It has come to my attention, just today, that The Big Bop and the Cameron House, two enjoyable and familiar Toronto bars-cum-music venues, will be closing pretty soon.
Yesterday, I read with significantly greater shock and horror that the Carlton Cinema is sharing a similar fate after today--its last day, December 6--when they'll be screening Monty Python and the Holy Grail with popcorn as its own Last Supper.
I don't live in Toronto most months out of the year anymore, so my sentimentality may be unfounded, even exaggerated. But I am sad. Mostly for the Carlton. Regardless of my support for the establishment as of late, and regardless of how much direct involvement I'd had with any of the three above mentioned venues in my meager near-21 years of being, it never occurred to me that they would die.
(I won't pretend to make this a universal message, because it's pretty specific; if you don't want to indulge my sentimentality, you can scroll away now, leaving with the simple message that the closure of these Toronto sites is sad and makes me feel old.)
I can recall a dark night in June of '05 (I think it was '05) when ICGYABL and I went to the Aquabats show at the Reverb and Bernice slept through it; or when some of us saw Juice Money Orchestra at the Kathedral, immediately surprised at how not-shitty they were. There was a time when some of us stumbled, underage, into the Cameron House, never carded, and ICGYABL bought a CD from some hip indie-folk four-piece on a whim. Perhaps most importantly, I can remember going on several--and I mean several--dates at the Carlton, and seeing some of the best films of the last five years there.
It's inevitable that venues close, money gets tight, and the Capital-M-"Mainstream" wins out over smaller film and music spots. I am not surprised that these venues have finished, nor do I think it's for the worst that they did. Mostly, what is affecting me is the realization that moving away from home does not keep it preserved in a museum or cryogenic ice-chamber. I cannot return and find everything the way it was. Though I experience this every year, the Carlton's death was the final nail in the coffin of my childhood.
Soon I will be 21. That's adulthood no matter where you are on the map. The closer school gets to completion, the closer my summer jobs get to becoming life careers, I begin to ask: where is there stability?
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11 comments:
Amen, brother.
I also share your sentiments. I didn't even know the Carlton was closing, dang.
Last winter I discovered Mirvish Books on Art (or something like that, I don't remember exactly what it was called), a wonderful arts specialty bookstore that I could have spent weeks on end exploring, only to find it was closing the next month. The feeling of knowing that this place had been in the city forever (ie. longer than I have), yet I discovered it only weeks before it was gone forever, was terrible. I still find myself wishing that either: a) it was still open (not possible), or b) I had discovered it much earlier (more possible, though younger me may have waved it off without much interest). I guess my point is, at least you had the Carlton for longer than that.
I know I missed your bigger point about change, but I have nothing to say about that, other than it's shitty, fo' sho'.
21 is the new 17.
21 Again?
I'LL BE ZAC EFRON!
Octopussy--may i call you that?--as far as i know, you can still search their catalog online, order a book, and arrange a time with them to go around the back entrance and pick up your glossy 28" coffee table book on Kadinsky or whomever
But the fun was in the browsing! All the browsing! Thanks for the tip though, I'll check it out.
I believe the title of shittiest band ever to play the Kathedral goes to my high school band. Not only did we have a shoe thrown at us but the girl who threw it climbed on stage DURING a song to get it. In her defense though, we were really fucking bad.
As well my favourite meditation on lost childhood of late is a little snippet of a poem Thug Wrangler showed me the other day. Check it:
My heart of silk
is filled with lights,
with lost bells
with lilies and bees.
I will go very far,
farther than those hills,
farther than the seas,
close to the stars,
to beg Christ the Lord
to give me back
the soul I had
when I was a child,
ripened with legends,
with a feathered cap
and a wooden sword.
- Federico Garcia Lorca
Is 21 really worse than 20 though? I just turned 20 and dealt with it fairly poorly...
In other news I have totally forgotten my password...
- Michelle Obama has a Rabbi in the Family
The older I get the more trouble I have getting hysterical about it. I am 20, I used to be 10; I still have some dreams, I used to have more. That doesn't bother me. What bothers me, true to icgyabl form, is that it doesn't bother me. When I was 10 I thought turning 20 would feel like the end of my life, and it doesn't because I've mellowed out, gained perspective, learned to compromise. That's what makes me feel truly old.
ICGYABL, you are wise beyond your years. I only wish you could be wise beyond mine, too; it would save me a lot of trouble.
As it happens, I'm not surprised at my age. Like I said in January 2009:
Person: "How does it feel to be 20?"
Me: "Eh, I saw it coming."
or:
Person: "Are you weirded out that you're 20 now?"
Me: "Are you kidding? I've been waiting 20 years for this!"
The former punchline is truer than the latter, and the fact that I posted this over a month before my birthday testifies to that.
I guess the fundamental surprise for me - I don't know about you - is not my own impending mortality, but the mortality of things around me. Like the Carlton this year, or George Carlin last. Heck, I feel funny just being able to tell people that "I remember when George Stroumboulopoulos was just a MuchMusic VJ."
I miss Mel's more than all of my dead pets combined. And when I found out that it was gone by arriving there, drunk, hungry and expectant--that's what hurt the most.
Relevantly, I too had a quarter-life crisis at the age of 20, realizing that 20 rounds to 30, which rounds to 50, which rounds to death. Also, 20 is the age things really start to slip away; you spend so long waiting to be 19, and then every birthday after that is just sort of a letdown, wondering why we spent so long waiting and not more time DOING.
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