Category: City Life

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City Life

The Lost Basquiat

Abstract image formed by multiple layers of graffiti on the glass of a bus shelter.
Shot in bus shelter on NW corner of Dupont and Dovercourt

I confess: I’m responsible for rumours of a lost Basquiat. I’d written a story about how Basquiat painted a fence and I posted the story on my website. It turns out there are a lot of people who can’t tell the difference between a story (work of fiction) and a story (piece of news). I’m not sure the difference is all that meaningful, but that’s another story. In any event, my story (work of fiction) sprouted legs and skittered into the shadowy reaches of the internet where it got quoted as god’s awful truth in threads about neo-expressionism. Faster than you can say “by-line”, somebody on Wikipedia posted a link to my story (work of fiction) as evidence for the existence of a lost masterpiece. Given that a Basquiat sold in 2017 for $110.5 million, you can understand why the hunt for a lost Basquiat turned into the art world’s equivalent of a gold rush. People flocked to the Lower East Side, pulling up graffiti covered fence slats and inundating galleries with demands for authentication.

I took down my website at the beginning of the pandemic because I got tired of all the questions coming through my contact form. In retrospect, it was naive to assume that most people have the fiction version of gaydar that automatically alerts them when they’re reading fiction even when it masquerades as reportage. Anyways, to my story. As I say, I took down the website, so my story has gone missing even on websites like the Internet Archive with its Way Back Machine. But I remember how it went, so here it is in broad strokes:

In the mid 80’s, when Ronald Reagan was still using shoe polish to colour his hair and Oliver North was still siphoning money to the Contras in Nicaragua, Jean-Michel Basquiat shot up in a 3rd floor tenement apartment on the Lower East Side. The owner of the apartment wanted to watch TV but the young artist was splayed across his favourite spot on the couch so the owner dragged him onto the fire escape and forgot about him. Almost a full day later, Basquiat woke to the sound of a basketball banging on the pavement of the parking lot below. A refreshing breeze cooled his body. Slivers of light fell through the ironwork of the fire escape and settled on his face. Like pigeons taking flight, laughter rose up from the parking lot. And, for a few minutes at least, Basquiat was happy. He felt gratitude. Like St. John of the Cross, he had known his dark night of the soul and now he lay on the metal landing, safe and awake and free from the harrowing.

Struggling to his feet, Basquiat leaned on the railing and watched the kids shooting hoops. The far side of the parking lot was bounded by a plain wooden fence and, at least in Basquiat’s mind, its plainness cried out to him the way a blank canvas cries out for paint. Its plainness was a blight. Its plainness was an insult to the joy of the kids running layups in the sunlight. He crawled back through the window where he found his canvas shoulder bag full of spray paints and he stumbled downstairs. He would thank the kids by turning their fence into a testament to their joy.

It wasn’t long afterwards that the artist OD’d and, as always seems to happen, Death strolled through all the galleries of Manhattan, waving a bony finger and converting Basquiat’s art into money. But Death forgot to wave a bony finger as he passed the parking lot where the late artist had lately spray painted his message of gratitude and joy, so the owner of the tenement building, (mis)taking it for vandalism, painted over it with a dull grey wash. And there the painting lay, hidden beneath a soul-deadening layer of paint and accumulating grime, on through HIV/AIDS, and the Gulf War, and 9/11, and the invasion of Afghanistan, and the collapse of the Lehman Bros., and the election of Obama, and the defeat of Clinton at the hands of an overblown grifter, and the arrival of Covid-19, and rants about a stolen election. All these layers of misery laid down over a single fleeting moment of gratitude.

And that was my story. Or at least the gist of it. As I say, I took the original down and it’s since disappeared. If I rewrote the story, not as fiction but as reportage, and I scraped away all the layers of this historic palimpsest, I’m not sure I’d ever come to a sunny day in Basquiat’s youth when a wave of gratitude and joy swept over him. That is the fiction. As reportage, I’m inclined to think I’d find misery all the way down to that very first needle in the arm, maybe even down into the cradle. The idea that he might once have known joy: that is the lost Basquiat.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Janice Takes An Uber to a Coffee Date

Big Ben viewed from Charing Cross, London
Big Ben viewed from Charing Cross, London

We met Janice before when she fell asleep on a subway while on her way to work in Toronto. Join her here for another narcoleptic adventure…

The Uber pulled to the curb in front of the house where Janice rented a basement apartment. She had a date. Sort of a date. She’d met a guy online and they had arranged to meet at a Starbucks for coffee. She could use a coffee. As for the guy. Well. She could use a guy, too.

Janice had an unruly brain and it inserted thoughts into her consciousness whether she wanted them there or not. One such thought, more like an Instagram video than a thought, was a scene of two dogs sniffing each other’s behinds. In a way, that’s what she and this guy were about to do. They would cover it with layers of social niceties—double latte misto blah-di-blah, neutral talk that avoided religion and politics, coded signals of class and income—but peel away the layers and all that remained was butt sniffing. She cursed her brain for throwing this unwanted image into her more conventional hopes for the meet-up.

The guy’s name was Oswald. She’d never known anyone named Oswald. In fact, when she first noted his name, she had swiped past his profile thinking: anyone named Oswald must be a loser. She caught herself mid-thought and wondered if she wasn’t being a bit unfair. It’s not as if Oswald had given himself the name. It was probably a struggle growing up with a name like Oswald. Kids beating you up all the time. High school girls snickering at you as you walked down the hall. He probably had astronomical therapy bills. Janice swiped back to the profile and chastised herself for being superficial.

As the Uber headed down to the Danforth, the side to side sway rocked Janice into a gentle reverie. Her eyes became unfocused and the houses passed in a blur. Waiting at the light to turn right onto the Danforth, people on the crosswalk passed in a riot of colour. Red t-shirts. Yellow t-shirts. All of the colours blending together in a way that reminded her of an expressionist painting.

When the car arrived at the Starbucks, Janice couldn’t remember the intervening time between her wait at the crosswalk and her arrival. And yet she couldn’t remember falling asleep either. She must have drifted into an indeterminate state that suspended all awareness of time passing. She thanked the driver and stepped out of the car. However, she had assumed she was stepping onto the curb whereas she found herself stepping into traffic, almost mowed down by a van going in the wrong direction. 

She experienced a momentary feeling of disorientation, then pulled herself back into the moment and crossed the road. Inside the Starbucks, she stepped straight away to the counter and ordered a tall bold with coconut milk and raw sugar and paid for it with her app. While she waited for the person to fill her order, she surveyed the room and found her Oswald sitting in the corner, lost in his iPhone. She was pleased to note that he was better looking in real life than his dating app photo suggested.

Taking up her coffee, Janice stepped to Oswald’s table and introduced herself. Oswald looked up from his iPhone and said hello and stood and invited her to sit and Janice was utterly smitten if for no other reason than that he spoke with a soft English accent. She told herself not to be so superficial but she couldn’t help herself. Thanks to his accent, Janice could forgive any number of other sins, including his goatee and beret and affected radical student look.

Oswald hoped the location wasn’t too inconvenient.

Janice said it was perfect. She lived on the Danforth which was central to just about everything.

Oswald gave a quizzical look. The Danforth?

You know, Greektown.

Oswald shrugged. I’m just a Yorkshire lad. I don’t know where anything is.

Janice gazed out the window behind Oswald and noted a black cab passing on the left side of the road. Oh god, she said, I’m not in Toronto, am I?

Oswald smiled. You’re on Berkeley Street. I’m afraid if you turn right out that door, and turn right again at the corner, you’ll find yourself at the back end of Buckingham Palace.

Janice pushed back her chair and stood. I really need to be going.

Oswald stood as well, taken aback but doing his best to suppress hurt feelings. You can hop on the tube if you like. Around the corner. Green Park.

Oh god, not another subway. Who knows where I’ll end up. As she left the coffee shop, she turned to Oswald and said: It’s not you; it’s me. She knew how that sounded, but it was the truth.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Why I’m Still Repaying my Student Loans

Night photograph of a sculpture called Pair, by Neil Campbell, at the 2012 Nuit Blanche in Toronto. Pair is a pair of giant pink balls sitting underneath the court house library on University Avenue.
Scotiabank Nuit Blanche, Toronto

On the morning of his 18th birthday, Jonas disappeared. His mother found him hiding in the loft above the garage. They had to leave in two hours if they were going to make it on time for the ceremony and Jonas wasn’t even cleaned or dressed yet. She pleaded with her son to climb down the ladder and get himself ready.

Jonas told his mother she was nuts if she thought he was going to the ceremony. It was cruel. It was barbaric. It was something stupid from their primitive prehistory. They lived in the modern world now. And whatever meaning the ceremony had in the past, that meaning had vanished with the invention of things like cars and airplanes and the internet and Twitter.

His mother called up to him from the foot of the ladder. We’ve been through all this before. I thought we agreed: your reluctance is just a product of anticipatory anxiety. You’re afraid of the pain. And yes, there is an initial pain, but beyond that is a much deeper reward. Look to that reward.

If, on the day of his birth, he could have chosen his parents, Jonas would have asked for a mother who was anything but a clinical psychologist. She was always ruining her parental talks with psychologist buzzwords. Jonas couldn’t give a shit about anticipatory anxiety. All he knew was: the thought of taking part in the ceremony made him want to hurl.

The last time he’d been to one of these things, it was for his brother, Simon. That was almost enough to make Jonas tear off to the north country and live in the bush. He remembered how they made Simon disrobe in front of everybody, then lay his genitals on the ceremonial block of wood known in the old tongue as the ptarchuck. He remembered how they isolated Simon’s left testicle with the metal casing called the sinistrabölle then flipped the lever that sliced through the flesh. It was so sudden, Simon didn’t even know it had happened, but when they applied the boiling tar to cauterize the wound, he screamed and doubled over. Two hooded acolytes dragged him off the platform to make room for the next boy waiting for the rite of passage.

Jonas. Honey. This is a beautiful thing. It makes you a full participant in our community. But more than that, it gives you a sense of connection to your ancestors. Our young men have been doing this for as long as anyone can remember.

The boy’s father appeared in the doorway while he was complaining that he liked having two balls and didn’t see why he had to give one up for some stupid superstition.

Where the mother was soft and looked to persuasion, the father was hard and just as apt to speak with a leather belt as with his tongue. He had no patience for the boy and demanded he come down this instant.

It’s not the pain. It just makes no sense to me.

Who cares what you think? It’s about being a part of something bigger than you. I did it when I was your age, and my father before me. We’ve always done it this way and we’re none the worse for it. I’ll be damned if I let you float through life without knowing the suffering I’ve had to suffer. You think you’re better than me? Is that it? You think you deserve to have a pain-free life while I suffer to put food on your table and see to your education? Is that it?

As you might expect, Jonas relented and went to the ceremony. Backed by a massive social machinery, the force of his father’s words seemed unassailable. Privately, he promised himself he’d never end up like his father, that when his sons came of age, he’d give them his blessing to challenge the system. But we know how that goes. If you give up a nut when you’re 18, then you’ve pretty much set the pattern for your whole life.

Categories
City Life Public Art

When your eyeballs explode in the vacuum of space

A child wearing a Toronto Blue Jays hat climbs on a sculpture of a Toronto Maple Leafs goalie with a sign that says: Please Do Not Climb On Sculpture
Sculpture in The Distillery District, Toronto

My son attacked me with a baseball bat the other day. Obviously I’m fine. Even so, it’s left me on edge.

My relationship with my son changed the minute he discovered that I’ve played bit roles in action flicks. When the robbers storm the bank, I’m the first guy they shoot in the head. When the platoon takes the hill, I’m the private who steps on a live grenade. And when the aliens attack the spaceship, I’m the astronaut whose eyeballs explode after he gets sucked into space without a helmet. Each time, I’m gone in the first big scene and the movie goes on without me for another hundred minutes.

Josh thinks it’s the coolest thing to watch his old man get destroyed a hundred different ways. So the other day he invites all his school friends over because they don’t believe him when he brags that his dad is indestructible. I walk in on a roomful of nine year olds and all they want to know is if I’m made of rubber or maybe titanium wrapped in latex, like in that movie, you know—what’s it called?—Sperminator? And they giggle.

I try to explain to them how the studio applies CG effects in post production, but their eyes wander and they start to squirm. They want to watch more clips of me getting my arms blown off. I try to explain that when I have that look on my face, it’s because I’m acting, not because a bullet is actually going into my head. I go: you know how you can send photos of yourself and the messaging app puts cat ears on your head? They all nod. Well it’s like that, only instead of cat ears, it’s high res blood. I hear the creak of gears turning inside their tiny little heads, but the gears don’t turn fast enough to make the connection between cat ears and exploding eyeballs.

I tell them I’ll go make some popcorn. Josh says he’ll put on the next scene. As I’m walking to the kitchen, I hear the familiar dialogue from a motion cap scene I did for GTA. I’m a loser who gets rear ended driving a Ford Pinto. I get out before the car blows up, but the thugs come at me with a baseball bat anyways. It occurs to me then that the kids are too young to be watching this scene, what with all the gratuitous violence and swearing. I’m sure I’ll get a call from somebody’s parent.

I come back to the TV room with a bowl of popcorn and Josh comes at me with a baseball bat.

He shouts: He’s made of rubber and I’ll prove it!

It’s amazing what happens to time when the adrenaline kicks in. I’ve noticed the same thing on movie sets. It’s like the frame rate jumps to ten thousand so you can slow things down and still keep your movements smooth and seamless. In that instant, I see how Josh’s face is contorted, not with malevolence, but simply with effort. Popcorn explodes like there’s a tiny grenade planted inside the bowl and the kernels seems to hang suspended in mid-air. A roomful of nine year old jaws gape in wonder as the rubber man executes a sideways twisting move and avoids the baseball bat.

I snatch the baseball bat from Josh’s hands and order him to his room. Then I tell the kids the party is over. Call your parents and have them pick you up. Nobody whines because they’re too busy going on about how Josh’s dad really is made of rubber. Did you see how he moved? Next time I come over, I’m bringing my dad’s gun; I bet Josh’s dad can dodge bullets.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: I Sang with the Choral Mafia

A choral conductor in casual dress stands before a grand piano and choir, right arm raised, left hand resting on his hip

When it was my turn to audition, an assistant in excessively formal dress ushered me into the room, low ceiling, dimly lit, walls covered in oak paneling. Positioned in the far corner, the accompanist sat at a grand piano and affected an air of indifference. In the corner closer to the entrance sat a large wooden desk and, behind it, the maestro himself. Immediately, I understood that the room’s arrangement was strategic: I would have to pass before the maestro in order to deliver the audition music to the accompanist and that would give the great man an opportunity to see how I moved in a performance situation. I confess that I felt awkward. I had stepped into the presence of one of the world’s most intimidating choral figures and it seemed to me that he could hear every breath I took and could even feel the motions of my diaphragm. He could descend to the cellular level and uncover the workings of my larynx.

I handed my copy of Samuel Barber’s “Sure On This Shining Night” and, in halting tones, announced what I’d be singing. Although I wanted to explain my choice—how I thought it was better to sing something simple with sustained notes (rather than something flashy and operatic) as a way to demonstrate my potential to blend with a choral ensemble—my voice teacher had advised against saying too much. She said it was disrespectful, especially when dealing with a man of the maestro’s stature, because a long and involved explanation implied that the man was stupid.

I nodded to the accompanist and started into it. While I can’t say that it was the best performance of my life, it was pretty damn close. Half way through, the maestro waved an arm and the accompanist stopped playing and I continued one note into the silence, hovering there like the coyote before he realizes he’s run off the cliff, and I waited to drop into the abyss. 

Enough! the man shouted. Mr. Barker, you come into my presence today, asking if you can sing tenor in my choir. And you think because tenors are god’s chosen that I have no choice but to grovel and beg you to join the tenor section. But you have no respect. For years, you could have joined my choral family. But no. You wait until today. You come into this room and you don’t even kneel to kiss my ring.

At first, I thought that I had failed the audition. But the maestro paused and I took advantage of that instant to approach the great man, to abase myself before him, to kiss his ring and to ask him humbly, and with all respect, if I could become a member of his choral family.

The maestro urged me to my feet and said that he would be happy to have me join the tenor section. But remember, he said, one day—and that day may never come—I might need a favour, and I expect you to be ready to offer your services.

So began some of the most fulfilling years of my life. Not only was it musically rewarding to belong to the maestro’s choral family, but it was also socially stimulating. I developed many enduring friendships and I felt more connected to my community than I’d ever felt in years.

But I knew this couldn’t last. As I was beginning my 10th season with the choir, the maestro summoned me to his oak paneled office. It was time for him to call in his marker. He explained the situation. There was a soprano who was beginning to squawk like a parrot. For the last two years, he’d been able to mask the sound by cleverly positioning her with other voices. But this season, at the first rehearsal, he couldn’t help but hear that the parrot was sick and no amount of clever positioning would mask the sound. He had asked the soprano to leave. He had asked politely. He had asked respectfully. But no. She said the choir was her family and she wouldn’t abandon her family.

The maestro looked at me and said: I need you to make her an offer she can’t refuse.

At the next rehearsal, I showed up with a length of piano wire. It tends to be messy, but it makes a real statement, especially in the choral community when people see what it does to a windpipe. I realize one day I could suffer the same end, but let’s be realistic here. I’m a tenor, one of god’s chosen, whereas sopranos come through this place like there’s a revolving door.

Categories
City Life

When The Smile Fades

Worn advertisement with the words "Chocolate Cone" appearing on a ribbon above a portion of a face that excludes the mouth.
SW corner, Wellesley & Yonge, Toronto

Take a letter-sized page and fold it in half, then fold the result in half again. As a theoretical construct, like the point or line in Euclidean geometry, you can fold such a page indefinitely, because it has no width, no imperfections. But in the imperfect world of real paper, you can complete no more than six folds (seven with tools) before the exercise comes to its necessary end.

As the Louvre’s Chief Conservation Officer, Lisette faced a similar problem in her efforts to protect La Joconde. Taken as a theoretical construct, the Mona Lisa’s smiling face would last forever. But every year in the real world, she lost a little more of her substance, a molecule here, an atom there. Perhaps a gust would issue through the gallery and dislodge a few wisps of paint.

To guard against such mishaps, early conservators had replaced her with a clever copy and hermetically sealed the original in a protected vault. But even there they could not guard her from the ravages of cosmic radiation and the force of Earth’s gravity. It does not seem like much, a molecule here, an atom there, but in our imperfect world, such a diminution leads to a calculable end, as it does for the body, as it does for the Earth itself.

Over the millennia, Earthly powers had risen and fallen. First, there was the Europe of the Renaissance that had given rise to this most famous of paintings. Then the British Empire. Then revolutionary America. From its ashes rose the Canadian Empire which soon gave way to China which in turn surrendered its prestige to the Sub-Saharan Coalition. We compare the ebb and flow of power to the tides, but that is a strange analogy because, one day, even the tides will cease.

In all this ebb and flow of historical power, Lisette happened to be the person, a real person, not a theoretical construct, to preside over the passing of one of its great symbols. Whatever else Art might be, it was a symbol of power. It had grafted itself to Earthly longings and had turned itself into a standard bearer for the march of time. Lisette was convinced that the Mona Lisa’s smile was no great mystery: it had about it a sly mix of mockery and contempt that the privileged always bear for those who stand outside their circle.

Lisette stepped into the shattered remains of the Louvre’s glass pyramid where media waited for her announcement. She had memorized a carefully prepared speech, but worried that her emotions might unsettle her words:

Friends of the press, Citizens of the World—

she introduced herself and her colleagues, their offices and credentials, then went on

—it grieves me to announce that our beloved masterpiece, La Joconde, is no more. The last strands of canvas have crumbled to dust. The smile has faded to nothing. For thousands of years, this institution has presided over the care of this great work by an unknown master whose name is lost in a murky past. However—

In the silence, as Lisette struggled to recall what came next, a voice from the press shouted: Failure. You had one thing. One thing. And you failed.

As swiftly as the rise of a summer storm, Lisette’s demeanour changed from grief to anger. Failure? she cried. You may as well direct that accusation at yourself for allowing yourself to die. And I assure you: you will die. There are many extinctions that are a failure. A failure of stewardship. From the dodo to the white rhino. The African elephant. The honey bee. But this is death by a natural process. By your logic, we should blame the mortician when a man ends up on his slab because of old age.

Lisette stormed from the presser and locked herself in her office where she cried. She couldn’t say precisely why she cried, whether from grief or from anger, or perhaps from some as yet unnameable feeling her enigmatic painting represented.

Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Houston We Have A Problem

A Nuit Blanche outdoor contemporary art exhibit on Toronto's Queen Street West featuring orange cherry pickers extended high above the crowded street and laden with palm fronds.
Gap Ecology (Still Lives With Cherry Pickers and Palms) by David Brooks

A dick pic started circulating around mission control and, after some investigation, Dr. Laura Bybis discovered that it had been leaked from Commander Niezosi’s confidential medical file. Niezosi complained of tinea cruris and had sent a photo of his groin area to the ground-based medical team. Unknown to everyone involved, the default email settings automatically copied communications from the crew to a minor administrator who didn’t realize the sensitive nature of Niezosi’s complaint and laughed when she saw the poor man’s penis floating weightless between two patches of flaming skin. She’d been sleeping with a kid on the engineering team and forwarded the pic with a note: “If you ever let it get to this, don’t even think of crawling into my bed.” Once in the engineer’s hands, the image went viral.

Bybis called a team meeting and addressed everyone about the indiscretion and what it meant for crew morale. The crew, of course, was not present at the meeting because, at twelve million kilometres from Earth, a signal took forty seconds to travel in one direction. Forty seconds doesn’t seem like much time, but it’s enough to make live meetings unworkable. Instead, Bybis played a pre-recorded address from Niezosi to his colleagues on the ground. Bybis hadn’t screened the video before she pressed play, a decision that struck her in retrospect as regrettable.

Niezosi appeared on the main screen in mission control and addressed the team while framed on either side by screens that displayed diagrams of the mission’s trajectory to Mars. He was unshaven, haggard, dark circles under his eyes. But there was no hesitation. As you’d expect of a mission commander, he got right to it: “I want to thank all you assholes, all you dim witted engineers and shit-for-brains medical people for failing to anticipate the obvious. If you add up all the time we were confined to our space suits during the initial phase of the mission—prep in our cockpit twiddling our thumbs, then blast off, then the initial burn—you get nearly three days confined to our suits. Plenty of time for the rot to take hold.

“Now I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to tell me how Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin spent nearly nine days in their suits and neither of them complained about jock itch. But look what you give us to wear for the rest of the mission. For more than three fucking years we’ve gotta prance around in these skin-tight get-ups. No natural fibres. No breathable cloth. It’s as if you’ve vacuum sealed my dick in a Petri dish. What the hell were you thinking?

“And then there’s the medical team. I’ve searched our module from top to bottom and I can’t find a fucking thing. No anti-bacterial creams. No anti-fungals. I’ve searched the pantry for ingredients I could throw together. Make some kind of powder or balm. But the rest of the crew is worried I’ll compromise our food supply. I’ve taken to floating around au natural. At first, the rest of the crew thought it was funny, but between my feelings of humiliation and their feelings of embarrassment, it’s starting to take its toll on morale. Never mind morale, I’m so fucking itchy I’m going out of my gourd.”

The ground crew at mission control was an international team, and Dr. Bybis worried that many of the people wouldn’t understand the phrase “out of my gourd” but, as she later discovered, it’s an expression transferable to many cultures. Everyone on the ground knew exactly what Niezosi meant. And although a few of them suffered the same malady, they at least had the reassurance that, whenever they liked, they could drive to the corner Walgreens and pick up some ointment.

A man wearing special glasses stands in a crowd gazing at the sun. In the background is Toronto's Old City Hall on Queen Street West.
Gazing at the sun during a solar eclipse
Categories
City Life

Flash Fiction: Death Knocks On Luther’s Door

Black and white painting of skulls and hellish faces on fence in Toronto's Kensington Market
Painting on Fence in Kensington Market, Toronto

I must confess I was rather pleased with myself, almost giddy, for arriving at the Luther household with a hammer and a bag of gleaming nails to mark the 10th anniversary of that most illustrious of illustrious events. Like many of the others who shared schnitzel and beer at Martin’s table talks, we had taken to addressing him as Herr Doktor even though he affected modesty and insisted we call him Martin. So I felt somewhat deflated when the eminent man himself pulled open the door and, before I could utter a greeting or proffer my gift, advised that if I wished to cross his threshold I would first have to don a mask. They had received word only that morning of a fresh outbreak, a family on the next street manifesting buboes on their armpits and groins, and a little one who, sadly, had succumbed the night before. I complied of course, drawing from my pocket a face covering made from multiple layers of a fine linen which my Helga had purchased in the market.

Martin ushered me indoors. After surrendering my hammer and nails, I asked if he had any more theses he wished to add to the 95 he had already fixed to the door in Wittenberg, to which he answered that he could not say for certain; he would leave that for Herr Gott to conclude. I chortled until my corpulent midriff shook the floor and remarked that hopefully Herr Gott would conclude it in favour of brevity, otherwise the work would grow so large—

As large as you? and he elbowed me in the gut.

—grow so large that the weight would pull the door off its hinges.

I took a seat at the table where I stared directly at a woodcutting on the opposite wall, a framed work in the manner of Albrect Dürer, Death riding through the town on an emaciated steed. By contrast, Martin’s Katharina offered portions which were generous and, as she often said, would keep me looking as little like Death as any live man would care to look. I declared that I preferred not to be a Diet of Worms, but my joke fell flat amongst those at the table, most of whom were students from the university and either too thick or too drunk to appreciate the humour of intellectuals like myself.

Martin commented on the redness of my nose to which I answered that it was better red than black, for a red nose meant that I was still above ground.

As we ate, and as the Herr Doktor held forth on his latest theological musings, a knock came at the door. We fell silent while Martin opened the door and greeted a student, glassy-eyed and thin. As with me, Martin requested that the young man don a mask.

The young man’s voice rose as he spoke, and we could not help but hear his refusal.

Then I’m afraid I can’t allow you into my home.

Well then fuck you, Herr Doktor.

As the boy grew louder, it appeared to us that he also grew larger, as if by a magical mechanism that pumped air into his body and expanded it, as one sometimes sees with sausage casing that fills with a noxious gas when the meat inside begins to rot.

The boy proclaimed Herr Doktor Luther a hypocrite who, though he held himself out as a reformer and man of the people, what with his shitty Bible translation and his cavorting with drunks and his rescuing nun/whores from the clutches of the Church, but he was still nothing if not orthodox when it came to public health protocols. Wear a mask! Your mind has been taken over by the forces of evil.

The boy pointed to the woodcutting of Death fixed to Luther’s wall.

You think a little bit of cloth will do any good? It seems you’ve fallen in with that Copernicus heretic who puts his science before faith.

Luther said he was sorry the boy felt that way. But it didn’t matter because, at least in his own home, Luther was free to exclude whomever he pleased. And it pleased him very much to exclude drunken fools who refused to wear masks.

With that, Luther slammed the door shut in the boy’s bare face and returned to his schnitzel.

Categories
City Life

Condo Living

Voyeuristic night view of people in condominium units.

He stood in the hall, dressed only in his scuffed bedroom slippers, white T-shirt stained down the front, and tartan pyjama bottoms with the frayed cuffs. Muffin-top isn’t how he would’ve described the way his gut hung over the slack elastic waistband, but Elaine was given to using the term and he’d never come up with decent rebuttal. His only hope for self-respect lay in the possibility that his T-shirt would obscure the girth.

He stood in front of the adjacent neighbour’s door—#2307—and listened to the sounds of a party raging from the other side: an indistinct thrum of voices and music punctuated at random by a piercing laughter or the bark of a dog. Elaine had sent him next door to tell them to tone things down since tomorrow was a work day and she needed to get a decent night’s sleep if she wanted to be on her game. It was a matter of consideration. If the neighbours didn’t quiet down, then Elaine said they’d have no choice but to speak to the concierge and, from there, maybe the police.

He’d never met the neighbours. They were new. He’d seen them only from a distance and so had formed no impression. But Elaine thought she had a good idea what they were like: young, she said, barely more than teenagers, recently let loose in the world and still a little wild. It was like parenting, she said, draw clear lines and then demonstrate that you mean to enforce those lines. He thought Elaine’s parenting comment ironic given the way their own children had turned out. And now she wanted him to inflict his prodigious parenting skills on neighbours he’d never met, who may or may not be young, who may or may not be straight, who may or may not be sober, who may or may not be in a hostile mood, who may or may not be skilled when it comes to wielding baseball bats. So went his thoughts, skittering off to the very worst corner of the mental room where he organized his vast collection of horrible outcomes.

He’d knock on the door and after some yelling from the other side, a muscled man in a wife beater would pull the door back and laugh at the pathetic figure in shambling bedclothes. He’d stutter his way through a badly prepared speech after which the new neighbour with the giant biceps would tell him to go fuck himself and then slam the door. He held his fist poised at eye level, readying himself to rap on the door, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter.

Fuck it, he thought, and he returned to his own apartment. He held his fist poised at the level of his muffin-top, readying himself to turn his own door knob, steeling himself for a humiliating encounter. But he paused, and in that instant, however brief, he discovered that he had no idea which confrontation he dreaded more: the one with a neighbour he’d never met, or the one with a woman he’d called his wife for 35 years.

The building had a common terrace on the 4th floor, so he rode the elevator down in his bedroom slippers, gazing at his shabby reflection in the elevator’s mirrors. It was dark on the terrace and he was alone. He settled onto a lounge chair, tilting it back so he could gaze at the few stars still visible through the city’s light pollution. But that meager collection of stars was enough to set his mind adrift to far worlds and alternate realities, places where men could wear fresh up-to-date clothes and knock on a stranger’s door in a way that sounded confident.

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City Life

Economy of Outrage

Black and white photo of a bright railing angling diagonally to the lower left corner against a backdrop of small wall tiles illuminated by a shaft of light angling diagonally to the lower right corner
Stairs to Sheppard WEst Subway Station, Toronto

The global pandemic has given me object lessons in mathematical concepts like exponential growth (as when people go maskless to indoor settings and the reproduction rate of the Sars-Cov-2 pathogen rises above one) and exponential reduction (as when people follow basic protocols like mask-wearing and the reproduction rate of the Sars-Cov-2 pathogen drops below one). We see it, too, in situations where people lose their jobs but have to carry consumer debt at exorbitant interest rates. Seemingly small increments end up having huge consequences.

We can apply the same concept to feelings of well-being on social media platforms. Take Twitter for example. A tweet only gets traction to the extent that it deals in outrage. A politician says something beyond the pale so you tweet a video clip of the offending comment plus a few words about how outrageous this is and before you can say “your mama is a woke bitch” you’ve got a thousand retweets and ten thousand likes. Meanwhile, Gandhi tweets about non-violent resistance and Martin Buber posts a thread about the value of engaging one another with a loving gaze, but these tweets attract zero attention and soon the @gandhi and @martinbuber accounts wither and die.

From the very outset, programmers gamed Twitter to reward engagement that deals in outrage. Whether they mean to or not, users adjust their habits to optimize their role in the game. More likes. More retweets. And, of course, more followers. @jesus had only 12 followers. What a loser. No wonder. His message was boring. Love one another? Give me a fucking break.

It may not seem like a big deal. A few “idiot” and “moron” comments scattered throughout a day’s posts. What difference could that make? But scale that up by the number of daily active Twitter users (206 million at the beginning of 2022) and these seemingly insignificant expressions of disgust and outrage take on a force of their own. They become our cultural norm.

But as with reproduction rates below one, it is possible to reverse a trend. Don’t like or retweet posts that fuel further outrage. Don’t follow people except as they deal in kindness. Post images that make you feel happy. Promote a different economy of social exchange.

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City Life

History of Violence

Tow-Away Zone sign on a bent metal pole with tall buildings in the background.

One of the things the Black Lives Matter #BLM movement has tried to do is expand the meaning of racism. In the past, white people like me tried to exempt ourselves from responsibility by saying: “What, me racist? I haven’t got a racist bone in my body.” And, in a way, we were right if, by racist, you mean we don’t run around engaging in overt acts of racism.

The #BLM movement struggles to communicate the idea that racism is more than overt acts. It invites people who look like me to see beyond the obvious: to acknowledge that many institutions were designed from their outset to discriminate (and to commit racist acts on our behalf); to identify passive aggressive behaviours and microaggressions that neatly evade allegations of racism but commit such acts all the same; to own our failures to intervene when others do engage in overt acts of racism. People find it difficult to accept that simple omissions can be acts of racism too.

We can understand racism as a category of violence. If we look to violence generally, we find the same dynamic at play. It’s easy for most of us to avoid allegations of violent behaviour because we aren’t prone to engage in overt acts. I don’t physically abuse my wife. I don’t lose my temper and hit people when I don’t get my way. I don’t cut people off on the highway then get out of my car and threaten them with a baseball bat. So, no, I am not a violent person.

As with the #BLM movement, I get to avoid charges of violent behaviour only if I hold to a narrow definition of violence. But violence is more than overt acts. I can abuse my wife without laying a finger on her; it’s possible to engage in all sorts of manipulations that subtly wear her down. And I can do injury without ever striking a person; I can engage in implied threats or utter indirections that are nevertheless demeaning.

Further expanding my definition of violence, I see violence embedded in urban planning. For example, when infrastructure fails to accommodate increases in pedestrian and vehicular traffic, everyone grows frustrated and that frustration leaks out as anger. The people on the receiving end of that anger didn’t cause the frustration. They just happen to be convenient targets.

And when public services fail to meet the needs of the most vulnerable, not only does that do violence to those vulnerable people—the mentally ill, the homeless, the different—, it heightens the anxiety of everyone else and produces conditions ripe for moral panic: let’s round them up and warehouse them out of sight. This, too, is a form of violence and it implicates us all.

Then there is the violence implicit in our built environment. When we build in ways that fail to account for the human scale, we say in effect that people—all people—are incidental to the late modernist project. Concepts trump people. Ideologies transcend humans. Putin is not extraordinary. This kind of violence has been at work on us for decades.

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City Life

Arrow

A woman pushes a bundle buggy along the sidewalk while, overhead, an arrow points off at an inclined angle.
Walking west on Scollard Street, Toronto

Speaking of clichés … arrows are a great favourite in street photography. I’m not sure why that is. A Freudian thing, maybe? Or maybe arrows imply a sense of direction which viewers find reassuring. At least it’s reassuring until the arrow points in a direction that isn’t terribly helpful.

What do we make of an arrow that points at an inclined angle? I’m inclined to think the people who installed this arrow had Elon Musk in mind. It points the way to Mars. Or maybe city planners put it there to remind us which way the skyline is headed.

Personally, this arrow makes me feel uncomfortable. It doesn’t fill me with existential dread or make me doubt my fundamental beliefs. It causes a feeling of discomfort more on the same order as when I’m at a church wedding and the officiant goes on too long and the hard pew presses against my tailbone and I have to shift in my seat every two minutes to relieve the twinge. It’s that kind of discomfort.

I can tolerate an arrow pointing off into space, but I don’t want to take that as a prescription for my life’s philosophy. If I had my druthers, I’d turn the arrow the other way around. Instead of staring off at the heights or beyond into space, I’d encourage people to stare down at themselves and their rootedness in the ground they walk.

Dreaming and star-gazing are fine. But balance these impulses with self-examination and a regard for our own place. We can ill-afford to neglect the ground we walk.

Categories
City Life

Doors Open or Closed?

Gritty door with a sign on it that says: Stan's Pizza
Side door to pizzeria, Cumberland St N and Tupper St, Thunder Bay, Ontario

In my marriage, there are certain areas of domestic life that are subject to battles of the will.

For example, there is the question of cleaning the toilet. My wife insists that because I cause the greater mess, it’s my responsibility to clean it. I have suggested that we should take a more global approach to domestic cleaning. By way of illustration, I point out that I routinely wash the floor even though my wife does half the walking on it.

As an experiment, I’ve tried to measure my wife’s stubbornness as expressed in days without cleaning the toilet. Ordinarily, she is fastidious about these things (she absolutely refuses to use portable toilets and outhouses), but it turns out she’s not as fastidious as she is stubborn. We could go for decades without cleaning our toilet because she insists absolutely that it’s my job. It’s a matter of principle.

We have a similar battle of wills when it comes to our bedroom door. When I’m in the bedroom, the door must be shut. My wife doesn’t care.

My insistence on a shut door has nothing to do with fear or anxiety. I don’t worry that urban ninjas are going to break into our house and storm the keep. It’s more a symbolic matter. I need a sense of enclosure. Completeness. An open door is ambiguous. It allows for a leakage into the wider world.

Intellectually, I enjoy ambiguity. I love to read stories that leave me hanging in indeterminate positions. I love arguments that see-saw on a fulcrum. But as an emotional matter, I can’t abide an open door.

My wife is the opposite. If she watches a movie, she likes it when all the story lines come to clean resolutions. Art house films drive her bonkers. But as an emotional matter, she’s comfortable with open doors and the leakages they imply.

I’ve noticed lately that if I let the toilet go for a few weeks, I wake up in the morning and find that the bedroom door has been left wide open all night. And so the battle rages.

Categories
City Life

Black & White Photos Promote a Feeling of Nostalgia

A man talking on a cell phone walks on wet pavement past the graffiti-covered entrance to the Hotel Waverly.
Hotel Waverly, Spadina just north of College, Toronto

The Hotel Waverly doesn’t exist anymore. Even when it did exist, the word “Hotel” was a generous gesture. It was more like a flophouse. I had thought I’d write a short story someday about a family of tourists on holiday from another country, Germany for instance. Not knowing any better, their travel agent books a suite for the family at the Hotel Waverly. They arrive from the airport to some shock. Hilarity ensues as they share with the locals the German words for such phrases as “crack whore” and “meth-head.” They return to their home in Bonn with bedbugs and STD’s for souvenirs. Alas, I was too slow and a condo developer had demolished the building before I could get around to banging out my story.

Like so much real estate in Toronto, if I blink, it vanishes. While I’m out and about, I make a point of capturing older buildings so that I have personal documentation of what things looked like at that precise instant. It’s astonishing how quickly visual memory fades. Without the help of my photographs, I would soon forget the old buildings, the ones people like to say had character when what they really mean is that they were gross, dirty, and decrepit.

It feels somehow natural to offer these photos as black and white conversions. Black and white signals we are glimpsing a world that no longer exists. Black and white encourages a certain feeling of generosity toward the subject matter, too. However disdainful we snooty middle class types may have felt for the Hotel Waverly in its day, we can forgive its sins now that we look back from a safe distance. Such character!

After a few more years have passed, and we find ourselves growing weary of the endless rows of glass and concrete towers, we note a surge in feelings of nostalgia. The Hotel Waverly was not just a place with character. We realize now that it was somehow integral to the city’s life and personality. Its demolition is a lot like what happens when a senior loses brain mass. Memory grows unstable, and then follows the gradual slide into municipal senescence.

Categories
City Life

Kill All The Colours

View from above staring down onto King Street West and Toronto's Financial District. A translucent image of the photographer's foot appears reflected in the window.
Looking down on King Street West, Toronto, during the Pandemic

In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimated the inhabitants of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”. Subject to a quarantine for nearly a year, the characters grow anxious and fearful. Inevitably, the suspension of life’s ordinary activities coupled with the relentless threat of death wears on them. It corrodes the affective dimension of their lives, making everything appear dull.

I know from personal experience that severe depression can change a person’s capacity to see colour. All the colours seem muted. Where, in ordinary times, bright colours spark feelings of joy, in times of extreme stress, those same colours can look as if they’ve been greywashed.

In the first months of the pandemic, when most people weren’t sure what was going on and stayed in lockdown, the pandemic threatened to produce a secondary health crisis by ratcheting up anxiety disorders, promoting feelings of depression, and encouraging people to cope through self-medication.

Recognizing my own tendency to view the world through Camus-coloured glasses (life is absurd and pointless so let’s lounge all day in the sun smoking cigarettes and drinking ourselves into a carefully modulated stupor), I chose instead to put the pandemic in a neatly wrapped package. I would manage the shit out of this thing. After all, what a shameful thing it would be to have an epitaph that reads: “Here lies someone who was such a loser he allowed a respiratory pathogen to destroy his liver.”

I did a lot of little things to promote a sense of mental well-being (e.g. making the bed each morning, dressing up even if I wasn’t going out). On the photographic front, I refused to desaturate my photographs. I ignored Camus’s observation and, even if it didn’t feel that way, I pretended the world was bright and shiny.

Only now am I allowing myself the luxury of black and white conversions. I’m far enough away from the early sense of uncertainty that I can now revisit my photographs from that time with a sense of detachment. Featured today is a photograph I made early in May, 2020 from the TD Tower overlooking Toronto’s Financial District. A solitary streetcar rumbles past. There are no pedestrians. No cars. The streets are pretty much empty. The scene really does deserve to have all its colours killed.