First Week:
Things are crawling along. Huzzah. Yeah, the painting's going OK.
Sometimes one just doesn't feel like writing pleasant, family-friendly updates.
I'm overcome with a kind of miserable fury today, at seeing a painter whose work I loathe go for sale for over thirty thousand dollars a pop. This is why I have to be careful how I cruise the net - for the sake of my sanity. Porn, paranoia and atrocity are old hat, but work this dire can still dim the available light in the world a bit.
The work is so smugly horrid, so screechingly, plonkingly execrable and derivative, so pornographically soulless and so remarkably popular, I can't help that wish that everyone who paid to purchase one of them comes down with a case of galloping facial piles and and cramping trots. It would do the world a further favour if the only way to remediate these symptoms was to break the painting over the artist's head and set it aflame.
I can't blame my bad mood on parasitical gay art alone.
Here in Toronto, our mayor (and his near-indistinguishable brother) seem set on destroying just about everything that makes this city liveable. Frills like transit, education, health, tolerance, gay rights, the creative class, understanding, intellectualism, peace, trust in and cooperation with government, etc. You get the picture.
Living in Toronto is a little bit like being in a relationship you can't break off, but don't know why.
It's not beautiful. It's not soulful. It's not even a good dancer. It asks people how much money they make over dinner, isn't sure why 'puritan' is a term of opprobrium, and, in a local joke, says, "Thank God It's Monday"...and yet it tries so hard to do right. I hate the place in such interesting ways, that I've kind of ended up loving it. Sort of.
So, when you have two suburban...how to put this kindly - OK, I will be polite - barging in and claiming that the city is a mess, a socialist hellhole full of commies and art, a bubbling fountain of ill-gotten gravy over a mountain of gold coins stolen by evil socialists from the honest hands of labourers everywhere, etc., etc...it doesn't help the mood.
I was barely in love with this striving, antiseptic, orderly, gung-ho good sport of a place as it stands. Now they're making it even more difficult.
The only good thing about them (The Mayor and his City Councillor brother) is that they've got the populace so riled up they're actually turning out speak, organize and to passionately defend the city. People's hearts are swelling, and their stopped tongues have been loosed. Pride, rambunctiousness and, yes! - even passion - are in evidence all about. This is wonderful! It will be an even more wonderful day when you can walk down the streets of Toronto and feeeeeeelllll that luxe passion in the air all the time, instead of having to find it in the bottom of the freezer, and thaw it out.
What's happening in Toronto seems to be part of a North American trend: ruling via enforced stupidity. It's very scary. It's most evident in the United States right now, with the Republican leadership trials featuring two people who are, to put it kindly, imbecilic, superstitious, manipulative fanatics.
Personally, I always feared being ruled by "intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic", to quote H.G. Wells. But this mucky, pointless sewer of rotten effluvia that's drowning out rational discourse - and even set on actually eliminating rational thought - is far worse.
Canada got a little whiff of it today, as our charmless Prime Minster tried to stir up fears that Moorification was a great threat to Canada. Real classie, thar, bringing that up on the tenth anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. An announcement by him about the perils of unjust wars, abridgement of human rights, and fundamentalist religion would have been nice. That, and how he can manage to even stand up with his lips firmly rallied 'round the flag of a wayard superpower so fundamentally corrupt that news of it's insincere dealings worldwide reads like rivulets of bloody pus. But, he's a fundamentalist himself, so I won't be expecting any water from that rock.
Well, I'm off to bed at 7a.m. What dreams may come!
