Adonis and Cuban Art in Toronto

I was hoping to find a snippet of "The Death of New York" by the Syrian poet Adonis, unfortunately no one's put that epic online. In the poem there's a line about bridging the distance between Wall Street and Whitman, and then the more prophetic lines, written back in the 70s that in today's secure homeland seem like an all too foreshadowing warning. The ROM (Royal Ontario Museum, here in Toronto, had a featured exhibit by the Cuban artist, Carlos Garaicoa, who is exploring the "lived in ruin" or "inhabited ruin" that is modern day Havana. Following the 1959 revolution Havana had an exhibition of sorts, to display its beauty and architectural ingenuity in the hybrid of Spanish colonial architecture and island influenced urbana. This is no longer the case, not in the least... As we walked through the exhibit I couldn't help but think of the blight in Brooklyn, the abandoned spaces, buildings, boarded tenements and graffiti scarring the city. Perhaps, at the moment, Toronto is too clean for me. I want something in the middle, some sense of broken and something clean mixing into a place that feels like a well lived in sofa. I'm not at all moved by the architecture here, the city is more plasma screen than interesting brick. Things may be different outside of downtown, but here all the bars and clubs are exclusive and you wait outside as if it was Studio 54 or the Limelight for permission to be among the beautiful. I don't like it at all to be quite honest. I prefer a good saw dust on the floor kind of joint.












Death

We die unless we create the gods.
We die unless we murder the gods.
0, kingdom of the bewildered rock.

-Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)


And now... to call Stacey Mae of Russia fame... read the blog posts from June if you missed the travels of Waldo in St. Petersburg... ah yes... Stacey...