Chinese Broccoli

For those mired in the dark ages of Maxwell House drip coffee in a canister (hi, Dad!) I feel this might be a good time to bring up the fact that for the past year I have channelled all my spare beverage energies into being obsessed with delicious espresso and pretty lattes.

My seemingly unending travels this year were made a million times more fun (or at least, more wakeful and chemically enthusiastic!) by becoming a bit of a coffee tourist. Be it through word-of-mouth, wifi research on coffeegeek.com or panicked long-distance phone calls to Oliver for guidance, I have ended up at dozens of fine-to-great coffee joints east of the Mississippi in 2006. Rainy Montreal mornings were made better by Caffe Art Java, repeated frenzied trips to New York City were anchored calmly by the heavenly, if horribly named Joe — The Art of Coffee, while Northampton Coffee and Intelligentsia continue to feed my crazy desire to start a cozy, amazing cafe you can actually do your work at here in Toronto. And let's not forget the two-hour detour to the headquarters of Gimme! Coffee in Ithaca, without which I never would have met that nice waitress at Moosewood who absolutely would not let me leave town without practically forcing me face-down into a gorge.

And of course, there is the home team. It is ridiculously inconvenient for me to trek over to Mercury Organic Espresso Bar (no real website, but this blog, and they're at 915 Queen Street East between Logan and Carlaw — really, just go there) yet I seem to make it there semi-regularly, to drink coffee easily worth my environment-killing gas mileage and the COPS-esque close calls with the domestically disturbed neighbours who inhabit the space behind Mercury's (illegal) patio. When I am stuck closer to downtown, I naturally go to Bull Dog, the first coffee shop (but not the only!) to recognize itself on my Flickr paean to latte artwork. (Nice catch, Amber!) Sadly, everywhere else that serves espresso in Toronto kind of sucks. But I'm patient.

Because my job as a writer completely rules, I recently had the opportunity to write a little piece on these dudes for City Bites, a nice Toronto food magazine you can pick up for free at finer food stores (or download in PDF format!) It was awesome to talk to Stuart and Matthew about their craft. Plus, it gave me an opportunity to drink more of their coffee. Hey, whatever you gotta do to pay the bills, right?

In any case, I just thought you all should know what you're missing.

Posted by liz at 10:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

How I spent the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival:

Posted by liz at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

We start with an empty stage in a circus hall in Little India. There are blue lights and on the synthesizers is a single red rose; on the floor have fallen three petals. Fallen or been placed. Fallen or been placed.

So, Jandek comes out. Jandek wears a suitcoat. Jandek takes off the suitcoat, folds. Drummer sits on floor. Guitarist takes off shoes, socks. Why wear them onstage to begin with? It's dark and blue and gravely silent. Like they have stumbled upon a beautiful fragile animal that they don't want to scare away, no one moves, no one crinkles anything, no one's phone even goes off. (robots in disguise / small fleet of sparrows) But it is not all good, it is not all palatable, most of the time, in fact, I do not find it at all palatable, but I wait and watch. I thought, maybe, for some reason, things were going to rage. Things were going to break apart, like the breaking apart of secrets or of the slience that was mostly vocal squall and sometimes wiggling whirr. No shoes guy is amazing. Sitting guy is occasionally perfect. Most of the time things seem particularly unexperimental, other than playing with things that look like chopsticks, skewers, tobacco tins, a drinking straw. But mostly there is a wish for breaking (and respite), and then there is truly a moment, after nearly two hours, and it is not a long one, but I am with them, with the chopstick guy and the percussionist who has rattled and rattled and made eye contact and knocked down the chimes, and you want to listen to the clanging and steal the densely scrawled lyric notebook (pure gold! fandom! poetry! eBay!) and maybe you'd rather even do that than be here, but it's all so tenuous and you just kind of keep hoping.

And then Jandek picks up his suitcoat and his little clock and walks away and you ride home on a streetcar full of Jandek fans (world's most unlikely occurrence) and think, man, that was totally weird, and and you wonder if we were being goaded, how many of us took the bait, have always taken the bait, took the rose petals, and fell for it.

(the evidence)

Posted by liz at 11:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

My friend Sean likes to foment community in unusual and interesting ways, and for him this isn't entirely an outward thing as it is an inward thing as well. "I was thinking," he said to me last night, "that maybe I don't need to ever leave my neighbourhood at all?" Naturally that'd short him on the odd opportunity for cornbread and company in the west end, but I occasionally see his point, somewhat like a fantasy, wherein everything is contained and makes sense and is proximal in a way that feels not limited, but full of blessing.

I feel that way about my own city, for the most part (it can only give me what it is, of course, and other places can only give me what they are), and today I imagined for a moment I might get away with the same kind of thing myself—only stay within these walls, shun the last-summer-flingness of Labour Day, buckle down and work before one of the city's main pleasures—that ten day stretch of sitting in a dark room, I mean—swallows me whole. If I haven't stayed in town for more than two weeks at a time in four months, shouldn't the counterbalance be to stay inside all day some days when I am home, reconnect with the pleasures of cleaning one's basement? But just as I was questioning my motives, I was reminded that you don't decide these things for yourself: invitations came loudly as four-fisted bangs on the door.

"We're going to be having a magic show today. In twenty minutes. Excuse me. The next one will start in twenty minutes. And my little sister tried to eat out of your ashtray but I'm not going to smoke until I'm sixteen, because my mother said you should try everything once in your life, and I'm also going to try cola, I'm eight and I've never tried it, but I think I'll have one bottle every four years. We'll be starting in twenty minutes. I'll come back and get you then."

And so of course I went, and even the (other) grumpy widow and the (other) disaffected hipsters on the block straggled over for the 3:40 showing: mostly sleight-of-hand, a pair of rigged dice, some sidewalk chalk and a stolen tampon. Everyone clapped, and everyone left themselves for a moment and joined what was going on around, because, and in spite of them. You can't fight it, I guess—I left the house and drank coffee and got all my work done, smoked out by the buzz of snowbirds and the trickery of children. And I have a feeling that the full goodness of days can't often happen in a tiny vessel like my own house. But at the top of the street, where the wildflowers bend and encroach into the sidewalk, and you can almost forget you're in civilization—well that may just be a portal.

Posted by liz at 09:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)