Making Salt Fish and Ackee

Posted on by
2

Ackees, photo by kaiton

On Sunday, my boyfriend and I are hosting a fundraiser brunch at our apartment for the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation and their Friends for Life Bike Rally. We’ve done this brunch twice before and we always serve a full Caribbean meal — jerk chicken, ox tail stew, patties, ackee and saltfish, rum punch (!), plantain, rice and peas and so on. My mother is from Jamaica, so this food is near and dear to me. It’s like my mac-and-cheese or meatloaf — a deeply comforting reminder of childhood.

Continue reading →

Generation Owe (And Why I’m Neurotic About Debt)

Posted on by
4

Photo by Kerry Shaw for The Grid

This week, The Grid — a free, weekly magazine in Toronto — ran a cover story about the debt habits of twenty and thirty somethings. Written by a former colleague of mine, Carely Fortune, the piece suggests that easy access to credit and financial illiteracy has lead my generation to spend all of our hard earned cash, as well as a great deal of borrowed money, on all of life’s inessentials — trips to Cuba, new iPads, expensive jeans. We’d rather have instant gratification — lattes and cupcakes — than long term financial stability, retirement at 60 (let along ever) and living debt free. In short, we’re screwed.

The story opens at Woodlot, with Carley’s mom looking around the artfully under-decorated Little Italy restaurant, wondering how such a young clientele can afford the near $30 entrees. I know the scene all too well.

Continue reading →

A House I’ll Never Own or Decorate – The Bedroom Dance Party Edition

Posted on by
2

Thanks to a combination of factors — a deep-rooted fear of debt, my poor choice of career paths and an over-inflated real estate market — It’s a foregone conclusion that I’ll never be able to afford a house in Toronto. And if I did buy, it would likely be a bachelor condo the size of a hamster cage on the fringes of civilization (heaven forbid, somewhere north of the 401). I’m picturing a life where I’m too poor to hang curtains or buy any furniture, yet too stressed by my massive mortgage payments and claustrophobic digs to even care. So while I can’t buy a house, I’ve decided to torture myself with indulge in fantasy real estate — basically, from time to time, I’m going to be picking the places that I’d like to buy, and blogging about how I would decorate them to make them my own.

The Place: 15 Crocker Ave., a two-bedroom, $519,000 Victorian townhouse near Trinity Bellwoods. It’s around the corner from Nadège Patisserie, which means I would get happily fat eating too many butter croissants and gin-and-tonic marshmallows. Overall, I like the neighbourhood and think this would be a fun fixer project.

15 Crocker Ave.

Continue reading →

Getting to Know Bob Marley

Posted on by
Reply

Marley, directed by Kevin Macdonald

In a sense, I grew up listening to Bob Marley’s music. My mother was born and raised in Mandeville, Jamaica, and although I wouldn’t say she was necessarily a big fan — we probably listened to The Very Best of Andrew Lloyd Webber more than Legend — I definitely wore a One Love t-shirt in grade school and could probably sing along to No Woman, No Cry, even if I didn’t understand the lyrics. My grandmother was the main source of exposure, though. She managed a hotel in the Cayman Islands where my brother and I would spend part of every summer. To satisfy rum-drunk Brits and Americans, the hotel played Stir It Up, Is This Love and Jamming on a seemingly endless loop. It’s because of this over-exposure that I developed a cynicism about Bob Marley in my teens. I didn’t really pick up on the poetry of his lyrics — the songs just felt like touristy kitsch to me.

Continue reading →

HBO’s Girls, a Translation

Posted on by
Reply

Lena Dunham plays Hannah on HBO’s Girls

I’m not entirely sure if anything significant happened on the most recent episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls, titled All Adventurous Women Do. Hannah ate a cupcake in the bathroom. Marnie had sex with herself at a party. Shoshanna didn’t have sex with anyone. The biggest plot development was Adam Sackler possibly giving Hannah HPV, but considering his head-to-toe grossness, is that really so shocking? Hannah and company did say a whole bunch of random stuff, though. And I guess that’s significant. Or at least funny. Here’s a collection of the highlights, and to make the dialogue slightly less random, a translation.

Marnie to Charlie: “You look scary to me, like Mickey Mouse without the ears.”

Translation: Before you shaved your head, you used to look like a too-cute children’s cartoon that I didn’t want to have sex with. Now that you’ve shaven your head, you look like a deformed children’s cartoon that I don’t want to have sex with.

Continue reading →

Getting to Know Jean-Paul Lemieux

Posted on by
2

Jean-Paul Lemieux's Evening Visitor, 1956, at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa

On Saturday afternoon I took a drive out to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection. The gallery is just outside of Toronto — in Kleinburg, near Canada’s Wonderland — but it’s log-and-stone buildings and treed surrounds makes the place feel like an Algonquin retreat. It’s a refreshing escape so close to the city, and while there I was delighted to discover a great Canadian artist that I hadn’t previously heard about: Jean-Paul Lemieux. I only noticed a couple of the Quebecer’s works among all the pieces by Tom Thomson, Emily Carr and the Group of Seven, but Lemieux’s paintings made an impression with their minimal, graphic quality. I like how he captured the desolate, vast landscape of rural Quebec — in particular the harsh, snowy weather and long grey skies.

Continue reading →

The Gross Guys of HBO’s Girls

Posted on by
1

Obviously, Lena Dunham’s new dramedy, Girls, isn’t about men. But as a guy, I have to complain a little about how grossness of the dudes on the show. To be plain, Dunham’s character, Hannah, is dating Frankenstein, and her best-friend Marnie is dating a 12-year-old girl trapped in a 16-year-old boy’s body. Let’s have a look:

Adam Sackler

Adam Driver plays Adam Sackler on HBO's Girls.

He’s dense, poorly-shaven and unemployed, but that’s not the worst of it. Adam seems to have learned about sex from a curious mix of raunchy porn movies and professional hockey. What girl doesn’t like being surprised by a little anal action, or hearing sweet nothings like: “You’re a dirty little whore and I’m going to send you home to your parents covered in cum?” But I can see why Hannah likes him. Not only does he have special skills — ejaculating in the shape of Africa takes a lot of hand-penis coordination — he can also be quite considerate. Offering Hannah a bottle of orange Gatorade after she “almost cums” shows that he cares about her, and doesn’t want her getting too dehydrated. After five minutes of traumatizing sex, though, I think Hannah should be reaching for the gin.

Continue reading →

Ai Weiwei, You’re Hot

Posted on by
Reply

Dear Ai Weiwei,

I think you’re hot. It’s not because I have a thing for beards, bellies or artists, because I don’t. (Especially artists — imagine what it would be like to date Jeff Koons? Scary. You’re bits and bites would be on display).

It’s because, as the New Yorker‘s Culture Desk noted, you’re an artist rebel-hero of the hottest order

Continue reading →

HBO’s Veep: Like a Meat Grinder with No Meat

Posted on by
Reply

HBO's Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus

I was really excited for HBO’s new comedy Veep, starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Like any good satire, I hoped it would shine a slightly harsh but terribly amusing light on its subject matter — in this case the fraught American political system, and specifically the neutered, ineffectual office of the Vice President. Watching it, though, I was left wanting: for a solid story line, for somewhat believable characters, for a reason to tune in again.

Continue reading →

Toronto Real Estate: Why Do You Tease Me?

Posted on by
Reply

64 Wales Ave., Toronto

The sad fact is that I can not, under any circumstances, afford to buy a house in Toronto. I can barely afford a new pair of runners or wine with dinner. Yet, like a tween girl (or boy) with fantasies of being whisked away by Justin Bieber, I can dream. And I have a serious real estate crush at the moment. It’s a peaked-roofed, brick Victorian row house in Kensington Market, with a garden in the front and bright, clean-lined interiors.

Continue reading →