. In 2006, when I started blogging, the Varieties, along with a few other blogs, were pretty much the essence of my online existence. I read everything that came out, and I've gone back and read them again. And pretty much everything Conrad writes is excellent, and more importantly, it's memorable.

At least I think it is, when I reread it there, for the first time.

***

Beyond my own forgetting, and my long struggle to improve my memorization skills (I have what appears often to be an excellent memory, but a terrible ability to memorize), I am also watching my 4 year son going through what I call the Great Forgetting.

What do I mean by this? As a toddler, he had a fantastic memory, not only of his things, but of places he had been, and things he had done. Over the past 6 months, as he has become more of a little boy, he has forgotten a lot things which he remembered even a few weeks ago.

His brain seems to be going through a process where much of his young childhood is disappearing - he has forgotten some very significant things. Yet he still has the fantastic nearly photographic memory of a child - he just no longer remembers himself at a point in time where it would be wonderful if he did.

And then the worry becomes, given my own memory, who will remember him as a little boy? How much do we lose? And yet I've never really understood the desire to videotape or photograph everything, to capture each moment in time, so one ends up living the great moments of one's life behind some device that will allow one to watch it, perhaps, some time later.

***

And so I read the Varieties from 2006, and I think of my own blogging since then, and how much of my intellectual disengagement has to do with my inability to remember all these facts and strands of thought which, not so long ago, came so easily. This blog has taken the turns it has, in part, because I cannot remember why I write in the first place.

So this blog has been a depiction of a life as anti-bildung, of a desire for progress that never comes. Progress as something I expect to show up, in a big white Cadillac with horns on the front, to deliver me from the work that has always needed to be done. That it is memory, and not process, that allows one to grow.

However, one thing I can say - I remember all of my own work. At least for now.

The Hipster as an Artifact of Late Capitalism, Part I: The Black Hoof

It was our honeymoon. We were freshly off the plane, jet lagged, and I was hungry. However, as we were in Milan, and it was about 3 in the afternoon, not much was open.

So we wandered in search of food, happening upon a grocery store. We ambled in, and I grabbed a plastic-wrapped prosciutto and mozzarella sandwich.

And that was it. The prosciutto was sweet and succulent, with just enough saltiness to enhance the flavours present without it. It was beautiful.

I spent the rest of my honeymoon eating as much prosciutto as possible. Returning to Toronto, I was dismayed to discover the truth that many of us discover upon our returns - the good stuff doesn't travel.

For years, I sought out decent prosciutto, which, at the very least, would compare to the inexpensive sandwich-grade prosciutto I found at that Milanese grocery store. Occasionally I would happen upon some good stuff, usually at St. Lawrence Market, but it was never consistent - fine prosciutto one week became the salty-dried porcine husk you were sliced and handed two weeks later.

As reliability is the cornerstone of consumer choice, I flailed wildly about in my pursuit, hoping that one day, I would find a deli that delivered the prosciutto I had savoured Italy, all the time. But to no avail.

Local restaurants were not much better, and vastly more expensive. The much vaunted Terroni, purveyor of traditional southern Italian food, generally served disappointing Canadian prosciutto.

Here I must make a confession - I have never understood Toronto's love of Terroni's, and with it the long line ups that snake out the door of the Queen Street location. I have been there a number of times, in part because so many people love the place, rave about it, would throw themselves into the lake if it closed down.

Yet each time I found it lacking, especially when the bill came - how much for pizza and water? Really? So I remain unconvinced, but I haven't been there in 5 years now, so what good is my opinion at this stage?

Anyway, one evening, we visited a lonely restaurant on Stracahan, just off the Queen West strip. It was called Bollicine. And it was there that I tasted what I had longed for, that Proustian moment of biting into a soft mound of cured ham and being transported instantaneously to Verona - the dislocation of time and space through ham.

Each time we returned to Bollicine I encountered the same delicious prosciutto. Bollicine's prosciutto, as well as their other food, came as close to real Italian food as anything I had experienced here in Toronto. And remarkably, Bollicine was the nearest restaurant (at the time) to our place in Liberty Village.

So it should come as no surprise to any of you that Bollicine went out of business.

***

That was 3 years ago. A lot has changed since then. Back when I wrote this piece on Ossington, the piece that is, far and away, the most read piece on The Transcontinental, my one true "hit", which, in the greatest irony, has a mistake in it so egregious that I am surprised that no one has ever called me on it, a mistake which I have now corrected having noticed it but which a trace remains for those who bother to look for it.

I now live on Grace Street. So I am actually much closer to Ossington than I was back when first found myself interested in what was happening in the area, the area which feels most like my neighbourhood in Toronto for reasons which I cannot entirely fathom.

And like all the other failed projects the choke this blog, that entry to be part of a series of pieces on what I'll name the Trinity-Bellwoods district, which is, without a doubt, the epicentre of Toronto's cultural consciousness.

One of those pieces was going to be on Dundas Street, which, like Ossington at the time, was undergoing a similar kind of transformation. It would have been nice to be able to show you what has changed over the years, but I can't, because I never got around to it, just as so many things cannot be resumed simply because time has passed, and what once seemed necessary now seems irrelevant.

All I can show you is now. And are fewer places that are more now than the Black Hoof, which, like Bollicine, now has the distinction of being the restaurant nearest to my current home.

They themselves lack a website, although given the near unanimous praise, the Black Hoof, whose name is an Anglicisation of a Spanish ham and not the 19th Century Chief of the Shawnee, is pretty much the hottest thing going.

It is always busy. I know this because I walk by it all the time. Because it is right next to where I live. And as you know from my own story, I have a special love for cured meats, which, supposedly, is a "craze" in Toronto these days.

So it should come as no surprise to any of you that I went there one night with a friend. This is what we had:


The prosciutto was, frankly, underwhelming. But the Serrano ham was a revelation, a soft little mountain of piggy heaven that nearly brought me to tears of delight. More astounding, through some kind of gustatory alchemy, it made all the other meats on the slab taste really, really good.

Now the evening wasn't entirely without its problems. Firstly, they forgot our order. This was especially despairing as we sat directly across from the guy who sliced all the meat. So we sat there, watching him slice meat, delicious meat, none of it intended for us. Eventually, we asked what was going on, and apologies were made, and we were brought a variety of free cocktails.

Unfortunately, what would have been ever nicer than the wonderful free cocktails would have been more meat. If you bother to read the review I've linked to, you may notice that people talk of the place's affordability. It's true - the place isn't that expensive, but a plate of sliced meat, perhaps surprisingly, doesn't actually leave someone terribly sated, especially if they've been plied with apologetic cocktails.

Nevertheless, we left the place astounded, the heaped upon praise fully justified, and we were happy to part with our money for the experience.

The next day, I reflected on our meal, and I wondered why The Grizzly House kept leaping to mind.

I had (have) long entertained the idea of opening a fondue and hot rock restaurant here in Toronto, a place where you slice meat and vegetables and then charge people to cook it themselves. Moreover, elements of the Grizzly House aesthetic (tacky, thrown together, everyday things at exclusive prices) constitute a core part of the Queen West/Dundas West/Ossington aesthetic, wherein the hipster culture that fuels these places finds increasingly sophisticated and expensive ways to fuel their love of the grubby.

The Black Hoof, like other recent additions to the area, embodies the area's hipness, which is to unabashedly charge its patrons a lot of money for something deliberately unremarkable.

"Hypocrisy! Andrew, you enjoyed the place, you loved it, you obsessed over sliced meat for months after going there, you thought of taking your son, as he too has a weakness for cured meats. How can you castigate them?"

Please do not misunderstand me, but let's be clear. They slice meat and mix drinks. And people can't get enough of it. They do stuff with marrow and pork belly too, which is also delicious, but what it isn't is remarkable. What's remarkable is that people have never encountered any of this before, what's remarkable is that sliced meat and cocktails is something new and astounding.

How strangely provincial this amazement over the Black Hoof is. Here we are, in a big, cosmopolitan city, and yet here in the heart of Little Portugal, right next to Little Italy, a block from a butcher, and people speak of the Black Hoof as though they had just seen that man had upon the moon strode.

I ask you - Do they slice their meat in a special way? Does the love they make their drinks with make them more alcoholic? Does the white enamel stove they have with the electric burners cook pork belly more consistently? Is it horrifying to simply say no, they don't?

What is truly remarkable is that my neighbourhood is chock a block with restaurants and furniture stores and art galleries that are premised on the improvement of the mass market everyday, a revolution in culinary and aesthetic experience of the everyday the likes of which no one has ever encountered.

Their aesthetic program, and it is both aesthetic and a program (indeed, one restaurant advertises their ideology on their website) is to elevate the industrial, mass-market goods that we all grew up with, grew out of and grew to despise, and convert them into art. The slavish care once reserved for coq au vin is now lavished on the hamburger.

There is a word for all this, my friends- it's KITSCH.

The dark heart of the latte-slurping vintage hipster elite West Queen Dundas West Ossington denizens is nothing more and nothing less than than a conception of taste that is the deliberate, cultivated, self-conscious absence of taste.

Closer to home, the Black Hoof now looks like an ill fit for this grand thèse. And this is probably why I would still recommend the Black Hoof - it is not their fault that cured meats were somehow non-existent to Torontonians (of a certain socio-economic class) until they (that class) "discovered" them.

Although the Black Hoof is the cause of these renewed reflections on my world, it is not, by any stretch, a neat example of the thesis which knits them together. Much better is the fact that most restaurants in the area have a house poutine. Just say those words together - house poutine.

"Yes, waiter, I'll have the house poutine. No, I'll eat it here, and tell the cook not to scrimp or char the carmelized onions!"

But that's to come. Or, if this blog is to be at all consistent, this will be the only post ever.

Or, the first stop will be Burger Shoppe Quality Meats.

General Strikes are Awesome

France is having one right now.

That, my friends, is social and civil solidarity. Could we ever have one here in Canada? Could we have had one this week if the government had tabled a lousy budget and the Liberals supported it out of their own political expdiency?

Oh right....Tant pis.

Et tu, Harpe?

Watching the Federal Budget, it was hard not think that Stephen Harper has produced a budget that both manages to rehabilitate Bob Rae's 1991 Ontario Budget, you know, the legendary one where he went all Keynesian on Ontario and everyone freaked out (the beginning of the conservative "turn" in Canadian politics), and also repeat Conservative history. He is miming Mulroney's government which, when faced with cutting or spending, chose the latter.

Now all that remains is for the Liberals to step in and restore financial order to the federal government, while conservatives demand tax cuts "more responsible spending" from those "tax-and-spend" liberals. With the cycle complete, Canadians can rest assured that their cherished myths of the Canadian political landscape are still intact.

But what's also interesting is that the Conservatives really do seem believe in their own cardboard cut-out version of "the left". "We'll give them the budget they want, which will be all about huge deficits and all that other crazy crap they like, and they'll love it." Tilt at those windmills, Tories!

I guess we'll see.

Bifurcation

For no good reason at all, beyond that I am impetuous and find my blogging here increasingly distracted by bits and pieces, I have created a new blog just for those bits and pieces over here.

My hope is that it will be the Modernist component to my overall intellectual project.

Infidelio

It seems that tenor Jon Villars, who was meant to have sung Florestan in the Canadian Opera Company's production of Fidelio, has walked off because "he hasn't mastered the role".

Yikes.....what does one say to that?

The COC remains a source of drama, both on and off stage!

A Community Service

With the demise of the Queen West Home Depot, the Torontoist, among others, would have you believe that the Queen West area is bereft of a steady supply of lumber.

For you see friends, despite the fact that the main readers of Torontoist and other Internet broadsheets are downtowners, their sensibility vis a vis many kinds of consumer goods is clearly suburban.

Some time ago, I documented Leah McLaren's lamentable ignorance of lumber and hardware stores in her area.

However, we expect ignorance from Ms. McLaren.

But to hear the Torontoist say:

Too bad that this latest bit of news means that the only victory for the locals is a hollow one: instead of ma and pa hardware stores getting pushed out of the community, some other ma and pa stores will instead; and instead of having a cheap and expansive hardware shop around the corner to buy lumber and paint from, they'll continue to have to mold things they find in the trash into other things with their bare hands, because that is what everyone on Queen West does when they need to make stuff.

Although it is apparent that the author's tongue is slightly against his cheek, nevertheless, I can no longer live with a misconception that hurts our local businesspeople!

Someone needs to take action.

So, in the public interest of those at Queen and Bathurst and its environs, here are the names of two, count them TWO, hardware/lumber stores within walking distance of said intersection!

1. There's Downtown Lumber at 172 Ossington Avenue, (416) 532-2813. I have purchased lumber from them, and they will even cut it to measure, for free.

2. Even closer is ML Lumber at 856 Dundas Street West, (416) 603-7878. Although I have never purchased lumber from them, they have an excellent hardware selection as well as a tool rental service.

Here's hoping to never again hearing an online hipster lament the lack of hardware and lumber in this area.

Thank you.

A Conversation about Biodiversity

Charlie Rose recently hosted a panel on his show talking about biodiversity. It's great stuff. Not much else to say except that you should watch it, and yes, this blog is well on its way to becoming a video link aggregator.

But it's an intelligent video link aggregator...Right?

National Film Board Now Online

The NFB has digitized their collection, so now I can do stuff like this:



This is Arthur Lipsett's 21-87, a very well-known experimental film, and also the inspiration for the Force. Seriously.

If Canadians were just a little bit more myopic, our identity "problems" would be over. Oh yes, and if we all also spoke French and English and Cree (at least).

Or better yet, Finnish. Seriously. (Some other time)

Anyway, what the NFB has done is really tremendous. It also shows, contra Philip Marchand's ridiculous article in the National Post musing about why Canadians can't name many national authors, shows that both greatness and government funding can go hand in hand.

I will take a stab at mocking Marchand's article next week - but today, I will watch, what is, for many Canadian boys my age, the greatest NFB film - the Hockey Sweater!!!

Happy America Day

The overwhelming response to my suggestion that we open up this whole playlist idea to Canadians themselves was unsurprising. Indeed, one could infer that this says something about Canadians! Or no one reads this blog....but who needs empiricism when one can idly speculate?

It seems that the only thing that Canadians are less passionate about than say, Canadian politics, is, uh, Canadian identity. Unless it's trying to tell Americans what Canada is all about, and then we're really interested. Indeed, most of our soul searching revolves around trying to tell Americans what we're all about, because they're the audience that matters, they matter far more than we do.

So everyone around me, and indeed the world it seems, will gather to observe and celebrate the inauguration of the President of the United States, all kind of wishing we were Americans today after eight years of thanking God that we weren't. Which is odd. Really odd.

I really don't get any of it. Call me a curmudgeon, but I'd like to think my indifference is more a growing sense of cosmopolitanism than good old fashioned Canadian parochialism and resentment toward those "exciting" Americans.

Only time will tell.