I’m on the “Red Rocket” again — a Toronto Transit streetcar, heading to work from The Beaches, where I’m staying at Strategic Coach’s guest house. Everything about that place has been put together with a wholly relaxing taste and elegance; it’s a challenge to accept that, yes, I’m allowed to stay there in such an up-market property and neighbourhood. A happy challenge that I’m willing to take on!
My flight over was… well, it was air-travel, which I find to be a tedious necessity. Air Canada was celebrating the inaugural flight of their Edinburgh-to-Toronto connection, so at the airport there were suits with droning speeches read from pages, and speeches, cake, coffee, and a ribbon-cutting. Meanwhile, though, in true Air Canada fashion, I’d had to wait an hour to check in, and the flight left an hour late. So all the self-congratulation seemed quite misguided, occurring as it did alongside rubbish service with no apologies.
This was also the flight crew’s first voyage on a plane painted up in the livery of a new branch of the company: Air Canada Rouge. The attendants wore grey hipster hats, cool grey leather shoes, and all their announcements were scripted in a breezy “Hey, we’re your pals!” slang that sounded all the more fake when repeated verbatim in French.
But whatever, it got me here. And it’s a thrill to be here.
Yesterday was my first day in the office, and within an hour of arriving I had nine new projects and I’d gone from a worn-out flatline of “Yeah, I do this for a living” to being excited again about what we do, thrilled to have the privilege to work with such smart, switched-on people, and jazzed about everyone’s plans for how to use the skills I want to develop. Oh, and I got a pay-rise. So a meaningful vision of future possibilities, plus social and financial rewards. What else could a guy want?
After work, I walked to The Annex and visited
The Beguiling, a shop devoted to comics and illustration. I guess because I’d sidelined drawing for so long I hadn’t really spent any time in there when I lived in Toronto, and I suppose my tendency from childhood until now was just to draw comics, not read them. Well, that’s changed, and this was a feast!
Despite being there for about an hour, I only picked up two little volumes, one by Dustin Harbin, whose work I’ve admired for a while, and another by someone the guy behind the counter said was local, and he thought his work was promising. All I know is the quality of his lines is supreme.
Toronto, it turns out, is a major centre for comics work. That was starting to spring up when I published doubleZero, but it’s really grown since then.
On the flight over, I watched a documentary called
Cartoon College, which I really enjoyed. (I was glad I’d bought it beforehand, because Khmer Canada Rouge’s in-flight entertainment, it turns out, is using your own iThingy’s wireless and battery to access shows via an app — which you had to have downloaded beforehand. I had it, but the pickings were slim.)
I had a lovely few days with my parents-in-law before flying out. I worked in Stirling during the day, then spent the evenings with them. We watched a lot of tennis, which I actually found exciting. And hooray for our boy Andy Murray. It’s a shame he’s such a glum Eeyore all the time. That said, if you could manufacture a personality that Scots could get behind it’d be someone like him: so not “above himself” that he’s practically buried in the ground.
One day while I was there, I finished my work early and figured I’d treat myself to a movie. Man of Steel was the only thing I felt remotely like seeing, and it was pretty much what I expected: stuffed full of CGI like a digital goose, and an okay but lifeless “reboot” of very familiar content.
The one scene that made me roll my eyes showed Jor-El/Clark visiting his Smallville priest to ask for advice. Clark’s handsome face occupies one half of the screen, while in the background we see a slightly out-of-focus stained glass window depicting Jesus.
Oh God.
At least when Stephen King named his character in The Green Mile “John Coffey” he acknowledged the reference and said, “Hey, this isn’t rocket science,” but this was like those old TV adverts I saw as a kid that were selling wild animal cards: the trick was to spot the animal that changed its appearance, and if you could name it when you placed your order, you got a plastic box to put the cards in. So they showed and elephant, its trunk flashed on and off in an unsettling way, and the voice-over said, “Did you see that?!”
So, yes, this was like that, but with Jesus and Superman. And the shot lingered, just in case you didn’t get it.
But here’s my beef with that, aside from the total lack of subtlety or trust in the viewer: it’s a perfect reflection of the bait-and-switch contemporary culture does between science and belief. (I’m not a Christian, so it’s not that I’m defending Jesus-the-brand, nor am I talking about him as a literal reality but as a mental construct.) It’s a category error: Superman is science fantasy, Jesus is a myth. You can pretend to be Superman, but you can’t aspire to be him. (That “becoming” is why Luke Skywalker captured my imagination as a kid and Captain Kirk didn’t.)
The community of people who talk online about science really, really — like, really — love to rubbish religion, faith, and the likes, but science is incapable of addressing or describing consciousness and inner experience yet is either sold like it can, or like the need for a meaningful context is silly and deluded. Everything is reducible; no other possibilities are permitted.
Superman is a closed loop product for kids. There’s nothing else you can really do with him. Jesus — at his scriptural basics — is a good idea. Not the dogmatic cruft, but the person who stood at the intersection of the worlds and said, as Douglas Adams put it, “Wouldn’t it be good if we were all nice to each other for a change?” (“…So they nailed him to a tree.”)
Coming back to Earth, I had a great night out with friends last night, thanks to my mum, who was trawling around Facebook and noticed that my best friend, Cosgrove, and his husband Eric were in town. I joined the group of friends they’d gathered together, a few of whom I knew a bit, and one, Bert, who’s been a great friend for a long time. So through happenstance I got to reconnect with some people I really like. That’s what I want this trip to be about: being with people who matter, rather than going to shops or movies or hiding out.
