Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Canada travelog #4
Toronto, ON · Sat, 23 Aug 2025. 4pm.

This afternoon we met the first of Hawk's long-lost relatives in Canada to visit an art gallery. It turns out they were never "long lost" in the sense of having been stranded on a deserted island. It's more like her great-grandfather, when he emigrated from Latvia to the United States in the late 1800s or early 1900s, lost contact with his entire family. He told his descendants, when they asked about their relatives in the Old World, "They're all dead." 😳💀🤦 It's not clear why he told his children and grandchildren this. They believed him, though, as between the Russians and the Nazis it was totally plausible all their relatives in Latvia had been murdered by 1945.

Anyway, the art gallery. I thought touring a local art gallery together was a weird way to say, "Hey, our family has been split for 4 generations, let's get back together," but I decided I would try not to challenge things too much. Modern art has a way of inviting challenge, though. And by the time I was even near the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO) I found it impossible to bite my acerbic tongue.

"We're next to the sculpture of an elephant," my inlaws texted me.



"This looks like a modern-art elephant," I texted back, including a picture of the above.

That sculpture, BTW, is titled "Large Two Forms". It's in Toronto's Grange Park next to the AGO.

My inlaws sent their address by naming the streets there were standing at the corner of instead of just saying "The elephant." When we met up I saw this elephant:



"So, somebody saw a pile of discarded leather chairs and cushions at a junkyard and thought, 'These look like an elephant!''" I asked.

Yes, they look like an elephant, my inlaws assured me.

"My elephant looks better," I challenged them. "Plus, I reject your orthodoxy that all elephants have four legs that reach from the ground all the way up to their bodies."

Modern art. 🧐🤪🤣

While Hawk's parents couldn't bring themselves to see things my way, her brother appreciated my view.

"Artists are, by-and-large, people with untreated mental illness or deep personality flaws who find wealthy patrons to fund their ideas... but not psychiatric help," I quipped.

"Shh!" Marty scolded. "You're saying the quiet part out loud!"

Marty then invited me to join him in analyzing a fire hose in one of the gallery rooms as if it were art.

"The loops of hose hung together show order in the face of chaos," I mused. "Though the negative space above the hoses is unbalanced by a tight border with the frame on the other three sides. The technique here is weak."

Do you think I'm being too hard on modern art? Well, consider this centerpiece in the room as we rounded the corner from the fire hose:



"It's as if the artist went camping and was equally inspired by both a picnic table and an elk, and decided to sculpt a combination of the two!" I said breathlessly.

"Either that, or this is a prop from a rejected scene in the 1982 movie The Thing."

Do you think those snarky ideas are too outlandish? Try this real explanation (paraphrased) from a placard in the room:



Now, tell me. If those three explanations, my two plus the one about Rodney King, were offered up in TV game show where a contestant is told 3 stories about an item, two of which are lies and only one of which is the truth, how likely would you pick Option C as the truth?

Also, maybe Canadian artists concerned about racism could confront their own country's racist history instead of banging their pots about the US. Our current toddler-president and his supporters notwithstanding, there are plenty in the US who understand and criticize the shameful parts of our history. It's a level of honest introspection I have seen in literally no other country I've visited.

Australia Travelog #7
Afoot in Sydney - Mon, 25 Dec 2023, 8:30am

Our morning sightseeing on Monday began with some of the things we wrapped up walking past Sunday afternoon. It was gloomy then and starting to rain, plus we were tired, so we'd lost patience for taking things in. Today, though, we're fresh, and the weather's better.



Two streets over from our hotel is Hyde Park, a fairly large urban park in Sydney. On the far side is St. Mary's Cathedral, as you can see in the photo above. St. Mary's is where there was "No room at the inn" yesterday. In the foreground in the photo is Hyde Park's Archibald Fountain.

Archibald Fountain is named for J.F. Archibald, a publishing magnate who donated the funds to have it built. Isn't that often how monuments are? "This is monument honors the wealthy person who spent the money to build this monument with their name on it." 🙄

Well, okay, Archibald didn't commission it just to honor himself, he commissioned it to honor the French for their association with Australia in World War I. He insisted the art be sculpted by a French artist, and the French artist they chose dug deeply into French history to depict... Greek myth. Yes, apparently the French consider that French history.



The fountain depicts the classic Greek French figures of Apollo, Diana, Pan, and Theseus. In the scene above Monsieur Theseus kills Le Minotaur. Allez les Bleus, Allez les Bleus!

From the park we walked north by northeast, angling toward a different part of the city than we visited yesterday. Soon we reached the Art Gallery of New South Wales. It wasn't a place we planned to visit. We're not big on art galleries. We're also not big on giant spiders.



Yes, there's really a 20' tall spider in front of the NSW Art Gallery. And yes, that thing under it is an egg sac. And yes, there are eggs in the egg sac. Actually they're rocks as best as I could tell from looking up from underneath. They're big rocks, 6-8 inches across. I guess that's the size of giant spider eggs.

So far this morning has felt like instead of a tour map I need a Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Thus it's not surprising when we saw this bird all over the place in Sydney...



...Our first thought was, "Ha, ha, that looks like a stirge!"

Stirges in D&D are bird-like creatures that suck blood from living beings. They fly at victims, clamp on their shoulders with their big talons, and plunge their long beak into the neck to suck blood.



It's not a stirge, of course. It's an ibis. Specifically, it's an Australian White Ibis. And it uses that long beak not to plunge into hapless low-level adventurers' necks and suck their blood but to root around in loose ground for bugs and grubs and stuff.

Another on the list of things I never did when I lived in L.A. years ago was visit "The Getty". The J. Paul Getty Museum at The Getty Center, as its full name goes, is an art museum perched on a hillside overlooking West L.A. It's not even that far from where I used to live. I can practically see my old apartment from it. More on that in a bit.

One of the newspaper stories I read about The Getty years ago was that the buildings and the view were as amazing as any of the art inside. It mentioned all the swaths of travertine stone.... When I got there on Sunday I saw enough Travertine that I could believe the average elevation in Italy sank a few meters after they mined all this stuff out!



The environs are stunning. Fancy stone everywhere. Gardens. Fountains. From the entrance building we looked at the doors to the first art display, turned right, and started exploring the gardens.



From the many observation decks on the buildings there are expansive views across the L.A. basin. I was able to see the towers of downtown L.A. (left in the picture above) west to Century City and Westwood (center) across the 405 (right) and all the way to the Pacific Ocean (not pictured). This is an example of where I could practically see the apartment I used to live in years ago. It was a few blocks away from where Santa Monica Boulevard crossed the 405. You can't see the intersection, per se, but I recognized in the view the trio of buildings (which I always called "the three sisters") right there and could place my old apartment fairly accurately from that.

But the art? Yeah, there's art. It's inside. It's the kind of stuff that stupidly wealthy people acquire. The kind of stuff that used to be in the Palace of Versailles, owned by King Louis XIV or members of his court. Y'know, now owned by people who consider themselves the modern equivalent of King Louis XIV or his royal court. But outside....



Outside, even a 12-lane highway looks nice. This is the 405 rising up into the Sepulveda Pass.

Inside, there's more art. We looked at it. We were... not entirely impressed. Around 3:30 we called it a day and drove our car on the 405 over the Sepulveda Pass to get late lunch at a delicious Mexican restaurant.