These are the text messages my wife sent to me the other day:
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Rachelle: How’s the pulmonary rehab going, my love?
Rachelle: Oh, I’m so glad to hear that you’re dominating the warm-up exercises!
Rachelle: Yes, you are a natural leader, it’s one hundred percent true!
Rachelle: What’s The Flower Pot?
Rachelle: I see.
Rachelle: So you sit in a chair, and then move one of your legs as if you were lifting it over a flower pot?
Rachelle: What a strange name for an exercise!
Rachelle: Well, I don’t know. Maybe something a little more macho, something like The Grizzly Stomp or The Sumo Crush.
Rachelle: I like The Grizzly Stomp, too. You should write that down and put it in the Suggestion Box.
Rachelle: You already suggested a Cosplay night! Interesting idea, Pickle, but aren’t all the other residents elderly?
Rachelle: I see, that’s good thinking on your part, you can make your oxygen tanks look like rocket packs!
Rachelle: You are very creative, it’s true, and as you say, you are the Wayne Gretzky of The Flower Pot.
Rachelle: Really? The physiotherapist asked you to lead the class yesterday?! How flattering!
Rachelle: Yes, I am sure it was a great honour that everybody else was bitterly jealous of! I’m curious, did you get to choose the music for the work-out?
Rachelle: That’s great! Who did you pick?
Rachelle: Oh.
Rachelle: Well, it just seems like an odd choice.
Rachelle: I didn’t know, Tori Amos just seems weird to me. Complicated, annoying.
Rachelle: Sorry. I am trying to encourage and support you, my love.
Rachelle: Really?
Rachelle: Right in the middle of the stretch she said you had a very small flower pot?!
Rachelle: OMG, That’s hilarious!
Rachelle: I mean nasty, just nasty.
Rachelle: 90 is old, and aging can make people mean.
Rachelle: You’re probably right, that smart-alecky Yvette lady likely had dementia.
Rachelle: Because it’s not your class, honey.
Rachelle: That’s why they wouldn’t let you “expel her from your program.”
Rachelle: Well, I’m glad you put her on notice, anyway, and sorry that everybody is now calling you The Little Flower Pot.
Rachelle: Think of it being like Dear Leader, a term of respect and fear.
Rachelle: Well of course I miss you terribly, but I’m struggling along. Even had a little party last night to fight the loneliness.
Rachelle: Probably less than 25 people, I don’t remember.
Rachelle: He might have been there, not positive.
Rachelle: Oh, you’ll get a kick out of this!
Rachelle: He brought his Porsche over the other day to take Jones for a ride, and Jones just loved it! I’ve never seen him happier! It’s astonishing Pierre doesn’t have any kids because he is just SO amazing with them!!
Rachelle: Yes, you’re amazing with Jones, too.
Rachelle: Sure Jones misses you.
Rachelle: Well, he’s still not really talking yet, so he missing you in a kind of subconscious way, I guess, but I can tell that he really does miss you!!
Rachelle: Tonight?
Rachelle: Oh, Steve needed to take somebody to the magazine awards at some fancy hotel and Jen is out of town, so I have to go as his date. Barf.
Rachelle: He was nominated in two different comedy writing categories.
Rachelle: It is a shame none of your work was nominated!
Rachelle: No, I have no idea why Steve won’t accept your Facebook friendship.
Rachelle: The world is mysterious.
Rachelle: Never mind that though, what are you up to tonight, my Little Flower Pot?
Rachelle: Fish stick night! Yum!
Rachelle: You’re my favourite fish stick, you know.
Rachelle: It’s true.
Rachelle: Don’t ever doubt that!
Rachelle: You will always be my favourite fish stick! xo
She was young and pretty, a student studying to become a dietician, and her youth, cast amidst the somewhat resigned and much older counterculture of porters, seemed to make everybody a little giddy. Her innocence and simple optimism was a narcotic, and all the men stood a little straighter and attempted to make charming remarks around her. She cheerfully pushed me about in my wheelchair as if it was some high school game and not life on the slippery slope, and it made me want to be outside, in the sun of some past, leaning back and resting my head against her and the limitless smell of her hair… but no, no– there is much work to do.
We pass so many people in the hospital corridors. The always smiling Happy Cancer Ladies, who’ve either discovered their bliss through illness or are frozen in panic, unable to move their focus from the positive for one second lest they shatter into a million pieces. Gratitude radiates from them, and they smile at me as if I’m a precocious child, making gentle, almost holy room for my slender passage. And then suddenly, I was part of a long procession of wheelchairs passing by—bald and pale cancer patients, a girl burned with acid from an honour attack and an elderly man with skin so thin you could almost see into his past. The Happy Cancer Ladies stand aside and beam, practically applauding, they’re so sincerely proud of us.
Men who wear brown coveralls run the elevators. All day they live in these boxes, these boxes that open and close like respiration. They sit there, flipping through the Toronto Sun and wondering what else the world might have to offer them, and when the new porter wheels me in, something happens. It’s like everybody has had three drinks and is now wearing their favourite shirt. Conversation pipes up, and everybody is talking and laughing and flirting, dispensing wisdom and jokes about the myriad complications of negotiating the underground tunnels.
“I was her mission, “ I say, “I am the treasure she has returned with.”
The young girl laughed because that is what she does, but the elevator man seemed intrigued, “You are a treasure?” “Yes,” I said mystically, “I can grant you a wish. You tell me what you want and I will make sure you get it.” I expected a joke, but I could see in his face that he would not let this happen. He looked at me, stating plainly, “I want my mother to be here with me.”
I put my hand on his forearm, ” You have to close your eyes and imagine her, thinking of the best, safest times you spent together, and through this you will summon her, and you will feel her touch upon your skin, her scent returning…”
It cast a little spell, this, and the girl made the sound of a small animal that wanted to be hugged, while the man stared off at a distant horizon. As I was being wheeled out, the elevator man wanted to tell me something, a message from a song by King Crimson that his language inhibited him from pronouncing, and as he leaned toward me trying to spell the title out, the doors closed, the potential of this information lingering between us for a moment, and then falling away.
Over at the bar sat an older man, his hand inside the dress of a young, very drunk woman. Her body was bending and curving into his, grinding and pressing, the bare flesh of her back exposed like a wound. Careful and still as a predator, he was looking past her incoherent eyes to another point in the evening, waiting.
Another man, probably near 60, had a mop of charismatic grey hair and carried with him the manner that suggested a confident expectation that things were going to work out in his favour. He’d talk to anybody, fully expecting that they’d be happy, even flattered, to chat and then move tables to accommodate him. Familiar in an indistinct way and able to immediately establish a hierarchy within the place, he had the aura of celebrity.
He turned out to be John McDermott, a Scottish-Canadian tenor and sort of middle of the road performer that your parents might really like.
Incongruously, accompanying him were a group of 20-something Bros, all dressed like they were ready for a night of poker and drinking in a buddy’s kitchen. There was a raw, unkind edge to them and they were treating McDermott like he needed them more than the other way around. They were egging him on, and in short order the room was called to silence and John McDermott sang Danny Boy for us while his crew, holding cell phones in front of their faces like masks, took disinterested videos while continuing their snickering conversations with one another.
The singing was lovely, and many people looked like they felt blessed to have been present for such a spontaneous gift. But still, there was something mechanical and imposed about it, like we were tourists who had just been taken advantage of by sneering locals who now expected us to pay.
I wanted to clear my head a bit from this and stepped out on the balcony. The city was soft, fuzzy and fog-lit, the skyline glowing.
Near me on the railing arrived one of McDermott’s young crew. He was wearing a black hoodie and had a smudge of a moustache on his upper lip, and rocking his body back and forth he pulled deeply from the back of his throat and horked over the side and down to the street 18 floors below. He then went into the bar and proceeded to talk the really drunk woman away from the older, predatory man, bringing her back to his group, a trophy now, for all of them to enjoy.
]]>Making the desserts is a beautiful, young woman wearing black leotards. She has a long frizz of hair, part of which is pinched into a bun at the top of her head, the rest loosely knotted by a bandana that looks like she might have been wearing around her neck two years ago when she worked as a camp counselor. She looks shy and not entirely sure of herself yet, but her job is to make things small and beautiful, to suggest a foreign accent through the softness and distance in her eyes.
The waitress is wearing black leotards, too, only she’s sporting denim shorts over top of them. She whirls out of darkness and puts a plate in front of me, her eyes moving through me to some point in the future– another table she has to tend to, the party she’s going to in an hour, the cat she always feeds on her way home…
Robotically, amidst the almost industrial din of downtown cool, she recites the memorized details of my amuse-bouche, as if a guide speaking through a megaphone to faraway tourists on a hot, double-decker bus excursion.
Men with beards drink artisanal beer at the bar.
]]>Well, it turned out to be one of those movies in which you are quickly conscious of the fact that it’s long, by which I mean you’re swiftly bored. It was impossible to penetrate through the surface of the images splashing in front of us, and instead of being immersed in the complexities of a grand narrative, we felt kind of like we were flipping through the pages of a pretty magazine while waiting for something better or more important to take place.
This might have been intentional, as it’s a relatively accurate thematic representation of the core of the source material, but it made for a pretty lousy movie. I mean, if we’d been handed a catalogue and told to go sit in the dark with earphones on– where passages of the novel were read to us–we probably would have had a deeper, more connective and personal experience.
There are a number of reasons for this failure, I think, one being that is was shot in 3D, and I’m not a big fan of this developing novelty. To me it’s a special effect that’s at it’s most useful when animating the unreal or exaggerating cataclysmic disasters. Instead of rendering actors more real and life-like, it reduces and flattens them into one dimension, draining all life and subtext from them. They’re about as emotionally penetrable as robots or mannequins, and as they stand in front of you there’s absolutely nothing compelling in them.
I had no interest or attraction to anybody in the movie. Hell, I didn’t even want to go to any of the lavish parties that were being thrown. Everything was just a summoned mirage to me, perhaps like the one that drove Gatsby toward his green light, and maybe that’s the difference between experiencing a work of art as a boy, and then returning to it later, in middle age, discovering that the fields you played in as a child were not tall stretches of eternity, but just small, scrubby accidents of geography.
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Cab driver took one look at me and said, “guess you’re hoping for a better year, eh?”
And then he said his mother had the “psychic gift” and that he could “tell things.”
Feeling a little scared and vulnerable.
Hate cab driver.
Think he smells like weird soup.
Maybe some “chunky” variety.
Sirloin burger, perhaps.
Taking shitty route while he tries to get me to pay for a psychic reading.
Might be late for party.
Have you ever heard of anything so stupid? A psychic reading by your cab driver?
Feeling very happy I brought my flask out tonight.
How is the party?
Excellent.
Please save a bottle of wine for me!
Driver just said I need to live in a dry climate and should avoid olives.
No, not a clue why he thinks that.
Just hide the bottle in the bathtub. Put a blanket over it.
Okay, I’ll ask him.
He says it will be five bucks.
Bartering to give him lotto ticket instead.
Says I have an allergic aura.
Have you hid the wine?
Just do it!
That’s one of your resolutions, right? Do things!
So, just do it!
Jesus wouldn’t care.
Not stealing, redistribution.
Free market still at play, but regulated!
Am now asking driver what colour allergic aura is.
Says it doesn’t work like that.
I am drunk, yes.
At the address right now.
Driver just asked if I was on the pipe.
Crack pipe.
Because of my teeth.
Fucker.
Giving him expired lotto ticket for his psychic advice.
Yeah!
That bang you heard was me slamming the cab door!
See you soon, love you!
(there is a two hour time period where no text messages were sent)
HAPPAAY 20312 EVERYBODY!!!!
FUCK THE MAYA1!
HIGH HEELS VERY HARD TO DANSS IN.
FUCK11!
SPACE BROWNIES AWESOME
WHERE R UDUDE?
RACHYLLE AND I R AT PARTY
COME ON!
THEREES FUCING DRY ICE ANDHID 2 BOTTLES OF WINE IN OVEN!
This is Rachelle.
Michael is really, really drunk.
Yeah, like in a bad movie.
He’s very sweaty and I think he’s going to be sick.
We’re going to have to leave soon, so if you come, we’ll likely be gone.
DOING IT FUCKEN GAHGHNAMAHA SYTLE!!!!
CANT EAT OLIVES IN NEW YEAR.
BUMMER.
IT SUCKS UP MY AURA OR SOMETHING.
It’s Rachelle again.
We have to go.
He’s showing his scars to a couple.
He just asked them if they were foreign.
JUSS MET SOME CRAZY BRAZILIIAAAANIAS!
ONE WAS BALCK AND THE OTHER WHITE!
FREAK OUT!
It’s Rachelle again.
We’re in the cab home now.
Yes, he was just sick out the window.
Words can’t describe.
I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’ll be able to make brunch tomorrow.
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It always seemed a little bit like New Year’s Eve to me. I’d feel all sorts of pressure to have a great time, make fancy plans, and then at the end of it all, feel as if I’d been at the wrong place all night, and then bitter and depleted, would end up walking home.
The sheer volume of people who attend Nuit Blanche disassembles whatever plans I had, and inevitably I’d spend most of my time texting lost friends.
Yr @ Dufferin Grove??
U said Dundas, did’t u??
The commissioned works that have the most promise always have endless, Disneyesque lineups that stretch 90 minutes into the future and the ambient art that serves as the connective tissue between the major installations has a souvenir stand feeling to it. In short, it gives me the sense that I just participated in some weird variation of spring break.
And so this year Rachelle and I felt little remorse about skipping the event. Instead, I participated via social media, opening up my Twitter feed to all the glory that was Nuit Blanche:
E-gene
Get ready for a stupid flood of poor-lit photos of unknown subject matter tonight on Twitter and Instagram. #sbnb
MryW
“Let the art speak for itself” — a girl after overhearing my bf’s interpretation of an exhibit. #sbnb
ESTRONG
Man beside me carrying bananas. Art or groceries? #sbnb
I’m at a high five competition … Haha #sbnb
Ion
I am supposed to be looking with a critical eye at #sbnb pieces, but really I am just drink drank drunk.
Alfagrrl
It’s the little things during #sbnb that make me smile. Nothing new here but makes me love my city!#sbnb
Petalpusher
Green frogs light up. Sometimes less, sometimes more. In background people scream about vodka. Latter not part of exhibit. #sbnb
Petalpusher
Some ass just fell off friend’s shoulders and whacked me in leg. He then tried to apologize with Italian opera. Yep, #sbnb is now messy
Blackcrown
#sbnb Not going out for Nuit Blanche is the new going out for Nuit Blanche.
if i ever find the FUCKING asshole who stole my seat & straps i will fucking CUT YOU TILL YOU BLEED & take my fucking bike gear back. #sbnb
Overheard: “Nooo! They are not having sex! They are being hung upside down by fish hooks!!” #sbnb
ashsper
Saw some interesting #sbnb stuff along bloor. Especially liked the ‘choir’ at the church at Walmer/Bloor. Soothing
“Yo, that sh*t is f*cking sick!” Woman (on drugs?) repeatedly yelling at performers in classroom at end of the world exhibit #sbnb
shannnnon
If you’re on a bike, you better ding that bell. Losers running into streets, taxis are swerving, drunk people barfing on curbs. #sbnb
sytc
45 minute wait at All Night Convenience at #sbnb you know where to find me
shedoesthecity
In Trinity Bellwoods people are playing tennis & renegade dance parties compete with shite #sbnb dance party. Skip park, go to castle!
Overherd
The funny thing is we’re not even looking at art we’re just drunk #sbnb
Anchorman2
Cab Driver: “let’s get the fuck out of here” #sbnb
HelenofCry
CRAZY lineups!!!#sbnb
AnnaVanna
LOVE Nuit Blanche, beautiful art!!!#sbnb
sighfactory
For those of us who have lived here for every rendition of#sbnb, tonight is just a yearly nightmare.
Makhoul
A field of glowsticks. #sbnb
Nina24
I walk #sbnb alone. Much prefer it solo. Ending night on a swing. Sean Paul blaring in background but tranquil here. Love this city.
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