Markus in Toronto (and Halifax, and Vancouver, and Las Vegas, ....): 2013/12/08: Arts and Music

Three concerts within two weeks, and the music genres couldn’t be more diverse: the York University Gospel Choir; the York University Symphony Orchestra; and Paul Kalkbrenner. Yes, THE Paul Kalkbrenner! He was here, in Toronto. He’s doing a North America tour, with live acts in New York, Montréal, Toronto, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Fun fact: all concerts including Montréal and Toronto are listed as “USA Tour Dates” on his homepage. Poor Canada, everybody thinks it somehow belongs to the States, although Canada is much bigger…

Kalkbrenner played (is it really playing? Or should I say reassembling?) from midnight until 2:40! The four of us (and many other Germans in the audience…) enjoyed it. My first electric "concert". And the first time I drank beer out of cans in a club... I will never become a fan of electric music, but I have to admit that Paul Kalkbrenner is great.

Unfortunately, the pictures of the concerts are terrible cell phone pictures, but here you go:

Why is this post called „Arts and Music“? Because I’ve also seen art, as I visited today the Art Gallery of Ontario (thanks to Zoe I was able to visit it for free!). I love Frank Gehry – labeled by Vanity Fair as "the most important architect of our age" – and his deconstructivist structures, so of course I like the building of the Art Galery. But I also liked what you see inside: Canadian landscape pictures of the famous “Group of Seven”; pictures and artefacts from all over the world; ship models (why do they show ship models in an art gallery?) – and first of all the temporary exhibition “The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918” with paintings by Picasso, Chagall, Kandinsky and others (unfortunately you are not allowed to take pictures in this exhibition). Thanks to the audio guide we learned and laughed a lot about the pictures and what the painters pretended to show.

At the end of the visit, I was interviewed on how I liked the art gallery and if I would recommend it and so far. There was the question “what surprised you most in the Art Gallery?” My maybe stupid, but surely true answer: it surprised me that the artists of the Blue Rider movement portrayed their wives as yellow cows. That's something I learned today and I'll probably never ever forget again.