phoenix from the ashes

I herewith aim to resurrect this sometimes report. It has been quite a while since I have aimed to write regularly about things both nonprofessional and professional, and it is about time I get back to it.

real weather

well....
It seems like I am missing all sorts of good material. What with torrential rains, mudslides and a boil water order for 2 million people, and now the cold snap and a dump of snow (snow?!) in the Lower Mainland and in particular Vancouver. But I am not there, so no reports here. Instead, I am in Toronto, happily on sabbatical. (Incidentally, it is unseasonably warm here -- we are in double digits.) Next week I am off to Argentina...

the end of an era

Yesterday, I put my dear cat of fourteen and three quarter years down. She had a tumor that was growing at an insane rate on her rump, and had started to cause her to be in a constant low-grade pain. Her movements were getting more and more constrained, and she was losing interest in food. (She would only eat yogurt and only when it was put right in front of her.) No doubt she could have hung on for another few days, maybe a week, maybe longer. But not much, and I couldn't bear to see her struggle to jump. I am, today, heartbroken, and wondering whether I did the right thing, or rather, whether I picked the right time. And the real answer is of course that no time is the right time, and if I was off by a few days or a few weeks even, she was still spared pain.

I have to say, though, the whole procedure was horrific. I had thought that I would go in, and she would get a shot and I would leave. But the procedure was somewhat protracted. First the vet tranquilized her, and once the sedative had taken over he took her out of the bag and laid her on the table. She was so limp and lifeless -- the only thing that moved was her breath, but her eyes were open, and I kept assuming she was conscious. I now think she wasn't but rather that her muscles were paralyzed by the sedative. I just kept stroking her as she breathed. I wish I had picked her up. And held her. But she looked so foreign -- as if she were already not my cat anymore. And then the vet came and shaved her leg and injected her vein with the euthanizing solution and then in seconds she was no longer breathing and was dead. I just wish I had held her as she died. Why didn't I pick her up? This is the first time I have been through this first hand, this close, and I didn't know. No doubt there will be a next time, and next time I will know.

Yesterday, I started to remember all the good moments. At various points in our life together. Before this year, before she was sick. And that made me feel good. I know that in a few days the rawness of this experience will be gone, and I will start to feel better, but right now, I have to say that this is one of the hardest things I have ever done. I haven't sobbed so hard since my grandfather died, and I was in the theatre seeing 'Breaking the Waves'. Grief is one of the few emotions we feel in an unmediated way.

'yes' and 'me you and everyone we know'

I've seen two movies recently that I am having a hard time writing up. The first was the most recent offering by Sally Potter, the director of 'Orlando', a film I thought I should have liked but which left me cold. This movie, 'Yes', had a similar effect, though it did strike me as sublimely beautiful in spots. There is a scene where the two lovers walk through a spring garden in full bloom which is absolutely divine. Joan Allen stars as the star biologist in a cold marriage who starts an affair with an Iranian refugee -- a former surgeon who now cooks and waits tables. Joan Allen is magnificent. Her face is extraordinarily expressive and seems like a textbook of acting. The script is full of artifice. The dialogue is all in rhyme, and no doubt it is meant to evoke a kind of 21st century Shakespeare. The themes are certainly full of humanity in a similar way, but here they seem overwrought. We are meant to gain insight into the clash of cultures, west and east, muslim and christian, upper and lower classes, white and coloured, north and south, and so on. I found it all a bit too unsubtle. Still, for the beauty and for Joan Allen's perfomance, well worth seeing.

As for 'Me You and Everyone We Know': I loved it. It is quirky but mainstream, profound but superficial, funny but serious. The actor who plays the youngest boy is incredible. [more on this later.

Trains

When was the last time you saw a movie involving a train? Really. There hasn't been a serious train movie in a long time. There are airplane movies and car movies, and 'Speed' was certainly a bus movie. No trains. This dearth of train movies tells us something about our culture. To see this you need to go back and watch some train movies. But let me be clear what I mean by a train movie. I am not sure 'Strangers on a Train', the famous Hitchcock movie, counts. Sure, the real action takes place on a train, but the train travel does little but structure the time in which the narrative takes place. I think the same can be said for the every wonderful 'Some Like it Hot'. In these movies if the train itself plays any role it is affording a place where two (or more) people who would otherwise not have met can meet. In this regard any other sort of public transport, could fill in...buses or planes, perhaps even boats (in the era of the reborn cruise ship). Train movies, movies that MUST involve trains, are about something else all together. They are, at their core, about human freedom, or the lack of it.

This new fixation on train movies began when I rented 'The Train', directed by John Frankenheimer (and since the guy at the video store asked, its one of his good ones, clearly the same director as 'The Manchurian Candidate' (the original), and starring Burt Lancaster as a French railwayman in Nazi occupied France. The movie begins in Paris days before the Allied re-taking of the city. The problem is that no one in town knows how many days until the Allied forces come into town. While the paintings at the Jeu de Paume (a sublime modernist collection, including Renoir, Picasso, Braque, et al) have been saved by bombing they have not been saved from the clutches of a sublimely calculating Nazi colonel who has decided to box them up and put them on a train to Germany. He argues that their value can be traded for arms, but one suspects he wants them for his very own and takes them because he can. The French curator of the museum argues to the resistance that these paintings represent the very soul of France. If they leave the country so does national pride. Lancaster, who manages the railyard at Orsay, has a hard time signing on to any mission to retake the paintings. (It is an interesting historical fact that in fact the paintings at the Jeu de Paume were moved to the new Musee d'Orsay built in that old train station.) After a series of events, he changes his mind. None of this plot needs to involve trains. What does is the struggle to take the art work back. Here the workings of the railroad itself represent the chess match between Lancaster and the Nazi Colonel. Lancaster knows the way trains work, the way the railroad works, he knows the way the Nazi mind works. The Nazi Colonel is no idiot. He knows the system too -- the way trains work, the way the railroad works, the way Lancaster's mind works. The train and the railroad represent the rules that structure our lives. These rules are put to use oppressing the French. The question is whether the French can use those same rules to effect their liberation. The thrill of the movie is the thrill of a chess match: all the possible moves are pre-determined. What is not clear is how the moves will be played out, and whether they will work -- that is, whether the opponent will see the move when it comes.

This is what is special about train movies. Trains run on tracks, tracks that are laid out on a particular path, with switches that determine when the train can be diverted from one path to another. Trains thus lay bare the ways in which human beings are constrained in their actions. We might be able to make choices, but the sorts of choices we have available are limited. Sometimes our interests run up against those of others and we have to really think through how we are to act. Trains also pose for us the question of how determined we are to act as we do. Take 'La Bete Humaine', the movie version of Zola's novel that tells for us the story of a recidivist alcoholic. We cannot help but think that the central character can choose to act differently, but the movie tests us again and again, making us wonder whether human beings might, just as is an animal, be determined to act as it does by the desires and appetites it finds itself experiencing. The idea that human beings do not have a free will but are just as determined in our actions as any other part of the natural world is represented on screen by the trainyard in which our hero works. There is shot after shot of train tracks extending off into the distance, determining just where the trains will go and how they will get there. A human being is no different from these trains on their tracks, the movie suggests.

There is a third movie to consider in this vein -- Runaway Train. The movie stars Jon Voight in a tremendous performance as a convict kept chained in his cell with no human contact for three years. He wins a constitutional suit, gets moved back into the prison population, and proceeds immediately to escape into the winter wasteland of Alaska. He manages to make it to a trainyard, where he hops a train whose driver proceeds to die of a heartattack. The train is a runaway. Just when Voight thinks he has gained his freedom he finds he is trapped on a train careening down the tracks. The train is destined to go to oblivion. There is a sense in which Voight is meant to represent the human condition. We have an illusion of freedom even though our course is determined. But what is interesting here are the small ways in which Voight acts and creates ephemeral moments where he makes this course his own. He takes what he is given, and how he is propelled forward, and where is bound to end up and still manages to move in his own way, and so to taste the every elusive freedom.

What does it say about our culture today that there haven't been any train movies in such a long time? Is it that we don't think about what it is to choose anymore? Is it that the problem of how to choose wisely isn't with us? Is it that we are resigned to determinism? Or content with an illusion of freedom? What think you?

Look at Me (Comme un image)

This evening I finally went to see the movie, directed by Agnes Jaoui, whose title is for some reason translated in English as 'Look At Me'. The French title is 'Comme un Image' -- and a better translation in so many ways would have been 'Like a Picture' or if they wanted to be catchy -- 'Picture Perfect'. The film is a family drama in the broadest sense...the characters are all paired off in overlapping ways, with intersecting lives. As they criss-cross, the characters find themselves at every moment making choices about how to live, and at every moment, almost every moment, they choose badly. The characters whose lives are 'comme un image' are in fact the least virtuous and the least likeable of the lot. The characters whose lives are, for lack of a better word, authentic, end up being the most likeable, even if they might not be virtuous. Individuals fill certain roles, roles which in many instances have a degree of celebrity, and at a certain point they cease to be individuals in their own right, but merely inhabit the roles they have slipped into. This existential theme is intertwined with meditations on the difference between men's and women's roles and the different pressures men and women face. The central character -- Lolita - is an overweight but nonetheless striking woman who does not see her own beauty. She is driven only to get her father's attention, and men's attention in general, and this is in part due to the fact that her father seems to go out of his way to be extraordinarily unsupportive and inattentive. The dynamic between the two of them ripples through the other characters...Sylvia, the singing teacher, Sebastian (whose real name is Rashid, but who goes by Sebastian to make his life easier), Pierre, Sylvia's husband, a newly successful writer, his friend Felix, his soon to be former editor, Edith, the father's young wife, Karine, their young daughter, and his sidekick Edward. Given it is a film about authenticity, the film runs a great risk...it is itself a series of images, after all. Nonetheless it wears its humanity on its sleeve. It has a gentle beauty, and is well worth seeing.

mid-March

Skated somehow through a weird winter for the past two month. No snow. Hardly any rain. Lots of sun. Sad news stories of scores of bald eagle carcasses on the north shore, slain RCMP in rural Alberta, and a mysterious acre of forest clear cut on the other side of Grouse.

I have been inattentive to world politics and to canadian politics but following with baited breath the US debate on social security. I am feeling more and more alienated from American culture. I am not a Canadian, and I feel less and less like an American. I am in nationalist no-man's land.

I think what I will aim to do in the coming months on this blog, such as it is, is to think through the difficulties of dual citizenship, (such as I am contemplating). So ...if you care at all...stay tuned for that set of thoughts.