Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Toronto - second and third impressions

Having lived through an interminable election cycle and coming up on our 6 month anniversary (back) in the city, I thought it was time for a few comments on my impressions.

Real estate is shockingly expensive.  Probably slightly lower than Vancouver for what you actually get, but certainly many properties are overpriced.  And yet, we'll have to find something, if only to make sure we are anchored fairly close to the kids' schools.  I decided to pass on a property because it would be extremely difficult to carve out another foot or two of head space in the basement and am now having second thoughts, given how rarely anything turns up in our desired area.  I guess we've got several months left, but I have the sinking feeling that that was probably the best we are going to see.  And I really didn't want to change their schools.

Toronto is really cramped.  As I related here, the City Hall plaza is just too small and unsafe for the various functions that it hosts.  Eric Miller said it well when he said that Toronto functioned pretty well for a city of 1.5 million, but was floundering at 3 million.  The streetcars are very overwhelmed during rush hour, though they aren't too bad otherwise.  Just getting into and out of the subway is a chore with not enough space for people to get up and down stairs safely, and the transfer point at Yonge and Bloor is a complete mess (St. George is a bit better, which is where I generally transfer).  Transit politics are a nightmare, with quite a few projects cancelled by the Conservatives years ago and then the one thing City Hall finally agreed on was an expensive subway that served far fewer people than the proposed LRT (hmm, sounds sort of like Vancouver transit politics but in reverse).  I suppose there are stations on the Red Line in the far north reaches of Chicago that are even worse in terms of the platforms themselves being cramped and dangerous, though in the downtown stations, the staircases are wider.  However, it is true that Chicago is stuck with narrow, unique gauge trains (which are thus considerably more expensive to purchase) on its transit system.  Once you are on the trains, the Toronto system is better than Chicago's.

I remain convinced that the amalgamation was a huge mistake, in the sense that neither the urban nor suburban residents really get their preferred mix of taxes and services, though in general the suburbanites get to outvote the urban residents.  That's certainly not what most progressive proponents of amalgamation have in mind, and it is usually progressives who push for these types of arrangements, though occasionally business-types urge it in the name of efficiency in service delivery.

But Toronto has been living up to its reputation as an arts hub.  The theatre scene is so much better than Vancouver's it is hardly worth mentioning (same thing with AGO versus VAG).  While it is still somewhat behind Chicago, I do find myself in the familiar situation of opening the paper and seeing more theatre openings than I can possibly attend, many at quite reasonable prices.  What Toronto has that Chicago really doesn't have, is the Shaw and Stratford summer festivals, a bit out of town granted, but still a concentration of classical performances with some contemporary theatre sprinkled in that is just really hard to beat.  Last night I saw Sextet at Tarragon, pushed by some glowing reviews.  It was fun, though derivative of The Big Chill.  In a strange way, it gives me a bit more confidence to keep working on The Study Group, in the sense that a perfectly enjoyable piece of theatre can be constructed where the conflict is low-key.  I mean there has to be at least some conflict between characters to move things along -- if everyone wants the same goal and shares the same approach to obtaining it, how boring that would be.  It wouldn't even make for an interesting documentary.  The set up of the play is that this sextet on tour has managed to get trapped in a motel by an on-coming blizzard* and all kinds of secrets come out and many lies are unraveled.  It is just a bit heavy-handed in that the leader of the sextet decides to substitute Schoenberg's Verklarte Nacht for the Schubert Quintet, as the storyline (a married women pregnant with another man's child) hits so close to home to his own situation.  But having made this artistic choice, the playwright milks the jokes about Schoenberg and serialism.  Who knew this could be so funny?  Here's a non-ironic performance of Verklarte Nacht as originally composed for string sextet.  The play was well acted, and the characters had pretty distinctive voices, though as the expense of making a few of them almost cartoonishly dim or twee.  (I find it is very hard to have voices distinct from each other and still be normal personalities.)  It definitely makes me a bit more inclined to get a 3 play subscription to Tarragon for the rest of their season, so that's something I'll consider fairly soon.

For a totally different experience, next week I have (cheap) tickets to see Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf which is almost nothing but expressed conflict between characters. I haven't seen this in ages, and I guess I wouldn't say I am looking forward to it, but I am curious how well they do it. I am trying to make the rounds of the small companies in Toronto just to see what they are up to.  I doubt I have the time to get on a company board, but I might see about getting a bit more involved with a smaller company.  It would be nice to put some roots down in Toronto, though maybe I need to wait until I know where I am actually living first!

I don't have any real regrets about the move here, other than if I had actually been possible, I should have just stuck around in the mid 1990s and I probably could have bought a nice house (or at least a semi-) after I had straightened out my employment prospects.  Of course, the truth is that without going on to Northwestern, I wouldn't have had any decent employment prospects.  My life would have been just as irregular and insecure as the protagonist of my novel.

* Actually, I was caught on a school athletic trip in a blizzard and 10 or more school teams had to camp out in the school gym where we were supposed to compete.  Assuming I ever do wrap up the first novel, that anecdote would supposedly find its way into the sequel.  I guess it is just a nice white lie I tell myself, just like I will at some point get back in shape.  I am on a path that just doesn't offer up enough free time to do either.  That said, I am starting to at least consider doing more winter biking, but I need some special winter biking gear.

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