[NON BLOG] Mother's Day Outing

[rfmcdonald]

My mother and sister will be here in Toronto until Thursday, visiting and achieving various tasks of their own. We spent most of today wandering around downtown Toronto. visiting Kensington Market before heading east on Dundas. Three notes.

• Art Gallery of Ontario: One early sign of the progress of Transformation AGO--that is, the four years of massive renovations required for the implementation of Gehry's planned additions--is that the gallery gift shop is shrinking, down to half of its space and with fire-sale prices aimed to clear out most of the remainder. I was able to get Rodney Graham's CD Rock is Hard--I caught the tail end of his exhibition at the AGO last June with thehollow/eurobound and echomyst. In other news, there's an interesting exhibition of the Weston collection's of the works of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Oh, and entrance is free to the AGO for the month of May: International Museum Month, you see.


• H&M: While I'm pretty sure that I don't belong to the ranks of the beautiful people, no one stopped me from entering the location at 1 Dundas Street West. It's an uncommonly well-lit store, as much as The Gap but with a more defined internal space than the latter.


• Red Lobster: I come from the Maritime provinces of Canada, where seafood is fairly easy to inexpensively acquire. Seafood is a not very unordinary foodstuff; if anything, on the Prince Edward Island of a half-century ago, only the poor children brought lobster sandwiches to school. (You could tell who the rich children were because they ate bologna sandwiches.) Eating at a Red Lobster--the one in the Atrium On Bay--for the first time in our lives was a bizarre experience, in large part because the restaurant tried and failed to look generically Maritime, or east-coast, or fishing-village. There was a certain amount of cognitive dissonance operating for us in the background as we ate: It felt off.