Blog # 80…April 2018

I realized as I started number 80 that I’m a blogaholic.  As each month rolls along, my compulsion to post takes over… always something to explore in the art that surrounds us.

We’re constantly being challenged to broaden our notions of what’s usual, normal or acceptable in the human condition in general and gender in particular.  How we respond to the challenges depends on our situation - whether and how we’re exposed to people who are different from us.  Thirty years ago we began to see stories of homosexuals presented in books and films and our friends, brothers, daughters and even our mothers had the courage to come out.  Still not easy, as you’ll find out if you go to see Love, Simon, a touching film about a gay high school boy…but coming out is only the beginning, being out is where it gets really hard. Supportive communities are in place in large centres, but small towns are still tough going.

In turn, the world of people with other different expressions of gender is beginning to become more open and very gradually more understood and accepted.  Again, books and film help to open our eyes to the humanity and struggles of individuals and of the people who love them.

Annabel, Kathleen Winter’s 2010 novel introduces us to an intersex child born in the 60’s in a remote community in Newfoundland.  We feel the challenges of growing up unique, with parents who had opposing views of which gender should be assigned.  It’s a masculine world with a stoic father who traps for a living, wants a son and calls the child Wayne.  She's Annabel to his fanciful mother when they’re alone, dressing up and dreaming of sequined bathing suits and synchronized swimming. Leaving for the broader world outside opens the search for ways to exist on her own terms.

In his latest film, Chilean director Sebastian Lelio introduces us to Marina, a transgender singer who has formed a loving relationship with an older man.  When the man dies, his family members scorn her and refuse to let her attend his funeral.  A Fantastic Woman is the film’s title as well as a perfect description of Marina.

Mchelle Alfano shares her story of welcoming a long awaited daughter in The Unfinished Dollhouse. Longing for a daughter and looking forward to building a dollhouse together, Michelle begins a troubled trip into motherhood with a premature birth and a vulnerable baby who survives and develops into a bright lively child. Until…a dark depression with confusion, anxiety and refusal to get out of bed culminates in Frankie’s revelation that she’s gay, a step on the road to realizing that she’s trans. Michelle’s compassionate and heartbreaking reaction to her daughter - now son’s – situation combines her emotional and intellectual responses with a candour and courage that will touch all parents, everyone for that matter.

Gender, parenting and relationships all offer us unique experiences with some common elements.  They are also ongoing and immensely complex and complicated.  Artists can help us enter stories that support our understanding of the world around us…it’s up to us to listen.

I’m also a swimaholic and on this International Day of Diversity, as I leave for the pool, here are some words to live by, from me and from Oscar Wilde…”Be yourself, everyone else is already taken.”

Blog # 79…March 2018

The world’s shifting population has ramped up in the past few years and it’s provided rich material for art forms to capture in fiction, film and theatre. 

And music…Safe Haven was a recent presentation by Tafelmusik, the baroque orchestra that performs at Trinity St Paul’s Centre in Toronto on instruments authentic to the period. Music has a way of conveying emotions that words on their own simply cannot. The concert offered some surprising revelations and changed our ways of hearing Bach, Vivaldi and Corelli amongst others.Threads of narrative were woven with music with a focus on the stories of refugee artists throughout history and the cross pollination that resulted.  

Here in Canada we've had the luxury of welcoming immigrants in a measured and somewhat controlled way.  Not so in some of the European countries, who've experienced sudden, overwhelming arrivals by water and on foot. Our eyes and hearts have been shocked by news photos of bodies lying on beaches and throngs of people hanging off the sides of small, unseaworthy looking objects.  A recent film from Finnish director Aki Kaurismaki – The Other Side of Hope takes us backstage in scenes where local Finns struggle with an influx of migrants, who look, speak and behave in alarmingly unfamiliar ways.  Despite Kaurismaki’s usual critical and unromantic look at his country and fellow citizens, he manages to represent the viewpoint and position of everyone in this film, - Finns, long term immigrants and recent migrants with clarity and humour.  At times they all warrant our attention, understanding, compassion and affection.

A number of novelists around the world have tackled migrants’ stories in their work, but the one that moved me and has stuck in my thoughts was a short story in The New Yorker many years ago.  An elderly woman had been brought from India to live with her son, his US born wife and their two children a few years after the death of her husband.  She had been happy enough in her village, but her son thought she must be lonely, so brought her to his large suburban house in California. Although she missed her friends and didn't speak English, she loved to clean, do the laundry and cook...only thing was, the neighbours objected when she hung the wash out in the garden, the family complained when she moved their things to clean...and they preferred pizza and burgers to her biryanis.

I often think of that woman, even if she was fictional, as we work to support our family from Iraq who arrived last July. Hiyam cooked us a wonderful middle eastern dinner last week for International Women's Day. We love her biryani, kubba and pomegranate salad ...and as we struggle to help her and her family adjust to life here, wonder if we're getting it right.

Blog# 78…February 2018

Figures of Sleep, on now at the U of T Art Gallery, caught my attention recently.  Hidden away just to the east of Hart House, the space is a little jewel -  always presenting something interesting, in a range of media.  Shows are small, vary in theme and span eras, sometimes featuring Canadian artists, but with an international focus. A coup about a year ago was to host the opening of  Shame and Prejudice, Kent Monkman’s show that was beginning a cross- Canada tour to celebrate our 150th birthday. 

I don’t know about you, but there’s not much I long for more than a good sleep.  It’s a frequent topic of endless books and pieces in newspapers, magazines and on TV and, since I’m a pretty regular insomniac, I was curious to see what artists would make of it. “Is sleep in crisis?” was the opening line of the show’s catalogue, setting the tone for the notion that sleep has evolved into less a peaceful repose than an evasive and erratic state.  

Contemporary art takes some work on the viewers’ part (something to fill those fitful nights) and I wasn’t disappointed. The artists have "adopted the motif of sleep as a cipher for...urgent cultural concerns." This show is as elusive as sleep itself, ragged and harsh rather than dreamy and soft .

Right in front of me as I walked in was a large image of a woman lying in a leaf-littered park. Titled Meet to Sleep, it represents women in India who met and slept in parks to protest the violence that made them unsafe in public. At the other end of the gallery, with a similar image and theme, Dream Catcher,  Rebecca Belmore’s unsettling tapestry shows an unconscious indigenous woman wrapped in a blanket stretched out on a sidewalk - a traditional medium startles us with a contemporary subject. 

Ron Muek, a German artist, has modeled a tiny and very realistic old woman curled up asleep in bed. It's from our National Gallery collection and she looks so cozy and relaxed, we can almost see her breathing and feel her comfort. She reminds us of  a baby....
or is she dead?




In Time Clock Piece, Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh took pictures of himself every hour for a year, starting with a  shaved head and finishing with a long bob.   The photos are speeded up to create the frenetic sleeplessness that he must have endured to create the work.                     


From the Vancouver Art Gallery,  Rodney Graham's Halcion Sleep is a compelling continuing video of a man stretched out across the back seat of a moving car. Asleep after a dose of halcion, he was moved to the car, then to his apartment where he slept for a further 8 hours. 

The show runs til March 4^th.   If you’re in the mood and the vicinity, you might want to see it, but don't expect it to give you sweet dreams.

Blog # 77 …January 2018

Welcome to 2018 and whatever ups and downs it brings us.   As I was wondering how to start the new year blog, I saw a production of Oscar Wilde’s A Woman of no Importance and decided to weigh in on what‘s going on in that department…women and their importance. We’ve been inundated with hash tags the past few months... MeToo and now MeToo, NowWhat? TimesUp and from the guys - JustListen. Women all over the world walked last week-end to call attention to the crap deal they’ve been dealt - whether their personal issue was sexual harassment or racial justice, workplace fairness or pay equity, reproductive freedom, migrants’ rights or the whole mess together.

I first met Oscar Wilde in 1957 on the pages of The Picture of Dorian Gray and have re-visited him from time to time as I turn to books to find some sense in life.  “Mere words! Was there ever anything so real as words?” And, “Nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.” Still words to live by.

The themes in the play (written over a century ago) are still with us - how women are admired, feared, valued and despised, sometimes all at once. We’re still in a state of moral complexity and need to retreat from a black/white, good/bad stance and get comfortable with ambiguity; it seems to be here to stay. It’s some of the status quo that needs to change.

A few days later I heard a promo for a doc called Mummy Wildest, about females in the animal world - did you know that elephant societies value grandmothers most because they remember where the water holes are?  Another item reported that elder abuse in care homes had doubled in the past decade. Then I heard a centre for philanthropy announce a study that found qualities like empathy and generosity have declined markedly in the past dozen years.   In the UK, Theresa May announced a Ministry of Loneliness…see any connections here?

What to do…how to proceed in the never ending quest for justice and equality.  One specific thing,  in the interests of leveling the playing field, is supporting women running for public office.  I have immense sympathy for all women suffering workplace harassment, but women in politics have an extra dose, with death threats often thrown in and sometimes carried out. We need to keep our eyes open for that and stand with them. We can elect some wonderful women to decision making roles, some mediocre ones too, just like it is with the guys.

Although it was a bit predictable and got a laugh, I flinched at Wilde’s last line in the play “He is a man of no importance” Men are in a precarious state and we need to move to a more nuanced position, we’re all important - to ourselves and to each other.

Blog # 76…December, 2017

In case you haven't noticed, Christmas is coming -  that time of merry excesses and jolly anxieties,  you know what I'm talking about, we all have them.

I got a wonderful surprise to launch the season from my friend in Helsinki -  two books about hygge. Hygge has been in vogue in urban centres like New York and Los Angeles where people yearn to escape from the horrors of the news, fake or real and the stresses of survival in the current  climate, threatened in so many ways. And interest is spreading as we all struggle to keep our heads as all around us...you know the rest.

If you’haven't heard of hygge, it's a Danish notion of cosiness, a way to live well, surrounding yourself with soothing things.  Denmark, a small nordic country, free from longing to be a world power, has always paid attention to looking after itself and its citizens. Generous social supports, vigorous environmental standards and a sense of the importance of creating conforting and welcoming environments are some indications of where their heads and hearts are...generally speaking anyway.

Hygge reflects this in a number of ways, first and most important is light.  Their northern location makes for long dark periods, (that probably has something to do with the craving for cosiness). Homes and public places are lit subtly, with soft shades and lots of candles,delivering light in a warm, relaxing way.






And the food...tasty, beautiful open faced sandwiches called smorrbrod and delicious
almond pastries called weinerbrod (which contain 33% of your daily recommended fat intake, but never mind that)




Physical comfort is reflected in their love of warm socks and comfortable chairs and their consciousness of the importance of quiet moments with a few friends...don't mean to make them out as simple and out-of-touch, or perfect either as individuals or as a nation, they just seem to have some priorities that I like.


In summer hygge takes the form of relating to nature - trees, water, sand.  Denmark is a series of small islands and promontories, never far from the sea, so those of us who live far inland may need to work a bit harder at the water part. but we all have nature of some sort and can try to appreciate it when and how we can.



So, as the holidays approach, see if you can find a little hygge for yourself and take it with you into the new year.
And, speaking of unintended consequences, have you noticed the upsurge in the numbers of women running for office in the US mid terms?  We're hoping to nudge that surge along here on International Women's Day in March.

Blog # 75…November 2017

There’s a weird disconnect in the air these days…on the one hand, confessionals where people’s dirty laundry is spread out in full view and on the other, glorious pics ( often photo shopped) of svelte and gorgeous  characters eating delicious meals in fabulous settings.  Neither is anywhere near where most of us live. One minute we seem to be more tolerant of deviance from what used to be thought of as the norm and less so the next. Exposure of men in power and their exploitation of women continues to be a daily feature in the news. We’re caught up in fantasy and immersed in reality at the same time.

So, life is remarkable and full of contradictions, what else is new. I just heard Scott Kelly talk about his book Endurance  where he recounts growing up with his twin brother Mark as distractible, mischievous little demons, not much good at school. Both boys went on to be astronauts: Scott commanded the International Space Station on three expeditions; Mark, who served on many missions also, is the husband of Gabrielle Giffords, former US Congresswoman who was shot in 2011.  Both Kellys have written books and actively advocate for gun control. Not bad for kids who were unremarkable and probably drove their parents nuts.

I was also struck recently by hearing artist Kanika Gupta talk about her difficult recovery from a concussion.  In the hours that stretched to days, then weeks and months when she was unable to do much more than lie still in a dark room, she had a lot of thinking time.  Her show ReThink Recovery opened recently at Lakeshore Arts in Etobicoke (a neighbourhood to the west of downtown Toronto). Kanita’s practice includes painting, ceramics, photography, printmaking and illustrations. She uses visual arts, and storytelling to expand understanding of the healing process and those who find themselves “on the fringes of normalcy”. In her workshops she uses a variety of art forms to explore what recovery means and alternative ways of being.

An example of Kanita’s visual challenge to cultural and medical assumptions about recovery is a ceramic piece, broken and then reassembled.  Not as it was but interesting in a unique way.   She questions our notions of health, beauty, wholeness and worth, and establishes a new set of values that are more inclusive and embody what it means to be human.

Sometimes I despair of where the world is going and wonder if we’re really moving forward or backward since we started walking upright…then I come across something about the Kelly twins or Kanita Gupta and  feel more hopeful. I'm also touched by the pluckiness of our Iraqi family and.appreciate the many very good dudes I know.  So find your own sunny ways to get through dark November and so long for now.

Blog # 74…October 2017

When we’re born, we’re issued a return ticket.  Many of us huddle in the crowd of avoiders and deniers -  referring to dying as passing on, buying the farm – or for sports fans – the final inning.

Images of death surround us, everywhere from the horror of thousands perishing in wars and natural disasters to the personal anguish we feel when someone close to us dies. As a person without the comfort that religious beliefs can bring, I struggle to make sense of life and death along with my fellow non –believers (I prefer wonderers).  As Woody Allen said,” I wish I could believe, it would be a big help on those dark nights.”

Since I often turn to reading for comfort and understanding of what’s going on, I picked up a recent book called The Art of Death by one of my favourite writers, Haitian/American Edwidge Dandicat to see how she linked the two.The book was motivated by Dandicat’s awareness of the approaching death of her mother. As a writer, she gravitated towards other writers and began to read and absorb the way they handled the topic. She shifts from fictional pieces - Toni Morrison’s Sula and One hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to deeply personal writings like Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking or Nothing to be Frightened of  by Julian Barnes.

The book that touched me deeply though, was Canadian musician and writer Paul Quarrington’s  Cigar Box Banjo where he speaks candidly about his feelings about his approaching death, how he mourns himself and the sadness his family and friends will feel. That’s what gets me too. As well as reminding me of other things I’ve read or might read, these writers share their feelings in a way that encouraged me to go there also.

In some other departments...we shared our Thanksgiving dinner with the Iraqi family who have been in Toronto for almost three months, introduced them to cranberry sauce with turkey and they brought us Coba, an Iraqi dish.

If it’s within possibility for you, try and visit the McMichael Gallery this month, while the bus leaves every Sunday from downtown Toronto.  The Alex Janvier show just opened, also very worth seeing are the Group of Seven Guitar Project; Passion over Reason – Joyce Weiland meets Tom Thomson and the wonderful drawings of Annie Pootoogook. 

And, we’re all thinking about how we can treat each other more fairly and kindly, men, women and children, all of us.  Next year will be the 20^th time a gang of us has gathered to mark International Women’s Day.  We’ve been wondering how to encourage more women to enter politics or go for other positions of power and influence to modulate the picture.  This week’s news coverage has been important and part of the larger conversation. The humiliation and hurt suffered by women abused in workplace situations of any kind are awful, but women in public life are particularly vulnerable and frequently exposed to death threats... and with Jo Cox, British Labour MP, the most tragic of outcomes.

As I write this, news of Gord  Downie’s death last night reached me…a life well lived, making music and memories  and over too soon.
So Stay Woke, as they say on the internet, keep thinking and talking about these critical issues.