Recipes for Trouble

I seem to be doing brunch a lot lately.

It’s winter, and weekend mornings do not yet lead naturally to coffee on the back porch or walks in the park. It’s February, and we need our friends, the comfort of steaming plates of eggy things, and the morning light pouring in.

My sister The TV Gal’s visit was as good an occasion as any to meet friends for brunch at my local brunch spot, Mitzi’s on College.

Mitzi’s, a venerable woman-owned institution with (now) three outlets in the west end of Toronto, has always been a go-to place for a queer-friendly delicious and innovative brunch.

I’d say this joint still has a few wrinkles to work out. I’ve been three times and while the food is tasty, the service and the prices are not. Arriving, you stand at the door waiting to be seated, whilst ignored by staff chatting in the back. You seat yourself, worried you’ll be ousted. (A sign saying Seat Yourself would do the trick). If you arrive during peak hours you’ll be waiting in line or in the limited wait room seating. You’ll ask if you can leave your cel number and go for a coffee and you’ll be told quite authoritatively that that is not an option.

But this time we knew to seat ourselves and chose a table in front bathed in sunlight. I had poached eggs on cornbread with spicy sauce, sour cream, homefries and sourdough toast. Barely warm, verging on cold. I don’t do cold eggs and certainly not for $13.75. The server cheerfully took them away and returned the plate only slightly less cold than before. I gave up on heat and joined the much more important conversation swirling around the table: our debrief of the previous night’s party. Eggs were a little underpoached, the sauce delicious, and the combo of cornbread and potatoes a little too sweet for my liking despite the addition of seasoned sour cream.

It was a glorious unseasonably warm day, so TV Gal and I ditched our plans for a theatre matinee and joined the Librarian and The Hair Dude for a stroll at The Beach.

TV Gal took a million photos like she always does. Hair Dude and Librarian cuddled on a bench as we poked around on the rocks. People held their faces up to the sun, like pilgrims awaiting a blessing: the beginning of the end of the long, long journey through winter.

There’s all kinds of art to be found in New York.

There is music, soaring out of the subway tunnels: African song; jazz sax; four part gospel harmonies; my niece The Red Headed Busker, singing her own pop melodies and hip hop inflected urban hymns.

There are art galleries, for sure, with their uneven gestures and brusque avantgardisms; there are store windows on Madison Avenue, glowing smugly; there is performance art – queer, sarcastic, ironic, joyful.

And, there is dessert.

The Dessert Chef (Shuna Lydon) and I have corresponded unevenly over a couple of years; I follow her blog, Eggbeater, and have tasted her sublime desserts at (now defunct) Sens in San Francisco, and we did a reading together in The Bay Area. She recently moved back to her hometown, New York. A couple of Facebook messages later, and The Red Headed Busker, The Butch Performance Artist and myself were meeting up for brunch at 10 Downing in The Village where Shuna is pastry chef.

This too was a kind of performance art. The Pastry Chef came out and gave a short monologue, just for us, about dessert, Karen Finley, and the rigours of working in kitchens. As usual, she was sweetly secretive about what exactly we’d be eating for dessert.

Red Headed Busker and I shared a tasty smoked salmon eggs benny with mustard hollandaise on brioche. The Performance Artist told us about her brilliant ongoing research-performance piece The Homo Bonobo Project. A basket of Shuna’s ‘baked goods’ – with her crazy-delicious citrus marmalade – appeared on the table.

As the pale winter sun streamed in we kept talking: about the changes in Greenwich Village and beyond; about the life of an artist, and about how you just keep doing the work, day after day, with or without funding. The Performance Artist bemoaned the loss of independent and queer culture in an increasingly corporatized and gentrified Manhattan. She’s rebuilding community with a series of cabaret evenings she’s hosting and performing at called The Bulldyke Chronicles, at Dixon Place. The Busker listened raptly: different genre and audience, same concerns.

Suddenly, two dessert creations appeared before us. The first was a cheesecake made with lebneh, a strained yogurt cheese, with a crisp crust reminiscent of, but way more exciting than, graham cracker, sided with roasted almonds and that thrilling marmalade. It reminded me of the cheesecake my ma makes at Easter, and the migrations – cultural and geographical – that had brought those light, resonant flavours and memories together.

These desserts are the sum of their parts. The other, Butterscotch Pot de Creme, came with dulche de leche, and brown-sugar-cumin roasted pecans. Soft and crunchy, sweet and salty; deeply sensuous.

By then, The Busker had to go perform in the subway. The Performance Artist and I groaned and moaned our way through these sweet/savory narratives, aka dessert. The afternoon was starting to wane and there was still art to be seen, and made. Performance Artist hopped on her bike and rode off into the narrow streets of the Village. I headed up towards the galleries in Chelsea and then changed my mind, went shopping instead. I was too full – of dessert, creativity, and inspiration – to ingest anymore art that day.

I’ve always believed that love stories should be written about friends.
The sweetness of their casual love,
the juiciness of their gossip
the thrill of sharing a meal.

There’s no ceremony, no legal process
no champagne
when someone enters your life and becomes
a lifelong friend.

But there is often celebration.

And meals. Lots of meals.
Babies, children, cats.
Books, films, music videos.

Friends are an archive
a witness
a board of experts
a think tank
a Greek chorus.

an inspiration

a comedy routine.

a home away from home.

Seven years ago, almost to the day, a secretive group of pampered, aristocratic, well-fed elites visited Vancouver. They were there to see if British Columbia had what it takes – unlimited and exorbitant funds, disdain for the poor and a willingness to create a legacy of oppression and injustice – to host the 2010 Winter Olympics.

They were delegates of the International Olympic Committee, the non-transparent body that, through TV rights, corporate sponsorship, bid fees, corruption and extortion, makes billions (tax free) from each Olympics.

I had just founded a ragtag group of artists and activists to protest Vancouver’s Olympic bid: “Billionaires for the Olympics”. We pulled out our fox furs and leopard skin coats, gilded our ski poles, dusted off our champagne glasses. One of us had a white limousine (he used it for his performance art pieces), someone else made a torch that featured billion dollar bills going up in smoke. In our very first action, we closed down an Olympic Parade on Granville Island. We handed out flyers detailing the monetary, social and environmental cost of this 17-day party:

This [Olympic Bid] comes on the heels of massive cutbacks to the social safety net by the BC Liberals. If there is not enough money ofr education, senior citizens and legal aid (to name a few) why is there money for the 2010 Olympics?

In the intervening weeks and months we made many appearances. People joined us – other actors and performers – wielding cigars and fancy hats and monopoly money. We got some good press, but reporters were frustrated that we wouldn’t give real names, always just Ivanka Strumpet, Max Profit, and Mike McMoney. Onlookers looked, and then looked again – were we the obscene subtext of the Games or were we protesters? We were both – mixing up the message, helping people to read between the lines.

I’ve never had so much fun protesting something. There was joy and passion and creativity among us. My brother Roman, a street musician living in the Downtown Eastside, had died just a year earlier. I was doing it for him, I was doing it for us.

Our only regret was that more artists didn’t join us. I guess they couldn’t have foreseen that 90% of arts funding in BC would be cut in 2009, just months before an Olympics for which the government was happy to blow $7 billion. They couldn’t have known (or could they?) that every single artist appearing in the Arts Olympiad would be required to sign a muzzle agreement, saying that “The artist shall at all times refrain from making any negative or derogatory remarks respecting VANOC, the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games, the Olympic movement generally, Bell Canada and/or any other sponsor associated with VANOC”.’

In 2007, long after I’d moved away from Vancouver, Billionaires for the Olympics was revived, and appeared at the unveiling of the ugly Olympic Clock that (dis)graces downtown Vancouver. In their press release, they quoted their own Max Profit “I think it’s great that we’re helping you spend all that money,” said Profit. “That money was in danger of going toward social housing and feeding lazy bums! If they don’t like it, let them eat snow!”

In the end, the Billionaires “won.”

Welcome to todays’ opening ceremonies, a spectacle that costs $1000 to attend and that’s just for the cheap seats. Welcome to the streets of Vancouver, where peacable activists get interrogated and harrassed, to a Downtown Eastside where housing for the homeless has never been so inadequate (while upwards of $115 million was spent housing elite athletes), to a highway to Whistler that decimated forests and wetlands, cost over $600 million, and even cost one First Nations elder her life.

If you didn’t or wouldn’t or couldn’t join our protests seven years ago, then protest now. Make your presence known at today’s march in Vancouver. You might even want to gather some friends, don a tuxedo or a ballgown, and chant, “Luge, Not Legal Aid!”

“TAKE BACK OUR CITY” PROTEST MARCH AGAINST THE OLYMPICS
Fri Feb 12 3PM
MEET AT VANCOUVER ART GALLERY, MARCH TO BC PLACE