It's all too much

Back in the hazy days of my childhood and youth, there was a studio called "Open Space". It was a very versatile place, on the second level above the street, though I can't recall just what it was above. I went to craft fairs there, concerts (very small concerts), plays -- was even in a couple of them, and movies. In the summertime, you could go to double, even triple features. I saw my first Marx Brothers films there. They brought in risers, set up a small screen, and hawked fruit, nuts, and chocolate at intermission. I think they did rather well at that. For one thing, there was usually a rather ropey smell shared by the audience who were usually pretty hungry, for some reason. For another thing, a really popular double feature was Disney's Alice in Wonderland followed by Yellow Submarine. Far freakin' out. Too much, man.

I was thinking about that this evening as I watched the audience trickle in at Silver City.  They were screening a one-night-only showing of a hand-restored print of Yellow Submarine, complete with digitalized soundtrack.  I'd say about fifty people showed up, most of them grey-haired, and a number of them struggling with the steps.

We took younger daughter who has been looking forward to this for a week.  Yellow Submarine is one of her long-time favourite films; she's loved the Beatles since she was two.  She wasn't the youngest person there -- a fellow with hair streaming past his shoulders brought in his kids who looked to be pre-teenagers.  They had "home-schooled" written all over them, but the funny thing is, those kids and their dad could have walked into a showing of this film forty years ago and not looked out of place.  They didn't look out of fashion; they looked outside fashion, timeless.

The film began abruptly, no intro, no trailers, and best of all, no "pre-show".  It was crystal-clear and damn loud.  Someone must have scurried outside, because the volume dropped abruptly during the second song, but the music was divided into half-a-dozen tracks, which did give that surrounded-by-sound sort of experience, but I think they failed to turn down all the speakers because sometimes the vocals were considerably fainter than the instruments.

It was a strange experience to sit through the film and really watch it.  After repeated viewings by both daughters, I'd tended to drift away to accomplish things whenever it was on, and now I found myself noticing details because of the large screen and clear image, and even getting jokes for the first time.  (Ringo says he dated Frankenstein's sister Phyllis -- I never got that before.  Also, the Resident Fan Boy pointed out the pun "I'm a born lever-puller."  Get it?  I'm not sure I'm glad I've got that one now...)

Perhaps the strangest thing of all was that no one laughed.  I don't think there was a single person in the cinema that was seeing this for the first time.  I remembered howls of laughter when I first saw this film.  Okay, maybe they were more like dizzy giggles...

Speaking of dizzy giggles, this is a great song for that kind of thing.  Not that I would know, children.  I heard it for the first time when I watched Yellow Submarine for the first time, and I still rather love it.

Canadian actors need work too

Still Life by Louise Penny

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


I think I'd have given this four stars if I'd read the book instead of listening to it. Not that I have anything against Ralph Cosham as a narrator -- he's been haunting me for the past six months, showing up as the reader of Watership Down and The Woman in Black.

The thing is, those are both British books, and Still Life is a Canadian novel set in a small town outside of Montreal. There are no shortage of English accents in Canada; I grew up surrounded by them, but there are no such accents in Still Life; the characters are all anglophone and francophone Quebeckers. Come to think of it, I had similar problems with a collection of Alice Munro's short stories read by an American reader. Canadians do pronounce words differently, no matter what non-Canadians think.

Cosham's accent wraps itself awkwardly around the colloquialisms in both languages (his bio says he speaks French, but evidently not Quebecois French), and robs some of the funnier bits of their humour. Please understand, he's won awards for book narration and deservedly so, but he is ill-suited for this book. Would you enjoy a British audiobook read by an American, French, or Spanish reader? Wouldn't you find it distracting?

In spite of these reservations, I quite liked the style and plot of this mystery, even though I'm not an unreserved fan of the genre, and look forward to reading more of Louise Penny's books. Reading them, not listening to them. (Sorry, Mr Cosham; I'm sure I'll enjoy your renditions of other British works, just as I have in the past.)



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Very supercilious (write of passage number twenty-five)

I have a number of issues with the Number Five bus.  It's the best bus for getting to the Resident Fan Boy's church, and goes up Elgin, which is my favourite street in Hades.  However, it has to be the least reliable route in the OC Transpo system, and that's saying something.  It also gets assigned the least ergonomic buses, usually the kind where the aisle at the rear narrows down so much that you have to move sideways to exit at the rear.

On this particular day, there are several people standing near the back, and our stop is approaching and being on the Number Five, we're late, so I decide to leave from the front of the bus, giving myself plenty of time.  There is a young man standing in the aisle, deep in conversation with someone who is sitting down.  I approach him,  wait a few beats for him to notice that I am standing behind him, and when he doesn't, I smile pleasantly and expectantly, saying, "Excuse me," in what I take to be a cheerful tone.

His reaction is very much like the fellows in the above photo, although he isn't wearing face powder or a white wig.  He straightens up, fixing me with an offended stare, and slowly, with great ceremony, switches his back pack, which is also quite effectively blocking my way, from one shoulder to the other before cooly waving me through.  I watch this performance in some bemusement, wondering what rule in this guy's private code I've just broken.  I suppose he could be operating on the assumption that I have interrupted his conversation, but I (ass that I am) have always thought that this doesn't really apply when one is blocking an aisle in the bus.

I  thank him warmly for moving aside.  I'm thinking, in that uncharitable way that I have, that this is far more likely to irritate him than if I give in to my initial impulse to throttle him.

Land of my Victoria

Today, the Resident Fan Boy, elder daughter, younger daughter and I spent an hour getting out to a branch of the Nepean Museum.  Elder daughter has a job interview tomorrow and high hopes of getting last year's summer job back at the same museum, so she wanted us all to come to the Victoria Day Tea, presumably to make a good impression.  (All past evidence to the contrary.) We arrived, found a deserted white tent, and a beautiful old house, empty except for the sandwich board advertising the tea locked inside the front door.  It seems that the tea was yesterday.  Nothing for it but to spend another hour going back.

See, we're from Victoria, so Victoria Day means Victoria Day, not the Sunday before Victoria Day.  This is Hades, though, where organizers would, quite correctly, consider Monday as the day when everyone is hurrying to travel back to wherever it is they came from.  And indeed, the bus there and back carried many people lugging suitcases and bags. A powerful-looking man heaved two enormous bags into the space where the wheelchairs and stroller ordinarily go, kissed the hands of his elderly father and mother in her veil, and pressed his forehead to the back of their hands, before asking the bus driver to let him off.

In Victoria, BC, Victoria Day means the big parade.  If you've grown up in the city, you've marched in the parade at some point.  I marched three times with my school band, as did the Resident Fan Boy, and elder daughter marched with the Brownies.  It's a mile from the Mayfair Shopping Centre to Douglas and Humboldt, and the trick is to avoid the horse droppings. This coming week, the first sunburns of the year will be everywhere because the May sun shines in Victoria, but it doesn't feel all that hot, so you forget to take the precautions..

No sunburns in Ottawa, because we have the humid heat to remind us to wear sunscreen and hats, although it's nowhere near as warm as it will get in July and August. Downtown is crowded with tourists here for the last weekend of the tulip festival, but in our neighbourhood, we've been living in a ghost town.  The Victoria Day weekend means the opening of cottage season for them-that-has-'em.  Last night, I went out for a late evening stroll, and was rather spooked by the number of dark and deserted houses.  I couldn't help but wonder if this is also a wonderful season for burglaries. Tonight, I walked out again and the driveways were full of SUVs, with people in shorts putting out the garbage and recycling, and watering their gardens.  (The Victoria Day weekend is also the official start of Ottawa's very brief gardening season.)

I continued down by the Governor General's residence, the clustering of trees along the stone wall starting to look dark and forbidding.  Ahead, I saw a corner of setting sun reflecting off a glass tower of one of the quasi-Arts-Deco condos.  I fancied that the brilliant orange light might spread to the gathering dark clouds, but the most colour they achieved was a mourning sort of mauve.  I wandered home by way of the Rideau River, blundering into clouds of gnats, dreaming of long, mild May evenings in Victoria.  There'll probably be fireworks over the Inner Harbour tonight.

Here?  We're supposed to be in for a lightening storm...

When I was a little girl, I thought this song was about the city in which I grew up.  
Long ago life was clean
Sex was bad and obscene
And the rich were so mean
Stately homes for the Lords
Croquet lawns, village greens
Victoria was my queen 

Victoria, Victoria, Victoria, 'toria 

I was born, lucky me
In a land that I love
Though I'm poor, I am free 
When I grow I shall fight 
For this land I shall die
Let her sun never set

 Land of hope and gloria
 Land of my Victoria

Canada to India
Australia to Cornwall
Singapore to Hong Kong
From the West to the East 
From the rich to the poor
Victoria loved them all

All things must pass

It was a sunny, but reasonably cool afternoon earlier this week when I decided to walk in to younger daughter's school from the Iris Transitway Station. It takes me about 25 minutes, so I had my iPod in my breast pocket, pulling it out periodically to advance to good walking songs. There's a sneaky uphill grade on Navaho that requires an energetic tune like, say, "Architects and Engineers" by Guster.

Made it to the school, and with younger daughter trotting in my wake, strode down the steep green hill at Copeland Park just recently shaved of thousands of dandelions,  and took up our stations at the bus stop.  Hmmn, I thought.  Better slip my iPod into my purse for safekeeping.

That's when I noticed that there was nothing else in my breast pocket.  There had been two bus passes there when I started my walk down Iris.  I've spoken before about how you tend to go through Kübler-Ross' Five Stages of Grieving in quick order for a minor loss.  A bus pass is, I suppose, a minor loss at $96.25 (that's about sixty pounds to any Brits listening in).  Of course, I'd lost younger daughter's as well at $76.75.  I went rapidly through disbelief, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally a wry kind of acceptance.  I could take some chilly comfort in that we were halfway through the month, and that I haven't lost my bus pass in over five years.

Of course, that time, I got it back.  The phone rang not all that long after younger daughter and I had made our way home, after a stop for scones with Devonshire Cream and lemon curd to salve my self-disappointment.  It was a fella who had found my pass at Iris and Woodroffe, and it turned out that, like the Resident Fan Boy, he worked for the Department of Justice, only in a different department on Sparks Street.  We made arrangements for my dropping by to retrieve it the following day.  I wondered if I would be lucky enough to get another phone call about younger daughter's pass, but reasoned it would be a long-shot indeed.

That night, I lay on my side and found myself grieving younger daughter's bus pass, and troubling myself with sad imaginings of it lying off the dark pavement somewhere, with her picture obscured by dirt.  I had to remind myself sharply that the genuine article was tucked up safely down the hall.

My cheerful plump saviour handed over my pass in the vestibule of his office building.  He told me his wife had told him to drop it in the mailbox but he told her it wouldn't get to me for weeks.  I answered that I was delighted to get it back at all, but particularly so quickly.  As I moved back into the street, I noticed it was a bit bent and a felt a little stab when I saw that the emergency bus tickets I always keep in the plastic holder were missing.  My CPS had not been the first person to find it.  It was then I knew I would not be seeing younger daughter's bus pass again.  From a distance, my daughter's picture could be of any young girl with long brown hair; I know the bus drivers seldom give more than a cursory glance.

Oh well, whoever you are, I hope you really, really needed this break.  Use it in good health and think kindly of the little girl in the picture.

This way sadness lies

The Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I came in from the brilliant and warm last Saturday of the Tulip Festival to the dark glowing interior of the Theatre in the National Arts Centre complex. We took our seats in the front row of the right side of the thrust stage (thanks to rush tickets), listening to crickets.  Soon, from somewhere below, we heard a few thumps building into a steady rhythm and the voices chanting the drum blessing.  Some minutes later, a handsome young man appeared at one of the vomitoria, gazing around the stage and occasionally toward the gathering audience.  He was dressed in what resembled an early 17th century gentleman's oufit, but with a feather adorning the back of his black hair and round gold discs hanging from his ears.  Finally, another young man with waist-length black hair swept past him, mounted the stage and approached the fire at the centre, banging a salute to each point of the compass, then the ground and the heavens.  You can see him to the left in the picture above.  Through the palisade gates at the back of the stage came two men wrapped in fur capes.  The elder of the two pointed out the young man waiting at the foot of the stage and introduced him as his bastard son Edmund.  So King Lear began with a cast of some of the finest First Nation actors in Canada.

Does it work?  On the whole, yes.  Director Peter Hinton and his cast kept it simple and stripped down.  Three powerful female actors stole most of the fire as the three daughters of Lear:  Tantoo Cardinal as a mocking, confident, terrifying Regan, Monique Mojica as a regal and dissatisfied Goneril, and Jani Lauzon as wronged Cordelia, then almost unrecognizably as the daring yet helpless Fool, which gave a whole new meaning to the line "My poor fool is hanged".

Lear was August Schellenberg whose impressive CV is pretty august in itself, but he didn't seem to hit his stride as Lear until his scene with the blinded Gloucester which is very late in the play.   He obviously had the physical stamina to tackle this, but I felt he was reciting most of his lines, more than acting them.  The final "Howl, howl, howl" carrying in the hanged Cordelia was very affecting, though.  I was touched to see him discreetly smooth her skirt down as he wept over the body.

We had prepared younger daughter for the blinding scene which always traumatizes me -- instead of fleeing up the aisle as I have been known to do in the past, I covered my eyes and plugged my ears.  Younger daughter seemed more distressed by Gloucester's later entrance in his bloody blindfold, but she assured us afterward that although she was scared, she knew it wasn't real.

We're glad we went, and are sorry to see Peter Hinton go as artistic director of the NAC English Theatre division.  It's certainly been an interesting seven years.

Crabapple

One thing I've learned from the past two weeks using a laptop: much of what I do depends on Adobe Flash.

So today, after logging into the Apple Care, and realizing that their trouble-shooting instructions make as much sense as any help page on the computer, I slipped my new precious in a bag over my shoulder and entered the Apple store at the Rideau Centre, looking as lost and expectant as possible.  This had the desired effect of attracting a blue-shirted guy with a long dangling earring in one ear.  (Okay, it may have been an earpiece; computer stores make me sweaty and anxious.)

I explained to him that I'd had my laptop for two weeks and had been having a lovely time, but I'd tried to download Adobe Flash only to have it ask me for my "administrative password" -- which I don't seem to have, although I do have Apple Care... (Both elder daughter and the Resident Fan Boy had said, "Tell them you have Apple Care.")

So Earring (or Earpiece) Guy took me over to two young men talking to one young lady and told me that "Albert" will help me.
 "Tell him you have Apple Care," he reassured me.
  Albert studiously ignored me for several seconds and then acknowledged me, so I told him my sad story.

"Oh," he said glumly.  "The trouble with that is if I try to set you up with a new password, that will probably wipe out all your programmes."
"I have Apple Care," I offered, hopefully.
"That won't make any difference."

Right.  "So what would you recommend?" I asked, thinking muckle, but not daring to say it.
"Well, let's open it up," he shrugged, leading me to one of the tables.

"There's the puppy," he said.  "What's it doing down there?"  (I'd dragged it out of the way and lined it up with the other icons which had clearly been a bad move -- sorry, buddy...)

After a few clicks, he informed me, "You don't have a password."
No kidding.  "Uh, no.  I don't..."
A couple of more clicks.  "There you go."
"Excuse me?"
"Well, I guess you didn't set a password when you set your profile."  (I didn't set my profile; the Apple guy selling me the computer did.)
"You don't need the password; you just click through."
"Uh, should I get a password?"
Shrug.

 Why is it I always leave an Apple store feeling less intelligent than when I entered?

Visual listening

I feel a little nervous sharing these three videos, due my own woeful lack of knowledge about the issues of American Sign Language (ASL) vs Signed Exact English (SEE).  I do understand that ASL is not English, and has a completely different syntax.  I think I understand that ASL is generally used in Canada, but that there is a variation of British Sign Language called "Maritime Sign Language" that may also show up here.

These three videos are interpretations of popular songs done by hearing persons learning ASL.  Not being conversant in ASL (I took a YMCA course and was rubbish at what I now think had to have been SEE), I'm not certain how much this first example ("Cell Block Tango" from the musical Chicago) veers into SEE.  It's certainly entertaining:

You may need to watch this one at YouTube in order to see all the women performing here. The other two videos are by the same fella, Stephen Torrence. I suspect his signing is closer to true ASL, and he has thoughtfully provided a gloss of both the English lyrics (of "Fireflies" by Owl City) and the ASL signs he's using. (If there's a short commercial in this video or the next one, I do apologize and it is very brief): I plucked up the courage to read the comments for this one (YouTube comments in general make me despair for humanity), and noticed that a number of deaf viewers appear to have enjoyed this. Stephen apparently had his loyal viewers vote on a song for him to sign before bowing out from video-making for a while. The winner was, predictably, "Bohemian Rhapsody" by Queen: I notice in the comments for this one that an ASL interpreter doesn't feel his translation goes "deep enough" for the true ASL experience, but I'm in no position to judge.

Spot the lilac

It hits me in the nose with a light purple biff.  I know it will take a matter of seconds to locate the source, and there is, lilac bush at ten o'clock.  A few paces, it happens again:  quick scan and -- lilac bush, two o'clock.

Sometime during May, Hades and Victoria fall into step.  The temperatures are the same, and the lilac bushes in both cities bloom.  Then Hades will stride ahead, headlong into humidity.  Something similar will happen briefly in October, only Hades' fall colours will be shorter-lasting and more brilliant.

I venture out into this ready-to-vanish window of evening temperateness whenever I can, although this month, I have to, if my pedometer is short the day's 10,000 steps.  Also, the Accent Snob needs his walk.

Try telling him that.

We thought the warmth of spring would revive a doggy enthusiasm for strolls that has been noticeably lacking in the five months since he joined our household.  He's certainly sniffing the greatly-expanded menu of intriguing smells with some gusto.  (Not sure if the scent of lilac is among these.)  Unfortunately, the re-emergence of olfactory delights also brings out other summery things, and we've discovered the hard way that somewhere back in the ten years before we met him, the Accent Snob developed a phobia for skateboards.

Take a recent evening, as I trotted westward (ho!) down McKay Street.  I noticed the Accent Snob doing anxious shoulder checks, and immediately scanned the immediate vicinity.  All I saw was a lady in a bright pink Spandex concoction jay-jogging toward us.  It took me several minutes to make out a small boy behind us, still a block or so away, pushing slowly along on a skateboard alongside his strolling father.  The Accent Snob's sensitive ears had picked up the dreaded sound.

All of a sudden, the AS bolted and the handle of the retractable lead flew from my hand.  To my horror, he dashed into the street which, fortunately, was early-evening quiet.  Calling futilely, I followed as he dashed up the opposite sidewalk.  After a few panic-stricken seconds, he realized he was pelting towards the problem, wheeled around frantically and dashed right into me.  I was able to grab his lead.  He continued to pull away -- he's damn strong when he's scared -- and I desperately looked for a side-street that wasn't there.  I finally hauled him back to the other sidewalk and held him until the young boy coasted by obliviously.

Clearly, I need to transfer my lilac-spotting skills to skateboards.  I wonder if I could learn to smell them.  However, given that their occupants are usually pre-adolescent, post-adolescent, and downright adolescent boys, I doubt I'd want to...

Taking dictation from Charlie Chaplin

Seeing as it was younger daughter's birthday last week, elder daughter didn't want to get her a "family movie", but something more befitting a sixteen-year-old. Younger daughter was introduced to the films of Charlie Chaplin a couple of years ago by the head teacher of her independent school. She adores the physical comedy -- and the captions!

 Elder daughter decided on The Great Dictator (no captions, alas!)  and this past weekend, we all settled down to watch it.  I have never seen the entire film through, and only recognised the famous "world-balloon ballet":

It's an odd film. There is dialogue, and a sort of plot that holds together the Chaplinesque black-outs which follow the story of a little Jewish barber who miraculously survives the battlefields of the first World War, ending up in a clinic with amnesia.  While he's "out", his homeland of Tomania is taken over by a dictator named Adenoid Hinckley.  Predictably, the little barber is eventually mistaken for Hinckley and finds himself addressing a vast rally of soldiers who have invaded neighbouring Osterlitz where the barber's girlfriend (Paulette Goddard looking remarkably like Vivian Leigh) and her family have fled to escape the violence and injustice of the Jewish ghetto.

In what has to be one of the strangest moments in cinema, the speech is given, not by the little barber, but by Chaplin himself who steps out of character to speak to the camera and in doing so, suddenly seems to age several years.  My understanding is that he had rather a different ending planned, when word came of the invasion and capitulation of France.

Meanwhile Goddard's character, prostrate in despair in the newly conquered  Osterlitz, rises to her feet as she hears the broadcast voice of the barber, speaking directly to her.  She, too,  looks much older, for all the hope in her eyes.

This film was released in 1940 and was Chaplin's most successful film.  Watching it from the distance of more than seventy years and knowing that, at that moment, the great slaughter of Jews, Romani, and other "undesirables" had not yet hit its stride, the speech has a poignance, desperation and grief that was far beyond what Chaplin intended.  He did say that, had he known the full extent of Nazi atrocity that was to come, he never would have proceeded.  I think it's safe to feel glad that he did.