TRH Movie – Hot Docs

So. I’m going to preface this entire rant by saying that I have absolutely nothing against Hot Docs as a festival nor any of the films screening this year — I’m highly supportive.

BUT.

In order to review some of the Hot Docs screeners for Chart, I had to sign up for a press badge. Usually, I’m thrilled to bits to get a press pass, but because I have no time to actually go to the screenings, I feel bad that I won’t be able to make good use of it. There’s too much bookish stuff going on next week, plus exercise classes, yeah, you get it.

The real problem is that I have been receiving non-stop spam from festival participants for the last few days for screenings, for parties, for everything and anything. Had I been a REAL journalist, all of these emails might have been worthwhile, even helpful. But for the most part, they’re just frustrating.

Regardless, I did screen four of the multitude of movies that are playing until April 29th: Your Mommy Kills Animals, Without the King, Yoga, Inc., and Forever. Full reviews are posted here, should you care. If you are planning on seeing any of the Hot Docs this week, I’m not sure if my recommendations will help or hinder, but here they are anyway:

1. Your Mommy Kills Animals: The story behind radical animal rights activists as compared to their tamer cousins, the animal welfare groups, I found this documentary to be excellent. It’s hard not to get emotionally involved in terms of watching footage of dogs being beaten or seeing the poor minks in the cages on their farms, but the documentary goes well behind the issue to present a smart, articulate and fascinating look at many of the groups (like the now imprisoned SHAC 7) the US government considers the greatest homeland terrorist threat.

2. Without the King: A fairly stereotypical documentary about the only absolute monarchy left in Africa, Swaziland, Without the King was actually really disappointing. I’m not a fan of traditional-style documentaries, I think that the art form has evolved so much over the last 20 years that there’s no excuse for lazy storytelling. This documentary, more so than the other three, suffered from this — the subject matter is fascinating; the documentary? Poorly done.

3. Yoga, Inc.: As a practitioner myself, I found this documentary kind of interesting. Again, the traditional ‘oh look at this fascinating subject’ narrative style annoyed me, as did the little ‘chapter headings’ that preceded each section; however, there’s a lot here. Including a totally awesome bit with the fellow who owns f**k yoga, which I would totally buy a t-shirt from. Especially considering he said something totally awesome: f**k yoga essentially means “f**k Sting” and all of the other H-wood types suddenly into the practice, which made me chuckle. Like I said, I do yoga, and I am totally guilty of much of the commercialization as the next guy. Hell, I shop at Lululemon, but at least this documentary did a good job of exploring the trend from all sides. It was a little history-light, but that’s okay.

4. Forever: Quite easily the worst of the 4, it’s a meandering, puttering film about the fascinating Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Forever was supposed to be a meditation on the importance of art in life. Yawn. As told through the people who visit the gravestones of really famous artists within the cemetery. Double yawn. When you watch a documentary, not knowing what it’s about until 15 minutes in is a sure sign that it has narrative problems. Anyway, I loved all the shots of the cemetery though, and I especially loved a few of the characters she films. One, a group of lovely widows who fled Franco’s Spain, and two, a fascinating woman who takes it upon herself to maintain the graves of many of the cemetery’s writers. The RRHB and I spent a lovely morning at the cemetery the first time we went to Paris almost three years ago now. And that’s exactly what we did: wander around and muse over art, and life, and the dead guys and Edith Piaf, but it’s hard to translate that kind of whimsy into an entire documentary. Oh, and the interstitials of the terribly earnest Chopin-adorer playing the piano? Triple yawn.

But maybe I’m too cynical. That could also be the problem.

Anyway. I’m dead excited about seeing a documentary that’s screening called Last Call at the Gladstone Hotel (it’s actually the only piece of spam I actually paid attention to). It’s airing on TVO May 9 and 13 at 10 PM. A look at the gentrification of the Gladstone, one of my neighbourhood’s hot spots, and a current literary scene staple, I’m curious to see the story behind the walls.

#26 – Out Of Africa

The romantic notions I had regarding this book stem, obviously, from seeing the film, where I assumed Out of Africa would echo the autobiographical elements of Sydney Pollack’s adaptation. For years, I’d wander past it on the shelf and think to myself, ‘man, I really do need to read that book,’ ashamed, that in six years of studying English, with a focus on post-colonial literature, I had never had the courage to actually conquer Isak Dinesen’s work. It was quite a shock, then, to discover how different the book actually is from how I built it up in my imagination.

After almost two months of reading it on and off, I’ve finally finished the real Out of Africa. Sometimes majestic, sometimes upsetting, sometimes painfully dated, and sometimes downright brilliant, the book is described in the 1001 Books as “perhaps the greatest pastoral elegy of modernism.” Telling the story of Dinesen’s time running a coffee plantation in the Ngong Hills, it’s almost anthropological in much of its intent, and the parts of the book that are so distasteful now, racist even, are contained in her attempts to categorize life in Africa. But the parts of the book that soar are when she’s exploring her very real connection to the land, to her farm, to her life as she built it around her. For example, when the book captures her very human emotions, it’s some of the most wonderful writing; yet when she attempts to “explain” away Africa to her European counterparts, perhaps her imagined audience, it’s almost painful to read it’s so offensive.

Yet something makes you hang in there, and there are subjects you almost wish that she released herself, and/or her voice, enough to write freely about: her true feelings toward Denys Finch-Hatton; her absolute heartbreak with the failure of the farm; her obvious anger toward her husband (who gave her syphilis, as we all know from the film). All of these aspects of Dinesen’s life are explored in passing, as if she could only express herself when truly looking at the landscape, as if the descriptions of Africa and the farm could somehow intuit how she felt on an emotional level about the rest of her life.

There are so many wonderful passages in the book that it would be impossible to list them all here, and as the Denmark entry in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge, I find myself once again confronted with the fact that the author I’ve chosen has once again transplanted themselves elsewhere to tell the story of an adopted land rather than his/her homeland. Perhaps in the end, it doesn’t matter at all where you’re from, all that matters is that you find your heart in the place you choose to write about. There’s no denying Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) left her heart behind in Africa when she was forced to return to Europe.

My own books I packed up in cases and sat on them, or dined on them. Books in a colony play a different part in your existence from what they do in Europe; there is a whole side of your life which there they are alone take charge of; and on this account, according to their quality, you feel more grateful to them, or more indignant with them, than you will ever do in civilized countries.

…I had consented to give away my possessions one by one, as a kind of ransom for my own life, but by the time that I had nothing left, I myself was the lightest thing of all, for fate to get rid of.

Take One Sick Day…

I was off yesterday with a strange virus that has left me nauseous, achy and kind of dizzy. Gotta love the immuno-suppressant meds for allowing your body to pick up every strange bit of something that floats by in the ether. Funny how life just seems to go on without you:

Cormac McCarthy continues to cement his place as the all star in terms of the literary world this year by now winning a Pulitzer Prize, which means I need to bump that book way up on my TBR pile if Oprah, the establishment, and the lit blogging community are all in agreement. Isn’t that a prophetic ‘stars aligning’ kind of situation?

Yann Martel is seriously interested in learning what Stephen Harper is reading. An interesting project considering every single time Bush cracks a book it makes major media waves. (props to Jane at RHC for bringing this one to my attention; Pickle Me This also reported on the new blog)

The world receives a major publishing event in the form of a new Tolkien novel. Here’s another smile and nod-type author for me. I’ve never read a single Tolkien novel in my life even though I loved the movies. Honestly, I tried to read the first book in the trilogy but couldn’t get past all the hobbits singing.

CBC.ca/arts reports on all the crazy marketing behind The Raw Shark Texts. I have read this book and will be blogging about it in the upcoming days.

Fingers crossed we’re all back on our feet today.

Alissa York Effigy Launch


On Tuesday night, my RRHB and I, along with a bunch of our friends, went to the Toronto launch of Alissa York’s Effigy. For the first time in many, many months, I attended a literary event where I hadn’t had the pleasure of reading the book first. Usually, it’s Zesty and I at these kinds of things, but it was so fun, and I had such a good time that I was triple-upset that we were too late to get into the Michael Ondaatje launch on Friday night—I was looking forward to more literary-inspire good times.

There’s no getting around how lovely and friendly Alissa York is—she’s smart, charming and utterly fascinating. My favourite thing about Pages’s This is Not A Reading Series is the fact that the authors are on stage with another person, sometimes a fellow writer, and sometimes a media personality, another journalist, it all depends on the book. In this case, it was Elizabeth Ruth, and in all honestly, I think the two were perfectly matched. Ruth’s questions were smart, probing, and always on topic. It’s a hard balance to achieve especially if anyone’s been to Harbourfront lately and endured some of the “interviews” they’ve got going on at that reading series (Zesty, I’m looking at you).

Some of the conversation I pulled out and wrote down was really inspiring, especially considering I admire York’s writing (Mercy and Any Given Power, both wonderful, both moody and both delicious) but also because I’ve got quite a crush on her spirit. One of the more intriguing things that she said had to do with separating the writing mind and the everyday mind. And I think this was a lot of what Gowdy was trying to get at too, aspects of humanity, dark and desperate places, just because your imagination goes there (and bravo that it does) doesn’t necessarily mean that she’ll go out become a a taxidermist, like one of the characters in Effigy.

It’s such a common thing for people to mistake actors for the roles that they play, but people do the same with fiction: they’re always plugging through the depths to find the autobiographical elements, when as York points out, that there may be wide gaps between what a writer is thinking and feeling and what he/she is writing.

The other point she made that has stuck with me over the past few days is how when she’s writing, her goal is to make people feel things versus simply thinking about them as their passively reading. I can’t help it: I feel everything. That’s just the kind of person I am, hell, Al Gore’s slide show made me a puddle for days afterwards, and the key to a great book in my mind is its heartbreak factor. All in all, it was a bloody brilliant evening.

#25 – Hallucinating Foucault

I’ve been wanting to write about this book all day. Last night I was about 20 pages from finishing but I was so tired after my new dance class (I’m taking a Thursday night class at the School of the Toronto Dance Theatre; it’s just a beginner class, but it’s perfect for me right now), that I finished it on the subway ride to Writer’s Group tonight. I hate that, leaving 10 or 20 pages to the next day instead of finishing a book, but sometimes your body just says that’s enough reading for now.

So, Patricia Duncker. She’s my born-in-Jamaica author, but according to the most basic Google search, Duncker now lives and teaches in the UK. Again, the theme of authors no longer living in their homelands comes up in my Around the World in 52 Books challenge. I guess, in a way, I’m not really reading as many countries as I imagined I would, trying to balance the 1001 Books list (page 856) and my quest to broaden my reading base, but I have I’ve ended up reading a lot of good books by authors writing about Europe and/or the States. Mainly, I haven’t spent as much time trapped in the lovely and deliciously wonderful world of Can Lit, and that’s actually okay.

(Oddly, I’ve been reading a lot of novels, like this one, set in Paris and in France, which makes me think the world is trying to tell me something…like it might be time to book a ticket or something?).

Regardless, Hallucinating Foucault brought up a lot of memories of undergraduate and graduate school. The book tells the story of a young man working on a thesis of an imaginary French writer named Paul Michel, who has been institutionalized and utterly forgotten by the establishment. After a particularly intense affair with a young woman called The Germanist, he sets out to save his idol from utter decay in a psychiatric institution.

The title comes from Michel’s relationship with the French philosopher, who is described by the author himself as his perfect “reader.” Intertwining all kinds of post-modern themes with a very basic coming of age story, Duncker’s prose remains sharp throughout. In fact, I’d like to note that the epistolary aspects of the novel,the letters between the novelist and the philosopher that the student uncovers while in France are especially lovely.

The story is very much about the insular life of a student studying for an advanced degree. Not unlike Possession but without the Victorian overtones (Byatt even blurbs the book), Hallucinating Foucault has a central literary mystery to solve: why did Michel stop publishing books? And is he really, truly crazy? Part love story, part philosophical tribute to the work of Foucault, it’s a short, intense novel that I feel lucky to have discovered.

However, it’s told me nothing of life in Jamaica. I have to admit that I would have much preferred to read Michelle Cliff, oh how I loved No Telephone to Heaven, but my challenge isn’t about re-reading books I already know I like, but about finding gems I never would have noticed had it not been for a little guidance.

My favourite quote is from one of the letters that Michel has sent Foucault:

My writing is a craft, like carpentry, coffin-building, making jewelry, constructing the walls. You cannot forget how it is done. You can adjust, remake, rebuild what is fragile, slipshod, unstable. …You can say anything, anything, if it is beautifully said.

"Local Ontario Tomato"

Well, our experiment with Green Earth Organics was a bust. In the three weeks we used the service we ended up with tomatoes from Mexico, oranges from California and apples from British Columbia. So much for local food from local farmers. We’re just going to have to make more of an effort to use the local farmers market, unfortunately for us, it’s only open on Thursdays, and then, only until 7 PM, which is early in a day and age where I barely leave the office before 6 PM.

Anyway, while doing research for “local ontario tomato” for something I’m writing for work, I was shocked to see the Google results. And disheartened that so few people are searching for local foods that the first optimized result is an official government document of a sort decreeing that there shall be a local board to deal with how to market Ontario tomato seedlings, but nothing at all as per where you can buy them, what kind of tomatoes people are growing, or even practical information about growing tomatoes in Ontario. Maybe I did the wrong search?

#24 – American Youth


Prior to writing a review of this book, I’m going to take a moment and note the passing of Kurt Vonnegut. I will forever add him to the list of authors that I smile and nod in response when he comes up in casual conversation. I’ve never read a Vonnegut novel, and even though there are a few on the 1001 Books list, I’m pretty sure it might take years for me to get to them. In fact, over the course of entire educational career (high school, two lit degrees), I was supposed to have read Slaughterhouse-Five, at least four times, and I avoided it like the plague. And it’s a shame that so much of the context of Vonnegut’s later life got caught up in that awful email forward that claimed he had just done a commencement address at MIT.

Annnywaaay. As I’m ever trying to find aspects that actually relate to one another during these blog posts, I think that Phil LaMarche’s American Youth, which I read in ARC format in Cuba (see photo), is kind of a fitting book to talk about on the day of Vonnegut’s death. Not to relate the iconic status of Vonnegut to LaMarche in any way, but rather to suggest the themes highlighted in some of the former’s outspoken politics can be found bouncing around the novel, as American Youth tells the story of a young man whose life changes irreversibly after a gun accident in his home.

With it’s overtones of American History X, and the right-winged dogged politics that swell underneath like silt in the ocean, American Youth is very much a compelling coming of age story in a time where you’re already expected to have grown up before adolescence if only to regress for the next 20 years (how many times have I heard 40 is the new 30 over the last few days? Too many). The unnamed narrator (from what I can remember) and the cold, removed voice were almost too affected for me as a reader, but the heart of this book, the story of a boy so lost after a tragedy with no clear way of making his way back, rang true.

I’ll say one thing for sure, it was quite an odd book to be reading on a beach chair on Cuba.