the brilliance of "Peter Grimes"

A thrilling evening last night in this fair city, a night when the promised rain held off and the downtown streets were so full of people enjoying Nuit Blanche festivities that it was hard to move.

But first - the opera. I've mentioned before my great luck to have a student in the chorus, who sometimes is offered cheap seats to fill up the theatre and sends the info on. So for $25 each, Annie, Jim and I sat in orchestra seats last night for the opening of Benjamin Britten's "Peter Grimes." One of the reasons for the cheap seats, perhaps, was that famed Canadian tenor Ben Heppner had pulled out due to vocal troubles. We were sorry not to see him, but the replacement, Anthony Dean Griffey, had had rave reviews in the same role, so we knew it'd be good.

I had no idea just how good. It's moving, haunting, a fantastic production of an opera that must have been revolutionary when it opened in 1945, still startling and vivid today. Often modern music seems random and gratuitously ugly to me, but last night, a whole new part of my brain opened up to the beauty of this atonal but stunning score. It's like a dour Thomas Hardy novel on stage, Grimes a scorned outsider and doomed loner, perhaps a reflection of Britten's feelings as a homosexual and pacifist in war-weary, narrow-minded England. Britten and his life-long partner the tenor Peter Pears, the first Peter Grimes, managed to escape prosecution for being gay, but their compatriot, the computer genius Alan Turing, did not. What a benighted time.

Everything about this production was exquisite - the singing and acting, the set and lighting. When I read about the opera, I couldn't imagine how it could work, the tiny story of a troubled misfit fisherman in a remote village, in a grand opera. Well, it does, and how. I felt blessed to have been in the presence of such genius - as if I'd grown a bit bigger. That's what great art does.

And then, out into the surge of crazy artistic life that is Nuit Blanche. Last night I wondered if it can last without violence - hundreds of thousands of young kids on the streets, pumped up, looking for action. It was just too crowded for us, so after managing to thread our way to Nathan Phillips Square and its various offerings - besides the Weiwei bicycles, there were two driverless cars weaving in balletic fashion, and a giant neon poem - we walked back here, seeing various installations on the way.

Annie and Jim raised their kids in Scarborough, but are thinking of selling the big family home and perhaps moving downtown. "Just feel the excitement and energy," I said, "it's like this all the time."
"Yes," said Annie. "That's the problem."

a limited Nuit Blanche

Approaching Weiwei's sculpture of Forever bicycles, welded into patterns - pushing through Nathan Phillips Square jam-packed with thousands of revellers

So delicate and beautiful, yet massive, set against City Hall. I ran into a neighbour who said, "It's just a pile of bicycles." And remembered how sour his view of life is, and smiled and moved on. Well yes it is just a pile of bicycles, and Van Gogh's "Sunflowers" is just some yellow paint on canvas.

 You could walk through and spin the wheels.

On the way home, we encountered this outside an apartment building on Dundas - a kind of illuminated Rubik's cube that people were moving around.

hilarious improv skit

This is very clever. I worked with Colin Mochrie in the late 70's, when he was a sweet young theatre student in Vancouver. We had no idea he was a brilliant improviser who would become famous.

OMG This is So Funny.. Dont Miss It..

OMG This is So Funny.. Dont Miss It..

Length: 3:21

And this is fascinating. Take the test at the end. I got 86.1%, even though I read mostly non-fiction. So much for their fiction-centric research.  

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/03/i-know-how-youre-feeling-i-read-chekhov/?smid=fb-share

Ai Weiwei, artist and hero

Those who follow this blog are used to me exhorting you to see or do something. Well - if you live in or near Toronto, PLEASE DO NOT MISS THE AI WEIWEI EXHIBITION AT THE AGO, which ends Oct. 27. Friend Ken, who's a member, took Anna and me as his guests yesterday, and as we left, I resolved to go back. It's impossible to show in photos the impact of his work. (I asked AGO staff if we could take pictures. "Oh yes," she replied. "He wants you to.")

Weiwei is a brilliant artist, making fascinating and beautiful objects and installations, but he's also profoundly compassionate and connected to the world, and his art is social commentary, which has required enormous courage to produce in a totalitarian country. We don't see that often enough, art that is both beautiful and socially engaged. A deeply moving and inspiring exhibition.

We went from there to the exhaustive David Bowie exhibit, which suffers in comparison. There's no doubt that the feline, bisexual Bowie with his endless array of costumes and personae has made the world a more interesting place. But Weiwei has made the world a better place.

 Old stools, transformed.

 Historic ancient pots, transformed.

 One of my favourites - a sculptural circle of Chinese-made Forever bicycles.

My daughter took one look and burst into tears. Weiwei and his team documented the more than 5000 children killed in an earthquake due to the shoddy construction of their schools. The government refused to comment on the deaths, so Wei Wei tracked down every name and birthdate. It's like the Vietnam war memorial in Washington - overwhelming in its relentless bureaucratic simplicity. 

write me back, please

Good news, blog fans - a young geek called Nathan has fixed the comment box, so that you can easily write back. Would you like to try it out? I wish you would test it, as I can't - for some reason, there was never a problem for me to respond to my own posts. Good work, Beth, it was easy for me to say to myself. Not so easy for you. So go ahead. Or, of course, whatever you'd like.

Incredibly beautiful out there - 25 degrees. The cat and I, side by side, looking out at the fading garden, the hungry birds. I just want to be outside, drinking it in, because it won't last. Tonight, dinner with four of my oldest women friends. The other night, a wonderful documentary on TV, "Bill Cunningham New York," about the lively 80-something man who cycles around NYC taking pictures of style and fashion for the NYT. He scorns money for himself and is only interested in people with style, the more eccentric and interesting, the better. A profoundly joyful and even spiritual man. Oh I love documentary.

Oh I love bicycles. One of mankind's most brilliant inventions. Nothing better than sailing around the city in the sun.

What is happening in the U.S. right now is incomprehensible to a Canadian - the Republicans comparing Obama to Hitler. What is wrong with those people? Irresponsible, no, reprehensible idiots.