5 posts tagged “toronto”

...And the Withering Insults that Drove Us Onward

At Nuit Blanche 2007, one year ago, there was an exhibit slated to appear in Toronto's Kensington Market called Assbook. As near as we could interpret from the curator's description, the artist planned to set up a photocopy machine and have audience members photocopy their posteriors for posterity, binding them into a collection: The Assbook.

Because it sounded irreverent (and because we thought we might get to see some skin) we scoured Kensington Market for Assbook, but the exhibit was nowhere to be found. We're still not sure if the artist backed out or if the Nuit Blanche organizers pulled the plug on the exhibit, but for whatever reason, Assbook never happened.

Since then, any time there's an exhibit we can't locate, or one that is misleading (based on the curator's description), or one that's just plain bad, we term it an assbook and subject it to the acid wit of our crew of art connoisseurs.

Nuit Blanche 2008: Full of Assbooks

Let me preface this by saying that the group of friends that joins us for NB every year has no illusions about the  artistic efforts on display in Toronto. Oh sure, We're always very excited after reading grandiose curatorial descriptions promising wonderful and eloquent exhibits, but we've been attending this all-night art event long enough to know that the exhibits rarely live up to the hype. Yes, there are some that do, but it's no secret that you need to wade through a lot of crap to find the awe-inspiring.

Assbooks abound. But don't for a moment think that's a bad thing. There's more to Nuit Blanche than art. If there wasn't, the whole endeavour would have failed in the first year!

• There's the simple fact that you're out on the streets of Toronto much much later than you would ever normally be. We didn't get home until 5am this year.You get tired and cranky, but it's an experience that brings you closer to the friends you share it with.
• 

  Crack Team
  There's the fact that you're hopped up on drugs. In our case it was caffeine, but it was plain to see that alcohol was a big drug of choice this year. And our noses made it abundantly clear that weed was a big fan favorite too. Whatever your poison, altered states always add to the fun.
• Most importantly, there's the company you keep - in our case, a crack team of humorists, spewing barbed insults and directing their quick wit at every lackluster piece of crap that gets touted as artwork. What fun!
  

Yes, NB is less about art and more about making light of it. Still, we can appreciate the interesting exhibits:

• 

  House Of Leaves
  With House of Leaves, the artist tore thousands of pages from trashy romance novels and taped them to an outdoor hallway, inviting participants to walk through. I have no idea what it was supposed to mean, but it was pretty in its own way; making the hallway appear warmer, or at least more interesting. I suppose in the end it's not much different from wallpaper. 3-Dimensional wallpaper.
• Projekt Blinkinlights was impressive just for the technicality of it. The front of Toronto's City Hall was turned into a giant dot matrix display, with lamps in each office window turning on and off to let the artists play a giant game of Pong. This video is sideways, but you get the idea:
  Sideways Blinkinlights
• 

  Horrorridor
  The Horrorridor - a set of six projection screens set up in an unused portion of Union Station showing clips of actors screaming in rage, fear, and pain - was probably the most disturbing exhibit this year. Despite the fact these were all recognizable actors from Hollywood films and TV shows - and despite the fact that I knew they were just acting - being immersed in these sights and sounds actually had an impact on my emotional state. Which is great, especially given that this exhibit could have just been silly.
  

But for every worthwhile exhibit, there were multiple bombs. I'm not going to run through them all, but there was one that was particularly disappointing. Zombies in Condoland was supposed to take place in a park area surrounded by four large condos. People dressed as zombies were simply supposed to wander the park, I assumed as a comment on how our society is tranquilized and complacent. Should have been as easy as pie to coordinate, but by the time we arrived about halfway through the evening, there were only about a dozen zombies and the artist was trying to corral them for the start of the performance. There's something strange about someone in a zombie outfit yelling at other zombies with a megaphone to "Please congregate by the fountain!" It could have been wonderful, but lacked the organizational skill necessary to pull it off.

Unless... Wait! Maybe WE were supposed to be the zombies, gawking at this catastrophe of an exhibit... Naw. That would just be lame.

And to Finish?

Last year, you'll recall, we finished our evening at Lamport stadium, where we helped inflate a gigantic locust - the surprise highlight of the evening. Lamport delivered this year's surprise highlight as well. The curator promised dozens of sports team mascots working all night to entertain the crowds. After so long on the field (we arrived at 4am) we hoped to see mascots that had turned grumpy and lazy, but when we arrived they were clearly tired, but still going strong. It was so great to be among the crowd just listening to sports-event music and watching the mascots strut their stuff.

I don't know if it was art, but It was uplifting, and it was the best way to finish the night.

It's no secret we've never been impressed with the suburbs. They might be well-suited as places to raise children, but otherwise suburbs have little to offer. You'll never see a good band outside of downtown, nor will you find much in the way of culture. Community theatre is NOT doing great things.

But when it comes to food, it turns out there are exceptions to the rule.

Here in Ottawa, for example, the best Indian restaurant is Rangoli - all the way out in Orleans, 20 minutes drive out of the core. It truly is better than any of the downtown Indian eateries and, that being the case, we're forced to make the trek every now and then out to the suburbs for a meal.

As you can imagine, being as big as it is, Toronto must have more than one hidden gem on the outskirts. This past weekend we were in Toronto - to see Margaret Cho: comedienne extraordinaire - and spent a surprising amount of time outside the city limits.

On Saturday afternoon we made a pilgrimage to Pacific Mall out in Markham. And yes, we've had more than one person look at us quizzically asking, "why would you come to Toronto to spend time in Markham?"

Pacific mall is an Asian mall. It's full of small stores carrying electronics and truckloads of bootleg DVDs. It's run and patronized by Asians - so much so that it feels like many of the malls in Malaysia. It's easy to forget, when shopping there, that you're still in Canada. If you're white and you want to feel like you're part of a minority, head to Pacific mall.

In any case, the food court at the mall is chock-a-block with Asian food stalls. We grabbed a snack at Sun's Kitchen, where they make their own fresh noodles. Lex took this video and wrote this blog post about the food court, so no need to duplicate. We share her high opinion of the place.

But the real prize was in Richmond Hill - even further out of the core.

It's been a real challenge finding good Malaysian food outside Malaysia. In Ottawa we only have one or two Malaysian restaurants and, while they present a reasonable facimile of Malaysian food, it just doesn't quite match up to the flavours you get in Ipoh. Part of the reason is that food prepared by the Chinese Malaysian population generally tastes better than that prepared by the ethnic Malay population, and most of the restaurants we've found have been run by ethnic Malays.

We've tried a few in and around Toronto - one in Chinatown and one out in Mississauga - but they haven't been any better than the Ottawa restaurants. Then we found Restauran Malaysia in Richmond Hill, run by Chinese-Malaysians, and the clouds parted and the light shone down.

It doesn't look like much from outside - it's in a strip mall - but inside, it's a beautifully decorated restaurant that has one of the best Malaysian menus available in Canada. It's definitely a commitment to go for dinner at a place like this. You've got to be willing to wait for a table once you've driven 30 or 40 minutes to get to the restaurant, but thankfully, Restauran Malaysia is well worth the wait - which was 30 minutes in our case.

For the most part, SuburbanEats still tend to focus too much, for our taste, on copy after copy of restaurant chains - Denny's, Kelsey's, Montana's, Claimjumpers - but places like Restauran Malaysia help make the suburbs just a little less soul-crushing. No, we won't be moving out of the core any time soon, but this does give us another good reason not to get rid of the car!

It used to be that, if we had a few days to spare and wanted to take in the urban lifestyle, we'd drive 2 hours, into la Belle Province, and trek around Montreal for a day or two. That would usually involve enlisting a bunch of friends from Ottawa and going to the usual haunts - places in the Village mainly. Such trips were common a few years ago, when we'd regularly go to check out the clubs and just leave behind the drudgery of Ottawa for a night, but have become increasingly rare.

Montreal is still an incredible city, but it used to be that we didn't have any friends there, and so we had no tour guide to direct us to the interesting sights. That's changed and we now have an awesome friend in Montreal who is great fun to hang out with. So who knows. Things might start to swing back towards Montreal. Time will tell.

But in the meantime, Toronto has pretty much replaced Montreal as the prime destination for a weekend getaway. Over the past two or three years, we've developed a good sized network of friends in that city, which has made it more interesting to travel the extra 3 hours. In fact, we've gone at least four times since Canada Day 2006.

One of the The nicest things about it all is that all our Toronto friends now know and like each other. They hang out together when we're not there, for Pete's sake! So we know that a visit to Toronto means we'll get to see EVERYONE (and don't have to play favorites) and each of them will propose going somewhere we haven't been, or showing us a sight we haven't seen yet. The options are endless.

Unfortunately, this weekend was all business for Mel. He was in town for a course at McMaster and wasn't able to join us for everything, what with the daily drive to and from Hamilton and classes all day. But for me it was simply a matter of going with the flow. What a luxury!

Together with our hosts Lex and Ger - who have been wonderful in their hospitality and in taking us to some of the best cheap restaurants in Town (Lex and Ger publish the CheapEats series of books) - the flow took us to some new (to us, anyway) parts of the city. We managed to:

- Play Trivial Pursuit, Cribbage, and Parker Bros.' Sorry! (C'mon, you remember it!)
- Check out some local markets (and try on a few toques, but not find an appropriate style)
- Browse the pawn shops and camera outlet stores
- Grab some Pakistani food
- Stuff ourselves at Dim Sum

We really count ourselves fortunate to have such great friends - not only at home in Ottawa, but in nearby cities like Toronto and Montreal where we can go for a change of scenery. Keep the visitor kit handy, folks. We'll be back soon!

At Nuit Blanche in Toronto this past weekend, we were promised a trip on the pillow fight bus. While the bus never materialized (although we did get to ride on the mylar bus), we did manage to find some professional pillow fighters during the evening's wanderings.

We got a short video of the event -- which includes some pretty impressive blows. Check it out!

Since we completely bailed on our Toronto friends early in September when we altered our plans to visit and went instead to Syracuse we decided to make it up with a whirlwind visit this past weekend.

The hub of the visit would be Nuit Blanche - an all-night event celebrating culture/art in every form imaginable, and exploring different uses for the urban landscape at hand. From 7pm until 7am on Saturday night, downtown Toronto was bustling with spectators wending their way through the streets from Yorkville to Queen West looking for painting, sculptures,  sound installations, video projections, dances, games, readings, and pillow fights (more on that later) to name just a few. There was so much to see - too much for any one person - and all for free.

Our group grabbed a nap in the late afternoon, then grabbed a bite in Chinatown and headed off to prowl the night to find some really entertaining stuff - like readings of bedtime tales accompanied by hot cocoa and cookies,

or a huge speaker-like installation that you could walk on, creating sound sculpture - as well as a few installations that just made you scratch your head and say: This is art?! And some of the installations were just creepy - the most obvious being a woman asleep in a small plexiglass case in the middle of a parking lot. We couldn't bring ourselves to take a picture - but so many people were just getting right in close for a real good gawk.

There was an installation of 68 tents filled with personal effects of mental health patients - another eerie installation meant to explore the issues surrounding current mental health legislation. It made for a lovely photo though.

You travelled to the more distant installations on a set of

themed buses (like the clothing-swap bus). We managed to hitch a ride on a bus whose interior was covered in mirrored mylar. Kind of trippy.

Our friends lasted until anywhere between midnight and 2:30 am, but we managed to keep going until 4:30. The weather was iffy, but nothing an umbrella couldn't keep at bay. A good sleep until nearly noon left us refreshed and ready for the trip home. What Fun!

We were surprised at the turnout too. If this happened in Ottawa, you wouldn't get that kind of interest. We'll definitely keep it in mind for another trip next year.