Tafelmusik 10.11 Concert Season

Jeanne Lamon, Music Director

Ivars Taurins, Director, Chamber Choir

Chalumeau: (quoted from Colin Savage): a single-reed instrument, descended from the simple reed pipes of Greek, Roman and Middle Eastern antiquity, and produced in four sizes, three of which [were heard on Saturday night].

I, to my knowledge and recollection, have never before heard music produced by a chalumeau. I nearly swooned over the balcony when the instrument’s sweet and gentle notes lifted themselves up into the rafters of the church and floated into my consciousness.

Like the sound of tentative songbirds, the happy notes chirped and twittered, carrying me right out of my seat and back to the children when they were young. I saw Sarah sitting in front of her mirrored dresser, weaving her beautiful hair into a French braid. A few feet away from her, down the hall, Noam played on the floor with his trucks – all of them yellow – methodically making his way around the corner and into his room, his engine noises hardly perceptible to the human ear. Pabby sat on the window ledge in his bedroom, eating a peanut butter sandwich and staring out at the snow on Grafton Street, imagining himself decked out in hockey sweater #99.

My reverie extended over several years, the children growing older with the songs. (I suppose they aren’t even called songs, are they?) Sarah, hatless, knelt in her yard planting orange and yellow Gerber daisies. Noam walked in the rain down Bank Street, pushing a stroller, headed for his favourite coffee shop. Pablo sat in the hospital waiting for his radiation treatment. He was smiling and flirting with the nurses. All of the children were happy, despite everything, and the music of the chalumeau washed over me and brought relief.

Sometimes when I sit in Trinity-St. Paul’s and listen to the Tafelmusik concerts, I find myself becoming slightly annoyed. Mostly music lovers reside there, I know, and most of them are able to – many of them wanting you to know that they are able to, appalled when you are unable to – recite the piece, the period, the various orchestrations, the what not of the what-have-yous and the whos of the who’s who.

And it isn’t that I don’t care or haven’t any interest in remembering. My brain just doesn’t work that way. You can take me to a thousand Tafelmusik concerts, and I won’t be able to tell you from week to week whose music is being played, on what instruments, or when the piece was written. (If you ask me who smiled or frowned up at me; who looked wistful, tired or cheerful, or how many times the audience laughed and cried, these things I can often recall.)

My point is, I suppose, that what matters most to me is where the music takes me; how it makes me feel. There isn’t enough money in the world to pay for the experience of sitting in the balcony and listening to those songbirds; of being transported, as if by magic, to those moments with my children when we were essentially happy and well, and together. I wouldn’t trade that experience for a limitless number of lessons on composers, cantatas or even the chalumeau…however inspiring, however beautiful.

The important point, which has nothing to do with me, is that no matter your rationale or your experience, an evening spent listening to the marvellous, mellifluous mastery (how could I ignore this musical moment of meaningful alliteration?) of the Tafelmusik orchestra and choir is transformative. Life affirming and restorative, these talented, inspired musicians and singers will take you wherever you want, and need, to go, even if it’s all the way back to an apartment in Charlottetown in 1985.

First Person Narrative National Essay Contest

LGBTQ Call for Submissions

First Person Narrative National Essay Contest

Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives

This Year’s Topic ~ Where I Come From

Essay Length ~ 2000-2500 words.

1^st prize $500.00

2^nd prize $300.00

3^rd prize $200.00

With a special prize of $100.00 for Best Under Nineteen

Prizewinning essays will be selected by award-winning writer and CBC Radio Host

Bill Richardson and by Anne Fleming

critically acclaimed author and creative writing teacher.

Submission Due Date ~ November 1, 2010

Prize Winners announced ~ December 10, 2010

Entries should be typed, single-sided, and double-spaced with your name, address and story title on a separate sheet. Parent/Guardian signature required for anyone under 19. Forms can be found on our web site. Entry fee is $10.00 payable to Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives by cheque. Free for anyone under 19. Contest details available at www.clga.ca

Send your stories, with payment, to

Managing Editor, QA

106 Walpole Avenue

Toronto ON M4L 2J3

The contest is open to all ages and all backgrounds.

All entries will be considered for publication in Keeping Our Stories Alive, Volume 1, A Journal of the Canadian Lesbian and Gay Archives.

Falling Prey

Cladosporium: that which makes the lining of your nose swell to twice its normal size, causing you to sneeze and gasp for air and clutch at Kleenex all through the night. (Sleep my child, and peace attend thee…)

Not since I lived in Ottawa have I experienced significant side effects from mould spores, which were (although not half as bad as those festering in that Leamington swamp) paralyzing this time of year. I spent entire Thanksgivings creeping about the house, trying to suck in remnants of second-hand air while staring wistfully at lumpy mashed potatoes and Yorkshire chicken.

Wikipedia states that “[c]ladosporium species are rarely pathogenic to humans, but have been reported to cause infections of the skin [yes] and toenails, as well as sinusitis [yes] and pulmonary infections [heading there]. If left untreated, these infections could turn into respiratory infections like pneumonia.

The airborne spores of Cladosporium species are significant allergens, and in large amounts they can severely affect asthmatics [yes] and people with respiratory diseases. Prolonged exposure may weaken the immune system. Cladosporium species produce no major mycotoxins of concern, but do produce volatile organic compounds (VOCs) associated with odours.”

At first I thought the fault lay with the annatto, beet juice and maltodextrin lacing the Blue Menu frozen fruit non-dairy smoothies that I’ve been eating this past week. After all, every chubby woman knows that the second she finds something low-fat and delectable, the tables are about to turn, heading straight toward and landing on her cheesehead, hard.

It isn’t difficult to imagine, however, how something that was once pureed and that can now, at room temperature, stand upright on a stick for forty minutes without melting, might have properties only pertinent to plastic factory physicists.

Okay, so I say all this allegedly, but trust me: I watched the remnants of one of those frozen treats as it attempted to melt yesterday, and in the meantime I baked seven pies, hand-washed nine loads of laundry, and cleaned the garage (and we don’t even have a garage).

Anyway, you can see how dizzy-headed and silly these spores have left me…sitting here on my swivel chair, slopping tea all over my favourite waffle shirt, the wind outside my window whipping pollen at an unfathomable rate, taunting me, laughing in my swollen face, mocking my skin-infected cheek and forehead, deriding my unhappy lymph-node neck and head.

For now then, at least until things settle down, I am going to have to bypass the daily headlines: Katy Perry Shows Cleavage on Sesame Street; Ashton Kutcher and Demi Moore Tweet Photos of Themselves in Bed Together (is it me, or are headlines out-distancing their tweets?), and Lindsay Lohan Visits the Homeless (all of which are better understood as…Keeping Abreast of Desperate Young Girls; Twits Abound, and What I Did To Stave Off Parole).

No wonder my head hurts.

Achoo!

Premonition

'Twas a year ago and the moon was bright
(Oh, I remember so well, so well);
I walked with my love in a sea of light,
And the voice of my sweet was a silver bell.
And sudden the moon grew strangely dull,
And sudden my love had taken wing;
I looked on the face of a grinning skull,
I strained to my heart a ghastly thing.

'Twas but fantasy, for my love lay still
In my arms, with her tender eyes aglow,
And she wondered why my lips were chill,
Why I was silent and kissed her so.
A year has gone and the moon is bright,
A gibbous moon, like a ghost of woe;
I sit by a new-made grave to-night,
And my heart is broken –- it's strange, you know.

Robert Service

Wherefore…art?

I am the first one here, inevitably, hating to come when any eyes might be upon me (as if the whole world is waiting for, looking at, me me me me me me me.)

The room is essentially as I imagined it: big, bright; holding about twenty slightly sloping white desks (they probably have a proper name) – suitable for art work.

A nice man named Andrew has just appeared. He is, he told me, in a basic drawing class on Monday nights (voila!) and – wait – here come a group of women and they seem to know one another. They like this classroom better than one of the women liked the art room at Northern District School, wherever that is (although I can guess at least part of the location). (Apparently, this messy issue made the local news.)

About ten minutes ago as I walked toward the school, I came past a group of footballers (Glee), who looked raring to go out on the field. It’s a beautiful evening – warm and glowing – and just right, I imagine, for playing football.

Meantime, I can’t believe I’m in an art class – acrylic painting – and although I am incapable of drawing a stick figure, I do have an eye (just one), or so I’m told, for colour, having tested a perfect 200 on the dichromatic colour scale. (I made the name up just now because I can’t remember what it was called; it was a colour-identification test we used for ophthalmic patients.)

The atmosphere feels a bit church-like, the teacher looking a little under the weather as she pulls her supplies out of her bag and stands, very tired it seems, in front of the now eight or so attendees. Class begins in five minutes.

~

Well, class began, lasted three enjoyable hours, then ended. Had I anything to show for it, good or bad, I might have posted it here, but I took the high road and tossed my first experimental sketches along with my blob-test of some of the new paints I got last weekend. Other than that, though, I do plan on keeping a record of my work and, as bad as it will likely be, am happy to share with anyone who thinks they aren’t talented enough to take an art class. If I can do it, you can, too!

Besides, I think it will be fun to post something other than migraine-inducing diatribes against horrible politicians and badly scripted films, or put up poetry that isn’t mine. (Although, poetry that is mine….)

The teacher, as it turned out, might have been tired, but she was knowledgeable, prepared, patient, and helpful, and who could possibly ask for more than that (unless it came on a plate with a side of pickles)?

I have to go now, because in the morning I must go out and buy several paint brushes (I can’t remember even half of what I learned about them last night), some kind of board (masonite: I looked it up), a few knives (painting and matte), some glosses and mixers (Oh: gloss medium, modelling paste and retarder), and a plastic tablecloth. Sounds like a forensic experiment, I know, but ladies and gentlemen – this is art!

The Hare Psychopathy Checklist

I wish the Hare Psychopathy checklist list had been available when I was in my twenties and dating. It might – I hope it would – have stopped me in my tracks, preventing me from making one of the more serious mistakes of my young life.

Still, I am relieved that when I took the test last week I did not qualify as a psychopath, which is apparently true for most women. For whatever reasons, psychopathic behaviour – not to be confused with antisocial personality disorder – generally misses us.

I was initially directed to an article – “The Making of a Psychopath: Why They Don’t Care: They Can’t” – in the September/October issue of Scientific American Mind (page 22), ISBN 70989 38530. I have long been worried about someone I know, and wanted to see – well, no, I didn’t want to see, but sometimes confirmation is necessary. The only way a person can help is to become knowledgeable.

Here, in the article, I was to discover that 0.5-1% (250,000 Americans, 25,000 Canadians) of the general male population are afflicted, many of them working alongside of us, sharing an occasional meal with us, or sleeping in bed beside us at night. (To clarify: Don was as far from psychopathy as I am from slim.)

The highest possible test score (0-2 points on 20 criteria) is 40, anyone with a score of 30 or more being considered psychopathic. According to statistics, the average score is 4, and many people make it into the teens and 20s, the magazine citing these individuals as, among other types, “the bullying boss, the drifter, the irresponsible guy who is always milking the generosity of friends and lovers.”

Here then, is the checklist, which is divided into three categories:

Antisocial Behaviour:

• need for stimulation and proneness to boredom
• parasitic lifestyle [taking without giving; at the expense of the host; often poisonous]
• poor behavioural control
• sexual promiscuity
• lack of realistic long-term goals
• impulsivity
• irresponsibility
• early behaviour problems
• juvenile delinquency
• parole or parole violations [of course, you have to be caught first, and the psychopath, charming by nature, often eludes the law]

Emotional/Interpersonal Traits:

• glibness and superficial charm
• grandiose sense of self-worth
• pathological lying
• conning and manipulativeness
• lack of remorse or guilt
• shallow affect [defined as a tendency for genuine emotion to be short lived and egocentric, with an overall cold demeanour that can be covered by affected charm]
• callousness and lack of empathy
• failure to accept responsibility for one’s actions

Other Factors:

• committing a wide variety of crimes
• having many short-term marital [or marital-like] relationships

There are other traits that psychopaths share, as the article clearly outlines. But what I found heartening in all of this is the current belief that there is help. One-on-one therapy called decompression is one approach that psychotherapists are using on delinquent teens, whereby the cycle of negative behaviour/punishment/negative behaviour is being eradicated. Brain and genetic studies are also on-going, and a person can only imagine what modern science has yet to uncover.

In fact, sometime within the past month or so, I watched a documentary on this subject – I think the key figure was either a neurologist or psychologist, but oh, my memory! – whose pre-frontal lobe and DNA testing, as it turned out, highlighted him as the lone sociopath in his immediate family. [He had had a C-T Scan, which had shown the characteristic blue-coloured trouble spot in the front of his brain, and so he had investigated further.]

When he examined what made him different from other sociopaths, he found that throughout his young life he had been surrounded by a loving, stable, and positive family where he had been appreciated, encouraged, and attended to in ways that many of us only dream of. In turn, he had married, most happily, and is now raising a loving family of his own. Clearly, something circumvented that part of his brain that would otherwise have left him in psychological peril.

I suppose, in the end, I do not quite understand why we expect people who have these sorts of monumental glitches (which are blamed on genetics in about 50% of the cases) to behave in ways that most of us understand as human: compassionately, honestly, with integrity. I understand the frustration that comes with knowing and having to live with and suffer at the hands of a pathological charmer, not being able to make any headway or help them become happier and healthier. But it’s that thing my mother taught me: those who know better, do better.

Trying to make a psychopath humane is like asking a tiger to change its stripes. Without decades of investigation and years of persistence and uncompromised love (and perhaps not even then),  someone whose brain is malfunctioning is not going to change just because we ask it – ask them – to. I know, because I did everything within my power (which never felt close to enough) and nothing, absolutely nothing, worked.

Rob Ford: Penny-wise or Pounding Foolish?

What ludicrous snobbery. What ridiculous illogic. What a great pile of putridness.

It’s okay for Rob Ford to have been arrested for and charged with

• assault
• drug possession
• driving under the influence
• domestic dispute
• uttering death threats

and for making asinine comments:

1. "I can't support bike lanes. Roads are built for buses, cars, and trucks. My heart bleeds when someone gets killed, but it's their own fault at the end of the day."
2. “If you are not doing needles and you are not gay, you won't get AIDS probably."
3. "Oriental people [are] slowly taking over [because they] work like dogs."
4. “I can’t remember exactly what it was. I wasn’t drunk. [I] shared “a couple bottles” or “a couple of litres” of wine with [my] wife. [M]aybe I shouldn’t have been driving.”
5. Mr. Ford endorses the views of a fundamentalist Christian pastor who said same-sex marriage could “dismantle” a “healthy democratic civilization.” Appearing alongside Pastor Wendell Brereton, Mr. Ford says: “We’re together. We have the same thoughts.” He adds: “I support traditional marriage. I always have. But if people want to, to each your own. I’m not worried about what people do in their private life. I look out for taxpayers’ money.”
6. The Toronto Sun reports that Mr. Ford offers to help an ill man “score” the powerful painkiller OxyContin in a taped phone conversation. “I’ll try buddy, I’ll try,” Mr. Ford tells Dieter Doneit-Henderson. “I don’t know this shit, but I’ll fucking try to find it.” A few moments later Mr. Ford asks: “What does OxyContin go for on the street, so I have an idea?” Mr. Ford later accuses Mr. Doneit-Henderson of setting him up, saying he only suggested buying illegal narcotics to get a scary stalker off the phone.
7. During a council debate over a pothole, Mr. Ford calls fellow Councillor Gloria Lindsay Luby “a joke. She’s a waste of time. A waste of skin.”
8. During a council debate over speeding up construction of affordable housing units, Mr. Ford says: “People do not want government housing built in the city of Toronto. They want roads fixed, more police presence, but they don’t want more government housing that will depreciate the value of their property.”
9. Mr. Ford questions the utility of grant programs for transgender and transsexual people during a council debate. “I don’t understand. No. 1, I don’t understand a transgender, I don’t understand, is it a guy dressed up like a girl or a girl dressed up like a guy? And we’re funding this for, I don’t know, what does it say here? We’re giving them $3,210?”
10. During a council debate on whether there should be homeless shelters across the city, rather than only downtown, Mr. Ford says: “This is an insult to my constituents to even think about having a homeless shelter in their ward. And you want me to have a public meeting to discuss this? Why don’t we have a public lynching?”
11. During a council budget debate, Mr. Ford calls fellow Councillor George Mammoliti a “Gino-boy.” Mr. Mammoliti says the remark is a racial slur: “I heard it in school. Hearing it at city hall shocks me.” Mr. Ford denies making the remark.
12. Mr. Ford questions a grant for a video about homosexuality in Toronto’s South Asian community, telling The National Post: “I have no problem giving money out to physically or mentally handicapped children or seniors, but spending $5,000 on this video is disgusting, it is absolutely disgusting to spend this amount of money on this, whatever it was called, video.”

…as long as he is a big, tough, no-nonsense, dishonest, racist, homophobic, sexist, violent, classist, really stupid – which is key – meaty guy who bears no resemblance to those high falutin’ lawyer types who run around in expensive suits layin’ down the law/s…

Oh my God.

What idiocy. And how monumentally depressing. Why does one wrong person (David Miller) mean that someone like Rob Ford is right? Or even less wrong? And what happened to our Mel Lastman memories?

You remember Mayor Mel, the man so many Torontonians initially lauded; the one who, after his wife Marilyn was caught shoplifting from an Eaton's store in Toronto, threatened to kill then-CITY-TV reporter Adam Vaughan unless he stopped reporting on his family?

The man who said to the Toronto reporter about the Olympic Games, “"What the hell do I want to go to a place like Mombasa? I'm sort of scared about going out there, but the wife is really nervous. I just see myself in a pot of boiling water with all these natives dancing around me.”

The man who, during the 2003 SARS crisis, said in an interview on CNN when asked what the World Health Organization was doing about the crisis: "They don't know what they're talking about. I don't know who this group is. I've never heard of them before."

The man who, during his reign as mayor, held a surprise news conference alongside his wife, announcing that he had had a 14-year extramarital affair with Grace Louie, a former Bad Boy employee. Louie, along with her two sons by Lastman, sued for six million dollars, claiming that they were his illegitimate children but had not received sufficient child support. Lastman denied responsibility for the two children, and successfully fought them off when they tried to claim a share of his estate, although it was already revealed that he was indeed their father.

The man who served for two terms?

And if you are one of those people missing the significance of the comparison, then you are probably going to vote for Rob Ford even if he has someone tied up in the trunk of a car.

As if those ridiculous, shameful, put-on riots during the G20 Summit were not embarrassing and damaging enough, but we have to cheer on this functional, regressive, unenlightened, lacking-in-nuance Neanderthal?

Tell me this, then:

Is Rob Ford the person you would want to marry?

Is Rob Ford the person you would want your daughter to marry?

Is Rob Ford the person you would want as a son?

Is Rob Ford the person you would want to call father?

Is Rob Ford the person you would want determining immigration in a city that prides itself on its enormous and magnificent immigrant population? You know, the same population who drive our buses, clean our houses, wait on us in restaurants, pay extra money to attend our schools, and who also work as lawyers, nurses, financiers, construction workers, plumbers, psychiatrists, archaeologists, surgeons and civil servants to support and keep this city running?

Is Rob Ford someone you’d want behind the wheel of your car, especially when he can’t remember whether he has had a few glasses or a few litres of wine, or when he is angry with – raging against – you?

Is Rob Ford someone you would want taking care of your AIDS-afflicted brother or sister or mother or father or child?

Is Rob Ford someone you would like driving behind you while you negotiate bike lanes and traffic?

Is Rob Ford someone you would want teaching (Ethics, English, Journalism, Psychology, Labour Management, Gender Studies, Medicine, Law…) our public, high school or university students?

Is Rob Ford someone you would want to hear describing anyone as “a waste of skin”?

Is Rob Ford someone you want – especially in this economy, where any one of us could be out of a job and our homes in less than a month – denying people rights and access to or availability of homeless shelters?

If Rob Ford is unsuitable for any one of those tasks and positions, then why would you want to vote for him as Mayor?

We used to laugh a lot up here north of the 49th parallel when George Dubya Bush was elected – twice elected, in fact – as President of the United States. If I had a dollar for every student, friend, co-worker, family member, or person on the street who mocked, outright ridiculed, lambasted, derided, criticized, and scorned the lunacy of the American public decision in voting in this ridiculous, corrupt, remarkably stupid, contemptibly dishonest individual, I would be rich.

Well get ready, everyone. Because sooner than later, if we elect Rob Ford as Mayor of Toronto, that’s what everyone else will be saying about us.

You mark my words.

TIFF: Bad Faith is Gruesomely Bad

Bad Faith fails on every level: as a thriller, as film noir, as black comedy, as a murder mystery. Even its title is erroneous, if one assumes that bad faith really does mean “an intentional or malicious refusal to perform some duty or contractual obligation, or where the rights of someone else are intentionally or maliciously infringed upon.” Self-preservation generally precludes malice or malicious intent, at least in legal terms as I understand them, and the two leads in this story are so wacky that one can hardly accuse them of anything that hinges on the contractual.

In fact, I am left to wonder how many holes a plot can contain before it turns in on itself, somewhat like a bedbug infestation that devours its way through Egyptian cotton, leaving the fabric pitted and shred.

While I am as keen as the next person to sit on the edge of my chair (as it seems I have been doing throughout this season of festival films), I don’t remember the last time, if ever, I have practically nodded off in the cinema – certainly never before during a movie where little kittens are suffocated, eyes are gouged out (actually, that’s not true. They’re bayoneted in), and serial killers run rampant through the dark and daylight of the city (in this case, Gothenburg), their crimes witnessed repeatedly by the female lead, played to order by a withering Sonja Richter.

Furthermore, I am never one to shy away from coincidence. Truth be told, Thomas Hardy is one of my favourite writers, and he knows a thing or two about coincidence, having been sorely criticised for the same by half the people I know. That said, just how many murders can one woman happen upon in one week, let alone during an evening stroll? And how many times can a person witness a crime – no one in sight for miles, it seems – and manage to repeatedly escape the killer? And is it me, or is Sweden rife with only the crazed, the crazy, the rude and misogynistic?

Right from the film’s start, I was reminded of the hilarious Ingmar Bergman parodies I have seen (SCTV and French & Saunders leap to mind) (oh, if only Bad Faith had come close to the same vicinity as Bergman), and I missed John Candy more than ever, thinking what he might have done with this film and all of those ‘staring’ bits. Very scary!

No matter, I can’t get enough of going to the movies, especially during the Toronto International Film Festival week. And as a middle-aged urban-dwelling ESL teacher, I think I understand a thing or two about cultural differences, which is why I generally love documentaries and World Cinema films more than anything else. Even when a film doesn’t rank a ten out of ten, I can often overlook what for me are (that is, arguably) its weaknesses and focus on the music and the cinematography, which, in the case of tonight’s movie, were (or could have been) truly captivating.

That said, Bad Faith is one of the worst films I have paid to see in a long time. Its cynical, gratuitous, pretentious, illogical and working so hard to be so many things all at once that it fails to make its mark in any way at all. If great cinema is what you want, you are far better off spending your money on any of the other films I have had the pleasure of seeing this week: Behind Blue Skies; Tears of Gaza; The Human Resources Manager; Aftershock; Big Picture; Another Year, and my absolute favourite, Home for Christmas.

Tomorrow we are off to see The Trip and Jack Goes Boating. I have every good faith that these films are going to make me forget that every once in a while even the Toronto Film Festival slips a deploringly bad film past its viewers. Anyway, they can’t all be great, or even good movies, and the disappointingly bad one makes all the others shine that much more brightly by comparison.

Bent Hamer’s Home for Christmas

Magical, mysterious and memorable, Bent Hamer’s 2010, Home for Christmas (Hjem Til Jul), left me breathless. The interlocking Christmas Eve adventures – which feel more like odysseys – follow several individuals, and are woven together from a collection of short stories, Only Soft Presents Under the Tree, that were written by Levi Henriksen.

At first I was reminded of Robert Altman and the way he inevitably created a rich pastiche, blending individual lives in a tragically comic way. But I would never describe Home for Christmas as a comedy. The film is far more layered, the humour building on the premise that out of difficulty come moments of levity – sometimes.

The characters are likeable, not so much because the writer and director set out to (purposefully) make them that way, but more because this mode of storytelling, their way of viewing the world, is intrinsic to who they are. There is a goodness, a humaneness, a tenderness about the chroniclers that not only appeals but suits the Christmas theme beautifully. Their way of weaving people and stories together feels less like a device and more the way the author and director, simply and intelligently and kindly, see the world.

If that sounds presumptuous of me, I apologize. What I mean to express is that seldom have I seen a narrative (narratives?) treated with such individual and equal thought, with such sympathy and equanimity. I came to feel as if I truly knew these individuals and understood their lives: the things they longed for; who they loved; what they were afraid of.

Add to this the black-of-night cinematography, the director’s use of lights – city lights, streetlights, porch lights, starlight, spotlights, the Northern Lights – the season, the holiday, the trains, the enchanted snow-covered houses, the sweet decor, the meticulous attention to detail, the long shots, the mounting tension, the stirring music, and the fact that the characters span all ages, every walk of life, and experience multitudinous ways of viewing the world, Bent Hamer’s Home for Christmas is the gift I most especially hope to find under my own Christmas tree.

Romain Duris: An Oscar-Worthy Performance

Ah, the French! Mon Dieu! Their film endings…someone always headed for the guillotine or suicide.

Despite that, Romain Duris in The Big Picture (clearly not translated from its original French title, L’homme qui voulait vivre sa vie) gives an Oscar-worthy performance.

Nominated for his performance in three films – The Beat My Heart Skipped; Peut-être, and The Crazy Stranger – and discovered in front of a Paris high school, Duris’ role models were also some of mine: Jim Jarmusch, John Cassavetes, François Truffaut…although in Duris’ case the overwrought has not (yet, at least; or at least, not in this film) over-ridden, despite his classical-composer hair, a penchant for scruffy beards, and his obliquely tilted head shots showing brooding stares.

Also noteworthy of Romain Duris and his part in The Big Picture is that Cameron Bailey’s TIFF review entirely mischaracterizes the film and Duris’ role in it:

Paul (Duris) does not ‘pounce’ on a macabre opportunity, and in fact does not see this in any way as any kind of opportunity, certainly not in the generic way a person understands that word. Further, his friend, who seems hardly a friend in any sense, is not a ‘successful’ photographer, but rather quite a failed one. And the moment of madness is, as a person might say, thrust upon him (and most definitely thrust upon his rival), and it is the outcome of the accident that forces Paul into a way of life that is anything but full, as his mounting agony makes clear.

Which takes me to the point of Duris and why I think he ought to be, and will be, nominated for an Oscar.

First off, Duris’ task here is to create a tragic character in a mode and circumstance that seems to me Aristotelian (time/place/action) vs Shakespearean (tragic flaw), the former a much more difficult challenge and accomplishment. While a viewer is apt to empathize with the (in this case, I suppose arguably) guiltless victim, too many movie-goers will not understand Paul as guiltless, which further complicates the actor’s response to the role.

More than this, tragically flawed characters, which I claim Duris is not playing here, always garner more feeling in the form of sympathy by the very fact of not only the viewers’ alignment with them, but out of our desire to be “less bad” than they are and, therefore, redeemable.

In his initial aspect as loving husband and father, Duris is understood as a man desperately seeking to satisfy his wife and young children within a framework of guilt and blame, his wife accusing him of workaholism and of costing her, directly and indirectly, her happiness not only as his wife but in her failed writing career.

We know, however, from the responses of his children and his business partner, that Paul is a man ever-willing to sacrifice his career passion in order to provide for his family. In this initial phase of the story, Duris is sweet, hyper-energetic, loving, worried, panicked and finally distraught, and he migrates through these stages with more finesse and believability than most actors twice his age who have twice his experience.

Paul’s terror quickly becomes our own, as he tries to wipe away all evidence of what will surely be misunderstood as his crime. Even more compelling is his visceral grief over the forsaking of his family, the ravages of loss and guilt playing out in every crease and shadow that marks his harrowed face.

I sat on the edge of my chair, watching and waiting and worrying, caught up in the events of Paul’s life, holding my breath in terror and sorrow, as if he were a real person – this man who, forced from his home in the direst circumstance, tries to recapture an essence of his earlier self, bent on recovery and self-discovery, relentlessly aware of the children he has left behind.

There are flaws with the film, most especially with the ending. (As I said – ah, the French!) But the flaws are irrelevant next to the heartbreaking, hopeful, shattered portrayal from this nuanced young actor, who is as real and as spellbinding as anyone I have ever watched on-screen, and who ought to be rewarded for his remarkable performance in The Big Picture.

April Rise

If ever I saw blessing in the air
I see it now in this still early day
Where lemon-green the vaporous morning drips
Wet sunlight on the powder of my eye.

Blown bubble-film of blue, the sky wraps round
Weeds of warm light whose every root and rod
Splutters with soapy green, and all the world
Sweats with the bead of summer in its bud.

If ever I heard blessing it is there
Where birds in trees that shoals and shadows are
Splash with their hidden wings and drops of sound
Break on my ears their crests of throbbing air.

Pure in the haze the emerald sun dilates,
The lips of sparrows milk the mossy stones,
While white as water by the lake a girl
Swims her green hand among the gathered swans.

Now, as the almond burns its smoking wick,
Dropping small flames to light the candled grass;
Now, as my low blood scales its second chance,
If ever world were blessed, now it is.

Laurie Lee

TIFF: Mike Leigh’s Another Year

No one was giddier than I last evening, sitting in a reserved seat in the Elgin & Winter Garden Theatre, camera in hand, Mike Leigh, Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent standing thirty feet away on-stage. In fact, I was as excited seeing Jim Broadbent as I was gazing into the surprised face of Dave Foley last Toronto International film festival season.

And like everyone in the audience, I awaited Mike Leigh’s film, Another Year, with fitful anticipation, having heard a little about the story’s premise, and expecting Ruth Sheen and Jim Broadbent to play a married couple so adeptly as to render me speechless and quite sad by comparison.

Well, I have no idea what Mike Leigh’s intentions were, but from what I’ve read this week, and after watching the film intently, Mary and I are the only two viewers who do not see geologist Tom and psychological counsellor Gerri as coming even close to the ideal couple.

First off, what sort of therapist shuns a twenty-plus year relationship with a co-worker and friend (secretary Mary, played by Lesley Mann, and not to be confused with the Mary in the previous paragraph) – a friend whose tippling, freneticism, and heartbreak are not hidden from anyone – because that lonely friend has an absolutely harmless-to-everyone-but-herself crush on Joe, Gerri and Tom’s thirty-year-old son.

In fact, wouldn’t a loving friend (forget that she is in the day-to-day business of counselling unhappy people) – herself a woman long-fostered in love and emotionally supported by a dependable, like-minded husband – give her head a momentary shake and then try to help guide her misguided friend toward healthier insights?

Instead, we see Mary abandoned for months, kept at arm’s length from her decades-long relationship with this family, ultimately and tersely advised that she is not family – that she is outside the boundaries of family – and coolly and tentatively welcomed back in, only at Mary’s weeping, and not for the first time apologetic, behest.

And let’s face it, wouldn’t the fact that we see and are told many times throughout the film that both Tom and Gerri love to cook suggest how ultra-nurturing they are? how salt of the earth they are? how superb they are as married couple icons? Isn’t it true that only good parents – good people – love to cook, and cook well, and that those who are not bent in that direction are doomed as parental, perhaps even as human, failures?

It isn’t enough (well, really, it was too much…) that Joe’s terminally ebullient girlfriend is immediately approved of and adored by Tom and Gerri – oh, the coy peek-a-boo games right from the start – while Mary sits on the other side of the wall, glibly mocked by all four of them in the outer hallway? I ask you: who wants into that happy family tableau?

And let me tell you something else I know: that daughter-in-law-to-be (let alone all those shared recipes) would be out on her heinie faster than you can say “Bye bye!” should Joe decide to move on.

You smug bastards, was all I could think, my popcorn rolling ahead of me along the beautiful slant of the historic theatre floor. You limited, exclusive, precious, self-satisfied, do-gooder prigs.

Yes, like you, I am sure some of my rage comes from having had a sad, alcoholic mother, but beyond that I can assure you that these are not the sorts of happy, self-contained people I want to spend time with.

In fact, give me a tippling, struggling Mary; a ravaged-by-life Ken (another lonely, imbibing friend); an anaesthetized, bereft Ronnie (the newly widowed family member) any day (characters who are doomed to feeling beleaguered because, in Mike Leigh’s world, a person can only be happy living as a cookie-cutter half of a pair) over this lucky, married couple who seem to spend all of their free time gardening, cuddling or missing vast opportunities to help, in any real way, family and friends who are much less fortunate indeed, by lending more of an ear and a hand, and far fewer glasses of red wine and white wine depressants.

As I said, I am not sure what Mike Leigh’s intentions were in writing his characters – whether he forgot to flesh them out,  whether he wanted us to do the fleshing out on our own, or whether that’s all there is. But given his previous cinematic treatment of working-class people (against this family, who all describe themselves as having university degrees…although one of the ‘umble family members has to be reminded of this fact), and given Leigh’s final frame – a close-up of a fragmentary Mary who, we are at last reminded cheerfully by Joe, was once nothing more than a cocktail waitress in Corfu – somewhere in my heart I just have to believe that Mike Leigh also knows that too many long-term relationships are not, ultimately, all that they’re cracked up to be, and that sometimes lonely, awkward people are far more compelling than confident couples who, without exception, always feel at home with themselves.

Tears of Gaza: A Must See

Vibeke Løkkeberg premiered her film, Tears of Gaza, last night at the Toronto International Film Festival. Don would shoot me were he to hear what I am about to say (citing my faulty logic, and my insistence that those who know better do better):

I was stunned, then shocked and finally deeply disturbed watching – and nowhere has such evidence been so prominently in view as in Tears of Gaza – a film in which hundreds of people (and over 20,000 buildings) are devastated, mutilated, maimed and destroyed by a government (Israel) and a group of people (Israelis) whose own family members, numbering in the millions, were victims of this self-same inhumane brutality.

I cannot and will never understand how this works. If you know your mother and father and aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents were removed from their homes and families, gassed to death in Nazi showers, eviscerated in medical experiments, how is it possible that you could ever pick up a weapon, let alone fire it – point blank – into the heads, and hearts, of small children?

As much as anyone can accept that Israel needed to defend itself against Palestinian rocket fire from, and arms import, into the territory, the numbers are telling: the conflict resulted in 1100-1400 Palestinian and 13 Israeli deaths. And while Løkkeberg made clear in the Q&A, and in her film, that this is modern war anywhere – Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine – there is something frighteningly chilly about a soldier’s ability to deliberately, malevolently, kill a child.

How ironic, then, to move from those iconic Holocaust images of World War II to these same images in Palestine: men and women and children utterly betrayed by the rocket fire that wiped out their workplaces, their homes and their families. A person wonders how it can be that a nation – Israel – who in 1949 and onwards came, by the boatload, to the Middle East, and who in Poland alone lost over 9/10ths of its population during that same war, cannot better find a way to understand that what happened to their people, their mothers and fathers, their children, ought never to happen again.

In Tears for Gaza, Israelis give an entirely new meaning to the phrase up close and personal. To think that this nation that claims itself chosen has become – has long been – a perpetrator in these ways, is, to me, unfathomable. And no modern film more aptly depicts the final and most gruesome devastation of any armed conflict: the loss of its children.

Mourning the Dead

When someone you love dies you see them everywhere: walking ahead of you on the steps that lead down to the subway; crossing the corner with an opened umbrella that is partially shading their faces; playing bit parts in foreign films; washing the old Festiva in a coin-slot carwash.

And you wonder – I wonder – what part you played in the fact of their too-sudden absence; what you might have done more quickly, expeditiously, judiciously, intently, foresightedly, lovingly…to keep them alive.

People always say that you must learn to let go; move past the past; get on with your day – that hard work and time will heal your loss. But how can that possibly be true when – even though you say little about it and never quite leave your own small corner of the world – you keep seeing and hearing the dead.

In a strange way, I envy the mourners at ground zero. They have permission – emotional permission – to stand in all-weathers and hold posters of their loved ones while the world watches and mourns with them. Their grief is sanctioned, their losses enraging. They are entitled to grieve and, in this way, or in some way, move on.

Me, I feel a little frozen in time – stuck inside an enormous ice cube, people who love me standing outside looking in, my hand mid-air, attempting to wave.

September 11

Deaths and Entrances

On almost the incendiary eve
Of several near deaths,
When one at the great least of your best loved
And always known must leave
Lions and fires of his flying breath,
Of your immortal friends
Who'd raise the organs of the counted dust
To shoot and sing your praise,
One who called deepest down shall hold his peace
That cannot sink or cease
Endlessly to his wound
In many married London's estranging grief.

On almost the incendiary eve
When at your lips and keys,
Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,
One who is most unknown,
Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,
Will dive up to his tears.
He'll bathe his raining blood in the male sea
Who strode for your own dead
And wind his globe out of your water thread
And load the throats of shells
with every cry since light
Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.

On almost the incendiary eve
Of deaths and entrances,
When near and strange wounded on London's waves
Have sought your single grave,
One enemy, of many, who knows well
Your heart is luminous
In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,
Will pull the thunderbolts
To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys
And sear just riders back,
Until that one loved least
Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.

Dylan Thomas

And in memory of my mother, who died September 12 or thereabouts, 1974, and of my father, who died on September 12, 1998.

Is Gareth Malone A Lesbian?

Because he reminds me a lot of our old friend, Jane, and she’s a lesbian. And I know his sexuality is a pertinent point because when I went to look him up on the Internet I found about 1000 (hyperbolically speaking) sites addressing the fact of his sexual choices.

Seems people don’t entirely care to read the part about his recent wedding (to a female English teacher, which, if you ask me, seems just about right…the English teacher part, I mean) or about his involvement in music, brought to us by way of television…

• The Choir (BBC Two series, 2007)
• The Choir: Boys Don't Sing (BBC Two series, 2008)
• The Choir: Unsung Town (BBC Two series, 2009)
• How a Choir Works (BBC Four single documentary, 2009)
• Never Mind the Buzzcocks, (panel show guest 2009)
• Sport Relief 2010, (Guest - conducted the Olympic Choir)
• Shanties and Sea Songs with Gareth Malone on BBC Four, 7 May 2010
• Gareth Malone Goes to Glyndebourne (BBC Two series, June 2010)
• Extraordinary School for Boys (BBC Two series, currently in production)

…or the fact that, until December 2009, he worked for the London Symphony Orchestra at LSO St Luke's where he ran their youth choir and community choir, or that his latest project was, according to Wikipedia, as chorus master for The Knight Crew, a youth opera based on a book written by Nicky Singer and performed at Glyndebourne opera house (see above), or that in May 2010, Gareth Malone was awarded the Freedom of the City of London by Nick Anstee, Lord Mayor of the City of London, in recognition of his music education work in London.

My point it, and I know you have guessed it by now, that I couldn’t care less about the sexuality of this charismatic, appealing, richly talented, warm, sweet, thoughtful, funny, energetic, pragmatic, dutiful, compelling young man. And my guess is that most of the people googling Gareth Malone’s sexuality are hopeful gay men or wistful young women who don’t want it (his heterosexuality, or the fact of his marriage) to be true.

What I do know, aside from the fact that Gareth and Jane could be siblings and maybe even soul-mates, is that nothing keeps me awake more fervently than a late-night repeat episode of The Choir, seen in this part of the woods on TVO on Sunday nights, August 29 to September 19, at 8 PM ET. God bless Gareth Malone. And bring a box of Kleenex.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gareth_Malone

The Wheels on the Bus

Lainey begins her first full day of school today. She will be the last person on the bus in the morning, and the first child off at night. She is three years old. I am grateful that she has the type of personality – inquisitive, outgoing, fierce – that prepares her for the outside world and the socializing aspects of a busy classroom, but oh my. Three just seems so young.

I remember, vaguely, parts of my first day of school – my mother holding my hand as we strolled down the long block to Smythe Street Public School, my months’-long wait…watching the snow fall softly as I stood in that third-story apartment window…anticipating books and pencils and all those boys. (Even at that young age I imagined the boys, most of them standing in the schoolyard, the sun bouncing off strands of their squeaky-clean hair.)

But I was seven – a whole four years older than Lainey – and as it was I was still super shy. I can’t even imagine what school at three would have felt like, or which parts of it, if any, I would remember. Seems to me that kids grow up all too fast these days anyway, what with cellphones and computers and facebook and twitter. I was playing with dolls – soft raggedy ones – until I was 12, the same year I went to work full-time in the summers. And even going to work, I wouldn’t have dreamt of asking for anything more than an extra piece of pie, let alone known what electronic equipment looked like.

Still, I know Lainey, and I know that she is going to acclimatize beautifully, chatting with all of her new teachers and friends, and asking questions, and expressing her opinions, on just about everything. I can even imagine her choosing her outfits the night before – she is a girl of definite and distinctive tastes – and making sure she has pudding in her lunch pail. I picture her now, her lean little legs clambering up on the bus with her backpack tied tidily across her shoulders, and I cross my fingers and pray that she will be happy in her new life at school.

Lainey Waits

The wheels on the bus go round and round, all through the town.

Headlines

US woman gobbles up 181 chicken wings in 12 minutes to win New York contest, set record

"I'm so happy!" said Sonya Thomas, who ate 4.86 pounds (2.2 kilograms) of chicken wings to win the contest, besting world eating marvel Joey Chestnut at the ninth annual National Buffalo Wing Festival.

Buffalo, about 300 miles (480 kilometres) northwest of New York, is said to be the birthplace of the wings, typically fried and covered in tangy vinegar and hot sauce.

Chestnut, America's No. 1 professional eater, was favoured to win Sunday's competition. He came in second after eating 169 chicken wings, or 4.55 pounds (2.06 kilograms).

This was the first time Thomas, of Alexandria, Virginia, and Chestnut, of San Jose, California, faced off in a chicken wing eating contest. They went at it "neck and neck," said Drew Cerza, the founder of the festival, which was inspired by the 2001 Bill Murray comedy "Osmosis Jones," about a compulsive eater.

"They pushed each other really hard," Cerza said. "Joey is so strong. He's got great jaw strength. But Sonya's so fast with the hand."

Thomas, who's 5 feet (1.52 metres) tall and weights 105 pounds (47.6 kilograms), calls herself the Black Widow because she often defeats bigger male competitors — Chestnut is 6-foot-2 (1.87-meter) and weights 230 pounds (104.3 kilograms) — in eating contests. She set the previous wings record in 2005, when she ate 174 in 12 minutes.

She also previously set eating records for oysters, hard-boiled eggs, cheesecake and jalapeno peppers. She won her first competitive eating event in 2003.

The sprightly 43-year-old said she owed Sunday's triumph to her fancy finger work.

"Sometimes if I try to chew too much I slow down," she said. "I used my hands more than the mouth."

During the public contest, in front of thousands of people, she twirled the wings in her small fingers while quickly tearing off the meat with her teeth and lips.

Her cheeks were covered in a sheen of orange Buffalo sauce by the end.

But she said she was still hungry afterward, calling the wings "an appetizer." About an hour later, she made a guest appearance in the Ridiculously Hot Buffalo Wing Eating Contest and ate 20 more.

"The hottest wings!" she said. "I had to drink a lot of water."

From cbc.ca

Published: Sunday, September 5, 2010 | 10:26 PM ET

Canadian Press Cristian Salazar, The Associated Press

This story made me laugh from start to finish, as you can see by the bits I have highlighted, although I have no idea whether this (degree of laughter) was the reporter’s intention. Something about the metric conversions, the parallelism, and the picturesque detail had me half off my chair, tears rolling down my fat face.

Anyway, no matter what happens to the Black Widow, I hope she remains sprightly. A person wouldn’t want to feel too weighted down by 181 chicken wings, let alone ever have to digest oysters, hard-boiled eggs, cheesecake and jalapeno peppers. Fortunately, her sky-rocketing cholesterol levels are sure to keep competitors away, right up until she keels over, her cheeks covered in a sheen of orange Buffalo sauce.

Sustenance

Now I know how it happens – how kids become so spoiled and ultimately insatiable. I know because it’s happening to me. The more I get, it seems, the more I want.

This summer alone I have been on a road trip with Mary to and from Susan and Christopher’s welcoming home in Prince Edward Island; sat through a dozen Inside Out films, free-of-charge; spent five weekends in Ottawa (actually, I think it was six) with my family; been to see Rufus Wainwright, Sting and How Now Mrs. Brown Cow (all paid for by people who were not me); shared many lovely dinners with family and friends (Mike & Stephan, Pearse and Taras, Eva and David, the book club women, Sarah and Chris and Lainey, Noam…); relaxed through the best week ever at the cottage in Muskoka; visited with terrific friends; been to at least three parties; swam for hours in the local pool; sipped chilled wine on the candlelit porch; was invited by a favourite friend to spend a week at her home in Saskatchewan; won an enormous prize in a writing contest; delighted in the company of Lainey and Blue, and who knows what else.

In the next few weeks, I can look forward to the return of a season of Tafelmusik; the Toronto International Film Festival (nine movies this year); a ten-week art class, invited by and shared with friends; a road trip to New York City…and on and on it seems to go. And still with all this in mind and at hand, I had the audacity to complain today that I missed the lake; that I wanted to go swimming “just one more time.” I said this petulantly, too, the way a ten-year-old might complain that the summer was over and she had to go back to school.

I am taken now in my head to Don suffering from cancer, unable to eat in any comfortable or sizeable way, the two of us watching Donnie Darko, again, and Don longing – even able to laugh about his longing – for the pizza we kept seeing throughout the commercials. Of course, he was never able to eat pizza (or corn chips or ice cream or steak and kidney pie or peanut butter sandwiches or hamburger casserole or anything he loved) again while I, in fact, cannot even count the number of pizzas I have eaten in the six and a half years since Don has died.

So I am not sure why I have become this great spoiled creature who seems to only want more and more and more. Partly, I know it is because Don has died and that nothing can replace him or that gaping loss. But a better part of me also understands that I am taking life for granted; not remembering that every day that I am given is an unexpected surprise; that this, too, shall pass and that life, as my mother always said, “is so short, darling.”

Anyway, I didn’t mean to hobble up onto a soap box and sermonize. I mostly meant to write this down so that I, and ultimately my grandchildren, can better remember all that we have been given and all we have been able to do.

While other people lie in graveyards or are scattered across lonely lakes and mountainsides, I have been out waltzing through the world with kaleidoscope vision (like Lucy, perhaps), lavishing in fine food, fond friendship and enchanting journeys, enjoying the kind of freedom that many people would, if not kill for, do almost anything else to have.

It is true that most of us have a difficult time changing who we essentially are. Still, by itemizing in this way I hope that I, the next time I order pizza, will remember how fortunate I have been; how people love me well; how happy I have been made, and all that the world has given me throughout this one remarkable summer.