"This is really a Canadian story"

 

Alex Janvier in 2022

Three years ago, I wrote about the impact of seeing a 2017 retrospective of the art of Alex Janvier, who lived in Cold Lake, Alberta, and descended from the Dene Suline and the Saulteaux peoples. 

Janvier was one of the great artists, indigenous or Canadian.  He has just died, at the age of 89.  

This video, made two years ago, captures his gentle, but pointed truths.  It also shows a tiny fraction of his art, which is beautiful, but trust me, if you're standing in the same room as his paintings, it's like being overcome.  They are that amazing.

Sidewalk angel

 "I wonder how long I'll be able to walk around like this."

Demeter is seated beside me in a sushi restaurant.  We've walked from the bus stop in the heat wave, which is supposed to take four minutes, according to Google Maps.  It's taken something like ten, Demeter, now 94, uses a walker, and plods with deep concentration and no sunhat.  (I'd meant to tuck an extra in my bag, but only remembered everything else we need for today's dental appointment.)

We resume the trudge after a lunch for which neither of us has quite had the appetite.  It's a long, long block between Blanshard and Douglas Streets.  No shelter or shade on the north side.  I'd have directed Demeter to the shady side, but that would cost us five minutes we don't have.

On the blazing bright sidewalk, a pale young man, with strawberry blond hair and no shirt, sits cross-legged, head drooping.  There's a sign on the pavement in front of him - he's scrawled it on a piece of cardboard box with a marker: ELEVEN CENTS (11¢) -- THANK YOU

He reappears ahead of us, as we approach the crosswalk.  Two scraps of plastic, about the size and shape of sandwich bags, appear to be attached just below his shoulder-blades, like the wings of a angel.

The bear went over the parking lot

Across the street from our ground-level condo, we have had a front-row view of the dismantling of the strange stone structure with a window, which has been decaying for about two years, below an ancient house set on the rocks above.

Four years ago, I launched myself into the night, the Resident Fan Boy in pursuit, when I got a Lifeline call that Demeter had fallen.  As I fled past the stone whatever-it-was - some sort of garage, or storage room?, I could hear a dog barking at me from within.  (Demeter was bruised, but okay.)

Back in the present, I decided to remind myself how the structure had looked, so went to the "Street View" in Google Maps, noticing that the most recent update is November 2022, the first update since spring of 2017, which means that the photographic record of our neighbourhood now postdate our return to Victoria in late 2017, and our move to the condo in September 2019.

After refreshing my memory on how things had looked across the street from us, I wheeled the viewer around and gazed at our patio window, wondering if someone was sitting on the couch that November morning in 2022 - I could tell it was morning, by the angle of the weak autumn sunlight.  The leaves were also autumnal, lots still in the trees, and plenty on the damp sidewalk.  I "virtually" slipped down a side street, had a look at Moka House on Cook Street, then up the hill back to Fairfield Road, to look toward Demeter's building.

Then I saw a familiar figure on the sidewalk.  It was me, facing west, and evidently on the way to set up my mother's breakfast.  I was clearly standing stock-still, off to the right, in the driveway of a 1912 manor, waiting for an older gentleman to scuff through the leaves and pass me.

That was me in pandemic mode, always pulling off the sidewalk to keep the six-foot gap between other pedestrians and me.

I checked my journals, and realised three things:  the sidewalks were dampened for the first time since late spring as we'd had a long drought, lasting well into late October.  I'd just had my first cataract procedure - the reason for my sunglasses, even on a slightly overcast early morning. I had not yet fallen:  I'd hit the pavement around the corner on November 25th, and in this capture, I'd not yet switched to my winter coat.  So this was early November.  Six or seven weeks before I caught COVID, along with Demeter and younger daughter.  I stood on the sidewalk, planning Christmas, no idea of how challenging it was going to be.  But that's true of any time.

This is my second Street View capture.  The last time was in Ottawa, a May about ten years ago.  I saw the Google van with its tower camera that time, while trudging east, across the supermarket parking lot, clutching two cloth bags containing the makings of younger daughter's birthday cake.  I looked up the location later.  I looked remarkably like a bear.

Who will believe thee, Isabel?

So, I follow Munro's Books on Instagram. 

I follow three or four bookstores which have figured in my life, and if you've grown up in Victoria, your life will have intersected with Munro's at some point. (At several points for me.) 

This morning, I was startled and baffled by this Instagram post in my feed.  You can click on the image to enlarge it.

My first reaction - after the startled bafflement -  was dread.  "The late Jim Munro?"  Oh no...  You can't have grown up in Victoria without running into Jim Munro.  He and both his wives had connections with our church, and my daughters remember his Dumbledore costume on the release day of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

My confusion deepened as I wondered why this woman's sexual abuse as a child would affect Alice Munro's legacy.

Then I googled Andrea Robin Skinner, whose name I did not recognise, and the story actually got a bit worse.

Skinner is Alice and Jim Munro's youngest daughter.  Jim didn't molest her; Alice Munro's second husband did.  After denying it, and describing his step-daughter as a nine-year-old "home-wrecker", in search of "sexual adventure" (oh gawd), he was eventually convicted in 2005, when Andrea was 38, serving two years' probation.  The stepfather died in 2013; Alice Munro stayed with him to the end, estranged from her youngest child.  The rest of the family seemed to deal with it by not mentioning it, even though, after the initial attack in 1976, the little girl told her father and stepmother what had happened when she returned home.  A lot of damage was done.

Alice Munro died about six weeks ago, after living with dementia for about a decade.  I had set aside articles in the Globe and Mail, with the intention of taking them over to Demeter, but somehow, had never done so.  Shaken, I re-read them, in a new and disturbing light.  

The three-page obituary in the first section of the May 15th edition quoted a letter Munro wrote to a friend, after getting together with her second husband:  "My life has gone rosy, again.  This time it's real. . . . He's 50 and free, a good man if I ever saw one, tough and gentle like the old tire ads."

In a lengthy analysis for the weekend edition on May 18th, Sandra Martin wrote about a 1993 Munro short story entitled Vandals, about ". . . Bea Doud . . . who moves in with Ladner, a taxidermist with perverted sexual proclivities.  Doud befriends the two children who live next door to Ladner's rural property while ignoring the sadistic way her lover sexually assaults them."

I dropped the papers on the couch, clobbered by hindsight.

You can't go wrong with Whitman

 

The barista apologises as she slides over my drink.

 "Sorry! I didn't manage a design!"

"Oh, but look," I say, pointing to the faint skim milk outlines on the surface of my coffee.  "There's a very delicate image..."

"It looks just like the lighthouse," adds the woman standing next to me, who has just collected her breakfast in a brown bag.  (She names the lighthouse, but my brain doesn't catch it.)

"I saw a old man waving a cane." I'm rotating the cup.

We all laugh, and I return to my favourite table, calling back over my shoulder, "You see?  You contain multitudes."

I'm not sure that's the best quote, but it sounds profound.

Great was the fall thereof

Many Canadians may have been looking for ways to tune out the jingoism of American Independence Day.  There were options, but, at our house, we looked overseas.

The British election, it turns out, was perfectly timed for an evening's viewing on the west coast of Canada.  The polls closed at 10 PM British Summer Time, so the returns started trickling in about 4 pm our time.

When I discovered that the BBC News was streaming their live coverage at their web site, I alerted the Resident Fan Boy, a longtime election junkie.

"We can set up your laptop to see it on the big screen TV," he said, enthusiastically.

"You mean, we can set up your laptop." Apparently, it hadn't occurred to him that this was possible. (I wanted to use my own laptop to follow bulletins and charts.  The RFB probably had the same idea, blast him.)

And we watched things develop over the evening:  the strange, studio-filling graphics that failed to make things clearer, the exit-poll that was the chief structure for hours, until enough ridings had been declared to indicate that, yes, it had been a reasonable prediction -- except that no one knew that the Conservatives would lose quite that badly.

I was astonished to see Colchester, where most of my father's descendants live, turn Labour scarlet in a sea of Tory blue on the ridings results map.  A few years ago, elder daughter reported that, as delighted as she was to visit her paternal grandfather's family, she was horrified at how pro-Brexit and anti-immigration many of them were.  Golly,  I thought.  They really must be furious at the Conservatives.

And many famous faces fell, these strange, entitled people, who seemed to treat their country like some sort of college prank, but Sunak won his seat (and will resign as party leader).  And Farage, by gawd, got a seat by creating a whole new party, which only won five seats, but got an alarming percentage of the popular vote.  So the faces on British political satire shows will be largely the same for a while.

This afternoon, I sorted laundry in the bedroom and turned on the television for company.  It was the CBC news channel, and they were interviewing some analyst from the BBC.  

They're still at it, I thought. 

But no.  He was talking about the imminent election in France, which seems poised to be taken over by le Rassemblement National.

Nope.  If the Resident Fan Boy wants to follow that, he can take his lap top into another room.

Heads of state hyperventilating

British election today; elder daughter has probably already hit her local polling place. So-called Independence Day in the States, with the fall-out of the disasterous Trump/Biden debate, which I tried so hard to ignore - but it's everywhere. 

And today, a columnist in the Guardian, of all places, suggested the United Kingdom should be arming, because Trump was going to win in November, and he worships Vladmir Putin.

This is a catchy song. A bit depressing, but catchy. The sheriff disappeared. 

He drove in a doomed Corvette. 

Helen was in the passenger seat eating melon and spitting out the seeds, 

Feeling happy to be alone,

but still tuning a saxophone as cold as stone. 

She said: "This is what the apocalypse will look like: 

A tornado with human eyes, 

Poisoned birdbaths, and torrents of chemical rain, 

Like the heads of state hyperventilating in clouds of methane, 

Sundown on the human heart. 

And this is what the apocalypse will sound like, 

But it will be loud as a mushroom cloud. 

It will sound like 'Final Jeopardy', 

But somehow be ghostly like a glockenspiel, 

Like the testing of bombs, or the tapping of stiletto heels. 

It will sound like jazz - jazz jazz jazz - jazz on the autobahn." 

The sheriff disagreed. 

He tried to make the distinction 

Between death and extinction.

They stopped off at a place called Hamburger Heaven to grab a bite to eat, 

But Helen had no appetite; she just drank a 7 Up 

While the sheriff tapped his coffee cup to a distant beat. 

"It won't look like those old frescoes - man I don't think so. 

There will be no angels with swords - man I don't think so. 

No jubilant beings in the sky above - man I don't think so. 

And it won't look like those old movies neither. 

There will be no drag racing through the bombed out streets neither. 

No shareholders will be orbiting the earth, man, neither. 

It will be hard to recognise each other through our oxygen masks. 

The successful sons of businessmen will set their desks on fire, 

While five star generals of the free world weep in the oil-choked tide. 

It won't sound like jazz - jazz jazz jazz - jazz on the autobahn." 

 

They agreed to disagree. 

They zoomed off in a doomed Corvette. 

The sheriff couldn't recall feeling this way his entire life, 

As he drove through the principalities of unreality 

On the run with somebody else's wife, 

The heiress of Texas oil. 

'What is freedom?' he thought. 

'Is it to be empty of desire? 

Is it to find everything I've lost or have been in search of? 

Or is it to return to the things to which there is no more returning?

Does it feel like jazz - jazz jazz jazz - jazz on the autobahn?'

Making better choices

Apparently whoever has been in charge of the social media for the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation is moving on. Judging from this tweet, which has ruled my week, they will be sorely missed.

 

Hawkeye was an asterisk

Sutherland as Fortinbras

Ten days before Canada Day, we learned we'd lost another Canadian institution - Donald Sutherland.

He played a wide variety of roles, many of them in films that aren't exactly my cup of tea, but I remember him for three things - none of which were Shakespeare.

In the wake of Sutherland's death, I was looking for some of his performances when I stumbled across him at something like 28, appearing  briefly, as a gangly, snaggle-toothed Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince who turns up to clean up the carnage in Hamlet.  This was the 1964 televised production (available, thankfully, on YouTube, it's well worth a watch), filmed on location at Elsinore in the autumn of 1963, which starred a very dishy pre-Sound-of-Music Christopher Plummer, and a rather heavily made-up pre-Alfie Michael Caine.  

None of these guys were famous at the time, all three became so, although it took Sutherland considerably longer.

M*A*S*H was, of course, the film that did it for him.

It's one of the three things I do remember Sutherland for, along with his appearance in the music video of "Cloudbusting" with Kate Bush (based on the more sentimental aspects of the life of Wilhelm Reich),  and his performance of the easy-going, bewildered father in Ordinary People.  "Cloudbusting" is easily found on line, but Ordinary People must be on some streaming service I don't get.  My days of simply renting the DVD have disappeared, along with my beloved Pic-a-Flic, which closed about nine months ago.

M*A*S*H, if you can believe it, is available on Disney+, which we do get, in order that the Resident Fan Boy can get his Doctor Who fix.  

I settled down to watch M*A*S*H for the first time in years.

Just a little personal context:  Demeter loved this movie.  She saw it years before I did, of course, and now denies liking it so much, but I remember her raving about it years ago.  When I finally got an opportunity to see it (probably at the university cinema), I was puzzled.

Oh, it's entertaining.  And it was ground-breaking:  the improvisation, the overlapping dialogue, the gore in the operating theatre (which is mild, by today's terms, but shocking for 1970, particularly in a comedy). However, I remember feeling somewhat uncomfortable, and it took me several more years before it hit me - while I was watching it last week.

Hawkeye Pierce is an ***hole. 

Sure, he's a surgeon, and saves lives under appalling conditions, but plenty of surgeons are jerks.  The guy who safely delivered both my daughters by Caesarian was a jerk.  A fellow mum who was a doctor herself, smiled when I described my experiences with him and said "Well, he's an excellent technician." (Which helped, actually.) 

Also, I realise that M*A*S*H is set in the early 1950s, and seen through the lens of the anti-war attitudes of the late 1960s.  (The movie was released in 1970, but filmed a year or two earlier.)  

Even as a young woman, though, I felt uneasy about how the nurses are treated in the film, i.e. as fair game.  Hotlips Houlihan is, admittedly, a pain, but her punishment for being a lippy female and a senior officer is really over-the-top, isn't it?  Her humiliating exposure in the shower is the prelude of her reduction to a simpering hanger-on.  In one of our last glimpses of her, she's standing like an escort, as the men play cards. 

Here's a famous exchange from early on in the film.  The punchline from the late René Auberjonois is funny, but listen to what Pierce is saying to Houlihan.

See, if she were a normal woman (and apparently she's sufficiently pretty) he'd hit on her, and she'd acquiesce, because that's the natural order, right?  (Yes, she's being a highhanded twit; he's still an ***hole.)

Donald Sutherland, according to all reports, was not a jerk.  He was a fine, multi-faceted actor. We are diminished in the loss of him.

Stand on guard?

The Resident Fan Boy and I are taking the two-minute stroll to check on Demeter, about dinnertime in the warm sunshine of a rather lovely Canada Day.  As we pause to determine a safe time to cross the street, we are taken aback.

A young man on a motorized skateboard sails by.  He is shouldering an enormous Canadian flag on a wooden pole; it flies out behind him, catching the early evening sun. On the other shoulder, he's strapped some sort of ghetto-blaster, blaring out a song that sounds faintly country, but we haven't the time to register it, because, in a matter of seconds, he's a block away.

We come to our senses, and once again, check carefully before crossing.  As we approach Demeter's building, the RFB muses about motor on the skateboard, and the rather terrifying speed at which it's travelling.

"Well, you can't say he isn't visible," I point out.