oot and aboot in Toronto

I arrived in Toronto yesterday from Montreal via rail. My first day in Montreal, having arrived without any sleep, my hostel wouldn't let me check in until 1pm - so they made me pay to put my bags in a locker and I was left to wander the city for a few hours... I went straight to the Drawn & Quarterly Store - a fantastic comic shop. They were playing a Leonard Cohen record, as in actual vinyl on a turntable. So it was a fine first stop in Canada. I slept in the afternoon, but it was a horrible restless sleep, and I have vague memories of sleep-talking (confused babbling) to one of my dorm-mates and not understanding why he looked so scared of me... I think I'd rather be totally unaware of my sleep-talking episodes. Tuesday I went to the Musee des beaux-arts for their special Andy Warhol exhibition. I always hated Andy Warhol for being so popular with seemingly such minimal effort or talent. Still, none of his art impresses me much - mostly horribly outdated in my eyes. But the biographical layout of the exhibition was interesting... beginning with an eerie Liza Minelli soundtrack... with entire rooms lined with tin-foil to recreate the Silver Factory... looped reels of his most tedious films (tedium being the point of it all) and scaled down elements of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable immersive art experience... Velvet Underground footage and photos... An awful lot of wankery but there's no doubt he was an original thinker, and you have to admire his ability to appreciate the most vile, insidious aspects of pop culture. I guess. They even had one of the wigs that he wore in the '80s, and the signed photo from Shirley Temple that he treasured in childhood. At night I went to a popular alternative music venue called Sala Rossa to see some bands. It's a big hall at the back of a Spanish restaurant that would be completely hidden if not for the obvious musicians smoking outside the front door. The bands were good, and there was a vending machine that sold independent mini-comics, so I had something to do with my hands while I was waiting for music. Wednesday I went to the museum of contemporary art (or whatever the French-language equivalent of that is). They had an exhibition on "art and rock 'n' roll", with some overlap with the other gallery in the form of Velvet Underground material. They also had original drawings by Ray Pettibon (the Black Flag poster cartoonist who once lived with Henry Rollins - I was impressed). And original drawings/paintings by Yoshimoto Nara, the iconic Japanese artist only tenuously related to the rock 'n' roll theme. It was pretty cool... Wednesday night I was desperate for some home cooking, so I bought ingredients, made enough pasta for four people, then ate alone. I got talking to a few nice people in the kitchen but noone wanted my food... so it mostly ended up in the bin. Yesterday I caught the train to Toronto, on an overpriced ticket ironically called the "comfort economy" fare. Six hours through some typically Canadian landscape. Fields of dead crops and lots of barns and farmhouses seemingly built to the same designs. Toronto is a big place. It's nowhere near as cold as Montreal was, which has come as a relief. I did some walking around and covered a lot of ground. Last night I walked to the far corner of my map, to Lee's Palace in a university district for some "Japanese sludge psych metal". It was a popular gig. The band was good but not Japanese (i.e. quirky) enough in my opinion. Except for the drummer in the leopard skin blouse who was in charge of back-up hooting and yelling... I didn't stay until the end. I have a few nights here before flying to Mexico City on Tuesday.