When We Are The Ancients

Twenty thousand years from now, weary and starved for home, our descendants will arrive back on Earth, which they'd let lie fallow for nineteen thousand years. 

They will dig into the accretions of dust and dirt layered over everything we built. They will discover tantalizing signs of the lives of long-forgotten ancestors, such as strange markings on ancient pathways.

Scholars will conclude 21st century humans were surely bipedal, but travelled in great long hops. And their clothes shed pigment as part of some devotional ritual.  

Others will argue that the enigmatic markings are the remnants of a game. They will use the hopscotch hypothesis as analogous proof.

These two schools of thought will battle vigorously with one another for years as if the answer to the puzzle mattered at all.

One upstart, a specialist in ante-departural epidemiology, will recover records once thought destroyed, and propose that these are markings on a sidewalk in the aid of an obscure ritual called special resistancing (the translation is in some doubt).  

That researcher will die unrecognized, then be remembered reverentially when everyone finally sees that she was right.

Ah ... who am I kidding? Twenty thousand years from now, we'll still be in this goddam pandemic. 

Thanks for reading.

Happy American Thanksgiving!

Karen

Oh, look: another Picasso exhibit.

Death of a Panhandler

A news notice flitted across my screen the other day. Woman killed by cement truck. Not again, I thought. The cement truck body count in Toronto is high and getting higher.

Bad as it is to read of more pedestrian carnage, this time is worse because I know the victim. She was the woman with the loud, high-pitched voice who for years had panhandled at the corner of Dundas and Sherbourne half a block south of here. 

We spoke often, though the conversation was always the same. She'd say “Do you have any change?” I'd say “Sorry, no.”  

People claim to have warned her that it was dangerous darting out into the road to ask drivers for money.

Her danger increased at some point in the pandemic, when she had a foot amputated and took to getting around in a wheelchair. 

People in every state of mental and chemical disarray wander onto Sherbourne street all the time. And use the stopped traffic at intersections at Gerrard and Dundas as their chance to introduce themselves to potential patrons. 

Everyone in the ‘hood knew her, but no one’s quite sure of her name. She “succumbed to her injuries” at the scene and was pronounced dead in the street. 

That loud, reckless panhandler was someone’s child. And one of God’s children. There’s a piece missing now in the sound scape at the intersection. Someone who was a daily reminder of life’s uneven favour is gone. 

I’m sorry she’s dead. 

Thanks for reading.

Karen

 

Isn't It Iconic

There's a Picasso show on at the AGO right now, with paintings from his blue period, plus a few from before and after. 

The show was well put together and helped me understand the early years in Picasso's long and storied career as an artist. 

I learned art is autobiography. When Picasso was young, poor, struggling … when he was blue, as it were, so were his paintings. When he was better established, had some money and a girlfriend … his outlook was rosy, and so were his paintings. 

Sometimes you need a good art show to help you see something that was there all along.

One sour note: the word "iconic" draped like a plastic table cloth over the exhibit commentary.

Let me give you a hypothetical example to show what I'm complaining about.

Imagine a short piece on Picasso written, let's say, in the early 1970s:

As the most recognized, famous and influential artist of the 20th century, Picasso stands like a colossus. Bridging the seminal works of the Impressionists and the experiments of the Cubists, Expressionists and Surrealists, Picasso led the look, impact, and substance of modern art, at the same time standing on his own, magnificent and inimitable.

These days, the same passage would go something like this:

As the most iconic, iconic and iconic artist of the 20th Century, Picasso stands like a colossus. Bridging the iconic work of the Impressionists and the iconic Cubists, Expressionists and Surrealists, Picasso was an icon, at the same time standing on his own, iconic and iconic. 

See what I mean? 

Thanks for reading!

Have an iconic week!

Karen

Masquerade

Belleville: the birthplace of Gerald Cotten and Avril Lavigne ...
and where Hallowe'en gets taken to a whole new level.

These days social pressure, ambition and that ineluctable human quality called identity, make some people want to change who they appear to be.

Leaving aside furries and drag queens, two available methods to change how one appears are 1) to undergo plastic surgery and 2) to appropriate a racialized identity.

Oddly, irrespective of which of these two you choose, your next step will be to deny the change even happened. Rather, you will claim that you have not changed at all, especially if you have changed a lot.

For example, Rachel Dolezal and Carrie Bourassa have vociferously defended their genetically spurious claims of Black and Indigenous ancestry. Because these are women descended from Europeans, they have performed the remarkable trick of improving their status in society by claiming kinship with an historically downtrodden population. 

In her own defence, Rachel Dolezal says race is a social construct; she self-identifies as Black. This is more-or-less how Carrie Bourassa, who claims to be Métis, Anishinaabe and Tlingit, is responding to recent investigations by CBC and others that show she is 100% European by birth and ancestry. Her story is inconsistent so far, both relying on made-up details about her grandmother marrying an Indigenous man and the assertion that she was adopted into a Metis family, so claiming that DNA both does and does not matter. It’s hard to see how this will end well for her. 

Society reserves a lot of umbrage for people who want to change how they are seen. This applies especially to transgender women. Gender, like race, can be called a social construct (or not, tellingly). If you’re born with male genitals but grow up certain that you are female, you can have the surgery and pass as well as you can, but an army of outraged parents – and Germaine Greer – will never let you forget who you really are.

So you can understand why people will take deliberate, and at times painful and costly action, and then immediately deny it. People can be so mean.  

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Reupholstery Update: 

Before

After