A review of Madagascar Slim’s Good Life Good Living (2009)

Sometime in September or October 2009, I woke up – as I always do – to the sounds of CBC Radio 1. I’m not always sure why I listen to it, but it has something to do with all other options on the dial being much, much worse. Andy Barrie, the host of ‘Metro Morning,’ has a sort of dignified, grown-up way about him, a seemingly sincere desire to pander to my shrinking highbrow demographic, and so I get my tax dollar’s worth every morning between 6 and 7. Very occasionally, Metro Morning plays music; to introduce something the editorial team has deemed worthy of our rarefied ears. That morning, I encountered Madagascar Slim, an exceptionally talented Canadian singer, songwriter and guitarist, originally from Madagascar.

Now, Madagascar isn’t a geography I’m familiar with musically, despite having lived in Southern Africa for 20 years. This was perhaps a sign of South Africa’s disconnection from the rest of the region (culture, like foreign currency, wasn’t allowed to flow freely during the Apartheid years, and rebuilding regional relations since has been slow). In terms of widely recognized African music, West Africa (Mali, Senegal…) and South Africa itself always seemed to dwarf everyone else’s output, especially since the Western market for ‘world music’ isn’t known for its ability to differentiate sounds or appreciate the subtleties of regional inflection.

Madagascar, the world’s 5th largest island, had been a proudly independent seafaring monarchy for centuries before being invaded and colonized by France in the 1880s. It was a crucial trade gateway between East Africa and Southeast Asia, and – perhaps this is purely in my head – some of these influences can be heard in Slim’s music. For me, the recognizable elements are similarities to a certain South African ‘folk’ – I hear early Johnny Clegg (when he was still playing with his original band, Juluka) and Vusi Mahlasela. There’s a simple lyricism with very distinct Southern African elements here (I would call them kwela rhythms, but I realize that that’s just nomenclature). There’s also a “Latin” tinge, perhaps echoing the deep influence salsa, son and cumbia have wielded in other African coastal economies (such as Senegal, whose music is deeply influenced by Latin American sounds imported by sailors). While I can’t really hear an Asian influence, I sense elements of European folk song – evidence, no doubt, of the missionary colonialism present everywhere in historical Madagascar; this is similar to Waldemar Bastos from Angola, say. In this sense, Madagascar Slim’s music is an amalgam of his country’s history and geography.

Known as a Canadian world music guitar virtuoso, Slim also has another set of influences. Much has been made of his early discovery of Hendrix and his desire to play Jimi’s and B. B. King’s music. And certainly, there are tracks on Good Life Good Living (such as the cleverly named ‘Take Me Home (Slight Return),’ the name an homage to Hendrix’ ‘Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)’) that feature electric, blues-inflected guitar work. In essence, though, this is largely an acoustic, melodious, low-key affair that’s a lot less austere than a blues record, and it has absolutely nothing in common with West African ‘blues’ like Tinariwen, Ali Farka Touré or Boubacar Traoré. (I find myself wondering whether the “Malagasy kid discovers Hendrix, takes up guitar” origination story is maybe one of those self-perpetuating PR myths that don’t really serve to shed any light on an artist’s work but rather obfuscate the complexities of heritage and the richness of influence.)

There is much on this CD that is both immediately accessible (for someone open to world music) and benefits from repeated listening. Slim is an outstanding acoustic picker (witness the instrumental ‘Neny Malala,’ for example) whose simple picked chords propel everything here. There’s a heaviness of spirit here, a sadness of love and loss, underscored by strong and simple harmony vocals (‘Fankahalana’). Since I don’t understand the Malagasy lyrics and don’t have access to the CD cover (bought it on iTunes), I can’t say if it’s longing for lost love, home or a resolution of Madagascar’s complicated politics and poverty, but it’s touching in its simplicity and earnestness.

There’s one moment that borders on a misstep: ‘Take Me Home,’ a beautiful melody and a perfectly executed mid-tempo number, is apparently about every immigrant’s nightmare of living abroad, away from home, and about being sent home, deported. Suddenly, in the middle of the song, there’s a very Canadian voice (presumably meant to belong to an immigration official) announcing Slim’s deportation. It’s jarring… presumably deliberately, but uncomfortable nonetheless. At the end of the track, we hear a female voice waking the singer from his nightmare. It puts this track uncomfortably close to the ‘novelty song’ category. On the other hand, it’s these idiosyncrasies that make us remember and cherish certain albums, so I’m choosing to interpret it this way.

All is well the minute the next track comes on – a rollicking party of a song called ‘Sitaka’ that blends Malagasy roots, Quebec folk (or maybe Zydeco?) and intersperses it with a beautifully executed 12 bar blues seemingly out of nowhere. It’s effortless and demonstrates why Slim is in high demand as a sideman in Toronto’s blues scene.

I can wholeheartedly recommend this if you’re at all interested in world music. It’s one of the freshest things I’ve heard in a while, particularly since African music on CD has become so heavily oriented towards West African desert blues in recent years.

Madagascar Slim’s Good Life Good Living is available on iTunes, Amazon.ca, and Amazon.com. He also had a self-released (?) earlier album called “Omnisource” that is out of print and has sketchy availability.

Many of the houses on the Island are pretty basic but artistically adorned. This one’s shack is festively decorated with a universal pagan symbol.

This home struck us as the most modern and architecturally advanced on Centre Island. The view of the city skyline must be spectacular.

This seemed to be like a little Freecycle station: islanders appear to use this open air closet to get rid of unwanted junk.

The ‘parking lot’ outside the Rectory Café.

Footprints in the sand.

The Island seems to suffer from a high density of cast-off things stored in people’s yards. Here: a still life with Fender Rhodes. Fetching.

The Lake Ontario waves on a windy day.

Bicycles parked at the ferry dock, on our way back to Toronto.

All over Toronto, “Urban Fresh” Sobeys have sprung up in the last two years. For those not from Toronto, Sobeys is a large Canadian grocery store chain. The “Urban Fresh” stores are unholy, small ’boutique’ grocery stores aimed squarely at cooking-challenged young urbanites. They present themselves as filled with ‘healthy’ fast food options (there’s lots of prepared food, expensive luxury brands, frequently to the exclusion of regular budget brands, an olive bar, a whole display case of individual cake slices, etc.) but ultimately, they’re the worst of the industrial food compex: limited, expensive, unhealthy and wasteful. Sobeys “Urban Fresh” is where self-respecting, right-thinking people who care about their bodies and our world shouldn’t buy groceries. It’s the sort of place you should only go to when you’re in a pickle.

Almost Perfect is the anti-Sobeys. Located near Sheppard and Keele, it offers brand name food at dramatically reduced prices. The food got there because of damaged packaging, manufacturer closeouts, overstocks or changes of packaging. Almost Perfect is clean, reasonably well presented and looks like a grocery store. Most brands are recognizable, and in 95% of cases, it’s clear why the food is there: cans are dented, outer cardboard packages may be slightly torn (but the inside vacuum packages are perfectly intact), outer wrappers may be missing. Some items are past their manufacturer’s expiry date but have been frozen before that date was reached; the store has a helpful sign that assists with decoding the various “sell by” and “use by” dates on packages, and what they mean here.

It’s the sort of place that does well on the fringes of suburbia, and there’s only one in Toronto proper; the others are in Ajax, Oshawa, Whitby or Peterborough. The typical clientele, I imagine, consists of young penny-pinching families, those living just above the poverty line, and older, retired folks who are on a fixed income, and whose dollars go much further at Almost Perfect.

Unfortunately, Almost Perfect is also the sort of place that hip ecologically conscious urbanites wouldn’t be seen dead in. You don’t see any Zip Cars in the parking lot on Saturday mornings. No urban warriors cycle here to fill their baskets with fabulously cheap foods.

If saying no to industrially produced imported food is one side of the personal activism coin, surely Almost Perfect is the other side. In the same way that we think Second Harvest is a great idea (collecting unused food from fast food outlets and delivering it to social service programs), we should also rally around Almost Perfect. Not primarily because of the savings (though these can be considerable in these recessionary times; we bought about $80-$100 worth of various soy meats, sweet potato chips, loose leaf tea and other veggie-friendly stuff for around $30), but because things shouldn’t be thrown away when they’re slightly damaged or don’t look perfect. And as anyone who’s ever opened a can or frozen package well after its expiry date and found the food inside perfectly fresh can attest, those dates mean very little when things are stored properly.

Buying frozen food at Almost Perfect should be cool in the same way as buying a “pre-loved” pair of recycled jeans at Value Village, or getting a weekly organic produce box directly from a local farm. These may be small things in the greater scheme, but the greater scheme will benefit tremendously from them, as will your savings account.

The new Art Gallery of Ontario, recently re-opened with new architecture by Frank Gehry, is lovely inside. Granted, it looks like a giant shiny slug from the outside (especially on a rainy day), but the same tube-like structure forms a great, warm space on the inside, a sort of walkway that spans the street side of the second floor of the museum. I knew I wasn’t supposed to take pictures, but couldn’t resist (it’s not like I was taking snaps of famous paintings!) until a burly security officer told me to stop.

Generally, going to the AGO was a good experience, well worth seeing. It struck me that right now, the museum is showing mainly itself – its new face and design: the actual subject matter on display seemed relatively minor, a fun hodgepodge of painting, sculpture, some contemporary installations and a collection of model ships (that’s how far we got, at least).

Even so, definitely too much for an afternoon, so a return visit is called for this coming weekend.

The Beet Organic Café & Market is housed in an old TD Bank building, its entrance behind a still-functional Green Machine ABM terminal. I’m not sure if this is an amazing coincidence or a subtle, “only in the Junction” political statement: on Queen West, the big brands are taking over the mom & pop restaurants and stores. In Toronto’s “up and coming” West End, it’s apparently the other way around.

The Beet is not vegetarian, but very vegetarian and vegan friendly. All of its food is organic and healthily prepared. The fact that it’s co-owned by a certified nutritionist and a homeopathic doctor is evident in everything we tried: the food is tasty, healthy and solid. Unlike the light-and-fluffy salads that pass for vegetarian fare elsewhere, things here are weighty and feel like they’re providing actual nutrition.

It’s all very earnest, but excellent and deserving of a vegan’s/vegetarian’s/locavore’s/eco-aware person’s patronage. The “market” is a thoughtful selection of healthy products, from organic toothpaste to healthy granola bars to tea (the selection could be a little better here, I think…) and coffee. The soundtrack was tasty and chilled roots reggae today, perhaps indicating the preferences of the fabulously friendly blonde dreadlocked server.

We ordered the soup of the day (cream of parsnip with apple), the frittata of the day (kale, broccoli, Emmenthal), a tofu and avocado wrap and a freshly juiced juice. Everything was delicious, the soup a particular standout for me. The sandwich/frittata plates are served with a substantial helping of well-dressed salad (a rare feat, finding a well-dressed salad in any restaurant) and solid multigrain bread with sundried tomato spread.

I ordered jasmine green tea which came in a Bodum coffee plunger – a good idea in principle, but the plunger was a little loose, so I had a few moments of, “Oh boy, I hope it holds up!” :) I did get a free top-up of hot water though (without asking!), which was great.

The bathroom is fabulous (I imagine it used to be the bank manager’s office – worth checking out for its sheer size alone, but also very clean and new, and furnished with non-scented hand soap, which is a rarity again).

Overall, highly recommended. You can tell that intelligent human beings are involved in planning and running this restaurant daily. It felt like a bit of an oasis, and I think I’ll return many times. And I sincerely hope it does well. Toronto needs more restaurants like this.

Closed Mondays, Open Tuesday through Sunday. Hours and location on the website.

The Don Valley Brick Works consists of 16 heritage buildings and an adjacent 16-hectaire public park that includes the Weston Quarry Garden, wetlands, hiking trails, and wildflower meadows. From 1889 to 1984, the site was one of Canada’s pre-eminent brickyards. The Don Valley Pressed Brick Works Company produced a wide variety of bricks and kiln-fired clay products that built much of Toronto’s heritage buildings and many of Canada’s national landmarks including Winnipeg’s T. Eaton Building, Toronto’s Massey Hall and Casa Loma, Montreal’s Acadia Apartments and Moncton’s T. Eaton Building. (From: http://www.evergreen.ca/rethinkspace/)

Pictures from a weekend outing. I had to shoot around all the Japanese tourists and their tripods. Clearly, it’s a hot tip for tourists.

French-trained master baker Marc Thobor of Celestin fame has recently taken over the restaurant’s bakery counter and renamed it Thobors Boulangerie. It offers mostly beautiful standard French breads – baguettes, boules, fancy savoury or sweet variations, some croissants and a small variety of danishes, pains au chocolat and the like.

As an immigrant, I’m constantly in search of great bread in Toronto. Being German, I feel drawn to solid, chewy, darker sourdough and/or rye breads. Which are hard to come by: the Russian/Polish rye loaves are too light and fluffy, the Jewish varieties often have caraway seeds. Nice, but not pleasing to the German palate.

Discovering Thobors comes hot on the heels of a recent trip to Germany where we ate great bread – all kinds: seed-covered buns that were light and substantial all at once, the densest, moistest, most smooth-crusted rye bread you can imagine, and lovely 3, 5 or 7 grain breads that easily blew anything Whole Foods Market has ever made out of the water. To date, Dimpflmeier’s packaged rye breads have been the most consistent option… but they pale a little when compared to Thobors’ crunchy, fresh goodness.

I’m particularly enjoying the seeded baguettes (sesame and poppy), which have a pully, chewy bite. I like my bread to put up a bit of a fight. Pair these with a nice and simple cheese – maybe something like a Morbier – and you’ve got a very European-style quick meal.

Highly recommended. It’s actually worth making a trip up Mount Pleasant for. You could easily combine it with a visit to Bayview Avenue and its little food boutiques. But while there are now at least four bakeries in a one-block radius near Bayview and Millwood, you won’t find break as good as Marc Thobors’. My recommendation on Bayview is tostick with Alex Farm Products for cheese and Passion Fruits for excellent produce.

There’s an interesting interview with T.K.V. Desikachar, one of the founding fathers of modern yoga practice, in the March 2008 edition of the Indian news magazine Civil Society. It contains a number of interesting points, and I think the humility, simplicity and practicality of many of his and his school’s views are great. Yoga in the West, I think, is often taught either as a type of spiritual practice (by people who, when you see their tv shows, seem like earnest charlatans) or as a ‘performance sport’ with little focus on the individual’s physical and psychological needs.

The piece in Civil Society touches on a number of aspects around this. A key passage for me was about yoga and Hinduism:

[...] teachers were mixing Hinduism and yoga, presenting them as one, implying that if people wanted to follow yoga they had to follow the Hindu religion. Desikachar knew from his studies with his father that none of these practices followed the guidelines of Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras. For instance, Patanjali saw religious affiliation as a student’s personal choice not the teacher’s. If yoga is tied with Hinduism, then it would have to exclude people who may not be comfortable with its religious content.

What also resonates is Desikachar’s emphasis of individual healing as part of the process of studying yoga. Students come to KYM (Desikachar’s yoga centre) for many reasons, but often because they struggle with specific health issues.

An assessment is made of each person in his or her entirety. The student and teacher then understand each other through an evolving personal relationship. A course is designed for the individual and adapted according to the progress made. The personal factor plays a vital role.[...] Therapy at KYM includes helping those afflicted by psychological and emotional suffering. Here, too, the course is designed for the individual and adapted according to the progress made under the guidance of a supervisor.

This sounds enticingly different from yoga studios and schools in the West. Still, the spirit of this type of yoga was carried into the world by students of Desikachar’s. For instance, Vanda Scaravelli, an Italian disciple, brought some of these more interegrated, gentler, secular principles to Europe and North America. In Toronto, the Esther Myers Yoga Studio carries on aspects of this tradition today.

There’s an incredible feature of Toronto that I’m only discovering now: ravines. Before I moved to Toronto, this wasn’t even part of my vocabulary. A ravine is a small valley, often with an active stream, found in urban areas. Turns out the Toronto ravine system is quite extensive and provides beautiful pockets of green woodland in the middle of the city.

This weekend, a brisk, restorative walk through David A. Balfour Park and the “Vale of Avoca” ravine (who names these things? :) yielded these pictures. Sadly, I didn’t have my regular camera with me, so the contrast is pretty bad in these over-exposed phonecam pics. I want to go back and take detailed pictures of the graffiti everywhere.

As you can see, it’s a strange, almost mystical place, unexpected in the middle of the city bustle. On a misty day, you half expect to encounter fairies dressed in camo pants, or a group of trolls smoking weed near the riverbed.

There are multiple undocumented but reasonably well-maintained paths, some further up the slopes, some right down in the middle near the stream. What’s particularly delightful about this ravine is that it’s mostly empty, even on a beautiful, warm spring Sunday like yesterday. I think the ‘urban grit’ puts off many of the more middle class leisure walkers (who might prefer the Kay Gardner Beltline Park, a long linear trail of about 5km that occupies an old commuter train track from the 1890s). But it’s quiet (the city’s hum seems far away) and the air is good.

When I left the park, a bicycle cop was writing up two young men at the exit. One, a twenty-something with a red nose, bike messenger clothes, a bike and slurred speech advised me not to drink “down there” because he just got a ticket. I didn’t quite know what to say and mumbled something about “just walking.”

I think this blend of trees, trails, graffiti, concrete and urban decay is fantastic. Wear solid shoes.

It feels like a bit of an old topic. It’s been discussed many times before, and the outcome is pretty much always: be cautious. Don’t steal someone else’s Internet access. Depending on where you live, it could be a criminal offense to just jump onto an unprotected home wi-fi router and connect to the ‘Net. And, since you’re using someone else’s resources – presumably without their knowledge and consent – we’re told it’s just plain not very nice.

The other piece of advice that always goes with this is for anyone who has high-speed Internet access and uses a wireless router/access point to distribute it to various laptops, desktops and devices around the home: protect your network. Most wireless routers these days are trivial to set up, and their manuals make it child’s play to enable WEP/WPA, so there’s really no excuse for not practicing safe wi-fi.

And there’s the rub: unless you don’t want to – or can’t be bothered. In which case, my personal opinion is that anyone can jump on your ‘public’ network because you’ve made it fair game to do so. Again – in my personal opinion – I think you’ve made your network into just another node in an increasingly accessible wireless infrastructure that’s pretty pervasive, especially in large cities, especially in North America.

Being in a public spot in downtown Toronto (as I am right now), somewhere where there are lots of high-rise condo and office buildings, you really shouldn’t have to pay for wireless Internet access. Your challenge is more about where you are located physically and whether you have a high-enough, open-enough vantage point so that you’re within range of unprotected networks (most of which are residential).

There’s a slight security concern about making your traffic go through someone else’s network, of course. My sense is that you have three primary factors in your favour:

1. 90% of the time, your ‘provider’ won’t know you’re using his or her network.
2. Home routers are notoriously poor at logging network activities or data packets moving through them (and those are are good at it are operated by people who really know what they’re doing, and those people wouldn’t not protect their wireless networks)
3. If someone isn’t protecting their wireless network, there’s about a 50% chance they’re okay with it being used by anonymous users.

Now for the question of what’s okay and what’s not. We don’t want to get our ‘provider’ in trouble, and we don’t want to get in trouble ourselves. So here are some suggestions of what not to do when leeching wi-fi access:

• Download or upload gratuitous quantities of software, music or movies
• Use weird peer-to-peer protocols
• Download/upload porn or other materials for which someone could (maybe) get in trouble with their own access provider.

I think that using ‘borrowed’ networking time for email, surfing, reading/writing blogs, etc. is perfectly fine (note that I’m not giving you advice here or telling you what to do; I’m just saying what I think). These activities generate very low impact traffic that can easily piggyback on someone’s network without affecting them. If it gets too much for them, they can turn your access off by simply protecting their network. Until then, I am silently thankful to be borrowing their connection and respectful of their privacy, ethics and risks.

While I can’t comment on other cities, here in Toronto, the alternatives are pretty bad. The only ‘pervasive’ wireless network provider (in other words, not hot-spot based) in the downtown core is One Zone by Toronto Hydro Telecom. And that’s just brutal. Unreliable. Works only half the time (if that). Doesn’t work high up. Doesn’t work low down. Doesn’t work in areas that its own map says should work. Doesn’t work when there are a lot of people on it. Doesn’t work with good equipment. Doesn’t work with so-so equipment. It’s just not worth the money they’re asking for it: something like $30 per month, or day rates of around $10.

Wireless Toronto, on the other hand, is very cool: free wireless, simple rules, lots of access points. Sadly, I’m not really a ‘coffee house’ kind of guy, so the idea of seeking out a specific location to do my surfing doesn’t always work for me. But conceptually, I’m there. If it were pervasive, I’d pay for it under some co-op agreement – its politics are solid and its technology works a lot better than One Zone’s.