March 30, 2016 Garry Gottfriedson's Skin Like Mine
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
Thursday, March 24, 2016
Century
March 24, 2016
Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope.
Conceived and Edited by Bruce Bernard. Phaidon, 2002.
This interesting collection of images from the 20th Century focuses on assassinations, labour unrest and protest, politics, and war. There are a few artists, fewer scientists, some athletes, models, performers. Great Britain and the United States are featured. Even though some work by Canadians makes the cut (Superman, In the Heat of the Night), no Canadians or references to Canada are to be found here.
Century: One Hundred Years of Human Progress, Regression, Suffering and Hope.
Conceived and Edited by Bruce Bernard. Phaidon, 2002.
This interesting collection of images from the 20th Century focuses on assassinations, labour unrest and protest, politics, and war. There are a few artists, fewer scientists, some athletes, models, performers. Great Britain and the United States are featured. Even though some work by Canadians makes the cut (Superman, In the Heat of the Night), no Canadians or references to Canada are to be found here.
Monday, March 21, 2016
Tales of the Anishinaubaek
March 20, 2016
Basil H. Johnston and Maxine Noel (Ioyan Mani) Tales of the Anishinaubaek
Basil H. Johnston and Maxine Noel (Ioyan Mani) Tales of the Anishinaubaek
Basil H.
Johnston, Tales of the Anishinaubaek. Illustrated by Maxine
Noel (Ioyan Mani). Royal Ontario Museum, 1993. Autographed by the
artist.
Because
of the cover illustration of man and mermaid, I grab this art book of
Ojibway legends the moment I see it at Value Village. Tales told by
the famous late Ontario writer and educator, Basil Johnston. It is
the work of the illustrator, Maxine Noel, which I recognize.
A Maxine
Noel "artist's proof" greets everyone who steps into my
condo. "Daughter of the Summer Moon." I have owned it since
1985, the year I was training in Kingston, Ontario. Exiled from our
homes, living a stripped-down life in "barracks," groups of
us would rent cars on weekends and tour the triangle, cruising for
antiques and art. At a gallery in a small town outside Ottawa, the
Brown Bear in Westport, this gold-on-white embossed drawing captured
my heart. I can't remember if I bought it on the spot or made a
special trip back to retrieve it. Somehow, I got it back to Kingston.
Kept it in my cell for weeks. Lugged it on to the commuter plane to
Toronto. Hand-carried it on the domestic flight to Winnipeg. Coddled
it in the taxi from the airport to my apartment on Wellington
Crescent. Displayed it proudly near the front door.
The
first time an old friend from home visits after my return to
Winnipeg, he stops on the threshold, staring at the brass-framed
white-matted paper - long hair, long skirt, daisies - and says: "I
see you have one of my cousin's paintings?"
"What?
Who? I bought it in Ontario. I know nothing about the artist."
"Ioyan
Mani," he says. "Walking Beyond. Maxine Noel. She's my
cousin. From Birdtail." (Calvin is Dakota, from Sioux Valley,
west of Brandon. But Birdtail is Birtle, three towns over, west, of
my home town of Oak River.) "She grew up in Arrow River." I
am dumbfounded. Arrow River is barely twenty miles from Oak River. I
have travelled thousands of miles and have come home with art work
made by a neighbour.
Of
course, those of us who read Jung do not believe in coincidence. What
is the mystery in art which speaks to secret parts of ourselves? What
is it that we recognize in gold ink on white paper which says to our
hearts "This is home. This is you."?
What is
it within ourselves which lets us respond to, acknowledge that "This
is me. This too is me."
I've had
this happen to me with other works of art too, especially with a
painting by Deryk Houston titled "Looking Over To Black Tusk,"
which convinces me that "there is a divinity which shapes our
end." Or, more specifically, that predestination is a reality.
But this is a story for another time.
Now I
touch the beautiful inscription in my secondhand art book, and I am
home again.
Gone Tomorrow
March 18, 2016
Lee Child's Gone Tomorrow
Jack Reacher's on the New York Subway, watching a woman in the same car, checking off all the ways she fits the suicide bomber checklist. Working with the feds, and an NYC policewoman, his hands are tied. She likes her job and her life but he will be gone tomorrow.
Lee Child's Gone Tomorrow
Jack Reacher's on the New York Subway, watching a woman in the same car, checking off all the ways she fits the suicide bomber checklist. Working with the feds, and an NYC policewoman, his hands are tied. She likes her job and her life but he will be gone tomorrow.
Make Me
March 13, 2016
Lee Child's Make Me (a Jack Reacher novel)
Jack Reacher gets off the train at a stop called Mother's Rest. A private detective meets him, mistaking him for another. He helps follow the Internet trail. If you want me to stop, you're going to have to make me.
Lee Child's Make Me (a Jack Reacher novel)
Jack Reacher gets off the train at a stop called Mother's Rest. A private detective meets him, mistaking him for another. He helps follow the Internet trail. If you want me to stop, you're going to have to make me.
Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing
February 29, 2016
Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing
Tomson Highway's Dry Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing
Taking
the High Road:
With all the disruption of moving from my home of 20
years, waiting for deliveries, trying to get organized and establish
a routine, I missed my reading goal of one book a week. So I was
happy to spend leap-year day with this slim volume by a favourite
former-Manitoban writer. This copy, which I found at Value Village,
has a great 25+-year-old cover photograph of famous Canadian First
Nations actors--Gary Farmer, Errol Kinistino, Billy Merasty, Graham
Greene.
I love
Tomson Highway. His humour. His voice. The music in his writing. The
Cree-ness of his work. The way he incorporates mythology. The way his
characters seem so real, at the same time as they fade in and out of
other realities. The way in his novel The
Kiss of the Fur Queen the
brothers hover for shelter in the midst of a caribou migration, like
cowboys during a buffalo stampede in old western movies.
This
Tomson Highway play, Dry
Lips Oughta Move To Kapuskasing,
is the male companion piece to The
Rez Sisters, except that
hockey replaces bingo as the game of their lives. The road into this
reserve is a rough one. On my first reading, I found Dry
Lips to be somewhat
confusing and very disturbing. There are laughs. There is nudity.
There is sex. There is blood. There is violence. There are issues.
Fornication. Monogamy. Adultery. Illegitimacy. Homophobia. The
madonna/whore dichotomy. I can see why the play suffered from some
very unfavorable reviews accusing it of negative and abusive
attitudes towards Indigenous women. I can also see that a Cree
playwright will have major challenges. For whom are you writing? Just
who is the target? Will an urban mainstream audience "get it"
or will they see only stereotypes of "the other" and their
worst fears realized?
A Cree
audience, or any northern reserve audience, will recognize everything
and everyone and every theme in this play. Substance abuse.
Promiscuity. Practical jokes. Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. Preachers.
Powwow Dancers. Entrepreneurs. Pregnant, hugely pregnant women. Women
of varied shapes and sizes. Hockey. Suicide. Violence. Nature.
Knitting. Parental anxiety. But, is there a Cree audience for live
theatre? How does the writer reach them? The most positive thing I
can think is that perhaps art like this can help us communicate
across those cultural divides -- Cree/First Nations and
"White"/newcomer [I hate that term "settler"]
culture, rural and urban, male and female.
I had to
think about these things for some time. I found a critical essay on
line which mapped a useful way "into" the drama.* The First Approach off the highway leads into the field at the
sign saying DREAMLAND. The whole play is a dream. A nightmare. Your
(and the main character Zachary's) worst fears, incarnate. The Second
Approach is at the sign saying TRICKSTER CROSSING. All the
fear-inducing female characters the nightmare men interact with are
played by the omniscient androgynous shape-shifting male/female
Trickster saviour--Nanabush in Ojibway, Weesageechak in Cree. All
right? So, it's not really happening. And those characters up there
on stage are all your worst fears come to life.
The
first phrase uttered in the play is "Hey, bitch!" That's
your first clue. There is something wrong here. And something wrong
with the guy who says/thinks it. And the abuses pile higher and
higher. Disrespect for women. Sexualization of women. Failure to care
for pregnant women. Failure to acknowledge and accept responsibility
for loving and teaching the child. The old "fathers day on the
reserve" joke. The power struggle between males and females.
Male on female violence. Substance abuse. Suicide. Anti-church
rhetoric. "There are
many, many other ways of communicating with the Great Spirit. And
they are all perfectly legitimate. What them priests said about
me--about us--is not right. It's just not right. Respect us. Respect
all people!" (p. 106)
These nightmare men have been colonized by a racist and paternalistic
worldview. They have lost their cultural beliefs in gender equality
and mutual respect. With the poison named, a prescriptive "return
to the old ways" edict follows. Nothing good can happen unless
they stop the abuse and return to the old ways.
Tomson
Highway is also a Trickster. He sees the humour in the darkness. And
the irony -- of a plot centering upon the acceptance of an imported
game, hockey. Of the closing curtain tableau, a sentimental holy
family trinity.
This
play was written almost thirty years ago. In the meantime we have
had the Residential Schools Settlement, the apology in parliament,
and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I don't know. I just
feel as if I don't have to be told this message again. Unfortunately,
we will hear a great deal of the same themes in the proposed inquiry
into missing and murdered women and girls. Dry
Lips says to an audience of
First Nations, "We have to change. We have to go back."
This play, heavy on the symbolism, shows how many appropriated
prejudices of colonization continue to harm the colonized. But does
it say, does it say loudly enough, to the rest of the audience, the
Canadian capitalists paying to peer through that invisible wall,
"Look what you have done! What are you going to do to fix
yourselves?" I wish. I hope.
*
www.rupkatha.com Diehl, Lindsay. University of British Columbia,
Okanagan Campus. "And What Are You Dreaming About?": An
Analysis of Tomson Highway's Dry
Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing.
Rupkatha Journal on Interdisciplinary Studies in Humanities. Vol. VI,
No. 2, 2014.
jmb
April
23, 2016
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