Isle of Dogs

A couple of weeks ago, I discovered why our next door neighbour keeps her dog in a cage when she's out of the house.

We live in a neighbourhood full of dogs, and it's easy to get judgmental. There's the appealing little fella across the way whose people let him wander in their unfenced backyard. There's the lady around the corner whose bichons frises younger daughter and I discovered crisscrossing the road two blocks north of where we live -- in the midst of after-school traffic. They had dug their way out of her yard, and she swore they had not been gone for more than half an hour -- even though half an hour is the time they'd spent at our house after we'd carried them all the way home. Opposite us is a lady who also let her tiny white dog wander up and down in front of the house without a leash. When I pointed out to her that he had crossed the street and was now wandering up to the opposite corner, she was astonished: "He's never done that before..."

When we discovered that our neighbour in the other side of our semi-detached keeps her Jack Russell terrier in a cage (rebranded a "crate") when she's at work, we felt so sorry. We can hear him barking and yelping and call through the wall: "Hi Jerry!" There's silence and then the barking resumes. He's not a loud barker, but we worried about his being bored and lonely.

The Sunday before last, I was dusting around the living room window. I was probably avoiding doing something else, but the dusting was badly needed. I happened to glance out the window and spotted our semi-detached neighbour's weekend guest on the sidewalk with her own small dog on a lead while she checked her cell phone. I went back to my work, and heard her steps on our shared front porch.

What happened next was so quick, I couldn't quite fathom what had happened. In a brown streak, Jerry had zoomed across the street as a car screeched to a halt. Next-door Guest dashed after him, hauling her own dog. Jerry had crawled under a parked car and was cheerfully ignoring her pleas, until (swoosh!) he dashed back to our lawn, halting another automobile. NDG attempted to find a lull in the traffic to get back to Jerry, but he flashed across the street one more time. By this time, I was on the porch, wondering if he could be tempted into our place, which has always held some fascination for him (perhaps due to lingering whiffs of our late cat who departed this house and this life a little over a year ago). NDG was so frantic, she had dropped her own dog's leash. A lady rushed to her rescue and helped her corral Jerry, then thoughtfully caught the little white dog's leash and held her while NDG bundled the unrepentant Jerry back to his door.

"Has Jerry been naughty?" I inquired kindly, remembering a long-ago afternoon when I nearly lost a close friend's three Schnauzers. (I should tell you about that some time. Imagine three Schnauzers wandering unconcernedly up the longest street in Burnaby.)

"Jerry has been very naughty," she agreed emphatically. "She usually keeps Jerry in his crate, but I don't know how to latch it, so I didn't put him in, then he slipped out when I opened the door..."

Occasionally, we catch a glimpse of Jerry some mornings through the window in the neighbour's front door. He sits glumly in his crate, staring at the opposite wall. We're less sympathetic now. The rogue.

The hell below Haggerston

The Blackest Streets: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Slum by Sarah Wise

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I got this book out of the library for two reasons: 1) someone recommended it in the Goodreads reviews for Lost London: 1870-1945 which I'd recently bought; 2) I thought, based on my struggles with working out historical London streets, that I had ancestors living in the Nichol around 1840. I've since discovered that my lot were actually in Haggerston, several blocks to the north, but never mind.

This is a very readable account of the neighbourhood behind St Leonard Shoreditch which, for about one century, had the reputation of being the dirtiest, poorest, and most dangerous place in London. Sarah Wise doesn't dispute the dirt and poverty, but she has some perspective to offer on the danger. The Nichol was a dangerous place to live, no doubt, but more for malnutrition, disease, and domestic violence than murder. Wise tells the story of how a rather rural area surrounded by gardens became a dark warren of poorly constructed and overcrowded buildings in a few decades. We hear what it was like to grow up in such an area, why so little was done for the residents, and finally, the grand plans to transform the neighbourhood into a wholesome and aesthetically pleasing community for the "deserving poor", with predictable results.

It's an interesting angle on the nineteenth century and underlines how much, and how very little, has changed.

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Go West

And so this is Christmas. Well, it's really Advent, but Christmas stuff is getting in full gear, including younger daughter's school's "holiday concert" which, of course, has nothing to do with either Christmas or Advent, since we have a mix of Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, and non-practising types. Fair enough.

(Actually, what really used to amuse me was the situation at the public elementary elder and younger daughter attended which featured a holiday concert and un soir de Noël for the French Immersion students which invited involvement from the English Stream French classes. The former was scrupulously secular, and the latter blithely consisted of carols, presumably because it was somehow politically correct to warble Christian ditties in French.)

Younger daughter was all set to perform Macavity from Cats, as she did TS Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats for her poetry project earlier in the fall. However, yesterday at the bus stop, she struggled for the words - a sure sign that something is desperately important to her - and announced she wanted to do something "Christmassy" instead.

I dropped her off at her voice teacher's apartment where it was decided that "White Christmas" might work. Despite the "C" word, it's a very secular song. I hurried off down to Lees Station to waylay a bus, pondering what people perceive as Christmas music today.

When, for example, did "My Favourite Things" become a Christmas song? Sure, it mentions "silv'ry white winters" and "brown paper packages", but those things happen without Christmas, and besides, The Sound of Music is set in the summer. With Nazis.

"Jingle Bells" is often described as a Christmas carol. It's a) not a carol; b) not about Christmas. Same deal for "Winter Wonderland", "Sleigh Ride" and "Jingle Bell Rock". Check the lyrics. They're songs about winter. You could sing them in February. "Baby, It's Cold Outside"??? C'mon, people!

Then, of course, there's "Santa Baby". Okay, Christmas is involved. But still, it's not a carol. And Marilyn Monroe never recorded it. I've got nothing against these ditties, y'understand, I just think they're radically mis-categorized.

I gazed out the bus window, wrapped up in these thoughts and only vaguely aware of the salmon-coloured sunset. Wait a minute. The sun sets in the west....

I suddenly realized I was barreling west along the Queensway. Our house is to the northeast of downtown Ottawa, nowhere near the Queensway. I had absent-mindedly boarded a 101 Bayshore bus. After a second's disoriented panic, I noted that the automated voice had called out "Catherine/O'Connor" and hastily made my way to the exit. From there, I scurried another block west to Bank Street, and peered into the glare of the headlights in search of a #1 bus home, while Elton John's "Rocket Man" played on CBC Radio Two in my earbuds. (Also not a Christmas song, despite the bit about Mars being cold as hell.)

♪And I think it's gonna be a long, long time...♪

It wasn't, really; I got home a few minutes before the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter....

Too bad younger daughter has opted out of Macavity. I think her version would have been dynamite, although probably minus the swivels and wiggling you'll see in the DVD version:

Fashion for the unconscious

There was a wide variety and ages and voices at younger daughter's holiday recital. Well, seventeen sopranos and one very brave baritone, but a wide, curving range of ability, style and motivation. Three little girls with anxious mothers, half a dozen mature singers pursuing pleasure and self-improvement, and adolescent and post-adolescent young women in search of...themselves? A vocation? A career in music and theatre? Probably all of the above.

This was my third visit into this rarefied world of performance, the first two being younger daughter's first festival competition and the spring recital with much the same crowd as this one. As younger daughter becomes used to this sort of thing, so do I, and I found myself relaxing more and taking in the whole performances.

Which includes, although maybe it shouldn't, what the singers chose to wear. The little girls were, of course, in variations of little-girl-party-wear which these days seems to be a sort of shift affair with ballet shoes or Mary-janes. The mature ladies went for dressy-casual, some dressier, some more casual; usually a scarf was involved.

Nearly all the young women were in black minis. And here's the problem. It was an afternoon recital. In a church. Not a church service, mind, but the key words here are "recital" "afternoon" and "church".

I was most startled when I heard a clomp-clomp-clomp and up hobbled a girl in a spaghetti-strap chemise-top over a body-con miniskirt, complete with lace stockings and backless shoes with six-inch heels. She did wear a sort of black cardigan over this ensemble, but she still looked -- oh, how aged do I sound? -- kinda like a hooker...

Looking back without checking the programme, I can remember what the little girls and the mature ladies sang. I only remember what most of the adolescent girls wore.

(Oh. Younger daughter sang a gospel song, and a clear and expressive version of "Jingle Bell Rock". She wore a hot pink tee-shirt and mini-skort with dark pink tights and flats. She looked lovely. Her totally objective mother thanks you for asking.)

Enervation

So many things I would have done -- the clouds got in my way.Stuff from left field again. I drugged myself with family research and funny videos on YouTube, and every time I stopped, the pain came seeping back like a burned finger. I won't burden you with it.

Clever Dick (Duke?)

This is bloody amazing. The Duke of Clarence speaking in two dozen voices, some English, some American, a Scot, a Welshman, and one Shakespearean Canadian actor (although I doubt he did this role):

Things that could be improved with cats

I was watching It's a Wonderful Life tonight. It's not my favourite Christmas movie (that would be Scrooge with Alistair Sim), but it's full of wonderful moments. I particularly love the bit when the angel in charge of Clarence (Angel Second Class) tries to explain his shortcomings to his superior: "Sir, he has the IQ of a rabbit!"

If it were my favourite movie, I'd invest in a DVD. As it is, it takes three hours to show the darn movie on television because there are fifty minutes of commercials. That got me to thinking of this, which showed up on YouTube recently:



"People don't want to watch ads; they want to watch cat videos." Damn right. Come to think of it, that's what It's a Wonderful Life is missing --- cats...

Bah humbug

Don't get me wrong, this little flash-mob at Vancouver International Airport has its charms. They even have a live band! However, it has "spin doctor" written all over it. (Our national airline has been struggling with cut-backs, financial crises, strikes, and rather lack-lustre service for years.)

Then we note the date this took place: December 18th, 2010. Oh dear. Were any of those passengers en route over the Atlantic, say, to Heathrow? I think there were thousands of people who didn't even manage to get where they were going. Then, a huge storm hit the eastern US just after Christmas, and those who had made it where they were going had real trouble getting back. It was not the holiday to be flying, unless you were St Nicholas himself. Maybe that's why no one really seems to remember this.

An Advent apple

April may be the cruelest month, but for younger daughter, November is the loooongest month, with little to break it up but Remembrance Day which isn't even a school holiday in Ontario. Last Friday, she came home from school and rustled around furtively in her DVD collection. I heard Christmas music and realized that she had noted that it was a month until Christmas and it is now permissible to break out the holiday movies. For someone with memory challenges and a radically different sense of time than the rest of us mortals, this was huge.

This morning, to younger daughter's intense relief, the Advent calendars came out: the permanent one that we set up in the living room, with books to be read aloud, then hung on the Christmas tree (when we set that up a week before Christmas); an online one this year sent to us by an Albertan cousin; tiny Christmas-card-size ones sent by Demeter, and the morning ritual of opening the large cardboard ones, in our bedrooms.

As a child, my very favourite Advent calendars were the ones where the doors opened to show what was happening behind; a meal being cooked in a kitchen, an animal hiding a present under a bush. I haven't seen those kinds in years, although this December I have a very traditional German calendar with rabbits and hedgehogs exchanging gifts under a brilliantly lit woodland tree and huge double-doors for Christmas Eve which will almost certainly reveal the Holy Family in the stable. Door Number One was an apple, which seems appropriately Lutheran somehow. (A casserole, perhaps, for American Lutherans?)

My shopping is only partially finished, and when I think ahead to the extra cooking and cleaning, I could almost wish November back -- except when I see the glow from the corner where younger daughter is. These are the most precious days of the year, a month when she is truly happy. When December ends, we will have to let go of Christmas to allow it to return. However, for her sake, and hers alone, I would keep Christmas all year if I could.

They had us until the fish

I wasn't sure if it was hair dye or a forest green fascinator.

There I was, passing the minutes before the ballet, training my bird binoculars on the audience below. If you're in the loges at the National Arts centre, it's always fun to do a crowd comparison. The kind of audience that shows up for a symphony concert (reserved and dressy) versus those coming to see a musical (mixture of jeans and flamboyance) versus the Vinyl Cafe aficionados (pullovers). The ballet brings out a distinctive crowd. Oh, you have the usual bun-heads, those humourless and skinny young girls accompanied by their equally skinny and usually blond mothers, but you see some pretty unusual garb in the ladies room, and some head-turning male fashions as well.

You can also pick out the boyfriends and husbands who came along; some sons too, I noted as I scanned the first row where you usually see the more rabid balletomanes. Someone had brought two preteen boys, decked out in plaid baggy shirts. They were in full slump, propping their sneakered feet on the edge of the stage.
"I'll bet their parents are francophone," I muttered to the Resident Fan Boy (who, to confuse other ballet-goers, turns up at performances in a pullover). Anglophone families, in our experience, don't bring their sons to watch dance.

Directly below our loge, I could see a rather ungainly girl taking her seat in the front row. Well, I could see the top of her head anyway, and the front part of her head looked forest-green and feathery. I watched her with interest as I tried to decide, peering through my binoculars, whether she'd dyed half her head, or was wearing those fascinators that young Royals seem to think are nifty. She appeared to be clad in a rather shapeless dress with short sleeves and as she fidgeted with a sheer scarf which she kept smoothing out over her knees, I noticed she was wearing over-sized beige gloves. Well, I thought. It's for a Pina Bausch, after all.

We included this performance of Danzon in our subscription because I recognized the name. It turns out that these two Ottawa performances by Tanztheater Wuppertal were the only Canadian ones on this tour, and we had something of a hot ticket. I've seen bits and pieces of Pina Bausch works on television, so I was prepared for quite a bit of surrealism.

No disappointments there. We started with two women in white shifts struggling on their backs like overturned beetles while a man in an large diaper rolled stones at them, then, like a child, experimented with pinning them down with the rocks. Then a lady in an elegant swirly summer dress strolled across the stage ("I am here and you are there!") and plucked someone from the audience to share the view. It was, of course, the fascinator-lady I'd been studying earlier, and she turned out to be a man and clearly a member of the troupe.

Things got weirder from there. It was rather relaxing, as I learned long ago not to labour on attaching meaning to modern dance performances. It usually emerges on its own, and if not, so what? We saw naked women in bathtubs being slowly removed, one by one, by a blindfolded man. Couples literally rolled in the hay. A cross-dresser in an evening gown and full-blown Bette Davis mode, drawled through a meandering monologue. Tents were set up and campers listened to excerpts of Bambi and long jokes, roaring with laughter. Nude people behind a translucent screen showing flowers and crashing surf, chased each other, piggy-backed each other, and appeared to frolic in the waves. (The Resident Fan Boy told me later that younger daughter shielded her face behind her programme during that bit, but as you can see from the photo, we couldn't see much. I bet those preteen boys in the front row were straining their eyes.)

It was, as elder daughter might say, random, but in this small company with a pleasing family mix of young and old dancers, it felt as we were getting to know each individual character.

Then, out of nowhere, we were confronted with a large screen featuring close-ups of schools of various tropical fish. In front, a very young man in black, whom we'd not seen before, stood and fluttered his hands. This seemed to go on for a good ten minutes. That's the first time during the evening that I found myself trying to see my watch in the darkness. The other dancers returned and did various odd things with dirt, but it felt as if the spell had been broken.

At the end, the company came out for their curtain calls to rapturous applause. (The preteen boys in the front row were in a non-clapping slump.) The dancers clung to each other in a long line, with the young man who had been fluttering with the fish looking closed down and rather out-of-place.

As we descended from the upper levels to find the exit, the Resident Fan Boy commented: "I was fine until the fish." I giggled. I had been thinking almost the exact same thing. Younger daughter, however, declared she had liked the part with the fish, especially the one which reminded her of Dorey from Finding Nemo. So I guess it was a win-win, seeing as we had enjoyed the rest of the performance.

It being the one Canadian venue of the tour, there were detailed reviews from both the Ottawa Citizen and The Globe and Mail, both reviewers singling out the moving tribute to the late Pina Bausch. Apparently, she had choreographed the fish solo for herself.

I guess, then, if you were "in the know", that would be your reward. I think, though, that being unknowing isn't always a bad thing when watching dance. I'm certainly glad we didn't miss this.