It's evening, but don't ask me to tell you where the stars are. It's raining. This afternoon, up on Burnaby Mountain it snowed -- the wet sticky sort. It stuck to the cars and to the roads. Not a big deal really, but there were a slew of squeamish drivers who wanted to move very very very slowly -- even once they were past the snow line and safely on rainy pavement instead.
I feel like I am living in a bubble that insulates me from culture and world events.
The US President GW Bush is making a state visit to Canada tomorrow. Protests are promised in Ottawa, Halifax and elsewhere. Bush has refused to speak to Parliament because he does not want to have to face the heckling of question time. Stephen Harper is posturing, sort of. Jack Layton is being statesmanlike in his dissent.
.
Monday, November 29, 2004
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Ukraine
For anyone who is interested, there is a very helpful summary of basic background to the current situation surrounding the Ukrainian elections at Daily Kos. Just click on the title.
sigh
Its that kind of morning. a clear blue sky and cold. The sun hasn't risen enough in the sky to warm things up.
This is the weekend of powerless women. I went to the opera last night: Madama Butterfly. The singing was wonderful (Liping Zhang in the title role, a tremendous voice) and the staging was artful, but, you know, its just a bit dull. And painful. And there is something about the music in the last act that brought everyone to tears. I couldn't help it, they just started flowing, and I was self-conscious until I realized that everyone around me was teary-eyed too. Yes, the story is sad, very sad, and tragic, but lets just face it Butterfly is so naive that it borders on the delusional. You don't really like any of the characters, you think they are all annoying and pathetic, and yet you cry anyway. I have a new theory about Puccini: the major Hollywood genres derive from his operas. So far I count two: the Spaghetti Western, which finds its roots in The Girl of the Golden West, and now the Tearjerker, which clearly derives from Madama Butterfly.
But nonetheless this powerless women business seems to be going to my head. I feel heavy this morning. This must stop.
This is the weekend of powerless women. I went to the opera last night: Madama Butterfly. The singing was wonderful (Liping Zhang in the title role, a tremendous voice) and the staging was artful, but, you know, its just a bit dull. And painful. And there is something about the music in the last act that brought everyone to tears. I couldn't help it, they just started flowing, and I was self-conscious until I realized that everyone around me was teary-eyed too. Yes, the story is sad, very sad, and tragic, but lets just face it Butterfly is so naive that it borders on the delusional. You don't really like any of the characters, you think they are all annoying and pathetic, and yet you cry anyway. I have a new theory about Puccini: the major Hollywood genres derive from his operas. So far I count two: the Spaghetti Western, which finds its roots in The Girl of the Golden West, and now the Tearjerker, which clearly derives from Madama Butterfly.
But nonetheless this powerless women business seems to be going to my head. I feel heavy this morning. This must stop.
Saturday, November 27, 2004
Vera Drake
[woke up this morning to a perfect blue sky -- well the sky wasn't blue when I woke, but you can tell that was what it would turn into. cool and crisp. lovely.]
I left the theatre with my guts wrenched, a sense of hollowness and powerlessness fitting to the subject of the movie: abortion in 1950 England. Vera Drake 'helps young women in trouble' simply out of kindness and sympathy, for no remuneration, though the person who puts her in touch with her clients does make a clean profit. Yet Vera is the one who faces punishment. Vera, who, because of her sheer goodness and her seemingly super human ability to be blind to the horrors of human existence, is the least equipped to face the punishment.
Mike Leigh fills his movie with contrasts. We see Vera living in dark, cramped tenement housing, but she keeps things clean and tidy and as bright as they can be, and so has it better than some of her neighbors who are incapacitated in various ways. But she has it far worse than those in the homes she cleans. They don't see her or her life, and it is the men of these very households who sit in judgement of her at court. Even as their daughters secretly secure their own, wholly sanitary and safe, abortions by telling doctors and psychiatrists what they need to hear (even if it may or may not be true) and handing over cash in amounts that Vera and her clientele would never see in a lifetime. We get a glimpse of these daughters through Susan, the daughter in one of the soulless homes Vera cleans. In many ways Susan is the counterpart to Vera's own daughter Ethel; they are both painfully shy and meek. But the privileges of class cannot help Susan when she is date-raped and finds herself pregnant. She manages to pull herself together enough to get herself out of trouble. In a similar way, Ethel manages enough charm to endear herself to the war-scarred Reg, and her soul is revealed in the way she stands by her mum. Through the men, we see a contrast between the moral and the legal judgement of Vera. On the one hand, the men who have been through war and hard times, and who have known Vera, are able to understand Vera's actions and to forgive her, and on the other, the men of privilege who sit on the court find Vera guilty of one of the most heinous of crimes.
And then there is Vera, someone who in her simplicity cannot lie to the police, or even fail to confess. She knows what she does is against the law, and at some level she thinks it is wrong. Yet she also at some level knows that it is not her place to judge the women she has helped. She finds her way to them because they are in trouble -- a trouble that far exceeds whatever failures of judgement might have allowed it to visit them. But Vera is someone who works at the level of intuition, and though her sensibility is good she is neither educated enough nor discursively minded enough to be able to articulate those intuitions in a way that might either change the system or persuade the court to grant clemency. Vera is someone whose actions reflect all the complexity of thinking about abortion, but who has no voice to express those thoughts.
It our identification with Vera Drake that has us walking out of the theatres feeling haunted.
I left the theatre with my guts wrenched, a sense of hollowness and powerlessness fitting to the subject of the movie: abortion in 1950 England. Vera Drake 'helps young women in trouble' simply out of kindness and sympathy, for no remuneration, though the person who puts her in touch with her clients does make a clean profit. Yet Vera is the one who faces punishment. Vera, who, because of her sheer goodness and her seemingly super human ability to be blind to the horrors of human existence, is the least equipped to face the punishment.
Mike Leigh fills his movie with contrasts. We see Vera living in dark, cramped tenement housing, but she keeps things clean and tidy and as bright as they can be, and so has it better than some of her neighbors who are incapacitated in various ways. But she has it far worse than those in the homes she cleans. They don't see her or her life, and it is the men of these very households who sit in judgement of her at court. Even as their daughters secretly secure their own, wholly sanitary and safe, abortions by telling doctors and psychiatrists what they need to hear (even if it may or may not be true) and handing over cash in amounts that Vera and her clientele would never see in a lifetime. We get a glimpse of these daughters through Susan, the daughter in one of the soulless homes Vera cleans. In many ways Susan is the counterpart to Vera's own daughter Ethel; they are both painfully shy and meek. But the privileges of class cannot help Susan when she is date-raped and finds herself pregnant. She manages to pull herself together enough to get herself out of trouble. In a similar way, Ethel manages enough charm to endear herself to the war-scarred Reg, and her soul is revealed in the way she stands by her mum. Through the men, we see a contrast between the moral and the legal judgement of Vera. On the one hand, the men who have been through war and hard times, and who have known Vera, are able to understand Vera's actions and to forgive her, and on the other, the men of privilege who sit on the court find Vera guilty of one of the most heinous of crimes.
And then there is Vera, someone who in her simplicity cannot lie to the police, or even fail to confess. She knows what she does is against the law, and at some level she thinks it is wrong. Yet she also at some level knows that it is not her place to judge the women she has helped. She finds her way to them because they are in trouble -- a trouble that far exceeds whatever failures of judgement might have allowed it to visit them. But Vera is someone who works at the level of intuition, and though her sensibility is good she is neither educated enough nor discursively minded enough to be able to articulate those intuitions in a way that might either change the system or persuade the court to grant clemency. Vera is someone whose actions reflect all the complexity of thinking about abortion, but who has no voice to express those thoughts.
It our identification with Vera Drake that has us walking out of the theatres feeling haunted.
Friday, November 26, 2004
morning coffee
grey sky grey air grey light. still the sky is high. a skateboarder coasts down the Davie hill when he should be careening.
The Ukrainian presidential election dominates the news. Viktor Yanukovich came out the winner, but by all accounts, there was substantial voting fraud. The opposition party leader Viktor Yushchenko is holding fast, and protestors turn the streets of Kiev into multi-coloured rivers. To date: no violence. I am not at all clear what the political differences are in the two parties
The Ukrainian presidential election dominates the news. Viktor Yanukovich came out the winner, but by all accounts, there was substantial voting fraud. The opposition party leader Viktor Yushchenko is holding fast, and protestors turn the streets of Kiev into multi-coloured rivers. To date: no violence. I am not at all clear what the political differences are in the two parties
Thursday, November 25, 2004
why weather?
Its American Thanksgiving, not that this fact has anything to do with the weather, or the title of this blog.
The sky has turned blue, and if it were summer, it would be bright blue. But its not. Yesterday, it was nothing but rain pouring down, and no one knew if the sun ever rose.
I want to try my hand at writing -- but what to write about? What do people talk about when they don't think they have anything to say? The weather.
I do want to write about the weather -- to describe the light, the passing of clouds and time, the rain, the sun, to revel in the small details that disappear. I might also try my hand at reporting on the everyday, expressing unsolicited opinions about world events and movies and the quality of coffee. Occasionally, some profession-related writing might creep in.
The sky has turned blue, and if it were summer, it would be bright blue. But its not. Yesterday, it was nothing but rain pouring down, and no one knew if the sun ever rose.
I want to try my hand at writing -- but what to write about? What do people talk about when they don't think they have anything to say? The weather.
I do want to write about the weather -- to describe the light, the passing of clouds and time, the rain, the sun, to revel in the small details that disappear. I might also try my hand at reporting on the everyday, expressing unsolicited opinions about world events and movies and the quality of coffee. Occasionally, some profession-related writing might creep in.
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