No beginning and no end

Still Life and Street - a 1937 woodcut

It's the third day of what desperate Ottawans are calling "spring". Filthy piles of snow are melting into filthy puddles, and the buses and sidewalks are suddenly full of people pushing walkers, or in motorized wheelchairs. You don't see much of the elderly or disabled in the winter months; this isn't the ideal city for them.

I thought about this as I followed the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter down Sussex Drive toward the National Gallery. Last March, I struggled to keep up with them and had to stop for rests every time my knees gave out. Today, I gave thanks for being able to walk and stand. Evidently, I've been given a respite, but I'm grimly aware that last year was probably a preview of my own eventual decrepitude. Rather like winter, which always comes back, and is forecast to close in again this weekend.

Best to rejoice in what is. Among the exhibits currently at the gallery is a retrospective of the mind-bending images of MC Escher. It's a small exhibit by the Gallery's standards, only taking up three large showrooms, but with Escher, that's probably ample enough brainwork for one afternoon.

For those -- like me -- who are only familiar with posters of creatures seeming to crawl out of two-dimensional designs, or stairs that keep flipping over, it's something else to see Escher's early work: woodcut scenes from Italy created out of delicate crosshatching or hundreds of vertical strokes. In the centre of the first hall is a display table showing a sketch of a scene, the block with the woodcut for the same scene, and finally the print made from the woodcut. I found myself rather preferring the block with an image that wasn't a negative, exactly, but the city-scape at night which seemed to be emitting its own light.

Above is one of the prints that made me stop, go back and gaze. It's an early example of Escher playing tricks with a view out the window -- with no window. The street simply grows out of the desk and the books blend into the walls of the buildings. It's subtler than his more famous stuff. Go take a good look.

Below is a work from twenty years later which is more recognizable as Escher. I saw the devils before I found the angels. Is it a judgment?

Circle Limit IV - a 1960 woodcut

When I got home, I went up into the bedroom and wondered at an unfamiliar but not unpleasant odour. I realized the Resident Fan Boy had opened the window for the first time in five months.

He'll have closed it by the weekend.

Falling icicles and fossils

Oh, Ottawans are deluded. One day of plus-zero temperatures (Celsius of course!) and they're warbling about spring coming. They wander in a happy daze, getting beaned by plummeting tusks of ice. Early this afternoon, I took the Accent Snob for a splash through the slushy puddles that make up the sidewalks on the side streets, and we were blocked by an enormous clump of smashed white snow. It took me a minute to realize that it was one of the huge accumulations on top of the shrubbery lining the posh house on the corner. It had evidently slid off in a lumpy crunch sometime during the relatively balmy morning. The dog and I made a detour around it, as I checked quickly for outstretched legs. No casualties.

A European lady whom I glimpse every few months walking her pug, greeted me with talk of spring. I told her that I've learned not to even consider it until May to shield myself from disappointment. She strolled away laughing. It was pointless to remind her that when spring comes, it will last two weeks. Memories here are as short as the winter is long.

However, it's March Break (never Spring Break here), and I've made a list of outings for younger daughter and left it by her breakfast place. She chose the Museum of Nature today, so we set off to fit it in before her voice lesson which is in the same neighbourhood.

The lady at the admissions desk asked for student identification for younger daughter, a first. Younger daughter's school gave up on providing student cards years ago, and I don't carry her report cards around with me. I will now. "She looks older," said the lady kindly, but younger daughter is petite and still looks quite younger than her actual age. As we made our way to the cloakroom, the real reason occurred to me - March Break doesn't begin until next week for the public school system, so she stood out among the handful of tiny visitors to the museum today.

And indeed, I've never seen the Museum of Nature so empty. We practically had the Dinosaur Gallery to ourselves. This meant we could use the audio-visual displays for once. I've rarely had the opportunity to appreciate just how wonderful they are. They're a blend of interviews (subtitled - a huge bonus for younger daughter), animations, quizzes and puzzles. I learned about how fossilized leaves give clues to climate and landscapes: long thin leaves mean rivers, large smooth edges mean tropical, jagged edges mean temperate, and a long spout at the tips means rain forests. I learned there was an enormous Y-shaped inland sea stretching across what is present-day North America, and that the left arm of that "Y" stretched over what is now Saskatchewan, which is why they can find ancient shark teeth in the Pasquia Hills. I suppose it will be back some day, but not teeming with the creatures suspended over the entrance - not even with their skins on.

Younger daughter carefully avoided me, spending a long time at several monitors, murmuring the text from the screens to herself. Diplomatically, I kept my distance until it was time to leave, and we walked out into the sunshine, stretching our legs to avoid the slush and puddles along Metcalfe, listening to the dogs barking and squelching at the dog park on Frank Street, on our way to the coffee shops of Elgin.

Daylight saving whine

I was standing at the pick-up counter of our local drugstore this morning when I realized how peculiar I was feeling. It was 8:30 am, but 7:30 standard time and that was the whole problem. I was navigating myself through the day in a city full of sleepy and cranky people, and it will take at least three days before I feel anywhere near normal again.

Arguments for and against daylight savings time can be found here, but I found myself laughing hysterically at this item from HBO's Last Week Tonight

Beware, it's not very respectful to Germans, and downright rude to cows:


I admit I'm a bit punchy, so I may not find this as funny when my circadian rhythms recover.

Watching a book

Capital by John Lanchester




This book begins like a novel, and somewhere in the middle turns into a television series. This is not a bad thing; at some point I began to be strongly reminded of a British show from a few years back called The Street in which each episode was about a different household with characters from other household overlapping.

That street was working-to-lower-middle-class; the street in Capital has evolved over the years into a very posh street, although the characters we meet are from all walks of life: an African refugee, a Muslim shopkeeper and his family, a Polish builder, a Hungarian nanny, a city banker, a promising young soccer-player, a City banker and his spendthrift wife, and a dying old woman - plus a dozen others.

Lanchester does an admirable job of inhabiting each of these very different characters, and the narrative is very compelling - even if the ending is not all that surprising.

I wouldn't be a bit surprised to see this televised in the not-so-distant future.



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Too damn tired

It's March. It's Ottawa. It's Daylight Saving Time, and I get one less hour to sleep.

A shadow of his former self

Oh, I had noble plans. I had the day mapped out. Then I ran into my father. The one who has been dead for six years. The one I haven't seen for many more years than that.

I have a British subscription to Find My Past, but the site is offering free world-wide access this weekend, so before embarking on the day's activities, I tried entering some familiar names. I stumbled across three articles about my dad, two with pictures, all from Bay Area newspapers which is where he settled after he left us for the final time. The articles themselves didn't contain anything of which I wasn't aware; they concerned his involvement with the local branches of Junior Achievement and the American Diabetes Association.

I wasn't prepared for the heavy sad feeling somewhere below my heart. In the first photo, he is back-lit in a group of four men, but I instantly recognized his stance, his posture and the shape of his head. It was taken when I was about the same age as younger daughter is now, and struggling through a haze of depression in the final months of high school. I noticed with another small shock, that the photo had appeared in the San Mateo Times. My aunt, my mother's sister, lived in San Mateo for many years.

The second photo was taken three years later, after I had decided, based on a dream I'd had, that he had died. I was staying with a family friend in Muswell Hill, in the house he'd often visited with my mother, and was haunted by what I had imagined were vestiges of him. The photo is crystal clear. He is unmistakeable.

It took me a while, but I recovered and got on with my day. I didn't weep. I saved the articles and archived them until I can decide a safer place to store them. As I have mentioned in this blog before, a number of people need to be safely off the planet before I can tell his story to those who remain.

Grief, it seems, takes strange shapes, as tangible as a knot in the stomach and insubstantial as a shadow. It returns in a different form every time.

Goin' somewhere?

I woke up this morning rather dreading the day -- I've actually been dreading this day for some time.

However, the afternoon ended with the Resident Fan Boy, younger daughter and I making the long return by bus in sunshine that just about gave warmth, having made some decisions for the coming year. Whether we've made the right decisions probably won't be revealed to us for some time. Months, maybe. Years, probably. Days, if we're really unlucky.

When I got home, there were pumpkin pies to be made for tomorrow's pre-March-Break potluck at younger daughter's school. Well, they'll be getting one pie; the other was for tonight's dessert, because it would be cruel to make pumpkin pie and deprive elder daughter. While they baked, I folded laundry and ran smack into a memory from my own last year of high school.

It was the Christmas talent show and the last number in the darkened gymnasium was performed by a couple of brothers who were in the drama club with me. I remember them as being delightful, open fellows with a stinker of an elder brother who had, thankfully, graduated the previous year. Strumming guitars with ease and energy, they sang a ditty I'd never heard before, about going to see a film about Gunga Din. There was no internet in those distant days, so it took a while before I found out it was a Bob Dylan song, although from the sound of things, the brothers had based their setting on the version by the Byrds.

The following cover sounds a lot like how I remember that grey December afternoon. It was, as far as I recall, my last happy memory of high school.

(Singers Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, are, of course, the former lovers whose story is told in the motion picture Once.)

Gould comfort

It's March in Hades, which means veering from flash-freezes to freezing rain to slush. It was the last item today. I ventured out on the long afternoon journey to Bells Corners and was confronted with several shallow and not-so-shallow bodies of water, close to the curbs and overwhelming the feet of several driveways, effectively corralled by small walls of snow. One has to trek over squishy layers of grey matter to avoid ankle deep moats that cut across the sidewalks, while taking care to keep as close to the houses as the drifts will allow, because that ninth car in every ten will fail to slow sufficiently and one will re-learn the concept of water displacement in a curtain of salty filth.

I made it on to a bus with relatively dry feet, only to discover I had failed to re-synchronize my iPod when recharging it, so my music menu and assorted podcasts that help me through the hour-long trip to the outer reaches of Nepean were not available. This left me to choose between listening to the radio or contemplating my rich inner life -- the windows being too coated with mud to see out.

I chose the radio, and heard the middle of a piano piece with a voice humming along in my left earbud, so I knew it was Glenn Gould who was notorious for singing along with his nimble fingers. (Mind you, I also have a recording of the full score for Tchaicovsky's Sleeping Beauty in which you can hear, if listening on earphones, André Previn's "dee-di-di-di-dee" during the introduction to the famous waltz, so Gould was not entirely alone in this habit.)

I peered out at the passing Ottawa River, seeing someone cross-country-skiing on the snow-covered ice, ice-fishing huts near the Québec side, and someone else carrying what looked like large blue wings - all of these rather perilous pursuits in a thaw, no matter how temporary.

When I got home, I stumbled upon this:

Having someone in the house living on the autistic spectrum with a talent for music, I find I feel rather protective of Glenn Gould, even though he's far beyond needing anyone's protection now.

The temperature is plummeting tonight, meaning all those ponds will be miniature skating rinks.

Perfect.

Save it for later

Elder daughter sidled up to me in the kitchen last week and inquired, sotto voce: "How did you do it?"

We've been struggling over the past few weeks with younger daughter's descent to the breakfast table. The descent has been occurring later and later, until she was missing breakfast more often than not and worse, making her lift idle in the bus stop in front of our house. Our lives for the past half-dozen years have run on the theme of "Is it adolescence or autism?", so any attempts to reason with her were loudly rebuffed.

Finally, I remembered reading somewhere that writing is not nagging, so I wrote her a letter detailing the problem and making some suggestions, leaving it on her bed. We did hear an indignant "How dare they?" from behind her closed door, but, wonder of wonders, she has been down to eat breakfast in plenty of time for a week and a half.

This means, among other things, that we also have plenty of time to listen to the radio before she leaves. This was playing this morning:

I don't remember The Beat (known as the English Beat outside of England), although I do recall General Public, their next incarnation. Cute though, isn't it? The Beat in a fifties beat club which still manages to look thoroughly eighties. Maybe it's the hair.

While we're at it, here's Pete Townsend doing an acoustic version some years later:

Townsend offers a prize for anyone who can tell him what the song means. There's an unsavoury theory that the title and chorus are a play on words. I really hope they aren't.

Duh, Persephone

I have been meditating on musical reinterpretations, which isn't as pompous as it sounds - I've been avoiding doing things I should be doing again, and this works as well as anything.

Anyway, last week this video went viral: 

Now, most people are focussing on the fact that it's older people in the video, but what struck me was this wasn't just a karaoke version of the original by Mark Ronson featuring Bruno Mars - it's an honest-to-goodness re-recording of the audio and sounds, and it's edgier.  Nuthin' wrong with the slick original, y'understand.

While I was comparing the two (fabulous way to procrastinate and avoid - trust me), I had a feeling of déjà-vu, and tried googling Purple Rain, a film I've never seen.  I did see plenty of music videos from it, years ago, including this one:

That's when it occurred to me that the "Wait! What time is it?" break in "Uptown Funk" is a direct reference to "Jungle Love". This became even more obvious when I checked the comments for all the videos.

Duh, Persephone.

I also discovered discovered several mash-ups of "Uptown Funk" with "Jungle Love", and this recent performance of the latter song by Morris Day himself -- who is now probably roughly the same age as Alex Boye, if not the dancing grannies.

Rather a neat circle, isn't it? Day is backed by Haim:

Morris Day and the Haim. I just got that.

Duh, Persephone.