Burden of choice

As if the gajillion choices we have to make every day weren’t bad enough.  Assuming the faint of heart (who like yours truly cry at a mere hint of the cheesiest emotional moments in Bollywood movies) are ready to witness the plight of an average Torontonian/ big-city-North-American, and have their embroidered hankies handy (yes this bad pun was intended), allow me to provide a sample:

• There are 100+ brands of cereals starting with the letters A-C alone…. I stopped counting beyond 3 digits
• At any given moment, about 50+ movies are playing in Toronto mainstream movie theatres
• Within a 10 minute walk in a busy downtown area, one encounters at least 30 places to eat
• A mid-sized shopping mall has 150+ stores to visit

… and this isn’t even beginning to tell the story.  We haven’t even talked about the tv channels and programs yet.

Amidst all this, we Canadians have our federal elections.  A blip of an event compared to our “glamourous big brother” down South, with a total time of a month and change for election ramp up to October 14th, compared to the years of effort spent elsewhere (e.g. Southern Republican Leadership Conference Hotline Straw Poll was held in 2006 for the 2008 US presidential elections).

Gone are the comforts of non-democracy, where we had one (or a few million) less decisions to make.  We have, by choice, take on the burden of choice.  Our decisions might have an impact.  (The purists who believe democratic govts do exactly as their citizens want, and therefore voting alone will have an impact, can write their own blog.)  Voting is a big responsibility.  I know because they told me so when I was studying for the citizenship exam.

I need comfort food to help me deal with this.  Sleep deprivation due to indecision (or any other less honourable reason) is best remedied with freedom fries.  And what one reads in the free newspapers while walking to work or standing squished in the rush hour subway traffic, does not really help reduce the confusion or indecision.

So I decided to read up on how the wise predecessors have dealt with the unique challenges of democracy and the responsibility of running for office, to reinstill in myself the faith in political leadership and abilities.  A subset of the fruits of my efforts (which involved simultaneous internet surfing, typing and slurping veggie soup), follows:

• One day while campaigning against Dwight Eisenhower during the 1952 presidential election, Adlai Stevenson was approached by a female admirer. “Governor,” she enthused, “every thinking person will be voting for you.” “Madam, that is not enough,” Stevenson replied. “I need a majority!”  Needless to say, despite his popularity among intellectuals, Stevenson lost the election.
• In 1858, Abraham Lincoln campaigned against Stephen Douglas for an Illinois Senate seat. (Lincoln once described an argument made by Douglas as “thin as the homeopathic soup that was made by boiling the shadow of a pigeon that had been starved to death.”)  Following Lincoln’s loss, he was asked how he felt (by a sympathetic friend). “Like the boy who stubbed his toe,” Lincoln replied, “I am too big to cry and too badly hurt to laugh.”
  [Adlai Stevenson recalled this story following his loss to Dwight Eisenhower in the 1952 presidential election.]
• In 1974, Richard Nixon, not noted for his social graces, visited Paris to attend the funeral of French president Georges Pompidou. “This,” Nixon remarked during the ceremony, “is a great day for France!”
• During the 2000 presidential campaign, Al Gore’s daughter Kristin praised his role as a mentor. “He was… the guy who helped me study for my third-grade state-capital quiz,” she explained. “Seattle – I got it down.”  Sadly, the record does not indicate who broke the embarrassing news to the Gores: the capital of Washington state is in fact… Olympia.
• In October 2002, Arnold Schwarzenegger returned the Ferrari Spider which he had recently purchased, explaining that it did not fit his new image. The flashy car, he told the dealership’s president, might give potential voters the wrong idea: “I feel I need a car that would better telegraph my image as a candidate for California governor – a car that says I’m a man of the people.”  In March 2003, Schwarzenegger bought… an Austrian tank (called a Pinskower) modified to render it legal to drive on city streets.

Hmm…. eeny meeny miny moe…

Dis-art-ed

Nuit blanche this year (or what I saw of it) was for the most part disappointing.  Of course with contemporary art, one always expects that some displays (or installations as they’re ‘artfully’ called) may not resonate with every person.  However, if it were that the statements were too broad or abstract or not meaningful to some, execution would still have gotten some marks.  Just like one can admire a well-presented point of view while disagreeing with it, so can one appreciate an artist’s creativity and expression even if the message isn’t aligned with one’s own opinion or passion.  The artist’s effort respects the others’ (audience’s or viewers’) time and intellect, which in turn begets respect.

A small number of installations, such as Stereoscope at Toronto’s city hall or A dream of pastures near OCAD merited such respect (at least from the tired owners of feet-about-to-fall-off after a few hours of walking with little to show for it).  Conversation # 2 was another such noteworthy piece.  The genius of simplicity and creativity in these displays, not to mention the considerable effort (e.g. installing lights behind each of the 960 windows in city hall building, or crafting the intricately timed and positioned interplay of lights, gears, bicycle, and participants) drew the few moments of excitement and admiration in the night.

That is, if we don’t count the people who were just happy that for one Saturday night the city of Toronto wasn’t entirely asleep by 10 pm!  It seemed “people on the road” was more of a mentionable this time around on Nuit Blanche.

Or the other “happy” crowd (which yours truly is still trying to figure out) was the kind that arrived at a bar before they started the tour and were anticipating drinking so much (and made good on that expectation) that they handed a credit card to the bar tender before they started drinking, in case they later were not in full control of their signing hands (or remember which one was the signing hand!)  Last I heard it was still legal to drink on any night (not just Nuit Blanche) so no reason to go “all out” on the booze, and how ‘interesting’ did they expect the art to be, to have to be drunk to appreciate it! Or maybe…. this was actually an interactive art installation, and I totally didn’t get it (this lack of comprehension has been known to happen – or at least admitted to – about as frequently as the planets of our solar system coming in a straight line, sending fears of doomsday rippling through the faint-hearted!)

Since the next similar planetary alignment is not until 2438 (CNN and NASA say so, and I trust this time the measurement / calculation was in the correct units), I can continue to “get it” as I see fit and therefore hold firm on my pedestrian (pun totally intended) opinions on this year’s “art” displays in Nuit Blanche, both on and off the streets of Toronto.

Spaced out

Toronto covers approx. 1,655 square kilometres, earning it the 36th place by land (and 97th by density).  So in short, we’re doing OK for space.  Yet the city for some reason extended its land on the east-ish end.  And they called it Leslie Spit.  No joke.  While for the most part, the road/ paved trail is fairly consistent in its landscape, the view of the city is quite enchanting, especially on a cloudy day!

View from Leslie Spit