your fate is my toilet

cheese burger spring roll by 'lee restaurant' at '1000 tastes of toronto'

rating: Ford Model T / 10.0

PHILIP GLASS WORLD PREMIERE at LUMINATO

I'm low into the ground, maybe two stories down; the lighting here is low as well - a dim affair altogether. The curved concrete walls envelop the room around me -- rows and rows of computers facing each other with blank emotionless looking expressions. Some students are scattered among the rows -- mostly in a sparse sort of way. It's after hours -- something like that. I'm sitting on a chair and my desktop screen glows with tiled background of some obscure post-impressionist painting - likely made by the website owner herself - overlaid with her own blog. Fish busily swim in meandering circles around the page's header image. My earphones are plugged into the computer. I click on one of the YouTube videos embedded onto the webpage. It is a Max Richter song called Embers. I switch over to another application while the song begins playing. 

I'm staring strangely at the screen in front of me. My mind can't move; it's wrapped in this unrelenting paralysis. I'm still transfixed on the webpage I just left. My mind's been left standing there for two minutes now -- at the fringe of some vast sea of redemptive power. 

When I get back home, I open Max Ricther's Wikipedia page and some other articles about him. I frequently stumble on some important music figure named Philip Glass. The internet is pretty insistent on the fact he had a great influence on Max Richter, and also on the fact that he's one of the most significant composers of the past century. I open YouTube and type 'Philip Glass' into the search box. I click onto a video -- and then another -- and then maybe ten more. They all sound so different from each other, yet they all carry this unspeakable quality that seems to keep holding onto you. But it holds onto you in a way that assures you that this is what you want. 

This is what I want. I want to be held captive by Philip Glass. Hold me captive, Philip Glass. Don't let me go! I wonder to myself why I had never listened to this beautiful music before.

A few months later I'm sitting at home on a couch my parents likely spent way too much money on. A commercial for the Luminato festival washes onto the television screen in front of me. It is the only commercial that washes onto the screen, as opposed to all the others which just appear on the screen when it is their turn - almost in a manner of sheer obligation. This one washed onto the screen. What made it wash onto the screen was the beautiful music that hung behind it.

Now I'm standing at the verge of a crowd still congregating in a public square somewhere around the Entertainment District. At this point in my life, I'd missed a startling performance of Einstein On The Beach as well as the Scott Hicks documentary on Philip Glass showing at the TIFF light box thing. I should have felt sore, but I didn't. They were about to have some world premiere thing of a brand new Philip Glass composition; it was a free show too. The Toronto Symphony Orchestra hadn't performed a free outdoor show in around a decade, some important festival guy told the audience.

I stood here wondering why Philip Glass would choose Toronto. Now Philip Glass, at least to me, seems to be some perverted genius so wrapped up in fully realizing the concept of his own art. This composition was in fact premiering in two places simultaneously. The other location was Baltimore, Maryland. This composition's name was 'Overture for 2012'. It was a celebratory work to commemorate the 200 years of peace between the US and Canada. It was also directly making reference to Tchaikovsky's '1812 Overture'. Now Tchaikovsky's piece was about France's invasion of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars. Philip Glass's was a reference to the North American conflict known as the War of 1812, fought between the United States and Canada, which was then still considered the British Empire. Both Baltimore and Toronto were hotspots during the war, each representing fortified centers of each side. To me, this overture was a reenactment of sorts done two hundred years after the fact. How perverted of him to have each of the war's fortified centers premiere his new composition simultaneously. 

By the time the composition came to a close, I felt awfully used by Philip Glass. How horrible of him. Yet I was wafting in this transfixed ecstasy. There was that unexplainable enjoyment of being used by him; it was that horrible paradox again. Philip Glass was the type of genius that used you, but in a way that would make you beg him to keep using you. This was the very quality of his music. It held onto you, but in a way that made you repeatedly whisper, over and over again, never let go of me. Hold me captive, Philip Glass; never let go of me.