Being Kit

48 Hours in Toronto

2009-09-24T16:39:00.000-07:00

Saturday morning saw me on the bike down to the "Coffee Tree" streetside patio, New Yorker in hand. It's become a bit of a routine of late, and it takes the edge off that first few hours after waking up when you can't seem to make the voices stop. I read Goptnik's "Letter From Canada" on Ignatieff, sipping my Kenya Dark and watching his descriptions of Canada, and of Toronto, stroll past. The annual Bloor West Ukranian Festival was sprouting up around me, grizzled carnies bolting an ageing ferris wheel together, morning jog-niks puffing their way along the sidewalk past shuffling pensioners, bright-eyed dogs tied to parking signs waiting patiently for owners, and, out in the back alleyway, where I'd locked up my bike, a group of dark-haired girls in embroidered dresses rehearsing their act, singing and swaying in unison, their hands holding imaginary microphones. A family of Mexicans were setting up their roasted corn stall next to some chiseled, Slavic boys arranging a table of CDs for sale. I finished my coffee and my article and reluctantly cycled home to burn some archives.

17 straight days of sunshine at the end of an all-too-short summer can put a serious crimp in your ability to get things done. At least the things that require being inside. I was back at the festival by 4pm, having spent all the time I could stand in front of the LCDs in the living room. At the corner of Windermere Road and Bloor Street, in front of the Bank of Montreal, I was stopped dead for an hour, leaning on my bike, listening to a group of five immigrant kids play. Two violins, a bouzouki, a hammered dulcimer, a cello, and a dusty upright bass drum with a bent, tarnished cymbal bolted to the top of it. Military haircuts, aviator sunglasses, ripped vests and tattered punk rock t-shirts topped poofy Cossack pants and knee-high black leather boots.

Gusto, it seems, is in direct relationship to cold temperatures, political oppression, and poverty. The forward urgency of white folk music, that accent on the two and four, makes you lean into it, like careening down a steep hill in a shopping cart.

I ate a plate of pirogies, mainly out of a sense of occasion. Grilled onions and sour cream pooled into an auburn sludge around gummy, doughy lumps. Cold temperatures, political oppression and poverty, while producing thoroughly invigorating music, do not generate cuisine.

The large stage at Jane and Bloor was filled with folk dancers. Like so many other throwback traditions, the demure and prettily dressed women tip-toed about in sync, with sheepish smirks, as one by one, the men jumped forward to throw themselves about, squatting and kicking, spinning and lurching; displaying their maleness. Old and young clapped and bounced; those with the most recent memories sang along to ancient words.

Back at the house, I played a short, but entertaining game of "Risk" with Thorsten, Dirk's eleven-year-old son, and Robbie, the Trinidadian neighbour's son, who is in his first year of Philosophy at York U. At about eleven-thirty, the game pretty much a foregone conclusion, Robbie and I decided to go down to the Lula Lounge at Bloor and Dufferin for "Salsa Saturday" so that I could watch the band, and he could try to pick up girls. "I'd invite my friends." Said Robbie. "But I think they'd be weirded out that I was hanging out with an old guy. No offence."

I like him.

On our bikes in the crisp early fall air down to Lula. The place doesn't look like much from the outside. In fact, it is rather ominous, and smacks of back alley drug deals and broken-bottle skirmishes. But inside it is the best salsa club in the city. "I want to take lessons" said Robbie as we walked in. A great band; killer conga, just-off-the beat, make you want to jump timbale, and oh-so-sweet three-part Latin harmonies. The dance floor was an amusing mix of the talented, the sexy, and the stiff, the latter looking more closely at their feet than their partners. There are times when I am quite happy to be alone, watching. But everyone should have someone to dance with.

Sunday morning was shopping for vegetables and fruit. Another glorious, sunny day, I decided to head to Kensington Market. While the Village has exactly the same supplies, it was too beautiful out not to find an excuse to cycle the extra few kilometres. A warm poppyseed bun from Anna's bakery and a chunk of Old Dutch Master Gouda later, I was woefully unprepared for the bike home, two cloth bags stuffed with honeydew, Paula reds, broccoli, sweet potatoes, a football-sized pineapple and twelve limes. My neck is still killing me, and at one point, just turning off Spadina onto Dundas, I shouted obscenities as my wobbly progress was halted by a delivery van squeezing me between it's white panelled side and a parked pickup truck.

I needed boxes, and recordable CDs, so I dumped my bounty on the kitchen table and cycled north to Keele and St. Clair, where the Big Box Stores sprawl next to the railroad tracks. Feeling peckish on the tool home, and realizing that it was nigh-on suppertime now, I ducked into Pho'ga Bahn C'uon, a five-table Vietnamese restaurant in a sketchy strip mall on the north side of St. Clair at Runnymede, about a six-minute bike from home. A pot of tea was, as always, plunked down on my table, and a small piece of paper and a pencil added next to it atop the menu. Numbers and letters are the universal form for ordering food, when the language barrier is an issue. I ordered a medium bowl of tripe pho ( B5; $5), a glass of fresh coconut juice (D7; $1.50), and a Vietnamese shrimp pancake (Banh tom chien; C6; $4.25). You've all had pho; it's one of those comfort foods that you yearn for. The perfect, classic Asian mix of sweet, salty, sour and spicy. But it was the Banh tom chien that amazed me. A large plate was placed in front of me, with a yellow, half-moon pillow settled amongst crisp romaine lettuce, and piles of fresh herb leaves, both licorice-tinged Thai basil, and pineapple sage - the fuzzy, serrated leaves, with their bitter edge and sweet, aromatic finish. Cutting into the pillow, which crunched gloriously and puffed steam, the inside was a heady mix of bean sprouts, pink shrimp, and grilled pork. What you do is this: take a large leaf of romaine, place a good-sized hunk of the pancake on it, drizzle with nuoc cham sauce, throw a few leaves of basil and sage on it, wrap the whole thing up into a parcel, and devour it over your bowl of steaming pho, so as not to get the dribblings on the table. Three kinds of crunchy; crisp lettuce, fried coconut batter, and fresh bean sprouts meet the fibrous chew of shrimp and pork, the floral nose of fresh herbs and the hot/sweet tang of nuoc cham and fiery red chilies.

In one ear, on the radio Rex Murphy was waxing on about Swine Flu on "Cross Country Checkup" with a caller from Winnipeg. In the other, the high-pitched chatter and joyous slurping of Vietnamese families. I scooped the last of my shaved coconut out of the glass with a spoon, and waddled out to unlock the bicycle. A little Asian man stormed out of the dry cleaners next door, and, as much as an Asian man can be red-faced, screamed at me about locking my bike to his stand-alone sign in the parking lot. "3 Shrts Five Dollrs. Carpt Cleaning". Two Rastas, clandestinely drinking malt liquor from paper bags in front of the Jamaican patty shop, chuckled.

I wandered the Ukranian Festival for awhile again before deciding that I really ought to get some sleep.

Oh Canada
Our home, adopted land
True patient love
In everyone's command

With glowing hearts
we see thee rise
the true north, strong and free

From far and wide
Oh Canada
We stand on guard for thee

We'll keep our land
Glorious and free
Oh Canada, we stand on guard for thee

Most Valuable Player

2009-09-17T20:50:00.000-07:00

Keswick Ridge Rural School in 1979 had a grand total of 253 children, spanning grades one through nine. A classic red-brick pound of butter-shaped structure, it still sits starkly and, depending on your age, forebodingly in a gravelly lot at the junction of Highway 105 and McKeen’s Corner Road.

I can’t say that I enjoyed my time there. An outsider; my parents were not farmers or mechanics, but teachers. My pudgy frame and overzealous vocabulary inevitably placed me in the middle of a circle of jeering boys, being shoved around until I finally just crouched to the ground with my hands protecting the back of my neck, as if waiting for a bear attack, listening for the merciful ring of the bell that would put us all back behind our old wooden flip-top desks.

One of the worst things that children are subjected to in elementary school is gym class. Whoever decided that square dancing was something young people ought to engage in was sick in the head, and the eugenic fascists who came up with the “Canada Fitness Test” have rooms reserved in hell, to be sure. As a stumpy, unattractive nerd with about as much interest in athletics as in creamed herring, I was relegated to dancing with the ugly girls, and was consistently awarded the “Participation” patch (read: “Nice Try, Loser”) from the good folks at CFT.

One bright spot was ball hockey. Not that I was any good at it, mind you, but with a total of sixteen kids in grade nine – only eight boys – I was guaranteed to at least get to play. (don’t get me started on the vicious schoolyard practice of picking teams). Our gym teacher, Mr. LeBlanc, bless his D-contract, twice a week heart, thought it might be spiriting to form a Keswick Ridge Grade 9 Intramural Ball Hockey Team, the idea being to at least put some kind of collective, competitive school spark into our lonely educational outpost.

We practiced twice a week, flailing around the mint-green cinder block gymnasium, hacking joyfully away. I don’t think Mr. LeBlanc actually knew the rules. Or perhaps he was just happy to sneak out back for a smoke, I don’t know. Either way, when he announced, towards the end of the year, that we were to actually play a game against another school, we were excited, but unspeakably unprepared.

George Street Junior High is in downtown Fredericton, about twenty-five kilometers away. For most of the kids at KRS, it might as well have been New York City. When their shiny school bus (ours broke down regularly, and the parent phone tree on bitter winter mornings was the only thing that kept us from frostbite, waiting for a bus driver who was taking a blow torch to the engine block) pulled into the school yard, we looked on in awe, as the George Street Junior High Varsity Ball Hockey Team sauntered out with clean sneakers, matching shorts and shirts, and hockey bags.

By the end of the first period, the score was eleven to nothing. I think Mr. LeBlanc started drinking about then, as his counterpart’s be-smirked face gazed at him over his haughtily folded arms.

Sometimes, when a team loses badly, people will say they were “outclassed”. I’ve been searching for over thirty years to find a still kind, but stronger word to describe our performance. It’s not “outclassed” that’s for sure.

Of the myriad problems, the main one being a total lack of knowledge of the game in any respect, we were also further handicapped by the fact that only six of the boys in the class had showed up, which meant we had no substitutes. Compounding this, Keith Gordon, who’s dad had a dairy farm over in Scotch Lake, became quite angry at the situation, and would simply walk up and smack whichever George Street player was in reach, and was sent to the penalty box (well, the penalty “wall” I suppose). Problem was, they’d let him out, and he’d just run up and smack another one. We were a man down virtually the entire time.

At the end of the second period, the score was seventeen to zero. Our goalie, Steven Jewett, whose dad was a Ferrier, lacked any equipment at all save a stick, yet played valiantly. But if you don’t know how to swim, valiance doesn’t count for much in the deep end of the pool. The George Street Goalie took pity on him and actually leant him a glove before the third period. Myself, I had convinced my mother earlier in the week that I should have knee pads (mainly because I thought they would look cool) and I ended up lending the left one to Brent Spinney, whose dad was in jail.

For some god-be-known reason (Mr. LeBlanc was starting to wobble, I think) we started the third period with me playing centre.

Now, you have to understand the thoroughness of our ignorance. After George Street’s twentieth goal, I finally realized why I was quite happily winning every face-off. You see, the idea is to get the ball behind you; not just hit it first. Armed with this sudden light bulb, and because the George Street centre had simply decided to let me go ahead and give the ball away, when I actually scooped the ball back to Darren Reynolds, whose dad repaired small engines, they were both equally surprised, but for different reasons. Darren, snapping out of his deer-in-the-headlights trance, shot the ball across the court.

I won’t try and make something up here about how I ended up running towards the George Street net with the ball on my stick. To be honest, I don’t remember. But, like the proverbial roomful of monkeys, we had finally made a play.

In life, you have moments that crystallize into a series of sharp Kodachrome postcards in your head. The stunned look on the George Street Goalie’s face, as the orange ball sailed over his right shoulder and thunked against the upturned crash mat behind him is one of them. It was the first time I had ever lifted the ball off the floor with a wrist shot.

We celebrated for a good ten minutes.

With a final score of twenty-two to one, we shook hands with a dejected George Street Junior High Varsity Ball Hockey Team, and pranced our way to Mr. Holyoke’s decrepit school bus like triumphant Centurions.

On the last day of the school year, because there was no work left to be done, we would assemble in the gym to hear the principal talk about summer responsibilities, to hear the choir sing their last, and hopefully best rendition of “Day by Day” and to fidget with the anticipation of frog ponds, bicycle races and penny candy.

Mr. LeBlanc spoke of basketball, soccer, and badminton. Then, in a short speech that to this day I wonder if he actually worked on, he said, in so many words, “the first ever Keswick Ridge Ball Hockey Team had only one game this year, and one player stood out.”

As I walked through the space between the cross-legged kids towards a smiling Mr. LeBlanc, who was holding out a red, white and blue ribbon with a small, cheap medal on it depicting an ice hockey player in full dress, on my last day at this place that had been such daily torture for what seemed like forever, I couldn’t help but be a little sad there wasn’t just one more year.

On Finding Home

2009-07-17T18:42:00.000-07:00

“Home is where the heart is.”

But when the heart can only find joy from a vicarious distance, peering around corners to steal warmth from strangers, there is no home; the heart is vagrant, and glimmers of hope are but painful sips of water from Tantalus’s pool.

Personally, my heart stays encased in my rib cage, where it is pretty firmly attached to various important blood vessels.

“Home is where your stuff is”.

But if you have no stuff, you’re out of luck there too.

“Home is where my feet are”

This is a deluded fantasy reserved for narcissistic buffoons. Just ask a Cambodian landmine victim.

“Home is where you hang your hat”.

That is, if you wear a hat. Perhaps, if one were to wear a hat constantly, then wherever one decided to take it off and hang it would be free game for a raid of the refrigerator and an evening in front of the TV.

“Home is home, be it ever so humble.”

This flies in the face of the “stuff” concept, and puts a kink in the “hat” bit, if your home happens to be so humble that there’s no hook on the wall. “Home is where you toss your hat in the corner” doesn’t have the same ring.

“Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”

Smoke another one, grab some wheat germ and sing the theme song to “The Littlest Hobo” to yourself while you wait, you knob.

“Home is where the house is”.

Technically, I suppose, you could argue this one in court. And there must be some reason that trailer parks aren’t full of “mobile houses”. (Nahh; that’s just marketing).

“Home is one’s birthplace, ratified by memory.”

Any of you out there remember the delivery room? I don’t. And even if I did, I doubt it would look very nice even with a Christmas tree in the corner.

“Home is the safe place we can go as we are and not be questioned.”

That, to me, sounds like a mental institution.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in."

See above. And consider the term “homeless shelter” while you’re at it.

“Home is any four walls that enclose the right person.”

The dentist’s office? An interrogation room at the Mexican border? The bathroom at Denny’s?

“Where we love is home – home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.”

Hearken back a few quotes: without my heart, my feet are pretty much soup stock material.

“The home should be the treasure chest of living.”

Yeah; "funeral home".

Here:

“Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.”

- Ralph Waldo Emerson.

A letter to the family: Costa Rica, July 2008.

2009-07-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

The Journey: Day 1

American Airlines screwed up my flight, and I ended up spending the night at the Airport Sheraton in Toronto (on the cheap as a “distressed passenger”; not the first time I’ve been labeled as such) flying out to Costa Rica the next morning via Chicago, and then Dallas (the original flight was to have been direct to Houston, and then San Jose). Not much to say about the evening’s experience, except that watching the prostitutes work the bar at the hotel was both interesting and depressing. Don’t order the quesadilla, by the way. It’s not that the cheese is bad, but more that the guacamole is, well, “weak”. After contacting my friend Roberto in CR (who owns the Villas in Playa Samara I was to have arrived at that evening) to tell him of the delay, I retired to the oversized bed and fell asleep with The Weather Channel still on.

The Journey: Day 2

Texas is a really creepy place. The Dallas “Daily Morning News” was a smorgasbord of right-wing analyses of Barack Obama, a protracted piece on an expired Baptist preacher, and two separate stories of infants who died (from the heat) in SUVs when their mothers forgot they were there. Another lengthy article talked about the fact that George Bush, in an act not seen since Eisenhower in 1963, sanctioned the execution of an American soldier (convicted of four murders and eight rapes in the 1980’s). Apparently, you can’t execute a soldier without the expressed and signed approval of the President.

Ads for luxury homes, dental surgery, and weight loss clinics (as well as extensive articles about the Dallas Cowboys) abounded, accompanied by three full pages of obituaries, extolling the virtues of long-dead relatives and recently deceased enlisted sons.

A blistering, stifling 103F, and hardpan taupe countryside, speckled with bright green golf courses and huge tracts of cookie-cutter homes with azure swimming pools kind of rounded out the experience.

Not so much Chicago, which was my first stop, where cold Sam Adams lager and limp Caesar salad punctuated a two-hour layover. (Didn’t see the skyline either on the approach, or the departure; sad). I did find myself all verklempt as I walked past the towering windows of terminal K, remembering the picture of me as a small boy looking through my own legs back at the camera in exactly the same spot, more than 40 years ago.

That unmistakable Midwestern twang was omnipresent, as were the comments of “darlin’” and “hon” from the wait staff at the crummy airport restaurant (Wolfgang Puck needs to be taken out behind the shed and shot) sitting amongst the travelling salespeople, the road-weary families, and some other weirdos like me.

Then, almost suddenly, after a 4-hour, eventless (unless you consider two repeated showings of “Horton Hears a Who” on the ancient VTR above my seat an “event”) flight over the rest of god-forsaken Texas, the shining Gulf of Mexico, dark Guatemala, lake Nicaragua, and Costa Rica’s spine – the impressive Cordillera Central mountain range - our 757 touched down at Juan Santa Maria airport, amidst the startling brilliance of sodium vapor lights crouched between the volcanic mountains of the Central Valley.

After an hour of friendly and just-for-show customs lines, I found myself among the insistent cab drivers in front of the airport, having the first decent cigarette of the past 36 hours. (Smokers are social pariahs; I know that Western society has recently deemed, among other things – including driving cars, eating animals, and not keeping your teeth clean -smoking as taboo, but for God’s - Allah’s ; Buddahs’, Christ’s; whatever’s - sake; let some of us indulge in life’s small pleasures after particularly trying ordeals).

Then, as serendipity jumped out from behind a large bougainvillea bush, I met Estoban Salazar. He, among the many, asked me where I was headed. I said to Samara, but I needed to get to Hotel Il Millennium this evening.
“Oh, si; Samara is beautiful. I have a friend there. Maybe you know him? Roberto Carrere. He is the owner of Villas Kalimba.”

I sat back in the front seat of Estoban’s van, the windows wide open, a third blessed smoke burning slowly in my hand (and “Mandolin Rain” playing on the radio; not sure how to categorize that on an ethereal level, but it’s a good tune) and, for the first time in two days – maybe in two months, maybe in two years – breathed a serious sigh of relief. The careening motorcycles and overloaded trucks were more laughable than scary. Ladies with shopping bags picked their way along the side of the road between the broken asphalt and cavernous concrete runoff ditches. Open air bars and cheap hotels line the streets, and hunker in dark, narrow, lush alleyways, their cast iron security gates not yet bolted, full of the smells of roast chicken, fried fish, and exhaust fumes. Crooked neon signs announce small grocerias, which look more like gutted RVs than stores. And everywhere there is the musical sound of Spanish. And always laughter.

I am tired, but this is magical. I am met by Enrico (who, after seeing my guitar, expressed his longing to learn the piano) at Hotel Il Millennium. My $30 room is bright, loud, and smells of green (and no, not mould; the fresh kind). The shower was an epiphany. I’m watching a soccer match, and plugging my ears whenever a jet roars overhead (the airstrip is, like, meters away). If I want, I can wander out into the back and sit on a bench under a banana tree, or gingerly negotiate the sidewalk-less, craggy and damp roadside to find something to eat. Maybe some empanadas and a handful of fresh lychee.

Say what you want about my addictions to everything from substances to good conversation, my silly romantic nature, and my penchant for self-delusion, but I can’t shake the true reality of the calm that this place brings me.
La Pura Vida indeed.

And now, I sleep. Just need to see if Juventas can hold on to their 1-goal lead over AC Milan. It ain’t the Bluejays, but hell, when in Rome, eh?

The Journey: Day 3

Breakfast is coffee (of course; it’s Cost Rica) papaya, pineapple and a touch of dolce de leche on toast, as the sun rises (everyone here gets up around 5:30am). Estoban arrives to take me to the airport, and I stroll into the sheet metal hangar that serves as the waiting area for Sansa Air’s daily single-prop flights to other areas of the country. After an hour sitting on my backpack in the shade (strumming my guitar like some kind of 60’s reject; at least no one complained, or tried give me food or spare change) I approached the check-in desk (well, table, really) and was told that the gravel driveway in Carillo that serves as the airstrip is too wet to land on. They happily refund my money, and tell me to check back tomorrow.
This was not part of the plan. Not that the plan wasn’t sketchy to begin with, but the whole delayed and cancelled and/or unavailable transportation issues were starting to devalue my rail-running, go where the wind sends you style.
So, I called Estoban (he’d given me his card). “Como esta amigo? Yeah? Don’t move. I’ll be right there.”

So, Estoban drove me to Samara for the same price as the flight. Four hours through the central valley, up over the main mountains, across the Guanacaste bridge to the Nicoya Peninsula, and down to the plains and then over the coastal mountains, and finally to Playa Samara. We talked a bit, but mostly we smoked and listened to Estoban’s large collection of Mexican pop music at high volume, banging our hands on the roof of the van as we blind-passed trucks and tourists on the narrow, winding road. Trestle bridges over rushing waters, stands of teak 100 feet high, sugar cane, coffee, bananas, chickens, dogs, kids, and everywhere it is so incredibly dense and green.

And then the Pacific, and the 5km crescent of grey volcanic sand that is Samara.

The Journey: Days 3-5

I always have a difficult time explaining to people of the gut-enhancing joy that this part of the world offers me. Perhaps – maybe – it is simply some kind of escapism; a need for something new and different (a kind of hallmark of my life, actually) but then again, I may just need to disassociate for some reason (kinda the same thing when you think about it). At the end of the day, though (man, how I hate that phrase) this place makes me, well, all happy inside. Like Christmas morning, or a late-night movie that you know and love. But with large bugs.

What happens is this: You wake up at 5:30am, as the howler monkeys begin to bitch at the sun and the cicadas begin their long cries for relationships. You wander down to the beach around 6 (after eating some pineapple and drinking a coffee) as the tide is turning back towards the shore. The water is between 26-28C all the time, but you can always tell when the tide turns, because there are noticeable chiller bits in the incoming water.

Depending on the offshore weather, the surf is either huge, or massive. As the beach is shallow, when the tide comes in, the Pacific turns its power to shore, and mounts 15-foot breakers to the very edge of the beach. You can ride them (as many do) but I prefer to wait until they crest and break, and then dive under them, letting the tons of water rush by in a matter of seconds, popping back up on the other side unharmed to wait for the next onslaught. Particularly when the tide is turning in I like to play a game called “come and get me” where I try to see if the ocean can psyche me out and catch me unawares. This usually ends up, at least a few times per visit, in an ass-over teakettle joyride with a spluttering, salt water-up-the-nose, sand-in-the shorts conclusion and me muttering “okay, you got me with that one”.
Roberto has become a fairly decent chef, and cooked dinner three times while I visited (I made him some gorgonzola-stuffed penne with fresh tomato sauce one night, and a beef and fontina braccioli with red cabbage for lunch one day, and a salad to accompany dinner made of mango, chiote, ginger, carrot and red onion ). Oysters grilled with lime and breadcrumbs, marinated artichoke bruschetta, shrimp linguini, barbequed lobster tails with garlic butter, and always breakfasts of blended fruit, pastries, bacon, and scrambled eggs. His apple seed grappa is still poisonous though. Don’t tell him I said that.

I did walk down one night to one of my favorite restaurants in the whole world: el Legarto. It’s at the end of the beach, and its centerpiece is a palm wood fired barbeque the size of a small car. If you order the “Plato Mixto” you get a huge platter of chicken, strip loin, pork tenderloin, potato, and tomato, all blissfully seared over the open flames, all washed down with cold Imperial lager. Heaven for about ten bucks, and all in bare feet, watching the sun sink fast into the rolling Pacific.

The Journey: Day 6

The (one; guarded by a dude with a rather impressive shotgun)bank machine in Samara didn’t much like my Scotiabank card (odd, since Scotiabank has a pretty large Caribbean and Central American presence) and since Jen never allowed me to have a Visa or Mastercard (the best I could manage before I left, given my sad credit, was an American Express Card, which simply doesn’t carry any weight in Central America) I was forced to board a bus to Nicoya, about 35 miles Northeast (to put that into perspective, we’re talking about an hour and a half trip on a good day) to find an ATM that would dispense me the cash to check out and get me back to Canada (As I said before; I hadn’t figured the “home” part of the journey out yet – I just knew I’ll be in Miami by 4pm on the 5th , and Toronto by 11, crossing my fingers that the customs people will be, once again, sympathetic to my repeated attempts to obtain my Canadian PR card).

Honestly, today, I am at the point of buying a blanket and living in a ditch.

Anyway, after catching the 11:15 (natch; it showed up around 11:45) to Nicoya (anyone who has travelled by public transit in Central America will feel for me here; pretty hair-raising stuff) I managed to find the Banco de Costa Rica (I’m at a roadside bus stop as I write) and withdraw 200,000 Colones (about $400 US) before the thing crapped out on me. That’ll cover smokes, dinner tonight, my room in San Jose on the 4th, some minor cab fare to and from places and an honor-deposit to Roberto at Villas Kalimba, so I can bail tomorrow and promise him an Internet transfer of funds once I am in a more connected location.

Interesting place, Nicoya. It has none of the classic tourist chic; methinks it may be one of the only functioning towns in Guanacaste that doesn’t rely totally on U.S. dollars from tourism for existence. And as I sit under a sheet-metal overhang waiting for the bus, watching the afternoon thunderstorms roll in, I begin, again, to fall in love with this lazy, beautiful place.

And now, I need to go speak some broken Spanish to someone who knows when the bus is going to get here. Hell, maybe I’ll just flag down a cab. They’re almost New York-style omnipresent, if a little less, uh, reliable? New? Functioning in a proper manner? Air conditioned? Take your pick. One thing though, I’d take any of the cabbies in CR and put ‘em up against the toughest and most hardened of their New York counterparts.

Probably cost me five bucks, and I won’t have to sit next to any livestock.

The Journey: Day 7

Up and out by 8:30, madly shoving my sandy, damp and smelly clothes into the backpack and hiking them to the bus shelter (I managed a shower and a shave, for all the good it would do me) to wait for the bus to San Jose (Sansa, once again, failed to land at Carillo due to several intense downpours and spectacular oversea lightening the two evenings before) I sat in the mud with a couple from Denver, who used to live in CR during the seventies. Then the bus clattered and smoked its way to the side of the road.

Side Notes:

#1:

When you travel alone, you tend to find yourself talking to complete strangers. If you know how to listen, and what questions to ask, people will encapsulate their entire lives into an hour’s worth of wine and dinner, a three-hour flight, or even a fifteen-minute wait in a line. Especially when the social constrictions of familiarity are so completely removed. I have always enjoyed anonymity. It’s awfully liberating.

#2

Everybody should take a bus in Central America at least once. It reduces everyone to the basics of survival, has more thrills than a Coney Island ride, and is unpredictable as hell. At one point, just outside of Puntaneras, there was construction (a loose term in CR; it really means five guys in orange vests with shovels who don’t seem to really have much of a purpose) on a rickety (natch) bridge over a rather vast gully full of slow-moving, brown water and what looked like a high-school reunion of crocodiles. The entire passenger list disembarked the bus, baggage and all, to walk with the driver (well, that’s what it looked like, anyway; I just followed people and prayed) across precarious planks that took the temporary place of the bridge’s road bed. Once across (maybe 200 meters in total) we all got on another bus (similar in age and disrepair) and were off again, bumping down the pothole-ridden, 15 foot-wide goat path they call highway 4, leaving the orange-vested construction people to do whatever it was they were doing (piles of dirt and an aging tractor is all I remember; kinda blocked some of it out).

The Journey: Day 8

(Forgot a bit from yesterday; the bus from Samara, which, after 5 and a half hours, finally coughed to a stop at the depot, left me once again with little knowledge of where the hell I was. Bus depots in cities are always in the wrong part of town, however, so I flagged a taxi and managed to gesticulate my way back to the Hotel, with the help – again – of Estoban, who I called as an emergency translator from the cabbie’s cell phone).

I took a walk this morning down the strip outside Il Millennium, after a coffee, some toast and a guava yogurt. It had rained from the time I arrived and continued through the night as a steady but comforting roar, and the whole world was damp. You know when you go to a big greenhouse in February? That’s what it smells like – all loamy and green, but here is mixed with wet concrete, truck exhaust, sweat and flowers.

Estoban was, yet again, going to share his van, his Mexican pop tunes, his sunny attitude, and my money on the way to the San Jose airport.

In Costa Rica, you have to get to the airport at least three hours in advance. This is due to a few things, including stacked flights all at once, a tropical malaise when it comes to paperwork, and the fact that they close the place, without notice, regularly. Might be a union thing, but I doubt it. I think people just decide to go home.

Miami is hot, sticky, and crowded (with the exception of ice-cold bars full of nachos and Budweiser) and absolutely rife with wide-eyed, aimless travelers. The flight directly over the Florida Keys up highway 95 (right over the Sunshine Skyway to Key West) and then across the swamplands was incredibly entertaining though.
Not so enjoyable was the gaggle of pimply, hormone-soaked and same t-shirt clad teens on some kind of religious trek, who surrounded my relatively comfortable window seat at the back of an A300. Ah well. Oh, and if I have to watch CBS’s snippet-filled, corporate-lackeyed, smarmy, utterly retarded and grossly patriotic programming on American Airlines just one more time, I swear I’ll have to use the air sickness bag. Thank God for my laptop, and two saved back issues of the New Yorker.

The flight to Toronto was also marred by yet another crowd of adolescents, this time a uniformed group of Columbian soccer players, who – and I don’t know how this is possible – giggled and yelled at each other, throwing snack-o wrappers and standing in the aisles for the entire three-hour flight. I watched “Kung Fu Panda” on high volume as it was the lesser of two rather monumental evils. The saving grace was a series of wide and varied banks the 737 pulled, flying up through southern New York at 30,000 feet, to avoid towering thunderstorms, which lit up like disco balls as we sailed between, over, and through them.

So here I sit (after another easy talk-through at customs) in the Econo-Lodge on Airport Road in Toronto (called them randomly from a list of relatively cheap places) at almost two in the morning, smelling like bad American beer, stale Cheet-os and nylon seat covers, looking like a gaunt but well-tanned version of Grizzly Adams, picking gum off the shoulder of my shirt (don’t know where I picked that up today; just noticed it on approach to Pearson Airport) and writing the last few stanzas of this lengthy and completely self-indulgent travelogue.
There may be more, as I still have to figure out what tomorrow is going to bring. As I said, I’m heading to the Maritimes to burden some of you with my messy existence for a bit, get some work done to fill the bank account back up, and consider the next move.

But I can tell you about that in person. I make a mean gorgonzola-stuffed penne, so it seems. Trade you for a bed and some conversation?

Postlude:

Oh, and I think I have a Bot Fly larvae in my butt. One of you is going to have to look, because my shoulders hurt from carrying around the backpack and I can’t contort myself in the mirror properly to check it out.

Kit: August 6th, 2008

Music Review: Vernon Reid at Lula Lounge

2009-07-11T17:23:00.000-07:00

Vernon Reid with “ My Id” at Lula Lounge, Dundas Street West, Toronto, Canada, December 4, 2008.

I‘m here early. Like, _really_ early. I thought the show would sell out, so I made the effort to avoid lines. Apparently, though, Thursday night is all about downtown Toronto, not the upper West End.

...wait: 8:30 and the place seems to be filling out a bit. There’s a table full of cell-phone-holstered coolios next to me drinking Heiniken and exchanging hormone-soaked war stories. This is usually a good sign when hanging out at “Hooters” but is not promotional when you’re waiting for a theortetically intelligent concert to start. They occasionally mention bass players, though (I’m not a complete voyeur, by the way, but I do catch the odd bit here and there) so maybe they know something about tonight that I don’t.

Food:

Okay: I’ hungry and haven’t had dinner, so I peruse the menu.

Here’s a quote:

“Basil Drizzled Polenta Cakes Topped with Brebis sheep’s cheese and an avocado, roma tomato salsa. Served with steamed asparagus, black bean sauce and green rice pilaf with sweet peppers, golden raisins, pineapple and honey.”

I’m sorry, but wtf? This kind of pretentious jargon is always a sign that the marketing guys are much more talented than the chef. I mean, really, what the hell is “Brebis sheep’s cheese”? (well, just looked it up, and it’s a blue cheese from the Basque area of France, but I think you get my point). Dude goes to the Loblaw’s and buys eleven pounds of no-name blue cheese, and let’s the words on the menu dictate the price.

And raisins are raisins. “Golden” is complete marketing BS.

Here’s another good one from the same menu (I stole it as a souvenier; going to hell, I know):

“Corn-Crusted Fillet of Atlantic Salmon on basil chimichurri scented quinoa with a sweet pepper, tomatillo, button mushroom, lemongrass and ginger salsa. Served with Peruvian boniato chips and a black bean sauce.”

(Hey Phil! Toss me over some of those nachos and a ladle of the bean sauce; I’m gonna slop it on this salmon steak. You got any of that rice left over there?)

So against my better judgement (told you I was hungry; but I didn’t want to lose my front-row table as a result of running across the street to the Jamaican place for a roti) I ordered the daily “soup du jour” which was advertised as “Spicy smoked salmon chowder with Yukon gold potatoes, sweet roasted peppers & onions with a splash of tequila.”

...they failed to mention the lips and arsehole Wal-Mart soup stock and the heavy use of cornstarch. Oh, and the completely unidentifiable brownish, salty crunchy burned bits sprinkled lovingly over the bowl. Then they dropped a plate next to it containing two limp slices of whole wheat baguette slathered with something that tasted somewhere between bottled Tostito’s salsa and ketchup. Dissapointing, to say the least, but as I said, I was hungry, and my hat is off to the writers.

Anyway, Mr. Prima Donna sucked up the 10 bucks, and is now going to enjoy his glass of Gamay Noir (an uncharacteristically acceptable Niagara product, btw; wonderful leathery notes and a thick tannin finish) and wait for the band to start.

Music:

A hefty, pasty guy in a green plaid overcoat walks out to the stage and sits at the keyboard (two, actually, the main being a cute little 55-key Korg X3). I’m thinking “roadie”. After an hour-long set, though, he turned out to be a kind of Peterson/Shearing-esque prodigy, who lost himself regularly in blistering, tasteful solo work and rock-solid support.

Jeez; I called that one; after I wrote the above, I looked up his bio:

Robi Botos
Born in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary in 1978, Robert moved to Toronto in 1998. Since that time, Botos has been featured with many of Canada’s foremost jazz artists including: Pat Labarbera (Elvin Jones), Dave Young (Oscar Peterson), Don Thompson (George Shearing), Terry Clark (Jim Hall), Norman Marshall Villeneuve (Duke Ellington), Archie Alleyne (Billie Holiday) and Bob Mover (Chet Baker). He released a self titled album, “The Botos Brothers”, with brothers Frank (drums) and Louis (bass, vocal), with all original compositions. As a sideman, he can be found on numerous CDs with Toronto jazz musicians. In July 2004, he won First prize and the Public prize at the international Montreux Jazz Festival jazz solo piano competition, sponsored by TIME magazine. Robi also won the National jazz award for jazz piano earlier this year. He will also be performing in many parts of Europe in the near future.

Anyway.

The billed star, Vernon Reid, is absent for most of the show, and only wandered out for solo shots to publicly masturbate in that “see how fast I can play?” guitar-hero style. Staring complacently at his music stand, he painted the classic picture of a disenfranchised and personally lost rock star, subject to past memories of fame, delusions of potential, and the stark reality of Thursday nights playing small clubs in a country he probably can’t find on a map.

Don’t get me wrong; he’s technically impressive, but the way I see things, you’ve got to know what notes to play, and why they need to be played. Relax; you’ve got the chops. Think about it for a minute, and remember why you do it.

I’ve played music on a Thursday night. It’s hard. You have to dig for the joy that simply playing gives you, because it’s unlikely that you will find the electricity that a Friday or Saturday night, or a Big Ticket Venue provides. Unless you provide the electricity yourself. Great musicians do that. Sorry, Vernon.

All the tunes are original. This, I totally appreciate. Most of them are written by Aubrey Dayle, the accomplished percussionist (and recognized “leader” of “My Id”) and the last few are Vernon Reid’s throes at jazz/funk fusion. Esoteric for the most part, but without the standard weirdo time signatures and mixolidian BS you generally get from frustrated musicians. Great funk and reggae back beats occasionally, and some truly interesting melody lines.

And there were occasional smiles between the musicians - particulalry between the bass and keyboard - that helped you to understand why these people have chosen to do this for a living. I found myself totally focused on finding these moments, and keen to use my recently-discovered wolf-whistling abilities to show appreciation.

Gratuitous (yet technically impressive) solos from everyone in the band (save the saxophone player, who was awesome, and looked like the kind of guy it would be great to go fishing with) showed, once again, that it was a go-through-the-motions night for this group of extremely talented musicians.

Save one. I’m biased, I know, but shit; Rich Brown ranks among the top four bass players I have ever seen live. A six-string (usually relegated to the ranks of pretentious wannabee’s) Samick turned into a complete extension of this man; Victor Wooten, Jaco Pastorious; Bootsy Collins, James Jamerson; all of them channeled somehow, and all with the smile of someone who doesn’t really care if anyone is listening. He’s a Torontonian. I’m going to go watch him play whenever I can.

k

Travel Food (An older piece for a first post)

2009-07-11T16:17:00.000-07:00

It takes a couple of minutes. Realization (and subsequent comprehension) of self and space, that is. It always does, no matter where you are, or in what situation you find yourself (I swear, I could be on day 143 of capture by Mongolian extremist militant Scientologists and I’d still get this) to remember where you are upon waking up from at least an hour’s worth of reasonable sleep.

This paticular time, I emerged from beneath the cucoon of a leather jacket thrown over my head to find myself looking out the window of a locomotive as it traversed a bridge spanning the Quebec and New Brunswick border, just as dawn broke in early October. Black, fast-moving water; wisps of cold and impenetrable mist; stark contrasts of dawn brightness against the serrated edge of pine-lined mountains, and a familiar tinge of orange kissing the edges of tree-lined streets in a photojournalist’s wet dream.

My train car is full of people waking up. Stiff, dreary, but full of anticipation, they come to life grumpy, and begin looking eagerly for food. I, on the other hand, am preoccupied with the fact that my seat is strangely still comfortable, even after a full-day’s worth of shifting and scrunching. Note to self: write VIA Canada to complement them on their upholstery.

If you like this kind of thing, crossing the steel-blue Miramichi river on a trestle bridge, as the late autumn sun cuts knife-edge ridges into lemon and strawberry leaves, is just your kind of gig. Still ponds of ferrous-tinted water; complete with abandoned beaver lodges and stalwart, silver-grey sentinels formed of dead deciduous trees spin past my window, reminding me of where in the world I am.

I think that I am born to travel. Not in the sense that I like being in new places, but more that I enjoy the process. Every time that I step on to a plane, a bus, a train - even into a taxi in some far-flung backwater, I sense - love - the smell of travel. As someone who is generally going nowhere, I am keenly aware of the people around me who are going _somewhere_; to family, to home, to new and exciting adventures; to attend a wedding, a funeral, a birthday party, a reunion...

But this particular piece of writing is about food, not personal issues.

So.

I don’t cook for myself alone. That is, when I am at home by myself, I revert to take-out pizza and peanut butter sandwiches (toasted English muffins, slabs of cold butter and my mother’s raspberry jam are also a mainstay) for sustinance. Carrot sticks, crisp apples with a wedge of old cheddar, and the occasional glass of whole milk or cranberry juice fill out the daily menu. I am also partial to egg noodles boiled in cheap-o chicken bullion. If I’m particularly worried about my health, I’ll add a few frozen peas. Sometimes a little diced carrot.

Don’t get me wrong; I do try and get the four food groups in, but Nutella, ju-jubes, Doritos and breakfast cereal don’t seem to show up anywhere in the Food Guide. To be honest, I have to force myself to eat alone, for the most part.

Give me an excuse to cook for someone, though, and I’ll pull out all the stops. A crystal bowl full of grill-roasted aubergine hummus, spiked with paprika toasted pita spears. An ice-lined tray of Malpeque Oysters kissed with lime leads into cognac and rosemary baked capon. Then a baking dish filled with thin slices of Yukon Gold potato, scallions, minced shallots, fresh thyme, grated 12-year -old gouda and a heart-stopping dose of Chardonnay and heavy cream. Chiffonade a little Italian parsley, and sprinkle. Crisp fennel, red onion and maroc salad with toasted black sesame seeds and a cider vinegrette follows.

Then, a thin slice of brandy-soaked cheescake with a white chocolate crust and a drizzle of apricot coulis accompanies a thick, heady ounce of espresso in a tiny pewter cup. The finish is a dram of Niagara Valley Vidal icewine, chilled in the freezer for a good hour, and eboulient with tropical aromas as foreign to Canada as a machete. You have to wait a few minutes; swirl it around and let the room’s oxygen do it’s magic; but patience is not only a virtue, it has myriad rewards.

You will never find a more direct way to a woman’s heart.

Food on the road presents a unique challenge, mainly because eating alone in a restaurant is so desperately sad. If you get a few glasses of wine in you though, it is possible to fantasize a celebrity existence, and coo over the steak tartare whilst at the same time turning your nose up at the limp, acidic spinach salad. A fuzzy debit card transaction later, and you have a costly but hopefuly decent story to relate, and enough minerals in your bloodstream to make it through another day without passing out.

Mostly though, sitting on a red vinyl-covered stool at a stained Arborite counter, your boots dripping brown slush and your coat still on against the draft from the door out to the gas pumps, a hot chicken sandwich with a side of gravy-smothered fries and a pile of boiled grey-green canned peas will do the trick, and at least keep your stool solid. And more often that not, a just-shy-of-crazy trucker will regaile you with stories of past loves, wretched weather, tax burdens and brushes with the law. Food is about who you share it with, after all.

On a similar sojourn east to New Brunswick, this time in a car in late December, I pulled into a diner between La Haute-Cote_Nord and Riviere-du-Loup, somewhere along the desolate stretch of highway 20 that streaks you through the province of Quebec, hugging the edge of the icy, windblown south coast of the St. Lawrence River valley, looking for breakfast. This is a place where snowmobiles are more common at gas stations than cars, and losing lottery tickets, empty Tim Horton’s cups and spent diapers make up the bulk of the Wednesday morning garbage pick-up.

“Auberge du Riviere” seemed a hostel of local cuisine; perhaps a vignette of road-kill fricassee. The coffee, served up gently in styrofoam, was weak and cold. Two eggs, over-hard, limp streaky bacon, and rubbery white toast slathered in oleo was, however, a revelation. This is _real_ food. Some Acadian dude is slaving away over a griddle, just trying to make it to five o’clock, when he can hit the depanneur for a twelve-pack of beer and go home to watch the hockey game. End of day, the staff will take stock of what’s left in the freezer, sniff the aging milk cartons, count the float, shoo the last of the sad old men out into the dark, snowy night, and lock up.

I’ve had road food in a bunch of places. In Barbados, it’s a flying fish sandwich; usually a department store white bread bun with a whole, split and deep-fried flying fish slapped inside and slathered with expired mayonnaise, sold from a makeshift stand along with a mickey of Bajan rum a half mile from the entrance to the Hilton Resort for about 2 bucks. Filling, comforting, and excruciatingly fresh, but after two or three days of consistent ingestion, you develop a kind of gag reflex. Might be the rum chaser.

In the Canadian east (that is, the largely forgotten and misunderstood Maritime provinces) one finds a culinary host of artery-clogging sundries along the pothole-ridden roads. "Poutine" is a classic Quebequois immigrant, and is usually “crinckle cut” french fries with production-based gravy and tasteless processed cheese curds. If you put pepper (pre-ground, stale, and shaken out of a sketchy rice-filled diner-style vessel) on it, it actually transforms into a kind of time capsule; one that recalls cherished moments of TV dinners and limp, oil-soaked popcorn eaten at the local Cinema out of a flat-top box during “Raiders of the Lost Ark”.

The "Halifax Donair" is another semi-edible denizen of the east. This item is the brainchild of Greek and Lebanese immigrants to the area, and has the same kind of culinary cultural awareness that "Chicken Balls" do for immigrant Szechuan entrepreneurs. A cylindrical "loaf" of meat product about the size and shape of an elongated beer keg turns slowly on an upright spit in front of orange glowing heating elements. Donairs are created by shaving slices of semi-charred, dry meat product onto a pita bread, and covering them with diced tomato, onion, and "donair sauce" which looks like semen, and has a sweet and tangy edge to it. Be prepared to launder your shirt after attempting to wrestle with one of these.

Texas is another institute of road food. Outside of Dallas, you can, for about three bucks, get a behemoth of barbeque; a paper plate weighed down with pulled pork, sauced with smoke-fired chipoltle. No lettuce or carrot sticks to be found here.; just meat, lovingly slow-cooked. I hate Texas, and everything it stands for, but give me a feed of El Paso - grilled meat and I can almost see myself as a citizen.

And I can’t help but be totally confused by the lack of couiture in Central America. I mean really; these people live in a veggie cornucopia, and a land with _two_ tropical coasts teeming with edible delictibles. What do you get as road food there? Panama, Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Nicaragua; it’s all about “Cassado”. This is basically beans (soaked and boiled to within an inch of their lives) and rice (same grain; different cooks) alongside limp lettuce and half-green tomato slices , accompanied by (always stunningly fresh; I’ll give ‘em that) fried fish.

Here’s my menu for a roadside pull-over in Belize:

Pescado frito served with a slice of lemon and a fork, and a big 'ol mango.

(more food observations to come)

k