And then who the hell was I?

I can't understand why I am exposing us all in this way . . . . Is this the tsunami that she unleashed when she went, and all of us still flailing in her wake, trying to put her together in the wreckage, and her slipping away, over and over, just as we begin to see her face? - Sarah Polley, in an email to her father Michael Polley

Looking to see what family connections there possibly could be connected to me and enjoy building hopefully a happy picture - From the profile of a recent DNA match to the Resident Fan Boy

Stories We Tell has that quality shared by all of my favourite films: the ability to draw me back, again and again, noticing new details every time; being a completely different movie every damn time.

The subject is the gradual revelation of a family scandal, and how widely the narrative varies: from those directly involved, to the those affected by it, to those who witnessed aspects of it.

We tend to screen books, music, and movies through our own uppermost concerns, so my first viewing of Stories We Tell, about ten years ago, reminded me of the myth-making and myth-busting of family research and the resulting clashes of narratives and identity.  More personally, I had a similar, but not identical, revelation in my own family at almost the same time, resulting in everyone affected having to rewrite their own family story.  I think few amateur genealogists fully appreciate the risks of their research, but this risk applies to anyone setting out to tell the story of their relatives.

Our changes in perception are constantly evolving, so a few months ago, I re-watched the film following the tsunami in the wake of the death of Alice Munro, the Nobel Prize-winning author who died last spring. The figurative family bombshell that hit Sarah Polley's family about a decade and a half after the death of their matriarch is not of the legacy-tarnishing quality as that affecting the Munro family, but it was also deliberately kept out of the papers, initially to protect Michael Polley, Sarah's father, and then, because this documentary was being made.

Sarah Polley in the 1980s with parents Michael and Diane

Diane Polley, an actor and casting director, died in 1990, when Sarah Polley, then a busy child actor and now an award-winning writer, was eleven.  Diane had four older children:  John and Suzy Buchan, from her first marriage, and Mark and Joanna Polley, from her second marriage.  They all take their seats at the beginning of the film, like a family gathering at an intervention - except none of them are in the same room; this is footage from separate interviews, during which Sarah Polley asked each to "tell the whole story, from the beginning", as if to someone who is hearing it for the first time.  The backing music is "Skinny Love" by Bon Iver:  And I told you to be balanced/ And I told you to be kind....  

And the late Diane Polley also seems to take her place as well, via footage of an audition from the mid sixties.  But she doesn't say a word.

Someone who doesn't take a seat is Sarah Polley herself, who deliberately keeps silent through most of the film, aside from the occasional question or brief comment, and appears in the occasional re-enactment of events, but with no soundtrack. Sometimes this makes her presence seem oddly impassive, but, as her father astutely points out, she has the ultimate control over what makes it into the film.

Here, I must alert you to spoilers, if you're planning on watching this movie -- and you should.

Polley moves back and forth in time, revealing the surprises and twists out of sequence, but closer to the timeline of their discovery.  She illustrates events with authentic family movies and (*first spoiler*) reconstructed Super 8 footage, using actors.  The Resident Fan Boy didn't notice the latter, but I did, mainly because I recognised Rebecca Jenkins, a friend of Diane's, an actor who also sang back-up for Jane Siberry in the eighties.

Polley is careful to illustrate the differences in  the many narratives about (*big* spoiler) finding out the identity of her birth father. The stories are similar, but vary in small, but important, details, revealing, in particular, the biases of her father, actor Michael Polley, and her birth father, producer/writer Harry Gulkin.  At one point, Gulkin tells Sarah, with some intensity, that the story belongs to him, because he's the one surviving person who experienced it directly.  (I have to restrain myself from shouting at the screen every damn time - if the story belongs to anyone, it's Sarah Polley herself.)

One of Polley's greatest assets is the thoughtful articulateness of her interviewees, particularly her siblings, all evidently very bright people with greater comfort in front of a camera than most people.  It's particularly fun when her brothers give her a hard time, in the way that big brothers do.

Close to the end, we have another moving montage of the storytellers, this time to "Demon Host" by Timber/Timbre: All those messages you sent, clear as day/ But in the night, oh, I couldn't get it right.... The camera lingers on each bereft face: Diane's grown children, her husband, her lover, her friends, her brother.  Years later, she is clearly so missed.

Michael Polley and Harry Gulkin both died six years after the release of this film, within a few months of each other.

The unreliable narrator is a new concept for me, and I seem to be coming up against the term multiple times over the past few months.  (Don't know how I missed this while studying literature in university.) This film demonstrates that we are all unreliable narrators; human memory is just too malleable and mutable.

I think Harry Gulkin was mistaken.  The truth, while ever elusive, is closer through the mesh of narratives, rather than sticking to one voice -- even if that seems the more intelligible way.

But then, perhaps truth is never singular.

Throwing stones

For several months, I had only a vague idea of what happened at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021.  I'm a Canadian, for one thing.  For another, I found it unutterably depressing.  I do remember thinking at the time:  Holy Cow, my cousin was right.

Said cousin lives in California, and was sending me distressed texts in late 2020, saying that democracy in the US was in severe danger.  

I have awoken deeply concerned. None of Trump’s many minions who now fill the seats in the Senate and House have in any way acknowledged the validity of the results of our free and fair election. Their silence is ominous. Ignoring the votes of the American people is outrageous.  He is calling for Civil War. Many of his most ardent supporters are heavily armed.

Democracies around the world need to stand up for the sanctity of the democratic process. This slide towards authoritarianism  must be stopped. Globally, we cannot afford to lose American democracy. The American people have done our job and voted him out in a free and fair election. We urgently need our international partners to speak up.

Back in December 2020, I thought she was overreacting.

It was only when Home Box Office came out with a documentary entitled Four Hours at the Capitol, that I sat down to watch and listen.  It's still unutterably depressing, and I'm still a Canadian, although events in Ottawa earlier this year make trying to understand what went on in Washington DC more pertinent.  No country, after all, is immune to populism, and I'm getting worried about democracy in Canada, to tell you the truth.

Four Hours at the Capitol, which tells the story with no narration other than interviews, and follows events through phone footage (mostly by marchers and attackers), security cameras, and police vest-cams, has been criticised for giving screen time to insurrectionists, but I don't really see how a documentary on the subject can leave them out.  Besides, to someone like me, who has only a faint idea of the various factions involved, it was of some help, although I was quite confused at first.

Early on, I had to sort out just who the interviewees were.  They are identified, of course, as they speak, but the protesters are often described in rather vague terms. I was particularly interested in the testimonies of journalists, whom I ended up having to Google -- which also worried me, because it makes my search history look peculiar.

The three journalists that we hear the most from - mainly because they were in the thick of it - are Taylor Hansen (The Gateway Pundit), Brendan Gutenschwager (described as an "Independent Videographer"), and Ashley Gilbertson (an Australian photographer for the New York Times).  Hansen and Gutenschwager are youthful; Hansen looks as if he's only recently begun shaving.  Gilbertson has the air of a grizzled news veteran.  All of them give clear and articulate accounts - a relieving counterpoint to the mob's limited cache of simple slogans (ie. "1776!" "F*** Antifa!" "Stop the steal!", etc.) but it's only as the documentary progressed that I got a handle on Hansen's sympathies - I'd never heard of the Gateway Pundit.  He uses the words "patriot" and "patriotic" a lot, and he uses them as a synonym for "Trump supporter".  Gutenschwager is harder to nail down, he apparently has documented many demonstrations in the US, and sells footage to major news outlets.  Gilbertson just sounds incredulous, someone who followed the crowd into the Capitol, and couldn't believe what he was recording.

For me, the most unsettling witness is a guy called Nick Alvear, a young, pretty, bearded guy who looks like he could have stepped through a time portal from the late sixties and early seventies. 

He was filmed firing up a joint in the great hall of the Capitol, after members of the mob broke in. Apparently, it occurred to him that he had seven additional joints on him, so he passed them out. Months later, in his interview for this film, he beatifically contemplates this gesture, commenting on how he toned the energy down and perhaps stopped some serious s*** from happening. 

He looks like several of the young men I knew at the Unitarian church when I was a young woman (a hotbed of liberalism), so it's jarring to hear him earnestly declare that Trump is speaking out against the enslavement, rape and torture of children. 

He's referring to the truly bizarre "Pizzagate" myth, which has become part of the overarching "QAnon" conspiracy theory. Our soft-spoken alt-right quasi-hippy somehow misses the irony of thousands of children separated from their parents at the Mexican border under Trump's "zero-tolerance" policy towards illegal immigration (i.e. refugees) -- something that is actually documented, unlike Pizzagate. 

There's further irony: Alvear was born in Venezuela, under the name Eduardo Nicholas Alvear Gonzales.      

The violence is difficult to watch, and I'm not the first one to wonder how violent it would have been, had the crowd been anything but predominantly white.

Particularly gripping are the testimonies of those inside: the woefully outnumbered security personnel, the senators, and staff members.  A young woman on Speaker Nancy Pelosi's staff, who is clearly the same age as my daughters, describes the hours of hiding under a table in a locked room, not daring to text her parents for fear of weeping and telling them goodbye.

We see insurrectionist Ashli Babbitt shot, by a clearly terrified Capitol Police officer. (Taylor Hansen describes her as "so patriotic".) She died almost immediately. We see a policeman hauled out into the crowd, beaten and tasered repeatedly.  He survived, but was badly injured and traumatized. We hear of the four police officers who committed suicide in the weeks following the attack.

Mostly, I was left with an impression of lasting damage, both physical and emotional - and a frightening revelation of how much damage was there before this march got out of hand, and how deeply much of America is in the grip of delusion.

It's the long weekend of the Canadian Thanksgiving.  I could be grateful for being a Canadian - and I am - but, about the same time I first saw this documentary, the truck convoy invaded Hades.  I have a painful story about that, which will have to wait until I can bear to tell it.

Holy cow.  My cousin was right.

Madam, do you think we are barbarians?

I made myself watch the latest Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust - not that it isn't well done, but it's harrowing.  Everything touching the Holocaust is.

As bleak headlines came in about mass graves in the Ukraine and Putin's nuclear threats, I gripped the armrest and listened as author Daniel Mendelsohn recounted the ghastly stories of what happened to his great-uncle, his wife, and four daughters in Poland. As he pointed out that there were many ways of dying during the Holocaust, he looked off to one side with a hint of a shrug and the ghost of a wry, resigned smile, and I remembered Rudolf Vrba.

Vrba, who was born Walter Rosenberg in Slovakia and survived two years in Auschwitz, appeared in interviews for such documentaries as The World at War and Shoah.  He stood out, even amongst interviewees with equally horrifying stories, with his wry and articulate black humour.  In particular, I remember his description of the Nazi guards ordering the prisoners to move:  Schnell!  "They are a sporty people," Vrba observed, drily.

He also supplied the example of a distraught mother approaching a concentration camp officer, when she had been warned that her children were to be gassed. "Madam," he mirrored the officer's wolfish reply.  "Do you think we are barbarians?"

Vrba's story is remarkable in other ways.  He, along with fellow prisoner Alfred Wetzler, became among the handful of people who ever escaped from Auschwitz.  The meticulous report they wrote on the workings and layout of Auschwitz, along with their desperate struggle to make the world, including their fellow European Jews, understand the enormity of the Final Solution, may have saved thousands of lives.

After the war, Vrba obtained a PhD in chemistry, and, twenty years later, emigrated to Canada, where he worked for the Medical Research Council of Canada, and became a Canadian citizen. He eventually moved to Vancouver, where he was a professor of Pharmacology at the University of British Columbia.

In the mid-eighties, he testified against Holocaust denier Ernst Zündel.  This attracted a lot of attention in in Victoria, because Doug Christie, an eccentric lawyer who had a tollbooth-sized office in the middle of a downtown parking lot near the Victoria courthouse, was acting for Zündel.  When Christie asked Vrba if he had, in fact, seen anyone gassed at Auschwitz, Vrba's reply was mordant:  he had deduced, having witnessed officers tossing canisters into the chamber, that "it was not a kitchen or a bakery".  When Christie tried to throw doubt on Vrba's story that he had escaped Auschwitz at night without food, Vrba shot back:  "Perhaps in Girl Guides or Boy Scouts in Victoria, they didn't teach you how this can be done, but it can."

More than forty years after his ordeal, he was still having to defend it -- and still would today.  I imagine he was well acquainted with despair.  He died in Vancouver in 2006.

Ken Burns was a guest on Late Night with Stephen Colbert, just as The U.S. and the Holocaust was transmitting for the first time.  Work on the documentary series began a little under a decade ago, and Burns and his co-creators watched in growing horror as the issues discussed in the documentary, the racism and refusal to help refugees in particular, became ever more pertinent.

We don't seem to learn a thing from history -- or we learn the wrong things...

Gremlins and psychopaths and genes, oh my!

When I have a "gremlin episode", I wonder nightmarishly whether I'm actually seeing things with greater clarity (horrors!), or am deluded with dark nocturnal pessimism.

Do I really want to know?

I'm thinking of a show I saw on TVO a few months ago, called "Genetic Me". A Scandinavian journalist - there's darkness right there - disturbed by what she sees as her negative personality resulting from unhappy incidents in her childhood and adolescence, explores where our personality comes from, ie. genetics.

Can we help it? No. And yes.
Does our family life have a role? No. And yes.

Apparently, we have some say in how unhappy or happy we are, because we can choose how we respond - and our choices may be rooted in what has happened to us in our family.

The strangest story involves her encounter with a Dr. Fallon, a leading expert in psychopathic murderers, who accidentally discovered that he too is a psychopath -- his brain scan confirms it. However, he's a "pro-social" psychopath. He dispassionately analyzes how a "good person" responds, and this has mostly worked for him, preventing him from damaging those around him. He gives his mother's raising of him credit.

The Scandinavian journalist has troubles with what she calls "ruminating" - the experts call it perseveration - the first time I heard this term was June 28th, 2000. A speech therapist used it to describe my younger daughter, then four.

So, I think, the gremlins are my own way of ruminating. I can embrace it, recognize it, and move beyond it.

Can't I?

I rose, walked the Accent Snob with the Resident Fan Boy. As we made our way back, I thought of ruminating, gremlins, my panicking amygdala. I did my Creative Visualization exercises, and the angel cards drawn from my Blessing Bag read: "Comfort", "Cooperation", "Healing".

I can't stop aging.
I can't change younger daughter.
I can work on how I respond to these things.

Doing the subcontinental

A couple of years ago, I accidentally came across an extraordinary video. (I never actually look for these things; they always show up when I'm supposed to be doing something else.)

It's David Brubeck's "Take Five", but played on subcontinental instruments. I liked it so much that I shared it twice on Facebook.



It turns out that the viral video begat a documentary film and when it showed up on the calendar for the Bytowne Cinema, I knew I had to go!



I love that it's PG-rated for "violent images and smoking". (The violent scenes were from newscasts.)

The film opens with a man singing a haunting song, accompanying himself on a hand-pumped harmonium.  This is Nijat Ali, and the film introduces us gradually to him and several other Pakistani musicians struggling to keep their music alive in Lahore.  We learn that Lahore once had a thriving musical scene until a truly creepy guy named General Zia-ul-Haq took over and it was decreed that music was anti-Islamic.

Zia-ul-Haq eventually had his day, but it wasn't long until the Taliban stuck in their oars.  As a result, the musicians featured in this documentary were careful to play only in places with sound-proof walls.  Traditions were dying - it was hard to earn a living, and hard to train up sons (never daughters) in music.

Finally, a wealthy financier named Izzat Majeed, who remembered the "Jazz Ambassadors" visiting Pakistan when he was a young boy, made a bid to re-establish Lahore's reputation as a musical centre.  He remembered hearing Dave Brubeck all those years ago, and establishing the Sachal Studios and gathering musicians, recorded "Take Five", and put it on YouTube.  Brubeck, who heard this version before his death in 2012, sent a message expressing his admiration.

Not so long after that, they heard from Wynton Marsalis.  The second part of the film follows a select group of half a dozen musicians representing the Sachal Studio, as they make a great cultural leap in travelling to New York and performing with Marsalis and his jazz orchestra.  At Lincoln Center.  The men don't speak English nor read music.

The video below is one of the numbers they played, but is not from the film, but from a performance in Paris in August 2013.  (Which is odd, because as far as I can make out, the Lincoln Center performance took place in November 2013.)


There are three videos with the Wynton Marsalis Quintet and the Sachal Jazz Ensemble on Marsalis's YouTube station, but a fellow named Hassan Khan has a myriad of Sachal Orchestra videos, including several numbers with Marsalis, including this gem:



I was a bit worried about an aging violinist interviewed in Lahore in the first half of the film.  He wistfully tells us at the close of the documentary that the string section wasn't able to travel to New York. However, he is getting more chances to play; Sachal Orchestra has its own YouTube channel as well, and they've been recording their own versions of pop and rock tunes, among other things.



The documentary's co-director is Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who is Pakistani herself and an Oscar-winner for her documentary Saving Face. The story of how a woman manages to make a film about an all-male group of musicians in a profession where women, if they participate at all, participate only as singers would make a documentary in itself. (You can read about the challenges here.)However, that's not just a Pakistani problem. You constantly hear Marsalis address his orchestra as "my brothers", because there's not a single female musician among them.

The music's great, all the same.

Focused and critical

Some years ago, I took a course on documentary film.  I have never forgotten it.  It was taught by a National Film Board of Canada film-maker, and among the many things he pointed out to us was the fact that a documentary film can never ever be totally objective, no matter what you've read about cinéma vérité.  We are looking through the film-maker's eyes; s/he has chosen what to shoot and where to zoom or pan out.  We saw many classics, among them Titicut Follies by Frederick Wiseman, about the Bridgewater State Hospital in Massachusetts.  I chiefly remember a chilling scene where a prisoner declared insane by the state articulately argues that he is sane, and how the staff, after his departure from the meeting, explain among themselves how everything he has said proves his mental illness.

Today, I remembered that National Gallery, Wiseman's latest film, was showing at the Bytowne Cinema.  There was a huge line-up to see it, but I managed to secure a seat on the far aisle.  The movie begins with galleries filling with art-lovers and their faces which all have similar expressions:  the head pulled back, the eyes focused and critical.  The faces are all male, for some reason.  When the voices begin, they are female - the voices of the docents, addressing crowds of patrons, or lectures for art teachers,  or workshops for blind and nearly blind art-lovers who are feeling specially upraised outlines of paintings while they listen.

Three pieces that figure heavily in my own life are featured, albeit briefly: "Doge Leonardo Loredan" by Bellini; "The Fighting Temeraire" by Turner (both favourites of my mother's), and the Burlington House cartoon which I encountered on my first trip to London. I had never heard of it before and loved it so much that I would hurry back into the National Gallery at every opportunity to drink it in, even if there were only fifteen minutes available.  I got posters and postcards of it, of course, but it didn't match the magic of being able to gaze on the original.

The film takes us into boardrooms where the accents are (mostly) Oxbridge, females address males whose arms are crossed.  We return to more docents where the accents are more varied: Scottish, Australian, and (mostly) Estuary.  The faces of the gallery staff are all white, while the gallery visitors are every colour, and, in the case of school groups, possibly there under duress.  All manner of people bundle up against the weather (I think this was mostly filmed around Christmas of 2012) and wait overnight to secure tickets to a Leonardo Da Vinci exhibit. Greenpeace guerrillas post a protest banner across the facade as passersby gape and the police wait to move in.  Paintings being cleaned and restored, and scholars argue for and against such restorations. We see a television arts series being filmed, and press conferences, and opening galas attended by very wealthy people.  We see a life class featuring models with, miracle of miracles, unwaxed pubic hair.  We see piano recitals, ballet, and a poetry reading by Jo Shapcott.
This isn't footage from the documentary, but a film by the National Gallery done about the same time.  Jo Shapcott says roughly the same things in Wiseman's documentary, but ruins it a little by explaining that Callisto was experiencing rape a second time when exposed by Diana, because she had experienced "rape of a sort" by Jupiter.  I have double-checked the versions of the myth.  I think it's pretty safe to say that she was raped by Jupiter, period.

By the third hour, I was fighting to keep myself awake -- not because it was boring, but because the movie is probably about 45 minutes too long.  But I was happy I stayed to the end which features faces from many of the paintings that have been featured.  They stare at us, the eyes focussed and critical.

Merry Titanicalia?

Last September, we had an orgy of 9/11 retrospectives, rather like a bleak sort of holiday celebrating the vaporization of three thousand people. We have now reached the end of a week-long festival of Titanic remembrances, a loving itemization of the freezing/crushing/drowning/imploding of 1500 people in 1912. There was a parade in Halifax (where many of the recovered bodies were buried); the newspapers have had series of articles on the disaster, and of course, as with 9/11, we've been treated to a week of Titanic documentaries and movies. The Turner Classic Movie Channel showed The Unsinkable Molly Brown and A Night to Remember (which features one of my indirect links to the Titanic). The fellow responsible for Downton Abbey has come up with his take on the sinking, four episodes shown repeatedly. (I've only managed to watch bits before wanting to hurl stuff at the TV.) The History Channel and The National Geographic Channel have had a field-week.

Predictably, those that aren't interested were crying "Enough!" within a couple of days, but I've been, while not exactly a "Titaniac", a follower of things to do with the big ship since I was ten, so I've been having rather a lovely time. Or does that sound morbid and inappropriate?

One intriguing aspect of having so many television presentations on one topic is the opportunity to compare. We have the really high-end specials involving mind-boggling computer graphics. They have remarkably similar titles: Titanic: Case Closed; Titanic: The Final Word and Titanic 100: Mystery Solved. While all three are engaging documentaries, brimming with well-known experts and high production values, as a family researcher, I'm leery of titles indicating completeness. History is never finished.

A bit farther down the scale are those news specials and TV series suffering from limited time and funds. Real Stories: The Real Titanic, for example, has its heart in the right place, stating (quite rightly) that what really happened was many times more dramatic and tragic than in films made about the disaster. Unfortunately, Real Stories's budget did not allow the hiring of real actors --- nor the purchase of nail polish remover. We're treated to a long shots of "re-enactors" chatting on deck (looking remarkably unmoved), or in impossibly small row-boats (most of the Titanic lifeboats had a seating capacity of between 40 to 60 people). Most distracting and improbable is a scene where a First Class passenger with pearls, a shoulder-length hair-do and blood-red nails pretends to rub invisible cream into her face.

 Aside from the more expensive, less-hastily-made shows, few have been able to resist the basic Titanic myths:
 1) She was out to break a speed record. No, Cunard was after the speed records; White Star was going for the comfort angle. She was going too fast for seas laced with ice-bergs, but that was due more than the crew being unaware of the true danger.
 2) She had been marketed as "unsinkable". The "u" word only appeared in an engineering article which described her as "practically unsinkable". Any public perception of the Titanic being indestructible came from word-of-mouth, not from advertising.
 3) The ship's band went down playing "Nearer My God to Thee".  Oh for Pete's sake. Take a look, if you will, at very similar scenes from the two most famous movies about the Titanic: 1997's Titanic and 1958's A Night to Remember.

 Go ahead, I'll wait: Notice something? There are two completely different tunes. "Bethany" is the setting most familiar to North Americans, while the usual Church of England setting, familiar to most Brits, is "Horbury". Furthermore, Wallace Hartley the band leader, was a Methodist and was said to prefer another setting called "Propier Deo". Walter Lord, the author of the book A Night to Remember, wrote a follow-up in 1986 entitled The Night Lives On (because history is never finished). If you want to read the full argument, someone has thoughtfully posted the chapter and some bonus illustrations online. (Incidentally, the article mentions "Mrs A.A. Dick of Calgary" who happened to be an acquaintance of my late mother-in-law, so there's another of my admittedly very indirect connections to the Titanic.)

 I listened online to BBC Four's The Titanic Minute by Minute which depended heavily on Lord's original book for research and claimed to be an accurate timeline of the sinking. It was a tribute to the Titanic's noble and dutiful musicians, and also featured nifty numbers from the likes of Billy Bragg and Kate Rusbury. I quite enjoyed it until BBC Four, as so many others, could not resist the pull of the legend. They played "Nearer My God to Thee", in the Bethany setting, yet! I actually screamed abuse at the computer, much frightening the dog.

 Maybe I am a Titaniac, after all.