Anomalies

Rumour has it that Voltaire was with Louis XV at the time of the fall of New France, and in an effort to console the monarch dismissed the lost territory as “quelques arpents de neiges”. Indeed the winters of New France consisted of not just acres, but thousands of square miles of snow-covered landscape. And Voltaire’s opinions on the subject are truly documented, in both Candide and other writings. So it continues to surprise me when this "barren wilderness" produces such extraordinary products.

Forget maple syrup, if you can. And if you know it intimately on your pancakes, you can’t. Dismiss Bombardier, presently the third largest aircraft maker in the world. But the strawberries! How could anyone forget those savoury red berries which outmatch anything of the same name that the year-round produce market deems suitable for shipping more than a few kilometres from source.

And the wonder of it in this climate depends to a large extent on a kind of anomaly. L'isle d'Orléans. Originally named Ile de Bacchus by Jacques Cartier, it’s position in the St. Lawrence River gives it an extraordinarily favourable climate.

Over three months ago we bought our first local berries. This evening I brought home two pints heaped high. Tomorrow morning, pancakes with maple syrup and strawberries. Anomalies can be wonderful!

Distractions

It might be easier to deal with if it were a straightforward medical problem. Or attributable to genetics. Not that I would wish on myself all-out attention deficit disorder, popping Ritalin to keep me in line. But being easily distracted has its challenges. Very early this morning I received an email from a friend in Hong Kong. It made my day, but destroyed all my earnest plans for those Sisyphus-like activities laid out before me.

I was asked a simple question. “When will Though I am Gone be screened at the imminent Vancouver Film Festival.?” Like Alice, I tumbled into a cyber hole that lead me into another world. Not that the question was complex. I expect to discover the answer tomorrow when film festival offices are open for business.

Ever-curious I wanted to know the name of the filmmaker. Which led me to a wonderful interview which Shen Rui conducted with compassionate historian and film director Hu Jie (胡杰). He yearns to know the real and recent history of his country, China. He is a searcher after the truth, and a compassionate visual chronicler. In many ways apolitical, his films are more of a scourage to the establishment than those of a confrontational sort.

So today has been all about Hu Jie. I was willingly hijacked from the role of Hercules, and left King Augeas’ litter a-lying about me while I immersed myself in the fresh air of Hu’s story, so ably translated by Ms. Shen. And found his film on Youtube, albeit in ten segments. Now, later in the day, some seem to have disappeared. And all are blocked in China apparently.

Christopher Columbus is quoted as saying By prevailing over all obstacles and distractions, one may unfailingly arrive at his chosen goal or destination. Look where that got him! And me? Well my distraction may get me into even more uncharted waters. Time will tell.

Pedal for Hope

They arrived in the neighbourhood the same year that we did. Muslim Harji was tall and genial, and his wife whom we always called “Mrs. Harji” was warm and spontaneous. They had fled Uganda when Idi Amin’s regime threatened. Now they were a very busy couple setting up a small food shop on Avenue du Parc, in the midst of a heterogeneous community. Hassidim, Italian and Greek Canadians, Quebecois(e) and Anglos such as ourselves.

Then a daughter, Ayesha, was born to them, and a son two years later. The little store thrived as a family enterprise. Sadly, they retired after some thirty years of hard work. We picked up on their story at the library a few days ago, when Muslim, after warmly embracing us, recounted the Cairo to Cape bicycle journey which he and his daughter made last year. It was part of a fund-raising effort by the Aga Khan Foundation. Muslim didn’t have enough time to tell about the whole 12,000km trip, so he focused on Sudan. This was the Sudan you never hear about. Ayesha’s blog reveals the no strings attached kindness they encountered amidst the material poverty.

One day, in the small town of Karima, we were invited into the home of a man we didn't know, who didn't speak any English at all. Being the cautious traveller, I was worried that this was going to be some sort of scam with a request for payment at the end, but we went in and sat down on the floor of a thatched little open-air hut surrounded by palm trees.

After some small talk where, with some difficulty, we explained to them that we were on a bicycle expedition (only to get the same incredulous response), a young boy came forward with an enormous tray that he put down on the floor. He uncovered four bowls of food - salad, a delicious curry-type dish similar to what my mom makes at home, beans (called foul, pronounced "fool") and a sweet vermicelli dish (like sev for all you Indians out there). Around the four bowls were round pieces of bread and we all sat there on the floor and ate together. The man also gave us a tour of his compound (including his home, a wheat-grinder, a kitchen and a women's section - there were a lot of them, don't know how many wives this guy has, but anyway) and also gave us fresh figs right off a tree.

After all this, they just led us back into the street, we all said our goodbyes and they pointed us back in the direction from whence we came. No money, no payment, no nothing. It was just plain and simple hospitality, and he disappeared back into his home like this was nothing out of the ordinary. Everywhere along the road, many members of our group have experienced similar displays of openness and good will from the people in this country.

"Leave well enough, alone"

This is an old saying from my childhood. To be told this by my mother was a polite way of her saying “Shut up, you’ve already said too much!” Delightfully burdened with only fond memories of her presence, I feel free to indulge. It was the recent furniture store visit which set me to thinking. I won't leave well enough alone. Thinking about how people leave their mark.

My feelings on the robber barons, past and present, who leave such “gifts” as Carnegie Hall, are mixed.

The amenity is often appreciated, but the naming.... Why aren’t they named after some of the workers who died to make the amassed fortunes? My hero and companion in this line of thought, since schooldays, has always been Shelley, and the way he celebrated the once noble Ozymandias.

I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies.........

Enough. Back to the furniture store and sofas. The latter word apparently coming from Turkish into English almost 300 years ago. But what about ottoman, and chesterfield? And to a lesser degree, davenport? The world's population lolling about comfortably on them with the Sunday paper. Wouldn’t this be a fine way to have one’s name remembered.?

schlimmbesserungen

We set out to explore the bargains at an SAQ Dépôt. I picked up a bottle of Metaxa Seven Star as well as a French blend, a plonk which I recommend. Then I continued on with my good friends who are searching for suitable furnishings for their home-to-be. They are still at the exploratory stage, measuring tape in hand, and eyeing various combinations for purchase at a later stage.

The spacious and elegant showroom was designed primarily for the eye. Vast sweeps of white with pools of dark-finish table tops and subdued displays of colour. Pseudo-artistic creations at exorbitant prices. “Gimmicks galore for home décor” could easily have been the store’s slogan. I was particularly intrigued by all-in-one sofas cum chaise-longues which seemed to be the “in thing”. Cursory tests of either the comfort or practicality of these articles seemed to be the last thing on the minds of potential buyers. These were not your customary IKEA shoppers.

Which leads me to another article by Mark Kingwell. Bear with him. His thoughts outpace his expressive abilities. Unless your German’s up to par, you’ll have to read it to understand the heading of this piece! In the meantime open a bottle and enjoy the fruits of this 12^th century Languedoc Château!

The Reconciliation of John and Gordon

It was February in Prague, just a month after the former Czechoslovakia had been split into two separate countries, the Czech and the Slovak Republics. A sad event for me as I had already made many friends on both sides of the border. And I favour inclusiveness over separatism. But it was a beautiful evening all the same.

Powder snow swirled and glistened under the century-old lamps as we wound our way through the narrow streets of the old city, heading to the Staroměstské subway station. Another time I might be humming Good King Wenceslas as I held my head low against the wintry blast. But not tonight. Christmas was six weeks past. Besides, I only hum when I’m alone.

John, Jana and I had spent an evening in her cozy apartment overlooking the Vltava. After a simple dinner we did our best to empty a bottle of Becharovka. As it closed in on eleven, I headed to catch the last train to the hostel which was home. John insisted on accompanying me to the station. A Czech by birth, he was now a Canadian who had returned to his native land and was organizing volunteers to teach English to an eager populace. I was playing a part in this venture.

A retired career army officer, he wrote The Disarming of Canada, a critique of Canada’s military policy as a peace-keeping force. There was a chapter in it criticizing a peace education project which I had initiated. But over three years of collaboration a lot of trust had developed between us, seasoned with good humour and Pilsener.

The streets were empty so it was a surprise to come upon an unsteady figure in tattered clothing. As we approached, this Robinson Crusoe apparition stumbled again, his bleeding hands pierced by nails protruding from a packing case he dragged behind him. John rushed to his rescue and we proceeded, supporting him, to a nearby apartment. Despite the doorkeeper’s protests we took him to his room, cleaned him up, and John left him with a five hundred crown note. Apparently the wretched one had spent his rent money at a local bar, something that newfound capitalism couldn’t tolerate.

In the process I missed the train. The taxi was much more expensive. But well worth the cementing of our bond. It was the last time I saw John. He was drawn to the smell of conflict and became a war correspondent in Bosnia. He died there when his car ran over a land mine.

The Ghost of Maggie Thatcher?

This is a purely political rant.

Civic employees of the beautiful city of Vancouver are on strike. The libraries are closed for the first time in a seventy-seven year history. And the city has a magnificent library system which not only provides for the reading and research needs of citizens, but actively reaches out to those who are most in need of encouragement - the poor, the disabled, the non-English speaker, and the immigrant.

Their librarians are amongst the most committed of employees, with a sense of mission and passion for their work. Without going into all the details it is clear that their treatment has been shabby to say the least.

But why? This comment from the management on August 13 suggests that the bosses want it that way.

Vancouver's four-week-old civic strike could stretch past Labour Day and into the fall, a city spokesman predicted Monday.

"Our past strikes have lasted on the order of six to eight weeks and if that's an indication of where we are this time then that's how long it might last," Jerry Dobrovolny said.

Was this an event planned by the city administration to recoup money overspent in the run-up to the Winter Olympics 2010?

More information:

End of rant!

Hank

I knew nothing about him, not having a radio in our family home. But there we were, my buddy Gord and I on assignment for Quality Records who handled MGM and other labels in Canada. In our last years of high school we earned enough from these infrequent photo gigs to supplement more regular pay. In my case working part-time for a local supermarket. Doing the gamut from cutting meat to stocking shelves.

It was October 27, 1949 and I was seventeen, in grade thirteen, my final year. On the other hand, Hank was just short of nine years my senior, and had made it to #1 on the Billboard Country Singles chart with his version of Lovesick Blues.

The show took place in the Mutual Arena, a venue for ice skating in winter, and in summer a “roller rink”. It was my first venture into this particular kind of worldly atmosphere. But not the last. I was somewhat overwhelmed, and very intimidated as we entered the cavernous hall. The stage setting, lighting, and swelling audience were a far cry even from the high school auditorium gatherings. Even more remote from our gospel hall’s special meetings.

We were nervous. You can take landscape, or store window display photos over again if you flub them the first time around. But concerts are another matter. Our primary task was to take some shots after the show was over. Which it was all too quickly. Using Gord’s Kodak Vigilant, f/4.5 lens, bellows extended, loaded with a roll of 620 Super-XX, and with a carton of eight GE flashbulbs at hand we began. All eight shots counted.

Neither of us had any directorial skills, but fortunately the record company rep managed that for us. Hank Williams was most gracious to these two amateurs. So was Fred Roden, with Hank in this picture. For many years afterwards I meant to drop into Fred Roden’s Record Corral on Avenue Road north, and give him prints. But, like many good intentions .....

Tabula rasa

An inauspicious beginning I know! My encounters with Latin will no doubt be the grist for another day at blogger’s mill . However, tabula rasa, the slate wiped clean, interests me a lot right now. Piqued by Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine, released just yesterday. I haven’t read it yet, but just listened to her, and find its thesis fascinating.

The notion that major social and political change can be introduced following massive events such as the breakdown of an existing system has often focussed on armed revolutions and uprisings. The French, American and Russian revolutions are the most commonly known of these.

There are variations on this theme. After the surrender of Japan in August 1945, the Allied Command, at the behest of the Netherlands, asked the Nipponese troops to remain in control of The Dutch East Indies in order to preserve the existing colonial system. But Sukarno moved quickly to establish a republic, which became a reality four years later.

As an aside from Klein’s social approach, it appears to me that at the personal level, tabula rasa, would be a process that born-again Christians consider essential. A baptism or ritual cleansing. The slate wiped clean, and a new spiritual birth with its presumed attendant moral, ethical, and other personal consequences.

Klein goes further with her collective study. She documents the deliberate political, social, and economic efforts over decades to create and exploit “disaster mentality” and fear. Generated out of both natural events such as tsunamis and those with human intervention such as national fiscal crises. All to the end of supporting The Shock Doctrine, the Rise of Disaster Capitalism, a situation of fear, despair, or numbness which allows the introduction of conditions beneficial to interests groups but not to the general citizenry. This is not conspiracy theory but the work of a disciplined journalist.

I’m off now to buy a copy. No, this is not a paid commercial!

Fate strikes

As predicted in today's paper. Three very busy blogging weeks ahead!

GEMINI Today your ruler, Mercury, moves into a fellow air sign. That means the next three weeks are a wonderful time for expressing your thoughts.

Now I'll check the tea leaves [tasseography] for alternatives!

Archives

The past two days have seen a blundering archivist at work. He has never followed the rules of the professional. That is, to store safely, catalogue accurately (with appropriate cross-references), and have proper retrieval procedures. Now time is catching up with this amateur. The cardboard boxes are being unearthed, the contents spread across every inch of level flat space in the house, and the goodies being unruffled and placed first in categories, then assigned spaces and places of their own.

The thought behind this action has been of long-standing. But stand it did, without any movement. Until recently. The German Film Archives made a generous and irresistible offer to restore a film completed 28 years ago. Which brought the chronicler instinct to the fore. But simultaneously raised many questions.

We realise that certain of the records and artifacts are of international interest. Those we have separated from the family treasures. We also know from experience that Archives tend to be preoccupied with preservation and are anything but “user-friendly”. And those with an hospitable bent are scattered in nooks and crannies around the globe. So what to do with this conglomeration?

One option is to digitize and open our own cyber-archives, then hand the originals over to the best caretakers wherever they may be. But who would caretake the cyber-archives?

And of course we must first write the book before relinquishing the source material. He says with a wry grin.

And the odd item may be of interest to our children. Like the glass-framed original silhouette of Galahad at the completion of the Quest when the ghostly maidens enter the hall. And he cries out, “In the name of God, stay a moment!”

Illustration by Lotte Reiniger from Roger Lancelyn Green’s book, King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table [1953 - Penguin]

The Reconciliation of Carl and Jean

In my opinion the richness of “reconcile” has been somewhat debased by the bean counters. They use it to mean the verification of financial accounts. But reconciliation has much more potential than simply ticking off the items on a credit card statement. I think that Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu had it right, in principle.

What got me thinking about it was the first time that Jean Renoir and Carl Koch really met. Of course they didn’t know about that meeting until later. I will let Renoir tell the story himself.

Carl Koch had been a German army captain of artillery in the First War. In 1916 he was in command of an anti-aircraft battery in the Rheims sector. “It was a good sector,” he told me. “Nothing against it except the incessant attack of the French squadron opposite us.” As it happens, in 1916 I was flying in a reconnaissance squadron in the same sector, and we were the main target of a Germany battery which gave us a lot of trouble. Koch and I concluded that this was his battery: so we had made war together. These things form a bond. The fact that we were on opposite sides was the merest detail.

From: My Life and My Films by Jean Renoir 1974

We met both Carl and Jean long after they had died. Carl’s wife, Lotte Reiniger, introduced us to them both with delightful stories of their first meeting in Paris at the première of Lotte’s Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed. And their subsequent adventures in working together on the Renoir films. Glorious days in Meudon as well as dedicated work on such masterpieces as La Marseillaise and La Grande Illusion. Carl left first, and when he did Jean wrote to Lotte from his home, which was by that time in Hollywood.

“The best times in my life working in film were with Carl. It was through this connection that The Rules of the Game was such a success. Carl, from Heaven on high, must surely be laughing.”

True reconciliation.

Leisure?

A recent article by Mark Kingwell stimulated me to reflect on this theme. Thoughts somehow led to Chaucer, and whether the pilgrims heading to Canterbury were engaged in work or leisure. I know little about his work, although we did explore The Tales as a possible project to be animated in the classical style of Lotte Reiniger. But I do love the oral flavour of his language, and presently have the leisure to track down his use of the very word for my “spare time”. From his The Book of the Duchesse:

165    Amid the valey, wonder depe.
166    Ther thise goddes laye and slepe,
167    Morpheus, and Eclympasteyre,
168    That was the god of slepes heyre,
169    That slepe and did non other werk.
170      This cave was also as derk
171    As helle pit over-al aboute;
172    They had good leyser for to route
173    To envye, who might slepe beste;

Why not read the whole poem? If you have the time.

Anyway, Kingwell’s article explores J. K. Galbraith’s notion
that increasing affluence and its attendant desire for
material acquisition would taper off as sufficient
goods and services brought about fulfillment of those
needs. He refers briefly to the classical Greek attitudes
to the contemplative life. Although without reference
to a slave society, and to the undoubted fact that
philosophical reflection required collaboration and hard
labour from the local vineyards***.

With insight, although not complete clarity, he examines
why this has not happened. The parameters have changed
as leisure in its many forms has been progressively
redefined and co-opted by commercialism. Leisure now
requires one to buy. The transformation of advertising
raises the question as to whether consumption itself is
consuming us. [see also previous posting
The Cult You're In August 22/07]

In the meantime, even my leisure time requires being
plugged in at a cost. 

***Horace’s Ode to a Wine Jar